V0ldek

joined 1 year ago
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Aren't you supposed to only use whatever "self-driving" nonsense they have on highways only? I thought Tesla explicitly says you can't do it on a normal road cause, well, it doesn't fucking work.

It doesn't even seem the driver is actually holding the wheel like they don't try to avoid that at all

Just a second before the crash a car goes by, this thing could've just as easily swerved right onto that other car and injured someone, someone should at least lose their license for this

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If I were a half-a-billion-dollar scam I would simply not have audits taps forehead

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (15 children)

For LLMs specifically? Code is not text, aside from the most clinical, dictionary definition of "text".

But even then, it also fails at writing coherent short or longform, so even if code was "just text" it'd fail equally badly.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

So... I think it's high time to start planning an exodus.

Is there a good alternative to GitHub?

I have two types of repos, a few public open-source projects for which I require:

  • Basic git stuff ofc, PRs, forks, etc.
  • Issues
  • Automatic scanning for security vulnerabilities like GH does
  • CI on PRs and nightly CRON based, free and allowing both cloud-hosted runners and adding self-hosted runners
  • Ability to host a static documentation site

Plus private ones where I don't need any bells and whistles, just a git hoster for myself and no one else.

Is there something free that provides these things and doesn't suck? If I go to GitLab's page then it says:

so that's fucked too now, huh

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Well that fully answers the questions I had I guess

Why is everyone a milkshake duck

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago

God what's the odds that he also used a wisdom woodchipper to produce the text of that pdf lol

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

Also referenced here with a debunk by a material scientist.

Economics not beating the allegations of not being a serious science once again

 

This is a nice post, but it has such an annoying sentence right in the intro:

At the time I saw the press coverage, I didn’t bother to click on the actual preprint and read the work. The results seemed unsurprising: when researchers were given access to AI tools, they became more productive. That sounds reasonable and expected.

What? What about it sounds reasonable? What about it sounds expected given all we know about AI??

I see this all the time. Why do otherwise skeptical voices always have the need to put in a weakening statement like this. "For sure, there are some legitimate uses of AI" or "Of course, I'm not claiming AI is useless" like why are you not claiming that. You probably should be claiming that. All of this garbage is useless until proven otherwise! "AI does not increase productivity" is the null hypothesis! It's the only correct skeptical position! Why do you seem to need to extend benefit of the doubt here, like seriously, I cannot explain this in any way.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What does this have to do with literally anything I said about comparing AI with interns

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

But what's the point of having that if it doesn't result in improvement on the other side? Like you're doing hard work to correct code and respond with feedback but you're putting that into the void to no one's benefit.

Hiring an intern makes sense. It's an investment. Hiring an AI at the same skill level makes negative sense.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I don't think I ever had a vibe-check as successful as this, literally never heard about the guy, said he needs to be shoved into a locker based on vibes, an hour later he searches for his own name to respond and gets hammered in replies for supporting The Big Orb. Just a quintessential internet moment.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

Forever in my mind, the guy who said on another post he uses an LLM to convert strings to uppercase when that's literally a builtin command in VSCode, give people cannons and they're start shooting mosquitoes with them every fucking time

 

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

First of all, I only ever worked in a Scrum team once and it was really nice. I liked having a Product Owner that was invested in the process and did customer communications, I loved having a Scrum Master that kept the meetings tight and followed up on Retrospective points, it worked like a well-oiled machine. Turns out it was a one-of-a-kind experience. I can't imagine having a stand-up for one hour without casualties involved.

A few months back a colleague (we're both PhD students at TU Munich) was taking a piss about how you can enroll in a Scrum course as an elective for our doctor school. He was in general making fun of the methodology but using words I've never heard before in my life. "Agile Testing". "Backlog Grooming". "Scrum of Scrums". I was like "dude, none of those words are in the bible", went to the Scrum Guide (which as far as I understood was the only document that actually defined what "Scrum" meant) and Ctrl+F-ed my point of literally none of that shit being there. Really, where the fuck does any of that come from? Is there a DLC to Scrum that I was never shown before? Was the person who first uttered "Scrumban" already drawn and quartered or is justice yet to be served?

Aside: the funniest part of that discussion was that our doctor school has an exemption that carves out "credits for Scrum and Agile methodology courses" as being worthless towards your PhD, so at least someone sane is managing that.

Second point I wanted to make was that I was having a perfectly happy holiday and then I read the phrase "Agile 2" and now I am crying into an ice-cream bucket. God help us all. Why. Ludicity you fucking monster, there was a non-zero chance I would've gone through my entire life without knowing that existed, I hate you now.

 

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

 

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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