4 ms·

There is the undocumented 3rd option of simply shrugging and moving on without LLMs, you know, business as usual.

by forgetfreeman 4mo ago

jckahn 4mo ago
That's not the option most are going to take.
- forgetfreeman 4mo ago
  shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
baq 4mo ago
That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.
- inigyou 4mo ago
  Mythos found one low-severity vulnerability in curl.
  - OliverGuy 4mo ago
    Curl is one of the most audited code bases, so that's not surprising. Put it in front of a common-ish Python or NPM package and see what it finds, likely going to be a lot more.
- forgetfreeman 4mo ago
  Is this your first tech industry hype cycle or something?
  - baq 4mo ago
    No, it’s my experience from the past 6 months
    - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
      Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that. Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions... Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement... As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
      - baq 4mo ago
        I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
        forgetfreeman 4mo ago
        "objectively revolutionary" That very much depends on how you group your terms. Mediocre code has existed as long as programming languages, and it was something organizations trained juniors to avoid mass producing. What's revolutionary is now your boss is throwing money at tokens instead of paying for ass-seat-hours.
        4mo ago
- nunez 4mo ago
  Not really.
- preg_match 4mo ago
  It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.
i2km 4mo ago
Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s
usernamed7 4mo ago
That's a choice you are free to make, just like you're free to shrug and not use the internet or computers.
- forgetfreeman 4mo ago
  eyeroll If you truly had the courage of your convictions you would have gone all in here and told me to stop using electricity.
  - usernamed7 4mo ago
    I haven't told you to do anything, only highlighted that you can choose how to live your life, including not using LLM's. Believe it or not, some people actually do derive a great deal of value from LLM's and it's also ok if you don't or can't.
    - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
      "can't" Still feeling chippy over there I see. Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
      - selfhoster11 4mo ago
        Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.

There is the undocumented 3rd option of simply shrugging and moving on without LLMs, you know, business as usual.

jckahn 4mo ago

That's not the option most are going to take.

forgetfreeman 4mo ago
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.

baq 4mo ago

That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.

inigyou 4mo ago
Mythos found one low-severity vulnerability in curl.
- OliverGuy 4mo ago
  Curl is one of the most audited code bases, so that's not surprising. Put it in front of a common-ish Python or NPM package and see what it finds, likely going to be a lot more.
forgetfreeman 4mo ago
Is this your first tech industry hype cycle or something?
- baq 4mo ago
  No, it’s my experience from the past 6 months
  - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
    Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that. Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions... Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement... As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
    - baq 4mo ago
      I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
      - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
        "objectively revolutionary" That very much depends on how you group your terms. Mediocre code has existed as long as programming languages, and it was something organizations trained juniors to avoid mass producing. What's revolutionary is now your boss is throwing money at tokens instead of paying for ass-seat-hours.
        4mo ago
nunez 4mo ago
Not really.
preg_match 4mo ago
It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.

i2km 4mo ago

Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s

usernamed7 4mo ago

That's a choice you are free to make, just like you're free to shrug and not use the internet or computers.

forgetfreeman 4mo ago
eyeroll If you truly had the courage of your convictions you would have gone all in here and told me to stop using electricity.
- usernamed7 4mo ago
  I haven't told you to do anything, only highlighted that you can choose how to live your life, including not using LLM's. Believe it or not, some people actually do derive a great deal of value from LLM's and it's also ok if you don't or can't.
  - forgetfreeman 4mo ago
    "can't" Still feeling chippy over there I see. Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
    - selfhoster11 4mo ago
      Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.