TIOBE's methodology is to plug "$LANG programming" into a bunch of search engines (including oddly enough Amazon and ebay), apparently take the "1.2 million results" stats in the corner at face value, apply some magical fudge factors and call that good.

I'm constantly mystified why this nonsense gets this amount of prominence when there's better data sources. Look at employment offers, Github or something at least.

It's opposite, more like it.

The purpose of a screensaver was avoiding burn-in on screens prone to it, like CRTs and plasma displays.

LCDs and power saving modes mostly killed them off.

They were talking about text, I don't believe there's watermarking for that. There's just statistical guesses, and I don't think most LLMs are likely to be any good at it.

Then this is all a distraction. Maybe he filtered the text through/images a LLM to make it less recognizable, maybe it's just coincidence. It doesn't matter. The only important matter is whether it's actually true or not.

Also, the Verge are morons.

The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written.

You can't ask ChatGPT "is this AI generated"! LLMs don't have permanent memory. ChatGPT can't confirm "I wrote this for another user", it can't know. Besides that it's unlikely to be a good detector. It will answer, but it's not qualified to answer, it's a very general system not aimed at anything particular, and detectors are unreliable even when made for it.

Anyway, not saying it's not fake, just that the methodology presented here is complete bullshit.

I wonder how TIOBE would measure this sort of work. As activity in the source language (C)? Editing language (C#)? Or both?

It wouldn't. TIOBE is bullshit, I don't know why anyone uses it. Look at what it is: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-in...

It's just searching various engines for "$LANG programming" and applying magic fudge factors. It searches multiple languages versions of Google as well as for some reason Amazon and Ebay. And it relies on the "$NUM results found" provided by those sites.

So at best it's a vague indicator of the language's presence. It doesn't say much of anything about whether it's in use. If a popular documentation site goes down it will note a decrease, and it's trivial to cheat by encouraging the insertion of keywords in websites.

I don't think it does, at least not currently.

AI currently doesn't generate whole big projects, just smaller snippets of code. You can't just go "Make me a non-GPL VLC" in VSCode. You can have AI write smaller things, like "Create a skeleton for a Wayland program", but in such usages it's not all that different from copying stuff from Stack Overflow and random snippets from Google.

I'd say in general anything where one would worry about licensing is too large for AI yet.

If we do get to the point where we can just have a LLM spit out a full video decoding library that actually works, then it's fair to say that we're living in the future and any concern about licensing is probably obsolete. If AI gets to that point it's probably now able to do projects of almost unlimited size and the world is being turned upside down.

TIOBE gets its data by searching for "$LANGUAGE programming" in various search engines, and applying some magical scaling factors.

It's complete nonsense and has no relationship to actual real world usage.

I'm perpetually mystified how TIOBE is considered to be in any way reputable.

It's just searching for "$LANGUAGE programming" in various engines and applying magic fudge factors.

It's not an indicator of jobs, or activity, or much of anything else really. This is especially obvious with things like Visual Basic showing up weirdly close to the top, and having large spikes, as if there were times when VB suddenly got a huge influx in demand.

VB never even transitioned to 64 bits, it's that old. VB.NET i suppose exists but seems mostly pointless since it all compiles down to CIL anyway. Might as well use C#.

What do you mean by that? They both work out to the same thing just with a different syntax.

TIOBE basically searches a bunch of search engines and other things for "$LANGUAGE programming", applies some magical fudge factor and calls that a result.

It's absolute nonsense. It's highly manipulable if you can convince people to use the " programming" wording. It's going to be highly affected by the appearance and disappearance of documentation websites. It will of course still pick up ancient archives of stuff that nobody is actually using today.

I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near the top 10. The original VB died long, long ago. VB.NET wasn't backwards compatible in the slightest and I don't think it ever had much adoption, because what's even the point? You might as well use C# instead. In fact long ago I had a VB project I considered transitioning to VB.NET and quickly decided it wasn't worth it, and went with C#. That was somewhere in the early 2000s, and I don't think it's gotten any more appealing since.

TIOBE is still nonsense of the highest order, not sure why anyone bothers using it.

It's some search engine counts based voodoo. Maybe not the most terrible metric possible, but I have no idea why it's the one always being discussed when there's better things one could measure at this point. Like say, GitHub.

If we want to know what's currently most popular, what we should want is measuring the actual usage. That might be projects, or commits, depending.

I never understood Mozilla's foray into AI.

There's just nothing about Mozilla that suggests to me they are experts on the subject matter and have much to contribute in the area. I could be wrong, but Mozilla is so tightly associated to the web that it just was a hard sell to me that their AI efforts were going to go anywhere from the start.

But if I tell an LLM "Thanks that suggestion worked" that feedback is lost to the void. There's no upvoting, no storage that I know of applying to all other questions people ask to let the system know "yes that answer worked particularly well". So all the LLMs can go on giving out the same answers forever not really knowing they are flawed... unless someone publishes an article about it.

There's no reason why LLMs can't have feedback mechanisms. In fact they do. ChatGPT has thumbs up and thumbs down buttons. It almost definitely tracks usage of download and copy to clipboard buttons.

I mean on the low end.

Like formerly a small business would pay for the valuable HTML and FTP knowledge, but today many will just use Wix instead.

And more complex things are more proper webdev and not just knowing some HTML tags.

I remember there was a short time when the web was new and "webmaster" was a profitable occupation. Then a combination of improved web design software, CMSes, frameworks and the like quickly ate the low end, and the higher end just got rolled into software development.

I'm not sure why anyone thought that knowing what keywords a specific model recognizes best could ever be an enduring form of employment. To me it was always clearly extremely temporary.