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That’s a fun take on a real issue, but…

> Your code is only sent to the model provider (OpenAI)

When has this become an acceptable « privacy » statement?

I feel we are reliving the era of free mobile apps at the expense of harvesting any user data for ads profiling before GDPR kicked in…


That's not the privacy statement though. I feel like we're reliving the era of RTF... oh wait, we never left.

Ok I’ll bite: putting « only » implies this is not a big deal and a lesser of 2 evils, between an AI model provider harvesting prompts for retraining and a 3rd party hosting provider most probably only storing logs for security and accountability…

So yes this is the second part of the privacy statement


Share this gem on a team chat, everyone had a good laugh and now everytime we discuss some weird situation, we start speaking as grug brains… Don’t know how I lived without it so far


Basically DocBook?


Exactly. Seems like we already invented that but it didn’t really catch fire.


Yeah last time I touched it was during an internship 15 years ago, the few memories I recall were not enjoyment at all (however I was using LaTeX everywhere at the time).

Writing documentation as XML is powerful but not enjoyable at all I guess


Again, very « Silicon Valley »-esque, loving it. Thanks Gilfoyle


Truly hope that catches on, and not only for the « datalab » (incubation startup-like inside the gov doing cool stuff).

As a citizen, if only the first rule could become true for new and existing online public services such as « URSSAF », « Les Impôts » and « AMELI », that would be a great step forward (but I guess that will never happened as the hugh consulting firms developing these won’t have the same view on the matter)


https://github.com/datalpia/laketower

Slowly building an open-source Data Lakehouse management utility application for local development, scratching my own itch and trying to accelerate development workflows with customers developing for Databricks.

For now it only supports Delta Lake (using delta-rs + duckdb), only supports table metadata inspection and querying, but in the near future will add dashboards as code, simple Markdown notebook like mode, and Apache Iceberg support.

For now it's an enabler for me and others, hopefully I can turn it into a product somehow at some point.


> Code needs to be written properly; you can’t just waste money and resources endlessly to cover up inefficiencies.

Quite rare to hear this wise line these days. An I guess with AI coding assistant, this is only the beginning of this kind of horror story


For me, the horror story started when people ditched optimal desktop apps for Electron because they knew js and css.


Perhaps we can make an AI translate electron apps into native apps…


So tired of hearing this trope. Electron is alright. Memory is cheap. Tell me a single better way to write cross-platform UI other than a worse version of Electron.


> Memory is cheap

If you're running on commodity hardware, sure; if you happen to be a $1T company that solders 3x marked-up RAM then that's definitely not true https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space... is the entry model, and clicking the 48GB option dials the price up to $3k


The cheapest Apple laptops start with 16GB now. That's enough for quite a few desktop apps regardless of Electron.


Sure, but what do you think would count as better?


The other day I was reviewing the work of a peer on a relatively easy task (using a SDK to manage some remote resources given a static configuration).

At several times I was like « why did you do that this way? This is so contrived ». And I should have known better but of course the answer started with « … I know but Copilot did this or that… ». Of course no test to validate properly the implementation.

The sentiment expressed in the article were developers won’t even bother to validate the output of coding assistants is real. And that’s one of the biggest shame to this current hype: quality was already decreasing for the past 10 years, signs indicate this will only go downhill from here


Stack overflow was never a good excuse for crappy work and neither is AI.

Your real problem is a people problem: hiring, management, feedback, etc.


Problem is, big corporations top level management think GenAI will turn crappy developers into superstars.

Happy to be an independant and not an employee to not put up with this crap


what's funny is that I have had good experience using the opposite workflow as said coworker

Do implementation with minimal (not none, tbf) AI support, ask copilot if there are any obvious issues with and otherwise check my work.

This workflow has helped me catch quite a few gotchas I would have otherwise missed.

Coding assistants are really helpful for validating output, I've had much more mixed results trying to use it to generate novel outputs.


That’s because it’s pretty safe to safe you have experience and have seend havoc in the past.

