On Mobile, copy paste is not working, so paraphrasing:

They are everywhere and almost nobody is racist anymore

Take a cue from the US. The racists are still racists. They are just currently quietly pissed and likely working to be openly racist again.

Fighting against hate requires constant vigilance.

Remember that the companies didn’t want any of this -

It’d be nice if those companies used their millions of lobbying dollars to tell lawmakers just how stupid this shit is.

They won’t, though, because knowing exactly who you are and then verifying it via government documents or biometrics is way more valuable than the users lost who won’t verify.

They “don’t want it”, but they actually do.

Not antagonistically speaking here.

Do you think your input is not being used to train LLMs when posting on Lemmy? It’s publicly visible without an account.

I’d be shocked if there wasn’t either a scraper, or a whole federated instance, that was harvesting lemmy comments for the big ai companies.

The only difference is that no one is trying to make money off providing that content to them. A big part of the reddit exodus was that reddit started charging for api calls to make cash off the AI feeding frenzy, which broke tools the users liked. With lemmy, there’s no need for a rent-seeking middle man.

And this is why Digit wanted a clarification. Let’s make a quick split between “Tech Bro” and Technology Enthusiast.

I’d maybe label myself a “tech guy”, and forego the “bro”, but I could see other people calling me a “tech bro”. I like following tech trends and innovations, and I’m often a leading adopter of things I’m interested in if not bleeding edge. I like talking about tech trends and will dive into subjects I know. I’ll be quick to point out how machine learning can be used in certain circumstances, but am loudly against “AI”/LLMs being shoved into everything. I’m not the CEO or similar of a startup.

Your specific and linked definition requires low critical thinking skills, big ego and access to “too much” money. That doesn’t describe me and probably doesn’t describe Digit’s network.

Their whole point seemed to be that the tech-aware people in their sphere are antagonistic to the idea of “AI” being added to everything. That doesn’t deserve derision.

I had my best porn on one of those as a youth (because it meant nothing visible on my computer unless I wanted it to be) and then the drive died one day. RIP hours of downloading, plus all my games and music on my more legit disks.

It suggests to me that someone is measuring the length of a middle finger.

It seemed somewhat topical to me. Google’s censorship is the same trend of enshittification that Yar is talking about.

There are tons of other comments talking about the censorship issue. Using this moment to plug open source software is not unreasonable.

And you are a hero to that plow driver. And others like you are heroes to the people that also had to be out on terrible weather days and holidays.

I assume a gas station could run without anyone present, leaving the convenience store part closed, but having someone on-hand to hit an e-stop if needed is pretty important.

My goal is not to devalue your work, but rather to support it. “Essential workers” are called that for a reason. We should work to ensure that they are paid their worth. Just because it’s not necessarily a “skilled” job doesn’t mean it’s not important. The bro running the local hedge fund is providing way less actual value than anyone in a service job.

This is so me.

I live in a neighborhood with a school. Lots of children roam the streets. Presumably, they are taught to always look both ways, expect cars to misbehave, and otherwise look out for their safety. I haven’t heard of any injuries from cars.

I constantly watch cars, especially the oversized trucks, blow through stop signs, or accelerate to 35 mph on a 1/4 mile stretch of road with side street parking. It really boggles my mind when these same drivers then stop just before the school and drop their kids off to walk the rest of the way. Do you not understand that you put local neighborhood kids at risk from the driving you do, just to save a few moments of avoiding the actual car rider line? Where child safety is a priority.

“Nice stop!”

And then at night, delivery drivers blast through the area. Ignoring stop signs, driving excessively fast past parked cars. Kids live here, and they don’t always remember to look. Especially at dusk, when kids are still playing, but visibility is poor. These drivers gamble with three lives: the inexperienced child, their own, and that of the family that would grieve. For what? A few seconds?

Be nice to each other!!!

Thanks for your reply, and I can still see how it might work.

I’m curious if you have any resources that do some end-to-end examples. This is where I struggle. If I have an atomic piece of code I need and I can maybe get it started with a LLM and finish it by hand, but anything larger seems to just always fail. So far the best video I found to try a start-to-finish demo was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AWEPx5cHWQ

He spends plenty of time describing the tools and how to use them, but when we get to the actual work, we spend 20 minutes telling the LLM that it’s doing stuff wrong. There’s eventually a prototype, but to get there he had to alternate between ‘I still can’t jump’ and ‘here’s the new error.’ He eventually modified code himself, so even getting a ‘mario clone’ running requires an actual developer and the final result was underwhelming at best.

For me, a ‘game’ is this tiny product that could be a viable unit. It doesn’t need to talk to other services, it just needs to react to user input. I want to see a speed-run of someone using LLMs to make a game that is playable. It doesn’t need to be “fun”, but the video above only got to the ‘player can jump and gets game over if hitting enemy’ stage. How much extra effort would it take to make the background not flat blue? Is there a win condition? How to refactor this so that the level is not hard-coded? Multiple enemy types? Shoot a fireball that bounces? Power Ups? And does doing any of those break jump functionality again? How much time do I have to spend telling the LLM that the fireball still goes through the floor and doesn’t kill an enemy when it hits them?

