anecdotical:

I'm a Ham and I wanted to CAT control multiple radios and a couple serial port devices. I currently do this with multiple USB serial ports which is a pain because if you ever move them you'll get a different enumeration and have to reconfigure everything.

I asked an LLM to create a project for a multiport card with hardcoded serial numbers and configurable settings (speed, parity, polarity etc - even inter-byte delays).

It did everything as I requested. The only issue I had is that when I bootstraped the project i selected a different microcontroller target. But the result is now a serial port that 1) works exactly as intended, 2) has serial numbers which allows me to move it around ports without reconfiguring (Linux by-id path), 3) whatever quirks i can either fix or add as workarounds for badly behaving devices. 4) Is not a chinese clone that will refuse to work on windows because the official drivers detect it as counterfeit.

The experience was honestly just fantastic. I do NOT want to write code for a multiport serial card. It's completely boring drudge. There is nothing fun in it. There is just hundreds of #define and compiler guards for everything. This thing had a working solution in 10 minutes, of something that would probably take me an entire weekend to do myself - a weekend of, you know, not actually using my radios because I was too busy writing code. I was able to do what I really wanted (focus on the high level requirements and then actually use the product) instead of digging deep into a datasheet developing a skill I'll never use in my work (I don't do embedded code for work).

its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later

yeah, all of us write (or copy/paste) great boilerplate code. that's not really something to be proud of.

we all make mistakes when writing business functions which are never 25k LOC in a week.

except no. because when you ask it to generate test cases it comes up with cases you didn't think of. and it then run the tests and fixes the errors.

my experience with both 20 years as a software developer in multiple teams, and LLM user, is that they are very similar in results to what a human produces without enough context.

every time I got a "ticket" to add a feature, the ticket wasn't 100% clear, it only provided happy path solutions, and LOL if it ever provided any test cases. The "extras" I added myself by just thinking "maybe it should have this. The LLM behaves 100% the same. except in the case of humans we call them "peer reviews" which usually just means "the control freak lead engineer who wrote the bad ticket is now extending the scope because what you developed exposed the 1000 ways that he didn't think of"

Good news! Someone hacked it into existence.

It's done wonders for my addiction to Win 3.x games.

the finance bros "ai can't replace my bloomberg terminal" has some serious techbro "ai can't replace coders" vibes

Fraud. I'm talking about fraud.

When I say "destroyed the market for that model" I mean "the short-seller spread misinformation that severely and permanently reduced the value of the vehicles, such as falsifying evidence they were dangerous, from which the brand never recovered."—even if such deception were prosecuted (which, increasingly, under the current administration, it isn't) there is a massive temptation to attempt it, which is amplified by leveraging debt.

That is ideal. Economic growth is not an unqualified net positive for society, and lending is the root cause of most of its ills. With borrowing as it is practised by hegemons today, there are only two endings: either they must close the loop, using the dirty money to architect a revenue-extracting monster that milks non-borrowed money to pay off the debts, or the system collapses under its own weight, like Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme in the 2008 financial crisis. Debt creates its own incentives to abuse the commons and impoverish the public.

Of course, not being content with abusing the commons, there are also implications for abuse of single wealthy lenders, too. It would also effectively outlaw short-selling, since that consists of borrowing assets—the items being traded—then destroying the price, and pocketing the difference. If you think about it, this isn't even adding value to the economy; it's just skimming value off the inventory of whomever you're borrowing from.

If anyone tried this with a physical asset the lender would be apoplectic: "You borrowed 50 cars from me, sold them, destroyed the market for that model, and bought them back at a pittance. Now my inventory of 1,000 cars of the same model is worth a thousand pittances! Why would I ever do business with you ever again?!"—it only works as a system if the lender assumes that the assets will recover value over time, but the degenerate gambler doing the borrowing is incentivised to outright ruin the assets they're borrowing beyond any hope of recovery. In a sense they're even less ethical than corporate raiders, since both the company who issued the stock and the lender are being abused.

In theory slippery slopes are a fallacy, but it's really something else when there are people out there actively looking for slanted surfaces and applying experimental lubricants to every single one they can find.

Yes, Polymarket is the most degenerate, nihilistic, accelerationist bullshit imaginable. At best its creators are willfully in denial about this, since they have tried to ban assassination bets, but more likely they are just trying to maintain a facade of plausible deniability.

In a healthy society, the case of Polymarket would be studied as precedent in an ongoing debate about the possibility of criminalizing the very concept of financial speculation, especially placing a bid with borrowed assets.

Maybe I'm out-of-date or a control freak, but I don't want my codebases to contain custom code that I need to rely on but that I didn't write myself.

Apparently you're just a person who never worked in a team. Working in a team requires accepting other people's code. Code that you may not have written the same way but it works, and it's efficient. It's just not "your way".

If you're working in a team, I hope you're not making your coworker's lives miserable by dissecting every PR with 80+ comments and dragging it for days on end, because what you really want is that they will rewrite it the way you solved it in your head.

It's a tool. You need to know how to use it. But before all, you need to know what you want it to do.

I don't "vibe code". I explicitly tell an LLM what's the output I want. This works great. It's also helped me take care of long-standing low-priority tickets.

For example, I had it rewrite a backend function that reads from DB/returns JSON. But I had it do it "streaming" from the database instead of buffering-and-stringifying the database response. This has been long in my to-do list. I knew how to implement it (as I had done it in the past). I just didn't want to do it because it was a "nice to have" but not a must for our use case. And it's honestly boring to write.

The LLM did it for me in a few minutes.

I also tried "Vibe coding an app" to see how that would work. It didn't. It shows awesome progress at the beginning and then it starts failing. It deletes entire files, rewrites unnecessary parts, keeps looping and burning through tokens so, I honestly don't know what the "vibe coders" are really doing. It just didn't give me any results when I tried it.

don't worry, you will live at the company town and get paid in company scrip

also: FUCK SLASHDOT ADS.

"Scathing execration" comes to mind as a possible first step on the evolutionary chain from the latter to the former.

in a world of "age verification laws" and governments pushing for "cashless", and precedents like Canada freezing protesters bank accounts, yes.

governments are turning ultra fascist everywhere. doesn't matter if they say they're left wing progressive. they're after your internet anonymity and want you to keep your money in banks, mostly to avoid tax evasion.

(cue in europeans saying they're not fascist and i'm a dumb american etc and canadians justifying the bank account freezing because it was aligned with the party's interest)

and pay for it