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Comment Re:Apply Betteridge's Law (Score 1) 49

So, no, this cluster of patches doesn't tell us anything in particular beyond what we already knew: That emergency patches are relatively common.

Considering that Microsoft has been promising this exact same type of improvement since the release of XP Service Pack 3, the words spoken now are worthless platitudes provided to ensure the smoothness of the theft of your money. There is zero reality behind any of their promises.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.

Comment Re:25,000 lines of code (Score 1) 76

The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right.

Maybe in about 90% if you are lucky. That still leaves about 10% error rate which is way too much.

Not remotely similar to my experience. Granted I'm writing Rust, and the Rust compiler is *really* picky, so by the time the agent gets something that compiles it's a lot closer to correct than in other languages. Particularly if you know how to use the type system to enforce correctness.

Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases,

Depends on the definition of "bases". Passing test suite does not show your program correct. And if your test suite is also AI generated then you are again at the problem whether the tests themselves are correct.

Yes, you have to know how to write tests. A few decades of experience helps a lot. I find I actually spend a lot more time focused on the details of APIs and data structures than the details of tests, though. Getting APIs or data structures wrong will cost you down the road.

Also, I suppose it helps a bit that my work is in cryptography (protocols, not algorithms). The great thing about crypto code is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all. If you screw up the business logic just a little bit, you get completely wrong answers. The terrible thing is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all and gives you no clue where your problem might be.

Of course that's just functional correctness. With cryptography, the really hard part is making sure that the implementation is actually secure. The AI can't help much with that. That requires lots of knowledge and lots of experience.

and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch,

Vibe error detection goes nicely with vibe programming. That being said, experienced programmers have a talent to detect errors. But detecting some errors here and there is far from full code review. Well, you can ask LLM to do it as well and many proposals it provides are good. Greg Kroah-Hartman estimates about 2/3 are good and the rest is marginally somewhat usable.

Deep experience is absolutely required. My antennas are quite good after 40 years.

then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

Nothing goes as nicely as discussing with LLM. The longer you are at it the more askew it goes.

You really have to know what questions to ask, and what answers not to accept. It also helps to know what kinds of errors the LLM makes. It never outright lies, but it will guess rather than look, so you have to know when and how to push it, and how to manage its context window. When stuff starts falling out of the context window the machine starts guessing, approximating, justifying. Sometimes this means you need to make it spawn a bunch of focused subagents each responsible for a small piece of the problem. There are a lot of techniques to learn to maximize the benefit and minimize the errors.

My point is that 25k LOC a month (god forbid a week) is a lot. It may look working on the outside but it is likely full of hopefully only small errors. Especially when you decide that you do not need to human-review all the LLM generated code. But if you consider e.g. lines of an XML file defining your UI (which you have drawn in some GUI designer) to be valid LOC then yeah. 25k is not a big deal. Not all LOCs are equal.

Yeah, I am definitely not doing UI work.

Comment Re:25,000 lines of code (Score 1) 76

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.

Speak for yourself. I wrote Android's Keymaster implementation in less than a month, and it was about that size, and then re-wrote most of it in a week when it turned out I'd made some core assumptions that Qualcomm couldn't match in their implementation. It was relatively bug-free for a decade -- even when a third-party security research lab spent a month scrutinizing it. They found a handful of things, but nothing serious. I was amazed, especially since I'd seen the reports they turned in on some other code.

That's just one example. In my nearly 40-year career I've had a half dozen crazy-productive weeks like that, and usually when working on particularly-complex bits. If you haven't had that experience, that's unfortunate. It's not something I could do frequently (or would want to), but it's a glorious feeling when you're that deep in the zone.

Comment Potentially Good (Score 1) 75

The Public Markets have rules and laws that incentivize very destructive and predatory behaviors. Corporations behave like psychopaths to hit quarterly numbers for 'fiduciary duty' laws.

Private assets don't have these so they can build real companies with an eye on the future.

But private companies don't have nearly as much access to capital because all the investment money goes into retirement because of stupid tax laws which goes into psychopathic public companies.

And then Blackrock / State Street / Vanguard collude to tell these companies how to behave socially and politically, often against the interests of everyone else in society.

Of course this could be done poorly but the idea has merit. Congress is most likely to screw it up, but who knows, maybe they won't.

