Just a regular Joe.
Yeah - there’s definitely a GIGO factor. Throwing it at a undocumented codebase with poor and inconsistent function & variable names isn’t likely to yield great revelations. But it can probably still tell you why changing input X didn’t result in a change to output Y (with 50k lines of code in-between), saving you a bunch of debugging time.
Most code on the planet is boring legacy code, though. Novel and interesting is typically a small fraction of a codebase, and it will often be more in the design than the code itself. Anything that can help us make boring code more digestible is welcome. Plenty of other pitfalls along the way though.
I have a suspicion that the guy took issue with my use of “one” instead of “you”, more-so than the content. Maybe it came across as uppity.
It’s a changing world, and there is going to be an ever increasing amount of AI slop out there, and even more potential programmers who won’t make the leap due to the crutch.
At the same time, there are always people who want to and will learn in spite of the available crutches the latest tech revolution brings.
There will also be many good engineers who will exploit the tech for all its worth while applying appropriate rigour, increasing their real productivity and value manyfold.
And there will be many non-programmers who can achieve much more in their respective fields, because AI tools can bridge gaps for them.
Hopefully we won’t irreversibly destroy ourselves and our planet while we’re at it. 🙈
Hm? Oh, I obviously misread the room. It seems I interrupted a circle jerk? My apologies.
No, but it can help a capable developer to have more of those moments, as one can use LLMs and coding agents to (a) help explain the relationships in a complicated codebase succinctly and (b) help to quickly figure out why one’s code doesn’t work as expected (from simple bugs to calling out one’s own fundamental misunderstandings), giving one more time to focus on what matters to oneself.
Big Beautiful Bill, obviously AI
That all goes well until someone uses your platform for scams or CSAM… or when (as the other guy said), infra costs go up. Throw in various privacy regulations, and it can be a frustrating and costly endeavour.
There’s a sweet spot, but I fear it’s quite a small one.
So you want to create a human exploitation / profit maximising system?
Pretty sure those are proprietary algorithms, with some common knowledge foundations that LLMs will happily tell you about.
It’s all simple enough at a small scale, but the challenge is optimizing it for your use-cases, and building for scale & reliability in a cost efficient manner.
Such companies will likely also have top notch software engineers & statisticians, marketing teams, psychologists and lawyers on the payroll, all contributing their part to the perpetuation of human misery in the name of corporate profit.
Censorship / free speech is hard to get right, especially in the online world.
I’m for an individual standing on a pulpit and expressing their views, so long as they can be held to account. If they put the lives of others at risk, spread dangerous lies or harrass others unjustly, and there is legal recourse through an independent legal system(s) … no problem, because there are checks and balances. Many countries have a healthy foundation to support free speech.
OTOH, I am for restricting mis/dis-information campaigns by governments (also my own), corporations, special interest groups, and billionaires. We know it’s possible to effectively manipulate people and it’s really just another form of psychological warfare. The challenge is how to police such things (and when/what/how to educate/censor/fine/ban), with so much money and influence working against it … all without infringing on citizen’s rights.
No? It doesn’t seem to be a use case they target.
If you want to use git to store sensitive data, you should encrypt it before committing / pushing it.
This was similar to a trick that a few smaller (less serious) hobby-ISPs did back in the days of 14.4k/28.8k modems to take advantage of the “reasonably priced” business plans for ISDN. They’d register multiple businesses at a single address to qualify for the plans, then balance new egress connections across the pool using squid and other magic. Fun times…
I find it pretty useful to help get me over mental hurdle of starting something. So it’s faster than me procrastinating for another day. ;-)
Many governments get access to source code for critical systems as a condition for their use / part of contract negotiations. It’s also quite likely that Microsoft and all its services in China is operated as a Joint Venture.
China did have Red Flag Linux (with Government support) for a while, too.
Boomerang-Fu ?
Hmm. You are right, but they might not need it for every region. Steam is probably big enough that existing regional companies would come to it and be eager to form partnerships. They could become more of a payment processor aggregator, focused on a low risk market segment. And of course they can do CCs directly too - that’s the easy part.
The challenge will be to get consumers on board. I know that I groan every time I need to enter my CC details online these days.
They would face anti-competitive behaviour from Peepal though. So it’s a risk.
Internally, they are probably already working on ways to appropriately segment their catalog based on payment provider. “Sorry User, you cannot purchase title X using Paypal. We recommend $Competitor instead.”
It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.
They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hacker
“The media’s definition of the real term malicious cracker. A hacker used to be a well respected individual who loved to tinker with gadgets.”, plus a few other definitions.
Hah, yeah. Vibe coding and prompt engineering seem like a huge fad right now, although I don’t think it’s going to die out, just the hype.
The most successful vibe projects in the next few years are likely to be the least innovative technically, following well trodden paths (and generating lots of throwaway code).
I suppose we’ll see more and more curated collections of AI-friendly design documents and best-practice code samples to enable vibe coding for varied use-cases, and this will be the perceived value add for various tools in the short term. The spec driven development trend seems to have value, adding semantic layers for humans and AI alike.