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Comment What about the benefits? (Score 2) 66

That "lost time" isn't lost, it's spent learning a new system.

I would venture that compelling kids to use different systems would encourage understanding and abstraction as opposed to rote memory when it comes to using technology.

Kids already have phones and computers and tablets and TVs at home that may or may not each other or the school. Quit fretting.

As for work productivity, whichever OS allows IT to block minesweeper is probably the best choice. Metaphorically.

Comment Re: Neglected to remove alert (Score 1) 162

As I understand from other reading, one law enforcement agency cannot remove or flag the alert of another.

This IS Flock's fault by design. Removing bad data requires multiple agency coordination which is hard and time consuming.

The presumption of guilt remains in Flock systems after a person has been proven innocent. This is not how the justice system is supposed to work.

This is a dangerous design flaw in Flock.

Comment Re: 4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 1) 116

What's wrong with "inefficient, verbose code?"
First, today's AI is the worst we're ever going to have. It'll just get better, or, at least, you'll always have today's so it won't get worse.
Second, compact, efficient code is often hard to read. Not always, but a good .map().filter().reduce() can blow your cognitive load in a hurry.
Thirdly, I'm working in TypeScript, so "efficiency" is hardly the name of the game. We have a lot of business rules to parse and a little bit of cryptography, but no real heavy lifts computationally.

And back to efficiency. It might be that the AI's "inefficient" code is still better than layers of libraries that test all kinds of edge conditions that might well be redundant due to the next layer of library checking the same thing or not relevant to your use case and inputs.

Comment Re: 4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 1) 116

This. So much this. Thank you for posting!

There are pros and cons to not using libraries.
Pros: not going to be subject to as many supply chain attacks.
Cons: probably some new vulnerabilities unique to your code.
Mitigation: who's going to know about those vulnerabilities? Run the "find vulnerabilities" AI and have it harden itself up.

Will it be perfect? No, of course not.
Is that library you were using perfect? No, of course not.

Comment Re: 4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 2) 116

I work on the typescript/npm side of the world and what I've seen recently (the latest updates made a big difference) is not the inclusion of a lot of libraries, but a rewriting of boilerplate code that was probably cribbed from all of open source libraries the model used to train.

I agree with you that it makes code reviews difficult, but I think we'll be relying on tools for that soon enough, too.

Every time there has been a major shift in tooling, there has been the "old guard" concerned about the loss of craft. From assemblers, to C, to 4GLs, and every layer of abstraction ever added, someone has said "won't someone think of the junior devs? How will they ever learn the skills we needed?!"
Speaking as someone who started college in the late 80's and took an assembly course or two, the kids don't need those skill any more. At least not outside of a few specialist areas.

Comment Re: 4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 1) 116

Why do you think code reuse is good?
Maintainability? Testability? Comprehensibility?

AI has the potential to be a paradigm shift in _avoiding_ code reuse. How many times have you come across a function with collection of parameter flags that make the function behave differently? "This is almost what I want, let me tweak it." Those are such a nightmare to maintain or unwind, especially if there are a lot of calls to them. You try to fix one bug and regress another one. You end up adding a new flag and kicking it down the road.

AI can write what it needs for that use case in-line without impacting other use cases. Would I write that much code again? Not a chance. Is it best practices? Not by today's standards, but use case isolation has some real advantages, too.

Comment Re: 4GB has been insufficient for many years now (Score 3, Interesting) 116

What if AI coding goes the other way?

AI is good at writing tons of code. We might actually move away from layers of libraries if AI directly includes all the support functions we've been too lazy to rewrite.
AI, using its training on all those libraries, might end up in-lining only the parts of the libraries that are needed.

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