Mastodawn

Timnit Gebru (she/her).1d ago

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324676116121930

Incredible thread.

Answered some of my questions about what people think the future will be if everyone codes like this. It seems to be: instead of thinking about constraints of any kind or "what is the most efficient way to do Y or the most readable way to do Z?" answer the question, "what is the most brute force way to perform X if I pretend that there are no resource constraints and nothing needs to make sense as long as I see some sort of test passing? Just ship it with spaghetti code.

@timnitGebru Never in my life did I think I'd see software development, a field that's spent decades building best practices and being concerned with security and code quality, destroy itself in a matter of months.

At this point these people might as well be just reading tea leaves, or casting chicken bones on the ground.

G. Wozniak 1d ago

@prietschka @timnitGebru The worst part is that those who should care won't because "now I get to play with all my ideas!"

Paul Rietschka 1d ago

@gwozniak @timnitGebru "Working at higher levels of abstraction" is just some chudly pleading with his chatbot, apparently.

G. Wozniak 1d ago

@prietschka @timnitGebru "Will you be my giant WHILE loop? Love ya."

Paul Rietschka 1d ago

@gwozniak @timnitGebru When you have to plead with your LLM to "pretend you're a superhero," or whatever it is people are doing these days, we've long gone through the looking glass.

We've been at the level of New Age crystal ooga booga nonsense for ages with this technology, it's insane anyone takes any of this seriously. I feel like I live inside an opium hallucination.

Richard Kolasa 22h ago

@prietschka there are two bubbles, the financial one and the linguistic one.

Brad Macpherson 1d ago

@prietschka @timnitGebru Nah, this too shall pass. Half the industry runs off down blind alleys every 5-10 years or so, and the rest of us just carry on in spite of the latest bullshit fad.

On the code quality front, too - jesus wept, that's a never-ending uphill battle through a river of shit 😂 These GenAI kiddies will tire themselves out soon enough and we can just quietly plod along, doing a good job and preventing the worst excesses harming our systems.

Paul Rietschka 1d ago

@brad @timnitGebru I've seen all this too many times, it's why I'm out of the sector.

My guess is the coming Great-Recession-on-steroids-and-PCP crash will wipe a lot of this nonsense away under the weight of much suffering; but, still...I just can't do this anymore.

Maybe the genai kiddos need themselves a 1929-type implosion to understand what suffering is?

@prietschka @brad @timnitGebru I somehow imagine that in that event, a lot of people would find their savings and pension plans vanishing into nothing, while the bankers in charge of it all somehow went up in net worth.

MegatronicThronBanks 1d ago

@prietschka @timnitGebru

It's.... been total shit for 20 years. This is just the latest.

Laurent Bercot 1d ago

@prietschka @timnitGebru

software development, a field that's spent decades building best practices and being concerned with security and code quality

Do not mix "software development", the scientific-or-close-to-it discipline that exists, that has principles, that is taught (often badly, but that's another debate) in schools, with what techbros flood the industry with top-down.

Enterprise coding was never driven by sound software development practices. It was always bullshit. It was always an application of the latest company fads and buzzwords; vibe coding is only the latest one, certainly the most harmful, but not fundamentally different.

The knowledge and skill remains, no matter what these assholes do. It just won't be found in the capitalist world. It never was.

EndlessMason 1d ago

@ska @prietschka @timnitGebru
"We need to wrap it, so we are future proof, what if the library changes?!"

The compiler will tell us, what are you on about?

EndlessMason 1d ago

@ska @prietschka @timnitGebru
"No no no, we can't use that wrapper, it belongs to the other team, what if they change it?!"

@ska @prietschka @timnitGebru The enterprise approach is always focused on delivering a product, and hardware is usually cheaper than optimisation.

If your database is lagging, what's the best solution: Hire a database guru to optimise your configuration and make sure you are using appropriate indexing and query structure, or just whack another quarter-terabyte of RAM in the server?

Laurent Bercot 1d ago

@Qybat @prietschka @timnitGebru You're this close to understanding that capitalism is the problem

varx/social 1d ago

2010: Whee, I'm a software engineer!

2015: Hmm, can I really claim "engineer"? We're not *that* rigorous.

2020: Actually, yeah! Some of this really is engineering!

2026: Never mind. We're a bunch of fucking clowns.