Poliorcetics

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Rustacean 🦀, devourer of fruits 🍎. I love cats too, the one in the photo is the scrungiest I ever met !
🐙 Githubhttps://github.com/poliorcetics
This xkcd.com update introduces a variety of new reading modes which can be activated through the menu below the comic.
https://xkcd.com/3227/

Anthropic's Claude Code's full source code leaked. Claude is seen by many to be the best coding LLM on the market with Anthropic proudly stating that Claude Code itself is mostly written by the LLM.

Now this sounds good as long as nobody can see the code which is quite the trash fire. Detecting "code sentiment" via regular expressions, variable and functions names containing prompt parts trying to influence the bot, a completely intransparent mess of a control flow that makes actual maintenance and debugging functionally impossible and the prompts ... of the prompts. All the begging and pleading to the chatbot not to do this or not to do that or please to do this.

It is fascinating but it is as far away from actual engineering as drunkenly pissing your name in the snow. Dunno what you call the people prompting software at Anthropic but "engineer" is not it.

Now it is fun to look at the currently hyped product striped bare and showing its pathetic quality but that is the future of software if we let those companies continue to undermine every good practice software engineering has tried establishing.

The software we have to use will be bad, insecure, unmaintainable, expensive with nobody having the skills or resources to build something better. As I wrote a few months ago: LLM based software production is equivalent to saying that fast fashion should be the only way to produce clothing. A tragic degeneration of the quality of the artefacts we rely on build for maximum profit on the backs of people in countries from the global majority.

This is peak malicious compliance and I love it

https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-paperwork-flood/

Edit : the blog author is on the fediverse if you want to follow him here, and he maintains a follow page on his site with many options!

The 'Paperwork Flood': How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner., Sightless Scribbles

A fabulously gay blind author.

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

As the number of LLM-generated patches in my inbox increases, I am starting to experience the sort of maintainer stress that has long been predicted. But there's another aspect of this that has recently crossed my mind.

Just over a week ago, a new personality showed up with a whole pile of machine-generated patches claiming to fill in our memory-management documentation. A few reviewers had some sharp questions, the response to which has been ... silence. This person doesn't seem to have cared enough about that work to make an effort to get past the initial resistance.

Once upon a time, somebody who had produced many pages of MM documentation would be invested enough in that work to make at least a minimal attempt to defend it.

Kernel developers often worry that a patch submitter will not stick around to maintain the code they are trying to push upstream. Part of the gauntlet of getting kernel patches accepted can be seen as a sort of "are you serious?" test.

When somebody submits a big pile of machine-generated code, though, will they be *able* to maintain it? And will they be sufficiently invested in this code, which they didn't write and probably don't understand, to stick around and fix the inevitable problems that will arise? I rather fear not, and that does not bode well for the long-term maintainability of our software.

First they ask for your date of birth,
but later they claim it's not enough.

Then they ask for your full name and location,
but later they claim it's not enough.

Then they ask for a copy of your passport,
but later they claim it's not enough.

Then they ask for your facial scan,
but later they claim it's not enough.

Then they ask for your fingerprints,
but later they claim it's not enough.

Then they ask for your palm scan,
but later they claim it's not enough.

Then they ask for a scan of your iris,
but later they claim it's not enough.

Then they ask for ...

#MassSurveillance #Authoritarianism #AgeVerification #Privacy #Democracy #HumanRights

My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"

Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC

Wikipedia:Writing articles with large language models/RfC - Wikipedia

Reading through Anthropic's official repo for giving agents various "super skills"[1]... There's an "algorithmic art" skill and the instructions are explicitly encouraging pure deception as one of the key "critical guidelines":

"The philosophy MUST stress multiple times that the final algorithm should appear as though it took countless hours to develop, was refined with care, and comes from someone at the absolute top of their field. This framing is essential - repeat phrases like "meticulously crafted algorithm," "the product of deep computational expertise," "painstaking optimization," "master-level implementation.""

https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/skills/algorithmic-art/SKILL.md

For someone who's been working in this field for almost 30 years, this "skills.md" file is just the worst... and so far off the mark! 🤮

Touch some effing grass, Anthropic (and all boosters)! How can so many people think this approach is _the_ future? The map is not the terrain...

[1] Alone the premise of this repo is pure comedy gold and pure sadness in equal measures!

#AlgorithmicArt #GenerativeArt #NoAI #Agents #Deception