Cute. I'm a senior software engineer that has trained many different models (NLP, image classification, computer vision, LIDAR analysis) before this stupid fucking LLM craze. I know precisely how they work (or rather, I know how much people don't know how they work, because of the black box approach to training). From the outset, I knew people believed it was much more capable than it actually is, because it was incredibly obvious as someone who's actually built the damn things before (albeit with much less data/power).

Every developer that loves LLMs I see is pretty fucking clueless about them and think of them as some magical device that has actual intelligence (just like everybody does, I guess, but I expect better of developers). It has no semantic understanding whatsoever. It's stochastic generation of sequences of tokens to loosely resemble natural language. It's old technology recently revitalized because large corporations plundered humanity in order to brute force their way into models with astronomically-high numbers of parameters, so they now are now "pretty good" at resembling natural language, compared to before. But that's all it fucking is. Imitation. No understanding, no knowledge, no insight. So calling it "inspiration" is a fucking joke, and treating it as anything other than a destructive amusement (due to the mass ecological and sociological catastrophe it is) is sheer stupidity.

I'm pissed off about it for many reasons, but especially because my peers at work are consistently wasting my fucking time with LLM slop and it's fucking exhausting to deal with. I have to guard against way more garbage now to make sure our codebase doesn't turn into utter shit. The other day, an engineer submitted an MR for me to review that contained dozens of completely useless/redundant LLM-generated tests that would have increased our CI time a shitload and bloated our codebase for no fucking reason. And all of it is for trivial, dumb shit that's not hard to figure out or do at all. I'm so fucking sick of all of it. No one cares about their craft anymore. No one cares about being a good fucking engineer and reading the goddamn documentation and just figuring shit out on their own, with their own fucking brain.

By the way, no actual evidence exists of this supposed productivity boost people claim, whereas we have a number of studies demonstrating the problems with LLMs, like MIT's study on its effects on human cognition, or this study from the ACM showing how LLMs are a force multiplier for misinformation and deception. In fact, not only do we not have any real evidence that it boosts productivity, we have evidence of the opposite: this recent METR study found that AI usage increased completion time by 19% for experienced engineers working on large, mature, open-source codebases.

Haskell's also not there. I was ready to criticize any quadrant it was put in heh. But that's probably mostly because the axes are kinda bad.

In modern chess, engines have gotten good enough that we generally do know the top moves and humans can't beat them. We can even numerically assess someone's chess play with a computer, which we call "accuracy". Obviously they can always be improved further, and there are a handful of situations where they might misevaluate, but it's still pretty incredible.

Engines have only made chess more exciting as they have shattered a lot of old theory and helped people find a lot of new and innovative ideas. They are an incredible aid in analysis and tournament prep.

I believe it's saying that the drive-thru was open but the restaurant interior was closed.

I'm a senior software engineer with a pretty uncommon skill set. Recruiters are the primary way that companies hire in my industry outside of networking contacts and I get contacted frequently. The job before my current one was through a recruiter.

I very much dislike Microsoft and LinkedIn in general, but not using it all is a huge handicap that isn't worth taking on.

Nah, it's all hyped up bullshit that has to be babysat and manipulated to a degree that you may as well just write your damn code.

But beyond that, I'd argue that it's actually damaging for engineering organizations, because it means the org is incurring the maintenance cost of code not written by its engineers and that has no real thought put behind it. Maybe you can eventually coax it to produce code that's not completely broken shit, but it's code that your org doesn't actually "own" from a maintenance and knowledge-base perspective. The social aspect of code maintenance with this shit is always massively overlooked.

Only if using JSON merge patch, and that's the only time it's acceptable. But JSON patch should be preferred over JSON merge patch anyway.

Servers should accept both null and undefined for normal request bodies, and clients should treat both as the same in responses. API designers should not give each bespoke semantics.

There are a number of blue cities in the Midwest. What's the lowest temp you want? I live in Lincoln, Nebraska and it's pretty great: nice weather most of the year, low cost of living, blue city, tons of parks. Only downside is dealing with red state bullshit from the state government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_language

HTML is famously known for not being a regular language. An explanation isn't required, you can find many formal proofs online (indeed, a junior year CS student should be able to write a proof after their DS/algo/automata classes).

This very old post is funny because despite it being so famously known as being irregular, stack overflow questions kept popping up asking how to use regular expressions to parse HTML, which you can't do.

It's not the case that viruses can't exist on Linux, it's just very improbable through normal usage. The key difference is that the overwhelming majority of software installed on Linux is through a package manager, which is a tool that downloads software from a maintained, trusted, and vetted repository of software. So instead of googling "Firefox download", clicking on (hopefully) the right link (and getting this right gets harder and harder with Google fucking up search results), and downloading the software from the website, you simply execute a command in your terminal like apt install firefox (for Debian-based systems, command can vary by distro you're using) and it pulls the software from a trusted repository. This alone eliminates the most common attack vectors, since usually Windows users get viruses by downloading random executables off the internet.

Generally, the way you get viruses on a Linux system are through finding/exploiting vulnerabilities in software which is very hard to pull off generally and are usually resolved fairly quickly once they're discovered (And of course, Linux is not unique in this respect, any computer can be target of such attacks).

It's less of an issue of reviewing all packages than it is that this causes DOS in the first place. It's pretty damn stupid that you can't unpublish packages others depend on, and the whole recursive dependencies thing makes the situation a lot worse than it otherwise would be. Neither of these are issues with other package registries.

Huh, my local Walgreens is usually like 1-2 pharmacists, 3-4 techs, and 2-3 people for non-pharmacy.