And let's not overlook that this is yet another attempt by the AI lobby to convince the public that AI "thinks," and even has the same concerns that human workers do. Which it doesn't. But the more the public believes that these algorithms are comparable to human intelligence, the better it is for all the people who keep pouring money into this bubble.

Ah, gotcha. You were referring to the comment from the summary, not mine. Yeah, it's fun to watch the young'uns realize that they are absolutely going to spend their whole lives realizing they forgot something they used to know. It's even more fun to watch them the first time they look at code they wrote two months ago and say "Who wrote this stupid shit? Oh....".

Really? Doesn't feel that way at all to me. What it feels like is that LLMs are a massive force multiplier for the skills I already have.

Why the scare quotes? Are you uncertain if she's a woman? Or do you not understand how to use quotation marks?

Did they steal stuff worth millions?

Though, of course, this raises the question of why someone would leave valuable masters in a suitcase in an unoccupied core.

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

Dude, I've been writing code for 40 years. I've used so many different tools, stacks, libraries and APIs that at this point I don't remember any of them, and I haven't remembered them for years, and it doesn't matter at all. Sure, I have to look everything up, but that's fine, that doesn't matter. What matters is that I know when something looks wrong, or hard to maintain, or inefficient, or insecure, or... pick the axis. And I can dig in and find the problem. Anyone can tell if code works, that's easy. Understanding when and why it might break or otherwise impose additional costs, that's the real skill.

Which, as it happens, is exactly the skill you need to use an LLM effectively. Also the skill you need to understand legacy code, review colleagues' commits, etc., etc., etc. I used to say that the ability to read and understand code is an underrated skill, but an old friend corrected me at lunch a couple of weeks ago, saying that the ability to read and understand code is the most important software engineering skill, and always has been. Upon reflection, I agreed. And LLMs make this clearer than ever before.

I'm confused by all of these posters who've never heard of "the curve". I wonder if it's because they're all young'uns who went to school during an interval when progressive educators had decided to abandon it... with the inevitable grade inflation that was totally predicted.

When I was in college 40 years ago every class that had more than ~30 students in it was graded on the curve, and even some of the smaller ones (though in a smaller class it becomes statistically questionable). I used to love the groans when a buddy and I walked in the first day of class, because they knew we were going to "bend the curve". :D

Though in all seriousness, the whole point of using a curve is that in a sufficiently large class, it's statistically guaranteed (to very high probability) to be "unbendable". Inserting a couple of students at the top would mean that students who might be just above a cutoff might fall just below it, but it's not going to make a difference to many.

College isn't like tee-ball, where every player gets a participation trophy, and it shouldn't be. Especially not at elite schools. Part of the purpose of a university education is to act as a filter, and not just to filter out those who can't cut it at all, but to rank all of the students by performance, so graduate schools and potential employers can make use of that information.

I suspect part of it is that the mitigation for DirtyFrag covers it, so everyone who blocked all the modules in question when that had only an incomplete patch probably hasn't unblocked them yet. I think this is the 4th patch for these modules, and only got a new name rather than just "there's still a way to get this code to do the wrong thing" because a different outside team found this one.

Don't be so sure about the "shipped off". Google is heavily investing in on-device AI that runs in a trusted enclave (e.g. TrustZone on ARM). I left the company in August of last year but I doubt this has changed since it's been a major area of focus for quite some time.

"Yes, you did pay to delete the backup... but not the redundant copy."

Well, odds are the people in charge at Instructure are relatively stupid themselves. It's like the old Sherlock Holmes quote: "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself" - the Instructure leadership probably can't fathom how anyone smarter than them could exist.

Given how people keep stupidly paying these ransoms... maybe it's time to criminalize that act.

GoogleBook never sleeps! It is always watching...

Uh, out for you! Yeah, that's it. It is always watching out for you.

Forget legal power ... HOW? What technical mechanism does the FCC have that can block firmware updates over the public internet? Are we proposing a China-style "Great Firewall" for U.S. consumers?