I could imagine that if the LLM was handed a well described design document and technical spec that it could do better, but I have yet to see that demonstrated. Given what it produces for people publishing tutorials online, I would never let it handle anything business critical.

The video is an hour long, and spends about 20 minutes in the middle actually working on the project. I probably couldn’t do better, but I’ve mostly forgotten my javascript and HTML canvas. If kaboom.js was my focus, though, I imagine I could knock out what he did in well under 20 minutes and have a better architected design that handled the above questions.

I’ve, luckily, not yet been mandated that I embed AI into my pseudo-developer role, but they are asking.

I think this is what will kill vibe coding, but not before there’s significant damage done. Junior developers will be let go and senior devs will be told they have to use these tools instead and to be twice as efficient. At some point enough major companies will have had data breaches through AI-generated code that they all go back to using people, but there will be tons of vulnerable code everywhere. And letting Cursor touch your codebase for a year, even with oversight, will make it really tricky to find all the places it subtly fucked up.

I have 3 questions, and I’m coming from a heavily AI-skeptic position, but am open:

1. Do you believe that providing all that context, describing the existing patterns, creating an implementation plan, etc, allows the AI to both write better code and faster than if you just did it yourself? To me, this just seems like you have to re-write your technical documentation in prose each time you want to do something. You are saying this is better than ‘Do XYZ’, but how much twiddling of your existing codebase do you need to do before an AI can understand the business context of it? I don’t currently do development on an existing codebase, but every time I try to get these tools to do something fairly simple from scratch, they just flail. Maybe I’m just not spending the hours to build my AI-parsable functional spec. Every time I’ve tried this, asking something as simple as (and paraphrased for brevity) “write an Asteroids clone using JavaScript and HTML 5 Canvas” results in a full failure, even with multiple retries chasing errors. I wrote something like that a few years ago to learn Javascript and it took me a day-ish to get something that mostly worked.

2. Speaking of that context. Are you running your models locally, or do you have some cloud service? If you give your entire codebase to a 3rd party as context, how much of your company’s secret sauce have you disclosed? I’d imagine most sane companies are doing something to make their models local, but we see regular news articles about how ChatGPT is training on user input and leaking sensitive data if you ask it nicely and I can’t imagine all the pro-AI CEOs are aware of the risks here.

3. How much pen-testing time are you spending on this code, error handling, edge cases, race conditions, data sanitation? An experienced dev understands these things innately, having fixed these kinds of issues in the past and knows the anti-patterns and how to avoid them. In all seriousness, I think this is going to be the thing that actually kills AI vibe coding, but it won’t be fast enough. There will be tons of new exploits in what used to be solidly safe places. Your new web front-end? It has a really simple SQL injection attack. Your phone app? You can tell it your username is admin’joe@google.com and it’ll let you order stuff for free since you’re an admin.

I see a place for AI-generated code, for instant functions that do something blending simple and complex. “Hey claude, write a function to take a string and split it at the end of every sentence containing an uppercase A”. I had to write weird functions like that constantly as a sysadmin, and transforming data seems like a thing an AI could help me accelerate. I just don’t see that working on a larger scale, though, or trusting an AI enough to allow it to integrate a new function like that into an existing codebase.

I’d wager that the votes are irrelevant. Stock overflow is generously <50% good code and is mostly people saying ‘this code doesn’t work – why?’ and that is the corpus these models were trained on.

I’ve yet to see something like a vibe coding livestream where something got done. I can only find a lot of ‘tutorials’ that tell how to set up tools. Anyone want to provide one?

I could… possibly… imagine a place where someone took quality code from a variety of sources and generate a model that was specific to a single language, and that model was able to generate good code, but I don’t think we have that.

Vibe coders: Even if your code works and seems to be a success, do you know why it works, how it works? Does it handle edge cases you didn’t include in your prompt? Does it expose the database to someone smarter than the LLM? Does it grant an attacker access to the computer it’s running on, if they are smarter than the LLM? Have you asked your LLM how many 'r’s are in strawberry?

At the very least, we will have a cyber-security crisis due to vibe coding; especially since there seems to be a high likelihood of HR and Finance vibe coders who think they can do the traditional IT/Dev work without understanding what they are doing and how to do it safely.

This is my fear. It’s still possible, barely, to buy a dumb TV. When my current fridge/dishwasher/stove/etc dies in a few years, will there even be a dumb version? Will it cost 5x the price of a spyware version? How about my thermostat. HVAC? Car? And will attempting to disable any of this spyware land me in prison?

Right now, uninformed/unaware/stupid people are affected by this. Pretty soon, everyone will be, or they will have to forego things we consider to be necessities now, like refrigeration and cell phones or be rich enough to buy the privacy-focused models.

I can’t immediately find it, but I just saw another post about a new privacy-focused cellphone with a huge price tag. The established manufacturers have a cost advantage. Samsung et al. can easily make a new fridge with fewer consumer rights, but a new company will have to spend tons of capital to make a factory to put out a comparable product; and they won’t have the advantage of selling your data to subsidize the price.

Privacy is and will become more-so a commodity unless we fight for it.

