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Comment Re:Appeal to authority fallacy (Score 1) 121

A 5 digit ID is not evidence of competence.

Definitely not. You need 4 digits for that. :)

But what is the quality of that code? How easy is it to understand for the next human dev brought onto the project?

I’ve watched a coworker do as you describe. Use the AI not only for developing new code but to debug and update that code as bugs manifest. It was a bit of a mess. The AI routinely broke formerly working code. If lost the context on why it had written the code that way in the first place, and when fixing a bug in that area it failed to consider a special case it no longer was away off. Introducing a new bug. I watched fixing one bug generate many iterations of one step forward one step back. The code suffered greatly as a result.

When I assisted him on a couple of occasions I was constantly spotting things both he and the AI missed. AI needs rigorous oversight for non-boilerplate code. Its a useful tool, but it can easily be misused. Often through overuse.

But that's the thing: All of that applies equally to human generated code, too. I've seen plenty of humans do all of those things even without AI assistance.

Where AI today consistently beats a human is on speed. No human can generate code as fast as an AI can. But speed of generation isn't everything. Right now (competent) humans have the edge when it comes to seeing the big picture, anticipating the code evolution over time as requirements change, and stuff like that. But it's hubris to think that human code is always better than AI code. Yes, I've generated a lot of AI code now that wasn't that great, where the AI code wasn't handling some condition that it needed to or wasn't anticipating some future change, but if I'm being honest, I've also frequently experienced the opposite, where I asked it to generate code and it handled some condition that I would have forgotten about if I had written it manually. The AI isn't perfect, but people aren't perfect, either.

AI code generation is here to stay. A competent human, working with an AI, can easily outperform a human operating alone, much like two humans using techniques like pair programming can outperform a single human when it comes to producing reliable code. Working with Claude Code feels a lot like working in a pair with a partner that is ridiculously fast.

If open source projects reject this outfight, it seems foolish to me.

Comment Re:Spot on... (Score 3, Insightful) 70

Software development is changing. I started coding in BASIC in the 1980's and have been coding now for over 40 years, over 30 years professionally. I'm good at what I do, but the AI is faster. Claude can churn out code faster than I can, and it's often better, catching some conditions I would have missed. That said, it often messes up, misses the mark, or goes in directions that aren't right for the larger context in which the code exists.

Today, professional software development is best done by AI with skilled human guidance and review.

Rejecting AI generated code in today's environment is trying to turn back time. On the other hand, rejecting a submission where there is no human who can "understand, own, and be able to fix the code they submit" makes perfect sense. There is a big difference between asking an AI to generate a fix and blindly submitting the first thing it spits out, versus having an extended session with an AI, correcting it where it goes wrong, vetting and testing the patch with human review and testing, then submitting the PR.

Comment Re:Pony up (Score 1) 204

I haven't been in one of the new ones, but I own two Bolts (2020 and 2021) and my dad has a 2023 Bolt EUV. They don't have "dumb buttons for hot, cold, and fan", they have a thermostat where you set the desired temperature and then it controls the heat based on that. The computer makes some counter intuitive choices at times, turning on the AC when it's already cold or the heat when it's hot. You can override it, but it's not the direct dumb buttons and knobs my older cars had where you directly controlled the air flow with mechanical levers.

Still great cars for not too much money.

Comment Re:Everything we know about physics (Score 1) 102

says ftl isn't a thing and the answer to Fermi's paradox is that everyone is out there but too far away to hear.

It really doesn't, though. Even without FTL, given enough time any technological species should eventually spread to all space.

Cool Worlds on You Tube covered this recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

With sublight speeds it takes millions of years to spread, but we've had those millions.

Comment Re:deus ex (Score 2) 190

Can anyone reference a story that addresses only the question of growing bodies without brains and using them for organs, without bringing in a deus ex?

In Altered Carbon they grow human bodies without a consciousness and then rather than harvesting the organs for another person, they move the other person's consciousness into the body.

Comment You can see expectations from the price (Score 1) 142

I've been using GitHub Copilot for a few months now and I can say that it definitely saves a little bit of time. I've seen reports that it makes developers 33% faster and it really does not come anywhere close to that. Where it shines is being able to fill in some boilerplate code faster than I can type it. When what I'm writing is something where the next few lines are something that an undergraduate student could easily predict, it can fill it in and I can tab complete it faster than I can type it. (Even when it's wrong, it's often faster to accept the close-but wrong answer and fix it than to type it all out manually.)

Expecting it to write whole routines or do any sort of serious architecting is going to be a let down.

But here's the thing: Copilot for Business is $19/month. Compared to a typical developer salary, how much time does it need to save per month to justify that cost? If it saves minutes per month, you're probably still coming out ahead. If anyone really believed it made developers 33% faster, they'd be charging a lot more.

But it definitely requires some skill to use it well. It comes up with some truly monumentally bad suggestions sometimes, and often suggests things that superficially appear correct but aren't. You need to be able to know the difference. If you don't, I could easily see it making things worse.

Comment Units are wrong. (Score 1) 155

So of 11600 MW of newly installed renewables, 10000 or 86% is in those batteries. That's absurd.

Why the F*** when a scientist says he's found a nearly complete bellusaurus skeleton, the reporter says: "A what-o-saurus??, let me get my pencil and write this down". But when it is about batteries and energy, they simply get it wrong. There is probably about 2000 MW, 10000 MWh of battery capacity installed.

Comment Sites differ, opinions differ. (Score 1) 316

There are two supermarkets on my commute to work. Both of them started with a few self checkout booths.

Then one did a big "redesign of the layout", now there are 8 or 10 self checkout points and one or two old-fashioned cashiers. The other one went back to all cashiers at about the same time. I guess they had different experiences.

In the one where the manager found it successful, they have one "self checkout" employee and one cashier most of the time. While before there would be 3 or 4 sometimes 5 working the registers. And for me: The last year or so, there have been two instances when there was a queue of 1 or 2 people for self-checkout (for 8 stations = quick!). To me it is a success and for the shop, as they expanded the self-checkout too I guess.

Apparently experiences differ. Apparently quonset has had a different experience. Or agenda.

Comment Kansas data... (Score 2) 501

Why did the masks work in Kansas? It could be that the masks prevented people from getting infected as you would think.

But maybe there is another mechanism. Maybe the awareness of "an issue with a contagious disease" makes people more careful, and the continuous reminders by seeing people with masks and having one on yourself creates that awareness.... That's what the non RCT studies cannot tell you.

My doctor prescribes me something for "high blood pressure". I call it the "zero F***s were given" medicine. It is possible that the effect is completely psychological. Work not done? No stress, go home. Doctors require RCT tests to prove effectiveness before they will prescribe a medicine. This could pass the tests that way....

Comment Definition of Temperature. (Score 1) 124

The definition of temperature makes for some "weird" corner cases. Apparently the environment in LEO has a very high temperature: The few molecules that there are are moving a blistering speeds.

If they claim that 30k temperature, I'm guessing they do some form of vacuum deposition where due to an oddity in the definition of temperature you can state that the temperature is indeed 30k.

Apparently the American plan is: Sue first, educate yourself later.

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