That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.
It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.
Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that.
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.
Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s
That ship has sailed. Even if you never even tab complete in cursor, if you don’t let LLMs review your code you’re very, very behind unless you’re in a deeply specialized domain which doesn’t have any public training data available. Anything remotely public and you’re just outpaced.
It might just be fine to be outpaced. Software isn’t actually infinite, it has a purpose and does things. If it does the things it needs to do then… great! Maybe you’re done. And maybe you were done 20 years ago.
Mythos found one low-severity vulnerability in curl.
Curl is one of the most audited code bases, so that's not surprising.
Put it in front of a common-ish Python or NPM package and see what it finds, likely going to be a lot more.
Is this your first tech industry hype cycle or something?
No, it’s my experience from the past 6 months
Heh. I vividly remember the hype cycle around self-driving cars. Roll the tape forward a decade or so and combined R&D spend approaches the GDP of a small industrialized country. Untold millions of column inches, close to a decade of hyperventilating FOMO hype mill output. Net result: some cab companies ended up filing for bankruptcy, but really Uber did that.
Crypto bros early claims that blockchain would threaten sovereign nations' ability to collect taxes by ushering in an era of perfect anonymity to financial transactions...
Glassy-eyed consultants convincing basically everyone that introducing electronic devices into classrooms would usher in a new era of human achievement...
As a software engineer it took me a couple more decades than it should to realize that the tech industry, and especially the tech industry in CA, runs entirely on bullshit.
I don’t care about hype cycles too much, I care about the value I, my team and the teams I work with are getting out of the technology and it is objectively revolutionary. I don’t run token ladders, I don’t play stupid status games, I use the tech because it’s a step function change in most workflows. You can call it hype, I’m calling it a dystopian rat race, the name doesn’t matter as long as we both have mouths to feed.
> Net result:
The future is here, but unevenly distributed. Waymo operates in a select few city, but in those cities, you can call a car, that car will have no human driver in it, and the computer will drive you to your destination. Yes it's taken a long time, but if your "evidence" is self driving cars, you might want to address your priors.
Not really.
That's not the option most are going to take.
shrug Not really a me problem, but I'd counsel taking an afternoon to reflect on what part of any of this is actually inevitable. You know, maybe come up for air for a minute and examine the industry hype from 30,000 ft.
That's a choice you are free to make, just like you're free to shrug and not use the internet or computers.
eyeroll If you truly had the courage of your convictions you would have gone all in here and told me to stop using electricity.
I haven't told you to do anything, only highlighted that you can choose how to live your life, including not using LLM's.
Believe it or not, some people actually do derive a great deal of value from LLM's and it's also ok if you don't or can't.
"can't"
Still feeling chippy over there I see.
Now would be a pretty good time to define "value". If folks find themselves in a position where statistically averaged word salad or time sunk combing work product for hallucinations equates value that's less an endorsement of the technology than a degradation of the term.
Executive dysfunction mitigation. Voice based interfaces. Heavyweight personal file classification with a few hours of prompt building vs labelling a bespoke classifier’s data set and training a more “lightweight” option in weeks or days. Language translation that isn’t DeepL or Google Translate for random websites. They are not deterministic, but the error rate is a lot better on these tasks vs classical approaches.
Ridiculous. Haven't you heard? All critical thinking skills have long since been sacrificed on the altars of the AI gods and it's inconceivable that we write any code the old way. If you actually understand your code it means you're a luddite and are going to be left behind. /s