mm Australia isn't one person so it can't say "no thanks" to anything. Could you please refrain from trying to astroturf your political views on Hacker News so that it can remain a good source of information for computer news?

Surely you are still allowed to raise criticism about a CEO even though the Justice Department closed one case?

I don’t see why not? It’s a (worrying) emergent tech/social phenomenon.

Things like this have existed before, of course, but this is probably the most mainstream effort; previously they were confined to things like Replika, which people would have to seek out, not being promoted as a first party feature in a major social network.

Xai recently announced the $10 billion investment round. They've been criticized for lack of a safety culture. They have a very high burn rate so that investor money is going to evaporate quickly. Spending it on AI waifu seems relevant.

There's a problem with incentives here probably, if universities get paid for the amount of people they crank out, this sounds like a natural consequence, doesn't it?

> if your code doesn't work it doesn't work

Code can definitely only sort of work: only works on the happy path, only works on the computer it was developed on, only works for some versions of some dependencies, only works when single threaded, only works when the network is fast enough, only works for a single user at a time etc etc etc.

Software engineering is way more of a social practice than you probably want to believe.

Why is the code like that? How are people likely to use an API? How does code change over time? How can we work effectively on a codebase that's too big for any single person to understand? How can we steer the direction of a codebase over a long timescale when it's constantly changing every day?

Yes that is very true but social science is more of a social practice than computer science

If you run your organization badly, you'll run into problems sooner, than if you are in social science, where you just have to say all the buzzwords and they'll just rubberstamp you true

If you are arguing that my point is that computer science would be 100% falsifiable and social science is 0% falsifiable then you're argument is a bit of a straw man

> Why is the code like that? How are people likely to use an API? How does code change over time? How can we work effectively on a codebase that's too big for any single person to understand? How can we steer the direction of a codebase over a long timescale when it's constantly changing every day?

At which point you are studying project management theory, or whatever you call it

I’d argue that computer science is on a gradient between social science and physics.

I'd argue that anything that has science at the end isn't :)

So computer science isn’t either then.

that's the joke :D

Materials science rolls its eyes every time it hears that hoary joke.

Code can absolutely "kinda work" or "mostly work"

aha and if it mostly works there are parts that doesn't work right?

>if your code doesn't work it doesn't work

you can't bullshit a computer

this is wrong. I would argue the difference between a junior dev/intern and a senior engineer is that while both can write code that works, the juniors find local maximas, like solutions that work, but can't scale, or wont be very easy to integrate/add features on top/maintain etc.

This happens in maths, biology, in all science fields. Experience is partly the ability to take decisions between options that both work.

This is why coding assistants are amazing at executing things you are clear on what you want to do, but can't help (yet) on big picture tweaks

Right I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I see where you are coming from right.

My point being that it's quite easy to demonstrate that it can't scale, by running an experiment.

Meaning that you could quite easily BS your way through that by just agreeing with whatever the status quo is.

Whereas in social science you can't do an empirical experiment, so you're epistemologically on much much more shakier ground

> This happens in maths, biology, in all science fields Right but I wrote social science and not maths or biology.

For instance if someone where to say that due to Hegelian Dialeticts and gender critical theory, in the future women are destined to rule the world, this is a good thing, and this will lead to the abolishment of racial inequality and exploitation through capitalism

how do you prove that?

in comparison if the problem is that your software isn't efficient when there are over 100 instance, you can prove that by spinning up 100 instances?

You can't clone earth and force all the inhabitants to enact ideologically pure race critical theory, and then ask the inhabitants in the control group to try out nazism, wait for a while and then use that to prove that one or the other is the best way can you?

it's helpful for them, because it means they can get a lot of VC money by putting some ugly 4chan meme pictures on a website in order to get attention

Just made for fun, we are self funded.

> This is almost always a consequence of relying too much on ChatGPT and vibe coding tools.

How do you know it's not because they are to put it bluntly stupid or lazy?

being good at software design isn't about memorizing the specific details of a single language or subjects

languages are subject to change

hire people who are good at finding information

not someone who is good at blindly memorizing details of a specific instance of a language or system

someone who memorized every single detail of COBOL will be a worse coder than someone who spent time thinking about abstract thinking and problem solving

you'll want to double check everything anyway

this shows of a fundamental lack of insight into what it means to be a good developer

it's like someone who thinks they are smarter than everyone else because they spent thousands on hours on playing chess

this student who has memorized the full specification of HTML, CSS and Javascript will be useless if you ask them a question about lets say Erlang, and is easily replaced by a book

dev atrophy test - can you still code without ever reading a manual

> "And if as a CIO you believe that your prohibition on using LLMs for coding because of 'divulging company secrets' holds, you are either strip searching your employees on the way in and out, or wilfully blind."

Right so if you are in certain areas you'll be legally required not to send your work to whatever 3:rd party that promises to handle it the cheapest.

Also so since this is about actually "interesting" work if you are doing cutting edge research on lets say military or medical applications** you definitely should take things like this seriously.

Obviously you can do LLM's locally if you don't feel like paying up for programmers who likes to code, and who wants to have in-depth knowledge of whatever they are doing.

** https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2eeg9gygyno

Of course you should not violate company policy, and some environments will indeed have more stringent controls and measures, but there is a whole world of grey were the CIO has put in place a moratorium on LLM but where some people will quickly crunch out the day's work at home with an AI anyways so they look more productive.

You can of course run consider running your own LLM.

I suppose the problem isn't really the technology itself but rather the quality of the employees. There would've been a lot of people cheating the system before, lets say just by copy pasting or tricking your coworkers into doing the work for you.

However if you are working with something actually interesting, chances are that you're not working with disingenuous grifters and uneducated and lazy backstabbers, so that's less of a concern as well. If you are working on interesting projects hopefully these people would've been filtered out somewhere along the line.