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.

I hate that this shit has an established name now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding

Still waiting for the VC billions for my startup Gatta.ca that will sell refrigerated high-IQ piss to the rubes so they can pass Google interviews.

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).

I can’t comprehensively express how much I despise what Discord has done to the internet. Support communities are gone from the open web (as in, you can’t use a search engine to search Discord servers, neither can you easily log them to processable text files like you can with IRC), tons of communities are now insulated to a point where you can’t even get in if you want to, because unless you’re large enough or have enough booster points (which, to no one’s surprise, cost money, and only last for a limited time) you can’t generate permanent invite links, so you gotta know someone to get in.

And all of that for a proprietary app that is an accessibility nightmare (for fuck’s sake let me change that ugly-ass font to something readable, because God forbid that one of your users might be dyslexic, you absolute munted dickheads), doesn’t listen to any user feedback but is constantly adding absolute bottom-of-the-barrel features, many of which are behind a paywall, and is now adding LLMs to the mix?

Okay, rant over, but I just needed to get that out.

Their accountant is probably three GPTs in a trench coat that’s being fed prompts by an unpaid intern or some poor dude in India.

I’m a senior software engineer

Nice, me too, and whenever some tech-brained C-suite bozo tries to mansplain to me why LLMs will make me more efficient, I smile, nod politely, and move on, because at this point I don’t think I can make the case that pasting AI slop into prod is objectively a worse idea than pasting Stack Overflow answers into prod.

At the end of the day, if I want to insert a snippet (which I don’t have to double-check, mind you), auto-format my code, or organize my imports, which are all things I might use ChatGPT for if I didn’t mind all the other baggage that comes along with it, Emacs (or Vim, if you swing that way) does this just fine and has done so for over 20 years.

I empirically work quicker with it than without and the engineers I know who are still avoiding it work noticeably slower.

If LOC/min or a similar metric is used to measure efficiency at your company, I am genuinely sorry.

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.