diegoe
Danielle ForéLLM code is the lead pipe of our generation of software engineers. They’re going to be replacing it for decades and wondering how we were so foolish
It’s the most terminally online fedi bro thing ever to be like, “um actually asbestos is a better metaphor”. Truly who gives a shit dude. Do you really think that is the important thing to focus on here. Jesus Christ. If missing the forest for the trees was an Olympic sport Fedi Bros would take gold every time
Sandor Spruit 🇪🇺🇳🇱🇺🇦🇨🇦@danirabbit Well, lead pipes will make you lose your mind first, so what do you expect?
Tyla (Combat Waifu Yuri Arc)@danirabbit OMG the whole correcting some ancillary and irrelevant point to frame an argument that is winnable while ignoring the whole point is such a thing with dudes.
I wrote a whole ass essay about that shit (funnily, I used pipes as a metaphor) because they would try to pull me into argument about the most random shit. I hate it so much.
Diego Assustado@danirabbit sorry, maybe because English isn't my first language but could you speak out your point about missing the forest for the trees?
Like is the missing part related to trying to find a better analogy when the problem is gigantically enormous ethical implications and death of people
or something else?
@diegovsky yes exactly
canning jars@danirabbit lead pipe is a better example anyways, there was no asbestos in “Clue”
:cool_s:ylvie 
@lids @danirabbit Lead also (no pun intended) leads to mental health related issues which I thought was well known to the point of being part of insults in the English language as early as the ‘90s and ‘00s. Way more apt a metaphor with ‘AI’ psychosis, stunting basic critical thinking, and other issues created
“Childhood lead exposure has devastating lifelong consequences, as even low-level exposure stunts intelligence and leads to delinquent behavior. However, these consequences may be more extensive than previously thought because childhood lead exposure may adversely affect normal-range personality traits. Personality influences nearly every aspect of human functioning, from well-being to career earnings to longevity, so effects of lead exposure on personality would have far-reaching societal consequences.”
McNeely@lids @danirabbit checkmate asbestos
@McNeely @danirabbit cry harder asbestcels
David Culley@danirabbit They're only saying that because Cory Doctorow used the "asbestos" metaphor.
Had Doctorow used the "lead pipe" metaphor instead, they would tell you the lead pipe would be the better metaphor whenever you compared it to asbestos.
They don't want to think for themselves. They just want to signal that they belong to the in-group, those "in the know". And spread the word of someone with authority as gospel, like missionaries.
@davidculley I’m so glad I never gave a shit what cory doctorow had to say
thepwnicorn@danirabbit I saw it described elsewhere as digital asbestos.
Piranhallama@thepwnicorn @danirabbit "aisbestos" is my current favourite. It certainly is. A wonder-product to cure all our problems now. It won't take as long as asbestos for it to be revealed as an awful idea though.
I'm sure it'll be harder for big ai to hide it than for big asbestos who spent years suppressing science, lobbying governments and denying victims' claims.
Pliny the younger wrote of the illness of asbestos mine workers and he's so old he's in history books. He even wrote about history before it had been invented. Probably because it was the present when he wrote. However we still put asbestos in everything we could in the twentieth century.
eobet@securedllama @thepwnicorn @danirabbit lead pipes, asbestos, pfas... it mostly all fits either way. 🧟
Thibault D.@thepwnicorn @danirabbit Lead pipes: victims are the users. Asbestos: victims are the workers. Who will suffer the most because of AI code, workers or users?
Ozzelot 
Rachael Ava 💁🏻♀️@danirabbit Or maybe asbestos.
Hot Dog Water"Did you eat LLM chips as a kid?"
luca@danirabbit That's the time frame I considered, decades. Furthermore, there will be advances with the technology. In some years LeCun plans to have his startup produce new models, based on JEPA. If you give even a 10-20% more reliability to current systems people will eventually adopt them as undisputable truth - even if they fail a 50% of times, and bias users 90% of times.
I've had a talk right yesterday with a very smart engineer who was anyway totally enchanted by an LLM's results.
I've had a talk right yesterday with a very smart engineer who was anyway totally enchanted by an LLM's results.
Seth Mos@luc0x61 @danirabbit my experience today was another example of why you should have prod and dev separated.
Asked to test entry. Test succesful, entry removed 😂
The other was implementing smtp, and it sent all test emails to logs succesfully. Yup
Reijo Pitkänen@danirabbit
✅ Causes brain damage when used to ingest.
✅ Adds a sweet taste to everything, even shit.
✅ Is the preferred weapon of thugs-of-the-age.
✅ Easy to solder together haphazardly.
Yep.
Frisk Fyrste Tofty for Helvede@danirabbit I'm a bit curious how ElementaryOS (well, you lot 😄) are coping with upstream vibecoding if and when it happens?
I have no bright ideas, to be honest - so consider this my copium asking more knowledgable people 😊.
@tofticles not well, personally haha
@danirabbit Absolutely fair 🫣.
Muod@danirabbit LLM is just tool. Thats all!
Rupert V/@muod @danirabbit A stolen tool that kills a non-trivial fraction of a polar bear every time it's used, that is sold by a man who constantly lies about its capabilities.
@rupert @danirabbit yes Agreed!
@muod @danirabbit So are whips. I heard baking with them is all the rage nowadays.
Ceri :neofox_floof_cute::tailwag:@muod so was lead, used because it was cheap and easy to form, despite knowing the dangers
xrvs
Sjoerd Stendahl@danirabbit Jeppp, same energy as what @pluralistic wrote a while ago: "AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:"
TinDrum@sstendahl is he not now using llms to write with?
not the same as generating code but the principle
degenerating degenerateIt's so wonderful to see such faith in the quality of the average human-written code!