That new hire might eat resources, but they actually learn from their mistakes and gain experience. If you can’t hold on to them once they have experience, that’s a you problem. Be more capitalist and compete for their supply of talent; if you are not willing to pay for the real human, then you can have a shitty AI that will never grow beyond a ‘new hire.’

The future problem, though, is that without the experience of being a junior dev, where do you think senior devs come from? Can’t fix crappy code if all you know how to do is engineer prompts to a new hire.

“For want of a nail,” no one knew how to do anything in 2030. Doctors were AI, Programmers were AI, Artists were AI, Teachers were AI, Students were AI, Politicians were AI. Humanity suffered and the world suffocated under the energy requirements of doing everything poorly.

I fully agree: Companies and their leadership should be held accountable when they cut corners and disregard customer data security. The ideal solution would be that a company is required to not store any information beyond what is required to provide the service, a la GDPR, but with a much stricter limit. I would put “marketing” outside that boundary. As a youtube user, you need literally nothing, maybe a username and password to retain history and inferred preferences, but trying to collect info about me should be punished. If your company can’t survive without targeted content, your company should not survive.

In bygone days, your car’s manufacturer didn’t know anything about you and we still bought cars. Not to start a whole new thread, but this ties in to right-to-repair and subscriptions for features as well. I did not buy a license to the car, I bought the fucking car; a license to use the car is called a lease.

I understand what you are saying, and what you want… but admitting fault publicly is a huge liability, as they have then stated it was their negligence that caused the issue. (bear with me and read this wall of text – or skip to the last paragraph)

I’ve worked in the Sec Ops space, and it’s an arms race all the time. There are tools to help identify issues and breaches quickly, but the attack surface is just not something that can be managed 100%. Even if you know there is a problem, you probably have to send an issue to a developer team to update their dependency and then they might need to change their code as well and get a code review approved and get a window to promote to production. A Zero-Day vulnerability is not something you can anticipate.

You’ve seen the XKCD of the software stack where a tiny peg is propping up the whole thing? The same idea applies to security, but the tiny peg is a supply chain attack where some dependency is either vulnerable, or attacked by malicious actors and through that gain access to your environment.

Maybe your developers leverage WidgetX1Z library for their app, and the WidgetX1Z library just updated with a change-log that looks reasonable, but the new code has a backdoor that allows an attacker to compromise your developers computer. They now have a foothold in your environment even with rigorous controls. I’ve yet to meet a developer who didn’t need, or at least want, full admin rights on their box. You now have an attacker with local admin inside your network. They might trip alarms, but by then the damage might be done and they were able to harvest the dev database of user accounts and send it back home. That dev database was probably a time-delayed copy of prod, so that the developer could be entirely sure there were no negative impacts of their changes.

I’m not saying this is what happened to Plex, but the idea that modern companies even CAN fully control the data they have is crazy. Unless you are doing full code reviews of all third-party libraries and changes or writing everything in-house (which would be insane), with infallible review, you cannot fully protect against a breach. And even then I’m not sure.

The real threat here is what data do companies collect about us? If all they have is a username, password and company-specific data, then the impact of a breach is not that big – you, as a consumer, should not re-use a password. When they collect tons of other information about us such as age, race, location, gender, sex, orientation, habits, preferences, contacts, partners, politics, etc, then those details become available for anyone willing to pay. We should use breach notifications like this to push for stronger data laws that prevent companies from collecting, storing, buying or selling personal data about their customers. It is literally impossible for a company to fully protect that information, so it should not be allowed.

Two comments, and I know this is now old news: it’s insane to see someone/somegroup get SO pissy for being hit with a soft, non-lethal projectile; and while I understand how he was likely carrying it, upon further review the clip above seems to show that this man is a sandwich-mancer and can summon subs from thin air.

I don’t normally like to use the AI summary of a search, but this one was funny: Force of rubber bullet vs sandwich

I’m glad they failed to indict him, and I hope he finds success in another place.

not a locksmith, but…

One of those candidates for ‘worst memorable phrase in history’ is the old “duct-tape for things that move and shouldn’t and wd-40 for things that should move and don’t”.

WD-40 isn’t a lubricant. It often works to get something un-stuck, but then you need to still clean and lubricate the parts to keep it working.

Full agree. It’s scary. These companies have collected enough data on us all – sometimes (often?) through things we didn’t directly use and thus didn’t need to accept any T&C for, such as surveillance cameras in a business or public street – that they can predict our actions, moods, and make inferences about our lives.

They have been doing this for YEARS, and they are constantly getting better. They don’t even need health data, but I can guarantee they want it. I remember noticing that we had a phase where my wife was being advertised baby products on her streaming service. We were not having another child, but the timing was eerily close to the interval between #1 and #2. I actually just had a hesitation about divulging that I have 2 kids, but then said fuck it, they already know.

Add to all that the ‘for the children’ angle, which I’ve always hated. It’s such a transparent lie that anyone with a lick of common sense can see through it. For anyone even on the fence, this is the foot in the door: Allow them the ability to track you ‘for the children’ and they will track you for the corporation as well, and the government, and your ex-boyfriend who is now a cop.

Fight this shit.