Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

@baldur And of course they have totally missed the point in wanting to generate more code.

I always thought the idea was to write absolutely as little code as possible to achieve the required specification and to make the minimum possible changes whenever there's a requirement to fix bugs or add new features.

*Everything* is bloated these days. Despite huge increases in computing power, every modern computer reacts more slowly than was the norm 40 years ago.

e.g. Why does my bank require me to install a 126 Mb app ? I object not only because this is a ludicrously large waste of resources, nor just because their app is horribly slow and buggy, nor because the UI keeps changing for no good reason, and also not only because *I* have no idea what all that code is doing on my phone. I also object because *they* don't know what all that code is for either.

They didn't write all that code themselves (it's far too huge for that), so what exactly are all those libraries that they trust which they linked into the bank app in order to make it so huge ? Are the libraries proven to be secure ? Is the entire app secure ? I know for certain that they cannot possibly have checked every single path through an app of such gargantuan size so it's clear that they actually don't know if it works properly. So why are they forcing this on me ?

Banks used to know what they were doing. They ran everyone's accounts using much smaller software, which they audited, and which ran on far less powerful smaller machines. I don't understand how they switched from being ultra careful to clearly not giving two hoots about the quality of code used for banking.

AI slop is of course making all of this, and all of everything else, much worse.

I admittedly i don’t have that many coding client projects left these days but in the ones I’ve got left, most of the coders I work with have adopted LLMs

For what it’s worth, they do seem to understand much less, work much slower towards the project’s actual goals, with much more code, and at a lower quality

While asking sillier questions

But they think they’re working so much faster because the tools find the occasional bug and generates so much code

🤷🏻‍♂️

Article starts out, literally kicks off the opening sentence with, “We’ve all used AI to help us write code” and brudda, let me stop you right the hell there. No, we all have not. Some of us are still resolutely hewing code out of text editors and actual human thinking, and it’s still usually better than whatever your steroidal autocomplete extruded for you.

@cwebber The saying "Give a developer three lines of code, and they'll find three bugs. Give a developer three hundred lines of code, and they'll find none." comes to mind.

Also here's a list of anti-ai software maintained by the amazing @the: https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

@cwebber

> And I know, you say, you'll be responsible about it.

A really important skill that we have abandoned is having the ability to say "I am not atypical and I am prone to the same mistakes as everybody else."

We have decades of research, probably more than decades of research showing that human beings *do not consistently concentrate and are bad at vigilance".

But no, suddenly every programmer has decided they're uniquely immune to cognitive fatigue.

@cwebber I thought that one of the main advantages of FOSS was that anyone could inspect the code and make sure it didn't have security issues, data privacy issues, etc. I don't know enough to do that myself, but I was always comforted by the idea that others were checking the code of well-known FOSS projects.

If even the people making the software don't fully understand the code anymore, is that advantage still there?

@bignose @cwebber as long as someone tends the garden it will not become overgrown. When I leave they can choose to replant some of the beds, and that's fine, and things will probably be ok. I can exercise aesthetic control now because I have power and standing; that evaporates when I leave, and any aesthetic control has to be exercised by someone else. The best I can hope for is that I have imparted my sensibilities upon my coworkers.

@erincandescent @cwebber well also the overriding theme I get from these posts is just "the software industry has been seriously immature for a long time", and I think to a large extent LLMs are just holding a mirror up to all the ills of the field...

I don't think good engineering has to be at odds with commercial forces, and in fact I think engineering stuff well gives you a competitive advantage in many cases; but since the industry is so immature and so stuck in a particular almost-mythological way of thinking about things, I feel like we'd long since given up on trying to reproducibly encourage well-engineered code and instead just crank out whatever takes a random developer's fancy this week

I really feel like we had several prominent FOSS organizations fail us by not saying "hey hold on, don't use generative AI in FOSS projects, we're not sure what the legal, community, environmental implications of this are but there are serious problems and we have a history of taking a stand" and I worry that maybe we lost our moment to be principled, except in niche spaces, and the walls are closing in

And... I'm really sad about it. I think we're underestimating the amount of damage that's happening. :\

Fuck FRONTEX.

Despite not really having any plans to go ahead with a previously planned new 101 series, this time about borders, I nonetheless continue the research just in case I change my mind.

Fuck FRONTEX.

Anyway, I came across a booklet published by FRONTEX aimed at children about being returned to their ‘home’ country.

It’s all very sick and unpalatable and I can only hope FRONTEX drowns.

Fuck FRONTEX.

Texas Politicians Slowly Realize Elon Musk Hijacked Billions
In Taxpayer Broadband Grants

Originally, Congress set aside $42.5 billion in taxpayer money in the infrastructure bill to spend on
broadband upgrades., Trump Republicans claimed
they’d “saved” taxpayers $21.5 billion dollars in “non-deployment funds” that appear to have
mysteriously fallen into a deep hole in the federal government.

I am a Muslim. I can assure you I have never once in my life felt attacked or called it "anti-Muslim" or "Islamophobic" when someone criticized the government or state of Saudi Arabia, the government or state of Iran, or the government or state of Pakistan.

Because governments and states do not have rights. There's no "universal declaration of states rights." That's not a thing. People have rights, states do not have rights. Banning criticism of states is fascism.

This is a post about Israel.

@aud @cwebber

It's a question of trust.. So long to build, so quick to lose.

Anyone who was using slop has betrayed that trust. I wouldn't trust them ever again. We know it deskills people. Why would I trust anyone who deliberately deskills themselves?

"Oh but it's so much quicker to debug !" They say. Debugging is a critical skill. It's only by doing the hard stuff that your skill grows. Do you want to grow? Then do the hard stuff.

Otherwise you're admitting you're last your peak, no longer willing to stretch your skills.

The day you stop learning is the day you die inside.

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@bodil/117192184593175250

the #Omarchy launderbros and capitalist circle-jerkers:

#1Password
#37Signals
#Block
#Cloudflare
#Coinbase
#Dell
#OpenClaw
#Sesame
#Shopify
#Stripe
#TapTap

they’re nvidious of Huang’s big VC incest funding, they’re cosplaying the Habsburgs with one of their jerkerbro bash files

capitalists, they're definitely not like us.

RE: https://xoxo.zone/@davidcelis/117191718220401381

Wild how there’s no money to fund the accessibility stack but $12m for *checks notes* ethnic cleansing. What the fuck are we doing

EFF will continue to work with community groups to keep ALPRs off their streets, and urge judges and state legislators to impose enforceable restraints on this mass surveillance. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/effs-policy-position-alpr-surveillance-eliminate-it-and-reduce-its-harms

Amazon already runs more than a million warehouse robots, and they're about to outnumber the humans. The dexterity gap that once protected blue-collar work is closing fast. https://inthesetimes.com/article/ai-is-coming-for-all-of-our-jobs

Trump, flanked by crypto industry executives, held a press conference in which he urged Congress to pass the Clarity Act. The executives who stood behind him represented firms that have collectively given nearly $60 million to his campaign.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpol #USpolitics #CitationNeededNewsletter

Next week, Tuesday, September 8, at 6:00 PM, join us with Bargaining for the Common Good for a virtual panel featuring organizers from the Chicago Teachers Union, Connecticut Tenants Union, House Our Neighbors, Kentucky Tenants Union, and Reclaim Rhode Island to explore how organized tenants and workers can team up to win big.

https://www.allyoufascistsboundtolose.com/calendar/home-is-where-the-union-is

That feeling when PayPal thinks your IP address is in Ireland so won’t let you log in unless it’s in a private tab on your phone over 5g

At least this year’s geoip clusterfuck almost has the country right. Only off by an R