But every time I look at Coverity (an excellent static analyzer for finding difficult bugs) I see their "defect density over time" graph which has the "OSS average" set at 0.5 (presumably per 1000 LOC).
Whenever I added new code, I could not get it to stay at 0.0, whether it was my code, other humans or AI. I had to rely on Coverity to determine the errors and fix them (now also AI's job).
Larvitz 
@danirabbit LLM for SW-Engineering = Creating technical debt on steroids ...
Stilic 🇫🇷@Larvitz @danirabbit says the person with a ai-generated pfp...
Bebadefabo@danirabbit AIsbestos
Kiran J. Holla@danirabbit unfortunately, it's the few powerful, and possibly non-techie, CXOs who are so convinced that this is such a great idea. The rest of us have little choice but to go along with this hysteria just to keep our jobs.
To be honest, the economics doesn't make sense to me. The amounts being spent on this — I am struggling to see the returns. Only time can tell a few stories. But until then, I need to feed my family and send my kids to college.
S. Lott@danirabbit For decades we’ve worried about replacing COBOL because the code was often opaque; the underlying business rules transformed into a spaghetti bowl of logic paths exacerbated by the REDEFINES clauses making the data just as awful.
The folks that considered leaving COBOL in place as an acceptable technology choice will buy into vibe-code slop and proclaim (still) “it ain’t broke so there’s no need to fix it.”
Satyam KapoorStill watching… Reliable code had very high value before LLMs came into picture and suddenly everyone became okay with mistakes 🤷♂️
kris@danirabbit as long as someone doesn't beat us to death with it first
qrsBRWN@danirabbit we have been on this path for a very long time LLM generated code is just the most obvious example. The problem that drove us here is that quality doesn't really show on a quarterly report and the ones businesses are bound to keep happy are the ones owning shares. And they want number go up.
Good code happened anyway because people cared. LLMs makes that harder because people think that engineers can output more if they get help with the writing part. That gives less time to "guerilla write" good code.
Good code happened anyway because people cared. LLMs makes that harder because people think that engineers can output more if they get help with the writing part. That gives less time to "guerilla write" good code.
gatinha fofa da navi
vxo@danirabbit
Screw lead, this shit is Orangeburg and Transite. It collapses under its own weight
Screw lead, this shit is Orangeburg and Transite. It collapses under its own weight
@danirabbit oh damn that's a great analogy 🔥
Casey Ydenberg@danirabbit Yet another thing our age shares with the end of the Roman Empire.
John Maxwell@danirabbit - And I personally plan to charge through the nose for it.
ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘@danirabbit That's a good example of things that seemed a great idea at the time, but turned out to be harmful. I'm certain genAI will be added to that list.
Kevin@danirabbit More like Asbestos. Big chunks will be chopped out expensively by very specialised people but small fibres will always remain and will cause big problems with a very small probability
Tobias Frech@danirabbit Recently we were discussing if it's more like asbestos or like plastic (and microplastics). How much thought should be put into stuff like this before it's rolled out globally? Can we simply go ahead and try to fix the problems later?
Fish in the Percolator@danirabbit definitely keeping my "free range, organic" coding in good health in the meantime!
Raphael@danirabbit More like asbetos, what with all the long festering and then tumors.
God Emperor of Mastodon@danirabbit OOS? Sure. Proprietary? There's a collective "that won't be my problem; I'll be rich by then!"
edsanders2@danirabbit
History is so filled with things that people (to be fair, mostly capitalists) thought were really good ideas that turned out to be disastrous that my head spins.
Lead in pipes, paint, etc. is certainly one, but, of the top of my head,
Radium watch faces
Thalidomide
Indiscriminately spraying DDT (the pictures of kids running after the trucks are truly mind boggling)
I’m sure there’s plenty more, but, apparently, we need to learn the same lesson over and over and over
ferricoxide@danirabbit
LLMs are useful for, "I know <LANGUAGE> but I'm working in <OTHER_LANGUAGE>, today. How would I write <SNIPPET> in <OTHER_LANGUAGE>" scenarios. And. yeah, often times the responses are like, "that's close but not really as optimized as the reference snippet I gave you".
LLMs are useful for, "I know <LANGUAGE> but I'm working in <OTHER_LANGUAGE>, today. How would I write <SNIPPET> in <OTHER_LANGUAGE>" scenarios. And. yeah, often times the responses are like, "that's close but not really as optimized as the reference snippet I gave you".
Romain_59@ferricoxide @danirabbit Agreed. Very usefull when i want to make small scripts but don't have the time to do it
Milcom MiasmaAnd they thought keeping COBOL developers around was a waste of resources. Wait 'til they see the job boom _this_ creates.
Human 3500@danirabbit It will be quicker to just back out the years of computer updates and start from there, or maybe just start again.
Both options assume the company is still in business which may be doubtful.
Kevin Karhan 
@danirabbit luckily I'm not using this form of "self-lobotomy" / "mental atrophy" and that'll pay dividents longterm…
paddlaren@danirabbit
I have a friend that went back to work coding after a very wet visit at local pub. A few hours of nightly drunk coding took about a week for 3 persons to clean out. (And I finally got through with my idea to always use version control). This was 1992.
AI codes much faster so I think you are probably right.
BUT to be fair, AI might as well sober up and at some point and do a good job fixing the code for us.