Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I wrote a comment about this several months ago on my old kbin.social account. That site is gone and I can’t seem to get a link to it, so I’m just going to repost it here since I feel it’s relevant. My kbin client doesn’t let me copy text posts directly, so I’ve had to use the Select feature of the android app switcher. Unfortunately, the comment didn’t emerge unscathed, and I lack the mental energy to fix it due to covid brain fog (EDIT: it appears that many uses of I were not preserved). The context of the old post was about layoffs, and it can be found here: https://kbin.earth/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/12147

    I want to offer my perspective on the Al thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. happily generate string- templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running rm -rf /* on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.

    I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.

    Now, do the higher-ups think the way that do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using Al tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.

    Basically, I think LLMs can be helpful for some folks, but my experience is that the use of LLMs by junior developers absolutely increases the workload of senior developers. Senior developers using LLMs can experience a productivity bump, but only if they’re very critical of the output generated by the model. I am personally much faster just relying on traditional IDE auto complete, since I don’t have to change from “I’m writing code” mode to “I’m reviewing code mode.”




  • The other person may have responded with a fair amount of hostility, but they’re absolutely correct. I run Kubernetes clusters hosting millions of containers across hundreds of thousands of VMs at my job, and OOMKills are just a fact of life. Apps will leak memory, and you’re powerless to fix it unless you’re willing to debug the app and fix the leak. It’s better for the container to run out of memory and trigger a cgroup-scoped OOM kill. A system-wide OOM kill will murder the things you love, shit in your hat, and lick your face like David Tennant licked Krysten Ritter.




  • As a Utahn, it pisses me off that we still have fucking coal plants here. We have 200-250 days of sun here. Shit, we’re at 4-5000 feet of elevation, so the solar flux is fucking intense. Why the fuck haven’t we built solar panels and shut these plants down? Why aren’t our reservoirs covered in at least some number of panels to cut the evaporation? Rather than fix that, let’s scum up the air for us and our neighbors with our shitty 1900s era coal plants and our fucking oil refineries that help contribute to some of the worst air quality in North America when an inversion hits Salt Lake City.

    I have nothing but contempt for the basket of cunts our gerrymandered districts keep shitting out. It’s amazing how ugly the politics can be in such a beautiful place.