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Software Automation šŸ¤–
Cats šŸˆā€ā¬›
Linux 🐧

I break shit for a living.

Certified Pissed and ready to throw hands with this goddamn regime.

You'll get mostly pictures of my lovely Bean (cat), occasional politics posting, and some general yapping about tech.

"I'm glad to know that the Software Engineering department isn't the only team that expects Daniel to break everything"

Trans Rights are Human Rights šŸ³ļøā€āš§ļø

(Please have some posts or an introductory post on your account before following)

PronounsThey/Them, He/Him, A/Problem
Cat’s NameBean

Boost plz!

Looking for critical scholarship on the use of "AI" by library/archive workers. University libraries in particular, but adjacent and tangentially-relevant-at-best stuff is welcome too. Any format is fine: books, papers, blogposts, whatever. If it's good, gimme all you've got!

Looks like we're gonna have a department-wide conversation about people using LLMs, and it's being framed as "we're all using it, but we're not talking about it, so let's make sure we're all on the same page about using it responsibly" ... I'll of course be pushing the "there's basically no way to use it responsibly" position, and I'd like to arm myself and others with some critical analyses of issues related to its use in library/archive spaces.

#llm #LLMs #ai #libraries #archives

@becomethewaifu @zzt I scrolled to see if someone left this suggestion; this is what I do to handle it. Both in iOS and MacOS, it mostly handled issues I have with liquid glass and I basically forget about it altogether.

Hopefully this trick works better, cuz I too was very disappointed with the ā€œtintedā€ setting.

I don’t expect this joke of a design system to stick around after 26, I am hoping they intend to just bury it, with the main director who forced this shit moving on to another role.

@emaytch Favoriting this so it gets more traction and it rockets up the recommendations/For You page so you can get that sick ad revenue payout
Rumours of Chuck Norris' invulnerability have been greatly exaggerated.

@philip @wwahammy Altman and Amodei off to the side: ā€œBut if it is encapsulated, then it means less tokens and less tokens means less better!ā€

Meanwhile they rot away developer’s ability to code and make them dependent on a toolset they have to rent to commit code worse than an intern would write.

As an aside sorta, as this shit is starting to sunset, we are seeing the discussion switch to tokens as something exchangeable as a thing to be exchanged for some supposed value. Pivot to AI had a video that touched on it, and it is just crypto all the way down.

https://youtu.be/KLERkM2TJbw

The money will continue to be invested until the still born ā€˜AGI’ god is declared born, and then it is a rush to not be left holding the bag.

AI companies try to pay staff in AI tokens, not money

YouTube

@wwahammy @philip right now at my job, we have some PMs that are vibe coding prototypes and passing it over to developers to integrate into the product.

They are AI features being integrated with no QA done on them beyond the developer saying ā€œyeah this is working alright.ā€

When you look at the code for the feature compared to previous code, it is so abundantly clear that even the implementation is Claude code.

I need the bubble to pop yesterday, cuz the brashness of it is just insane to me.
But hey I guess the customer base who seem to be all in on AI get to be the ones to grab tools to drive customers away from TV even faster than than it was already decaying. 🤷

@philip @wwahammy architecture, design, patterns, DRY, etc. are all where the work of software development is.
Coding isn’t the hard part, it is just the vehicle and tooling to ā€œbuild the buildingā€.

Mediocre and difficult to maintain code like this can only last so long as the tokens are subsidized with stupid money, and it will (arguably has) single handedly delay technological progress as a whole until stupid money gets smart.

@wwahammy At work, I had to do code review on some claude code output for writing some e2e tests in Playwright.

I looked at the PR initially, realized it was all AI generated, saw how unbelievably repetitive it was, and just left a comment suggesting we think very carefully before merging it because it looked like automated tech debt.

3 rounds of review of code from a guy whom I have never had to give much push back on basically ever cuz he had good principles, and it was finally in a state where it would be ā€œacceptableā€

The crux of it is yeah it cranked out like 40 tests!

30 of them should have just been definitions that were passed through into a single test method with light abstraction and basically just feeding am array of test variables into.

If 1 thing updated, ALL of the tests would have to be individually updated vs just updating the 1 method.

I also had to nudge to make changes so that it will run through every test case and not fail the whole suite if just the 1 test failed.

And this is just within an SDET type setting!

One of the senior devs has been doing an unfortunate amount of vibe coding and the weird issues that keep coming up have been really bizarre. I catch a lot of them but there is so much that I am certain I won’t be able to catch in advance due to systemic issues in the org’s testing capabilities. It is a really stressful time to be in QA rn and I need this bubble to pop and the phantasms of GenAI to fall from people’s eyes so we can build shit people actually want.

All this to say: You are completely right and sitting on the other side of vibe code and told to validate it has been so very stressful.

In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith's stewardship.

In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?

The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.

It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.

California has a lot to fucking answer for.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/

@thomasfuchs (my dishwasher is broken so I am the human shaped robot for doing the dishes)