Something like this needs density. If there's not enough people using it, then the per use cost will be far too much to make it economically viable. That makes cities much more attractive to startups like this. Of course there you have airspace issues with large buildings, so the true sweet spot may be relatively dense but very high income suburbs. But it sure as heck won't be rural.

Yes. So far, the LLM tools seem to be much more useful for general research purposes, analysing existing code, or producing example/prototype code to illustrate a specific point. I haven't found them very useful for much of my serious work writing production code yet. At best, they are hit and miss with the easy stuff, and by the time you've reviewed everything with sufficient care to have confidence in it, the potential productivity benefits have been reduced considerably. Meanwhile even the current state of the art models are worse than useless for the more research-level stuff we do. We try them out fairly regularly but they make many bad assumptions and then completely fail to generate acceptable quality code when told no, those are not acceptable and they really do need to produce a complete and robust solution of the original problem that is suitable for professional use.

But one of the common distinctions between senior and junior developers -- almost a litmus test by now -- is their attitude to new, shiny tools. The juniors are all over them. The seniors tend to value demonstrable results and as such they tend to prefer tried and tested workhorses to new shiny things with unproven potential.

That means if and when the AI code generators actually start producing professional standard code reliably, I expect most senior developers will be on board. But except for relatively simple and common scenarios ("Build the scaffolding for a user interface and database for this trivial CRUD application that's been done 74,000 times before!") we don't seem to be anywhere near that level of competence yet. It's not irrational for seniors to be risk averse when someone claims to have a silver bullet but both the senior's own experience and increasing amounts of more formal study are suggesting that Brooks remains undefeated.

You can do that with github and many of the others as well. My employer has a private github.

(+1, Truth)

Of all the major streaming platforms, Paramount+ stands alone in how often it just doesn't work. It doesn't work reliably on state-of-the-art streaming boxes. It doesn't work reliably on desktop PCs. In fact, of all the devices we have in our household, it works reliably on a total of zero of them.

We have several of the other commercial streaming platforms plus the apps or online services for several of our main national TV channels as well and almost all of them work almost all of the time. It's bizarre how bad Paramount+ manages to be compared to literally everyone else. It must be hurting their bottom line to some degree or surely will do soon if they don't get a handle on it, because why pay for something you literally can't watch?

Except it really isn't. The stuff from 2 years ago is miles ahead from the stuff 5 years ago. The stuff from 1 years ago is yards ahead of 1 year ago. The stuff from 6 months ago is nearly indistinguishable from the stuff from a year ago. Diminishing returns is hitting hard and rapidly. Many experts think that LLMs are closing in on their technical limitations, regardless of how much extra compute its given. It will need entirely new techniques to actually become much more than it is now. Which may happen, but doesn't appear to be on the horizon.

A study you can't even directly link to? Yeah, I call bullshit.

And my personal experience is it's at least a 50% slow down. I have yet to ever have it do anything not completely trivial that wasn't badly insecure and broken, and when using them to provide static analysis the false positive rate is around 90%.

No, those who aren't willing are actually following the science. Every measurement so far, every actual study has shown AI code generation is 20% or more slower for senior engineers. Even scaleai, a company founded and run by Meta's AI chief, shows the same in their data (https://scale.com/leaderboard/rli). Possibly it will someday get there, but it sure as hell isn't ready yet.

It is the Microsoft way.

There's a difference between not using AI tools at all and not using code generated by AIs.

The latter involves a lot of risks that aren't well understood yet -- some technical, some legal, some ethical -- and it's entirely possibly that some of those risks are going to blow up in the face of the gung-ho adopters with existential consequences for their businesses.

I mostly work with clients in industries where quality matters. Think engineering applications where equipment going wrong destroys things or kills people and where security vulnerabilities are a proxy for equipment going wrong.

I know plenty of smart, capable people working in this part of the industry who are totally fine with blanket banning the use of AI-generated code on these jobs. A lot of that code simply isn't up to the required standards anyway, but even if it does produce something you could actually use, there are still all the same costs for review and certification that any other code incurs. That includes the need for at least one human reviewer to work out why the AI wrote what it did, which may or may not have any better answer than "statistically, it seemed like a good idea at the time".

The claims also seem a bit sus. "Eighty percent of new developers on GitHub use Copilot within their first week." Is this the same statistic someone was debunking recently where anyone who had done something really basic (it might have been using the search facility?) was counted as "using Copilot"? A lot of organisations seem to be cautious about using code generated by AIs, or even imposing a blanket ban, so things must be very different in other parts of the industry if that 80% is also representative of professional developers using Copilot significantly for real work.

Also, Android is an open source OS. You can always run it on a modified OS that pretends to have secure storage but logs all data sent to it.

Still trivially though for any talented reverse engineer. Somewhere in the code they have a function that checks if they think they're 18 and returns a boolean. Change the function to always return true. It would be harder if it was sending the image up to the server to analyze, but local is easy to break.

I actually like my camera bump- when I put it my last phone without one on a slightly curved surface (such as the side of my bathtub) it would slide off. With the bump, there's enough friction to prevent that. So while ugly, that's enough of a QOL increase I'd rather have the bump.

I have a dead former coworker. His family has access to his account. Every so often, they browse fb on it and like a post. It feels icky and wtf every time. In fact the first time I had to go back through old DMs and emails to double check that he was actually dead and I wasn't misremembering, it was that fucked up. This would be the last thing I'd ever want, for my loved ones or myself.