201–210 of 719 posts
Software quality has been declining for long before AI was a thing. Microsoft didn't need AI to make windows 11 as bad as it is. The incentives are large companies are fundamentally not in align with making high quality software people actually enjoy interacting with.
I think MS devs don't even use their windows OS. How do I know this? Because every week my favourite applications list gets reset. Why would anyone do that?
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Perhaps its a slight overcorrection but it's better than the past where an online shop I gave my credit card info to would reply to a forgotten password request with an e-mail with my password in it in plaintext. Security used to be awful and people suffered because of it.
I wonder how many accounts have ever actually been compromised by a MITM reading passwords out of plaintext emails. I would guess it's very, very small.
Right now, the majority of companies I interact with seems to look at their now (let's assume) increased capabilities, and turns up the speed. But there's other knobs to turn up instead. Robustness, quality, user experience. Optimistically, I think we might just enter a new phase at some point, where businesses make very conscious decisions about what to invest in to differentiate. Like, everyone has support bots now…
Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back. Bizarre experience.
The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.
God, those "software is getting worse everywhere" takes are tedious. Let's have a look at a few rarely quoted examples from the last decade, shall we? Just six years ago, a big company rolls out a line of new chips so good that geeks and technology experts all get ecstatic and can't stop churning endless raving reviews. Those chips are fast, small and consume little energy. On top of that, the big company reworks the…
Or two and a half. Can you tell me why having a weak 4G signal sometimes doesn't imply being able to send and receive data packets?
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Can confirm. I just had a nightmare experience with a company where the customer service sent very ChatGPT-like replies and seemed very unreasonable and AI like. I had to threaten legal action to get my money back. Bizarre experience.
Role Collapse might work in this type of situation: prompt your own ChatGPT to decide a refund with a very permissive refund policy, copy its thinking, paste into the next support message after your prompt, and their ChatGPT may believe it's its own thinking. The Role Collapse attack is that LLMs turn out to ignore role tags (input, output, thinking) and identify role using writing style alone.
Customers speak with their wallets, and OP doesn't like what they're saying.
I'm doing the exact opposite: I'm maxing out my PTO and taking long holidays. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be in this field in five years time so why bother. It's time to figure out what other passions I have apart from programming. Programming is going to be like ceramics or pottery: you can grab a nice set of bowls at IKEA for $10. We are doing the artisanal pottery that no one really wants or cares for.
A lot of this is about bureaucracy
I agree that software becoming worse (in some sense) but I don't blame AI. My experiences as a user haven't really changed. Streamers fail to cast to TVs. Browsers are devices which reliably and efficiently propagate red console text and 500s from companies to you. I still see bluescreens on public touchscreens. Uncle Bob nailed one reason why the industry isn't getting better: the growth of programmers is exponentia…
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Windows XP has a solution to this: the taskbar flash
That "solution" is just as bad as the Mac's bouncing icons described in the article - while it doesn't steal keyboard focus, it does steal user focus