201–210 of 246 posts
Seems like that little kerfuffle with all the 2-digit years in legacy COBOL code was a well-timed distraction.
Yeah but this time it's for real. All the other attempts failed because they were just mindless conversions of formal languages to formal languages. Basically glorified compilers. Either the formal language wasn't capable enough to express all situations, or it was capable and thus it was as complex as the one thing it was designed to replace. AI is different. You tell it in natural language, which can be ambiguous a…
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A manager is not going to handle all the nitty gritty details, that an engineer knows, fine say, they can ask a LLM to make a web portal. Does he know about SQL injection? XSS? Maybe he knows slightly about security stuffs and asks the LLM to make a secure site with all the protection needed. But how the manager knows it works at all? If you figure out there's a issue with your critical part of the software, after yo…
There are already companies that exist to audit the security of codebases programmatically so this will just be part of the flow
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I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering. It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all. But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at college…
This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?
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I don't think it's about being a "type" so much as choosing what to specialize in. I could learn plumbing skills and do the plumbing around my house. I've chosen not to.
There’s definitely a type. My wife is much smarter and harder working than me, near perfect SAT score, made it through an engineering degree at a much better school than I went to. Then did med school, residency, and fellowship. She’s insanely quick. I once told her about one way hashing and before I was even half way through the explanation. Before I and ever said a thing about what they were used for she stops me a…
One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programm…
I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes. Somehow civilization continues to function! Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.
Citation needed, I think.
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Talking heads reference? Part of me thinks that we're already reaching peak stuff/employment/the current system. We are currently churning out graduates who work in coffee shops. More and more employment is make work. The issue is can we carry on requiring work, making it a moral requirement. I suspect it'll be like the industrial revolution, when the average labourer moved to a factory in the city living in a slum,…
> Although I'm starting to sound like Star Treks view of the future, which may not achievable Also worth noting that even in Star Trek, which is viewed as a utopian vision of the future, the sort of societal changes you are talking about only came after humanity almost wiped itself out in a third world war (which coincidentally happened to start in 2026)
One important and often overlooked democratization is spreadsheet formulas: non-programmers began programming without knowing they were, and without concern for error and edge cases. I cannot find the reference right now, but I recall seeing years ago articles about how mistakes in spreadsheet formulae were costing millions or more. I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programm…
Or will there be coding across disciplines, and attendant theories of literacies in context?
What I like about the OP is the consonance with literate practices, which has gone through similar generations of "our children don't know how to [...]" alongside of "our children will not need to [...] because of the machines."
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I think there’s an actual barrier. I’ve seen it, especially since the (until recently) brisk market for programmers was sucking people out of traditional engineering. It’s puzzling because programming seems so easy and fun. And even before LLM’s, we had StackOverflow after all. But for some reason a lot of people just hit a wall when they try to learn programming, and we don’t know why. The “CS 101” course at college…
This is literally the same for all professions, only in CS/SE it is for some unknown fucking reason considered “a problem”. Why isn’t there “replace extremely expensive doctors/lawyers with AI” movement?
There's national headlines every few months for lawyers getting in trouble for submitting LLM hallucinated citations in court, so lawyers are starting to do it to themselves as well.
It's early days yet, because unlike most CRUD apps, the consequences of hallucinations and outright bad calls in medicine and law are life ending. Unless the bubble pops soon, it's coming though.
I remember sitting in a senior seminar class in 1989 full of CS students. We were solemnly informed by a very earnest IBM employee that we would regret having majored in computer science because IBM's CASE tools were going to kill job market. That aged like milk. Will something come along some day that will actually drastically reduce the need for programmers/developers/software engineers? Maybe. Are we there yet? My…