I hope at least CPT does not have daylight's savings
"Very well, we shall resume in an hour" will never not crack me up
But it was written about Microsoft specifically. What's your point?
White people are late sometimes too...?
almost every person in tech (...) to deal with the fertility crisis
Why would we be listening to "tech" to deal with "the fertility crisis"? Why is "tech" concerned with "fertility"?
Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?
If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they’ll start using it
I always suspected that I wasn't a REAL MAN™, but I didn't know that me learning programming through C++ and being like "well this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better way" was one of the first symptoms.
referring to Colored People’s Time
to the what now? What cursed horror beyond my comprehension am I going to learn today?
I worked at MSFT between 2021 and 2023.
The Growth Mindset is very much just a gaslighting tool. To be honest I didn't get the culty vibe from it while being on the inside, on the other hand no one ever tried to make me to read Satya's stupid book (thankfully).
One important thing I just have to talk about is The Layoffs. If you ask me about "Growth Mindset", or indeed if I ask around my former MSFT colleagues about the first thing that comes to their mind when they hear it, it will be that time when, not even a month after the massive 2023 layoffs where MSFT fired 11,000 people, we were told by management at a Townhall that it is time for us to "apply Growth Mindset and move forward". I remember very clearly that they tried to spin it as if the layoffs were something that just "happened to us" and we had to move on, as if it was a hurricane that hit the office and not a deliberate act of management to cut costs. It was fucking amazing to hear that from them after I had a literal panic attack due to the uncertainty after the first wave of firings.
I made the decision to quit not long after. When I was leaving the genAI brain rot was already in full swing. The stuff about autoplaging Connects is just a great affirmation of my decision, that company is fucked.
Maybe if we funded them better they'd be able to tackle larger projects.
The orcas were trying to send us this message for a while now
$2400 is hardly a number compared to whatever we're already spending on genAI so fuck it
I want someone to fork the Linux kernel and then unleash like 10 Copilots to make PRs and review each other. No human intervention. Then plot the number of critical security vulnerabilities introduced over time, assuming they can even keep it compilable for long enough.
This is twenty percent logic, ten percent myope
Fifteen percent concentrated power of cope
Five percent incel, fifty percent lame
And a hundred percent reason to forget his name
People who train neural networks do not write a bunch of tokens and weights.
Reading this made me think of an analogy of generated code. This is basically exactly the same thing as distributing the code of your program but not in the source language, rather the assembly listing of the final binary, and calling it open source. You can turn any defense of the AI model of "open-source" into a defense of that model of distributing code. You can run my AI/code (if you have a powerful/similar enough machine), you can inspect it (it's just not going to tell you anything), you can modify it (lol), so it's open source!
Edit: The more I think about it the more I come to the realisation that the assembly listing is actually still vastly more useful than the AI models. Like at least a very dedicated and insane enough programmer could technically track down a bug in the assembly and correct it if given enough coffee.
I don’t think you want to hear my opinions
You're right there, buddy!
I thought "character.ai's suicide lawsuit" was your way of describing a stupid lawsuit that is suicidal to the company, but this is so much fucking darker, god.
You’re communication style will be replaced. Your place in the world is not valued. No one is viewing your response and gaining anything.
That's an impressive level of projection, you should run for office. Or go to therapy.
I'd love to get an interview with saltman and ask him to explain how they measure "power" of those things. What's the methodology? Do you have charts? Or does it just somehow consume 100x more power as in watts.
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.
Zuckerberg told execs to “figure out” how to spy on encrypted Snapchat traffic.
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.
