Having awarded a major contract to (controversial) data firm Palantir, a growing number of NHS staff are refusing to work with the firm's tools for ethical reasons, with wider passive resistance to its deployment.

One manger said: 'People are saying, ‘I refuse to work on this software. You have to find something else for me to do’... They’re calling it a workplace adjustment. [as] if you were disabled & needed a different desk, they’re literally treating it like that'! 

#NHS #Palantir
h/t FT

RE: https://mastodon.online/@Geri/116329534279830259

The decision to proscribe Palestine Action was wrong, and it has opened the door to this ever-deepening morass in which the government and judiciary now find themselves, prosecuting elderly clergymen and little old ladies for holding signs. It seems that now the government have got themselves into this hole, they are incapable of stopping digging.

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.

It is Trans Day of Visibility.

For those who are still on the outside waiting, for those who don’t feel safe visible… know that we’ve been there, and that we see you.

One day. Your day will come.

🫂