That's peak optimism for 2026.

Comment Re:Guessing (Score 2) 51

This is a weird situation.

If the license is changed it's no longer AGPL, it's a unique license.

If the license has restrictions then the copyright is violated by not adhering to the license.

The above makes it sound like both parties want to have it both ways.

I would just give the Russians proper attribution but the European governments hate Russia so much that they couldn't possibly do that. This is a problem with having governments run open source projects.

In the en it's probably going to be like Russian gas which they sanction except for not freezing to death in the winter, when they just look the other way and stay alive to hate the Russians another day.

The whole damn thing stems from some royal cousins hating each other in the 1830's. America was designed to "eff that noise" but every stupid American politician wants to act like a European so Americans get dragged into their stupid wars and other zero-sum games.

Open Source software is supposed to be a non-zero-sum game and the licenses are supposed to create the conditions for that. Maybe FSF should consider a v4 to improve the situation. Anybody seen Eben Moglen lately? Last I heard some whackadoodles at FSF were mad at him. Maybe a post-FSF license is needed.

"Play nice, children."

Comment Re:uhh (Score 2) 51

The interface in OnlyOffice more closely resembles the modern ribbon interface in MS Office. For some people, that's a reason to choose LibreOffice instead. OnlyOffice. LibreOffice works very well for me, but I don't work with complex documents, and I don't need collaboration or cloud stuff. The latter might be why they selected OnlyOffice, since that's more like Office365 than MS Office; a more modern paradigm.

Comment Re:Simple? (Score 2) 37

Perhaps the simplest answer is to not assume any human is infallible.

No one seriously working in Cosmology does that. Indeed, there are a lot of theories out there trying to either displace or at least amend Einstein's General Relativity, like MoND or TeVeS. The problem: No one until now has come up with a good idea how to do it, and all the proposed alternatives don't work very well either, have to assume even more unknowns, or are outright wrong in places where GR has been shown to work. Until then, we continue to use GR, because we know, where it works fine, and we know, where it fails.

It's easy to sit in an armchair and wandwave some theories in existence which superseed General Relativity. It's really hard to actually write them down.

Comment Re:"But there should be none" (Score 1) 39

> How exactly are we going to do that?

Kill all humans, I guess.

You have to understand that we live under a death cult which wants to destroy all sentient life on the planet. Pushing for "there must be none" is one way to do that, because once we shut down oil, nuclear and plastics 90% of the population die and the other 10% spend the rest of their lives fighting each other for food and shelter.

Comment Re:Oh but it works very well (Score 2) 63

This is so true, so true.

And it's not even US specific. In the wake of the Ukraine war, German parliament voted to give itself 100 billion of additional taxpayer money (i.e. debt) to spend on defense. Recently a report came out of all the money spent so far, 90% did not go towards the intended purpose.

Why any of the jokers in charge of our governments are still not in jail baffles me more and more every year. Oh yes, it's because they make the rules, sorry, my bad.

Comment Re:Enshitification of Github Proceeds Apace (Score 1) 73

I was hoping someone would eventually address the monopoly. Neither party does anything.

That's what campaign donations get you, if they are large enough.

This is why congress occasionally bullies the big tech companies. We all think they might want to have some regulation or to punish them. Oh sweetie... they're saying "nice company you have there... would be a shame if something happened to it..."

Comment Re:Soaring RAM prices (Score 1) 107

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

Comment Re:25,000 lines of code (Score 1, Interesting) 76

It might take one person one year to write 25k lines.

A year? I've regularly written that much in a month, and sometimes in a week. And, counter-intuitively, 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. I think it's because that very high productivity level can only happen when you're really in the zone, with the whole system held in your head. And when you have that full context, you make fewer mistakes, because mistakes mostly derive from not understanding the other pieces your code is interacting with.

Of course, that kind of focus is exhausting, and you can't do it long term.

How does a person get their head around that in 15 hours?

By focusing on the structure, not the details. The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right. Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases, and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch, then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

But, yeah, it is challenging -- and also strangely addictive. I haven't worked more than 8 hours per day for years, but I find myself working 10+ hours per day on a regular basis, and then pulling out the laptop in bed at 11 PM to check on the last thing I told the AI to do, mostly because it's exhilarating to be able to get so much done, at such high quality, so quickly.

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