Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Reminds me (Score 1) 135

Of every tv show where a bomb has a convenient countdown clock on it. In the old days it was an alarm clock wired to the bomb, then it was changed to a red digital timer because progress.

Anyone remember the movie V for Vendetta? Conveniently, V's bomb in the control room had a countdown clock so the guy who had no idea what he was doing knew how many seconds he had left.

Comment Re:subscribe to Amazon Prime now (Score 1, Troll) 32

You might say waiting 2 days for a free delivery is super bad inconvenient,

Only whiners living in their parent's basement would say this. For nearly everything one could buy (excluding groceries), two days is insignificant. If you're in that much of a hurry to get something, either an emergency has come up or you're too stupid to plan ahead.

Comment Re:I'll get the popcorn... (Score 1) 127

Not much. Plutonium isn't like uranium, it's effectively safe for human contact outside its fissioned form. This has been pretty well documented.

This is a step forward which is a long time overdue. It should've happened 30 years ago, and we'd have averted having to depend on China for our electricity production (wind + solar) without the net-zero production problems those two 'sources' introduce.

Submission + - The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI (fastcompany.com)

smooth wombat writes: Writing software is not just about knowing what to code. Verbally passing on knowledge of why something is done one way or the other, how to diagnose an issue, or what changes took place after implementation because no one documented those changes has been part of programming since day one. However, with the advent of AI, that institutional knowledge may be under threat.

It’s tempting therefore to imagine that generative AI will step into the breach and solve this for us. After all, even if you don’t want to turn a large language model (LLM) loose on a legacy code base—and there are plenty of reasons that you shouldn’t—having it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you.

But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there’s a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I’m writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision.

Moreover, it’s a chance for somebody else to understand why you did what you did. If they plan to change what I wrote (especially in a few years), they might understand why I needed to write it that way and what might be lost if you take it out. An LLM can read code that I’ve written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it’s doing. But it can’t assess authorial intent.

Comment Re:Caveat... (Score 1) 74

It's a concept called defense in depth, and perhaps also defensive programming. It's good practice. You do not want to hold things off at the gate exclusively, because that relies entirely on your gate defense. This shouldn't be a difficult concept to understand.

Yes, it's potentially more difficult to exploit, but if it's known, a clever exploit can still be fashioned to expose it. This is being seen increasingly with AI driven exploits. You don't need a kernel RCE to gain full system access - you need 3 or 4 small privilege escalation bugs (theoretical problems) in different packages that are commonly used.

You're viewing the waves for the ocean.

Comment Cope (Score 1) 75

"the people who have to review code"

That doesn't exist as a meaningful or useful discipline anymore, except in niche development roles.

Sorry, no. Your code review isn't useful. It's probably not even thorough.

We're well into the "code review should be done by agents" phase of things.

Comment Re:The Profit Effect. (Score 1) 112

This kind of thing comes from American Puritanism on the internet.

Well, the last piece of that sentence is the key part. I, and most everyone I know, have no problem using English language words. It seems to me that the only reason to censor yourself with weird, invented terms is because you want to be able to monetize your content on YouTube.

Slashdot Top Deals

Put your best foot forward. Or just call in and say you're sick.

Working...