Fair points, but I still take cleaning up someone’s own bad Node.JS code over cleaning up LLM Node.JS slop because the optimist in me hopes that the human who wrote bad code can at least learn something and become better over time. After all we all have started with writing garbage, I know that I have.

On the other hand, I guess I should find a job where I don’t have to touch web development with a ten-foot pole because it’s probably not getting better.

Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and we’ve interviewed a few so far. I don’t want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.

I normally don’t like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but I’ve been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and there’s a subset of people who will say, “I would ask ChatGPT now” in those scenarios.

I haven’t met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time.

I am fairly certain that their stupid AI stance at least played a role. I’m part of a largish writing community, where at least several hundred people did NaNo each year, a good part of them donated too. Last year, no one partook, instead we did our own internal thing.

If this happened across other communities too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it did, they must have felt it financially.

Can confirm. Our C-suite approved a large amount of money last year so we could implement chatbots into all kinds of processes. Now that the chatbots have been implemented, no one is using them past the initial trying-out phase and questionable image generation tasks for presentations. Even the suits themselves don’t.

I told them this would happen. They didn’t listen.

I hate it so fucking much that a non-trivial number of FOSS communities have become hostile nazi bars in the last years (or maybe they always have been and I’ve just not noticed it before).

Why would anyone shit on Lina of all people? She’s such a nice and wholesome person and her work is exceptional.

Fuck these asshats.

Also, from that one Lemmy thread:

What fascists are ruining OSS?

LOL! Lmao even. Just input Linux into the YT search bar and you have roughly a 50% chance of getting fascist content.

If I had to judge Razer’s software quality based on what little I know about them, I’d probably raise my eyebrows because they ship some insane 600+ MiB driver with a significant memory impact with their mice and keyboards that’s needed to use basic features like DPI buttons and LED settings, when the alternative to that is a 900 kiB open source driver which provides essentially the same functionality.

And now their answer to optimization is to staple a chatbot onto their software? I think I pass.

Thinking that trying to sell LLMs as a creative tool at this point into the bubble will not create backlash is just delusional, lmao.

Every time I hear Bengio (or Hinton or LeCun for that matter) open their mouths at this point, this tweet by Timnit Gebru comes to mind again.

This field is such junk pseudo science at this point. Which other field has its equivalent of Nobel prize winners going absolutely bonkers? Between [LeCun] and Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (his brother has the complete opposite view at least) clown town is getting crowded.

What the fuck did I just read? I had to double check the year.

I thought even the grifters had finally admitted that upscaling the chatbots won’t lead to anything, and suddenly we’re back at spontaneous emergence of intelligence if we just throw enough shit at the wall?

He highlighted the need for Google’s employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying the A.I.’s improving itself would lead to A.G.I.

What even is this? Hitting autocomplete on every word hoping it vomits out AGI by accident? That is certainly an opinion.

Did Sergey hit his head or something? He can’t seriously expert anyone to believe this at this point.

Oh god, Sabine “capitalism is when people buy things and academia is basically communism” Hossenfelder has opinions about AI now.

The corporate dickriding over at Reddit about this is exhausting.

When you use Firefox or really any browser, you’re giving it information like website addresses, form data, or uploaded files. The browser uses this information to make it easier to interact with websites and online services. That’s all it is saying.

How on Earth did I use Firefox to interact with websites and services in the last 20+ years then without that permission?

Luckily the majority opinion even over there seems to be that this sucks bad, which might to be in no small part due to a lot of Firefox’s remaining userbase being privacy-conscious nerds like me. So, hey, they’re pissing on the boots on even more of their users and hope no one will care. And the worst part? It will probably work because anything Chromium-based is completely fucking useless now that they’ve gutted uBlock Origin (and even the projects that retain Manifest v2 support don’t work as well as Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking YouTube ads), and most Webkit-based projects have either switched to Chromium or disappeared (RIP Midori).

Let’s be real here: when people hear the word AI or LLM they don’t think of any of the applications of ML that you might slap the label “potentially useful” on (notwithstanding the fact that many of them also are in a all-that-glitters-is-not-gold–kinda situation). The first thing that comes to mind for almost everyone is shitty autoplag like ChatGPT which is also what the author explicitly mentions.

So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.

As someone who’s doing a ton of frontend and backend, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck the asinine attitude that somehow everything that’s even remotely web-adjacent needs to be written or rewritten in pure JS.

Also Node is an abomination and literally every other language I’ve tried is better for the backend. People love to shit on Ruby, but JS has every flaw that Ruby is criticized for and then some, and at least Ruby makes an effort to take some great design paradigms from Lisp.

Peter, Paul and Mary are the only three people in the room. Peter only reads a book, and Paul plays a game of chess against someone else who’s also in the room. What is Mary doing?

My favorite bullshit test is to have the AI count letters. Something as simple as “How many A’s are in this sentence?” will have the thing give you a seemingly random number (which might sometimes even be correct), but as soon as you ask it to list them, it will have a stroke and just make up stuff that makes no sense.

I can’t be arsed to make an account with OpenAI or whatever, so here’s an example with Bing Chat, but this has worked on every single chatbot I’ve tested it on.

Another fun test (as suggested by @flizzo last time I brought this up) is to have the chatbot attempt to crack a simple code. Just Caesar cipher something and ask it to crack it. Hilarity will ensue. You can even ask it to encrypt it first and then to crack it for extra fun.

Me: Encrypt the sentence “I am a stupid roided Clippy” with the Caesar cipher.

Clippy: [After explaining what the Ceasar cipher is, which I didn’t ask for, thanks] Convert the sentence to uppercase: “I AM A STUPID ROIED CLIPPY”. Let’s apply the Caesar cipher to your sentence using a shift of 7.

• ‘I’ becomes ‘P’
• ‘A’ becomes ‘H’
• ‘M’ becomes ‘T’
• …
• ‘Y’ becomes ‘F’

So the encrypted sentence is: “PH HT H ZBHTLW YVPLUU”. 😊

Okay, first of all, it dropped a letter. And the shift isn’t even correct, lol. It said Y becomes F and then does whatever the fuck.

Okay, so let’s give it an easy example, and even tell it the shift. Let’s see how that works.

This shit doesn’t even produce one correct message. Internal state or not, it should at least be able to read the prompt correctly and then produce an answer based on that. I mean, the DuckDuckGo search field can fucking do it!

I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.

This is brilliant and I’m saving it and will post a link to it the next time someone at work asks why we can’t “just use AI to do it” when a ticket gets rejected for being stupid and/or unreasonable.

However:

The first is that we have some sort of intelligence explosion, where AI recursively self-improves itself, and we’re all harvested for our constituent atoms […]. It may surprise some readers that I am open to the possibility of this happening, but I have always found the arguments reasonably sound.

Yeah, I gotta admit, I am surprised. Because I have not found a single reasonable argument for this horseshit and the rest of the article (as well as the others I read from their blog) does not read like it’s been written by someone who’d buy into AI foom.

Proof that pasta doesn’t exist:

• An atom isn’t pasta.
• Adding an atom to something that isn’t pasta doesn’t make it pasta.
• Therefore nothing is pasta.

Oh look, Elon openly snuggling up to Nazis and “just asking questions”. As if I didn’t hate this clown enough.

(For anyone out of the loop: the AfD is a far-right political party in Germany and the spiritual successor to the NSDAP. They’re praising the SS, advocate for legalization of holocaust denial and historical revisionism, removal of hate crimes from the code of law, and more. They’re so openly Nazis that they got kicked out of the EU parliament’s far-right ID coalition for being too fucking Nazi. There’s no leeway. They’re literal card-carrying national socialists.)