The rare AI enthusiast

Hey, I know this is the site for devs who are so old that they're out of the game or enthusiasts who wish they could call themselves developers, but AI assisted coding is just plain normal today. It's not even controversial.

In all the projects you love, hate, or don't care about. If you're developing today and not using AI at all, you're the rare developer.

Fudge, obviously I meant to reply to the OP. Your post clearly has some basis in being informed on the subject.

I am obviously not an expert but... we know what happens when you remove a species from the food chain.

In other words: "I don't know what happens, but we (I) know what happens ... "

Like, honestly, dude.

Please, no. Often when writing code I need the API reference and only the API reference. I know what I want to do and how to do it, I just need a quick check of the exact order of arguments or exact symbol names. I don't need to try to sift that out of commentary. Likewise when I'm learning how to use the library I'm more interested in the overall view. I don't need to know the exact names of the options for a call, only what the options are for. I expect the code in the user's guide to be accurate, but I don't want the same things out of it that I want out of the API reference.

Except for the bit where it does that caching for a loop where each lookup only occurs once. Because everybody caches lookups, so that must be the right thing to do (it's the most likely thing to happen) in a case where the cache is never used. Riiiiight...

Something critical to note: intent is the most important thing to document when it comes to software. You can see what it does by reading the code, that's straightforward. What I need to know most, both when writing software and maintaining it later, is why it's doing that. What's it supposed to be doing? Why is it doing it in that way? What were the alternatives and why weren't they chosen? How is it supposed to be used by code that calls it? An LLM can't generate any of that just from the code.

This is why traditionally software libraries have had two separate pieces of documentation: an API reference that details every call and it's arguments and results, and a user's guide that lays out how and why to use the library.

Chances that you do this: zero

This has been typical behavior for large companies when dealing with vulnerability reports for decades. Report one, they treat you as the problem. They'll try to ignore it, consider it "not exploitable", delay and deflect as long as they can get away with it, anything but address the vulnerability. And they'll never tell anyone the vulnerability exists. This only changes when they have no choice but to admit to the problem and fix it, usually when the vulnerability is being publicly exploited. They push "responsible disclosure" because it includes the reporter not making the vulnerability public until the company has a fix, which allows them to stall disclosure as long as they want.

It used to be enough to just include a reasonable deadline when reporting it, after which the reporter would make it public if the company hadn't taken some action on it. Then companies started threatening and then taking legal action against the reporter as soon as they reported the problem, playing the deadline up as "blackmail".

So, what do you do when faced with this? The only reasonable response is to skip the company entirely and make the details public immediately. You're going to be facing retaliation from the company either way, this way the public isn't vulnerable for an extended time. And yes you include details on how to exploit the vulnerability, ideally via working code, so researchers other than the company can confirm it's a real vulnerability that's actually exploitable without having to take your word for it. No, that doesn't give the bad guys anything because remember the working assumption for vulnerabilities: if a good guy has found it, the bad guys already know about it and are using it. Remember that when the company whines.

"I've seen the pictures" says another American who figures using the internet amounts to actually living life, going places, being less of a moron.

Seasoned C programmers create memory bugs all the time. I mean, the idea that "experience" leads to perfect code is bananas. There's a reason why static analysis is used in any serious environment. Rust just makes that part of the language without an annoying about of tooling/pipeline cruft.

The problem is he had never put much thought into how to actually manage memory in a reasonable way in C. This is why C code is bad, because C programmers never ask themselves, "How do I not leak memory?"

Honestly this reads like you've never worked with real programmers.

"Insightful" because this place is full of old people who really overestimate their abilities to know what is good.

The world is moving on, buddy. C is "fine" in so far as how amazing you are at writing code that doesn't have memory access issues. I'm not shitting on C. But Rust isn't crap - it's really very good and there's a reason why the active generation of big stakeholders (Linux kernel devs, MS, and way way beyond) are chuffed about the value it brings.

Ah, that's an interesting detail (one I agree with) - thank you for pointing that out.

If you need to force people to promote / accept your culture, you should be asking why people prefer other cultures and address those issues instead.

Need is too strong a word. Want is the word. And mostly its there to force content publishers to protect a culture - given the balance of size of American popular culture, American content providers, etc .. I think it's naive to think it comes down to "a free market would accurately represent the desires of a specific domestic market in which it operates"

Media/culture is not some giant buffet where people walk in and just take (and pay for) the plate they want.

"slavery" - how do parents raise such stupid offspring? did they send to you the wrong schools?

"... Canadian and Indigenous content, such as French-language ..."

This is why morons remain morons - they let their emotions run their brain.