Less experienced developers are the primary vector of propagation for this « low quality » output, with seniors trying to educate and review the mess (if time permits)


was thinking about this while reading another story about AI code review.

Having an LLM write the code for me? Blecch, it doesn't do it right.

Have an LLM make suggestions about my code? That's fine. If some of them are asinine I just get to laugh and feel smart while ignoring them. But if 1/5 of the suggestions are actually good? That's a win.

But if 1/5 of the questions I ask an LLM are correct, that's a waste of time. Funny how the accuracy of the model matters a different amount depending on the task at hand!


Its actually amazing news, worse software quality means more oportunities for hackers and better tools


Or people just become satisfied with lower quality. Hand-crafted chairs from a woodworker used to be the only way to get a chair. You'd get an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws. Now that chairs are cheaply made in factories, we can have multiple different chairs with many flaws. And just toss them out and go on to the next one when needed. But... those sturdy beautiful fine-wordworker-made chairs are still being built. They are just more rare, expensive, and special than ever before.


Yeah that's where I think it's going. Quality software will have no space but a niche, and so your customers will be the top 1% that can afford it.


You actually believe that not a single woodworker said to himself, there are only so many wealthy people, I might do better if I make some chairs from cheap wood in a hurry, not doing so much polishing or ornamentaion, and I can make twice as many and sell to the not-so-rich people? You really don't think that existed?


One of the reasons of the downfall of Florence was that they didn't enter the low quality textile market and remained on the high end stuff.


the fact that low-quality goods/markets existed, whether textiles or chairs, contradicts the OP's original comment and solidifies mine: "the only way to get a chair... an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws"


I have to disagree here based on experience--the majority of software projects I've worked on really didn't care much for "quality" in any sense.

A HUGE portion of work in f500 companies that are non-software firms is outsourced--these companies spend loads of cash on consulting companies (yes, those ones) that often produce results to which the description of sub-par would be a compliment. There's been various cases made public, but more often is routine and poor quality mundane work that's way over budget and barely meets requirements.

If anything, the prevalence and adoption of LLM-generated code will increase the quality in a lot of places.

If you've never had to wade through something that one of Those Companies wrote, you have no idea how bad it gets and how frequently this is the case.

We just saw DOGE-related cuts to Accenture and Deloitte--these companies have huge contracts all over the place, not just public sector.

There's a massive amount of crap out there.

Most companies do not care, do not understand "quality" outside of some cargo-culted notion of "clean", have only adopted modern practices as some sort of ritual* of Things You Do without any assessment on what tangibly works or doesn't, have no understanding of how to attract skilled professionals, nor assess them, nor nurture them. Often their definition of skilled is a resume that contains the proper "experience" with whatever Java/Angular/React/we-love-containers thing they use. With the right number of "years" near it.

*a recent example--company has GH Actions with CI/CD for every commit on all branches but routinely suffers delays due to misconfigurations, runner issues, and other headaches. Code Reviews for PRs exist but are basically pedantry that just slow down deployments ("change this to switch over if-else") while missing crucial bugs, randomly updating major dependencies cause vague security warning that breaks interfaces and other APIs. All this and more--and this is one of the better examples I can think of, in terms of "quality."

I'm saying this as I worked at a Pretty Good consulting company that's business model changed to sub-outsourcing some of the labor to some of These Companies and often had to fix, assist, push back on, work extra to clean up, the various decisions made in these cases.

I also "inherited" and worked on fixes for things left behind by some of these places.

Good thing is there often was low-hanging fruit. Extra and overprovisioned cloud resources wasting $$ and the like, absurd architectures with extra dbs and queues, and all sorts of nightmares.


Just tried with « Time out of joint » from Philip K Dick, and it got it right… but only the first half of the story! Guess, there is no spoiler then


Why? You lose your phone or compatibility with latest OS version and suddenly you can’t even open the door or bring the lights on…

Not the target of the article but another guess would be repairability: while local craftmens around do wonder with wood, steel and electricity, good luck finding someone being able to properly debug a locked-down proprietary digital system!

Welcome to the real world I guess?


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