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• Post #4319152

  Today in "You must be really confident you won't ever be held liable for that", *Docusign* offered to use AI to summarise the agreement I had been asked to sign. (I declined, naturally)

• Post #4319151

  RE: https://eupolicy.social/@bert_hubert/117013610570019972 I did not expect a wild @gvwilson to appear while reading this...

• Post #4057194

  RE: https://aus.social/@CosmicRami/116960536168982873 I'm planning to head somewhere down Dubbo way with @prophetkristy for this.

• Post #3822384

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@mshelton/116920794602281891 Is "bots will be bots" the new "boys will be boys"?

• Post #3153660

  Sometimes applications have features where I am utterly mystified as to the requirements or past history of backwards compatible updates in the face of changing requirements that could have led to the feature existing. Current example: long lived Artifactory API tokens that explicitly *can't* be revoked without deleting the user's entire account (they still have expiry dates, it's just that the user and admins are actively prevented from revoking them early).

• Post #3153659

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@mkb/116678812504895003 I was familiar with the original, and concur that this is still well worth the watch :)

• Post #3153658

  Having reason to contemplate the differences between "obviously not broken" and "not obviously broken" (this is not an uncommon state of affairs, just especially applicable today).

• Post #3153657

  One of the more irritating elements of "CEO with a vested interest said a thing" "journalism" is when almost the entire article is uncritically rehashing whatever nonsense the CEO is spouting before mentioning in the final paragraph "they have an IPO pending", instead of the headline being "CEO spouts desperate nonsense to try to juice up their IPO" (with the lead paragraph noting that the aim is to reach levels that may sat...

• Post #3153656

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116698984063039344 Dare we believe that the mania is abating? (I almost used "hope" in that sentence, but that's the wrong word for something that's going to be a frickin' mess when it finally happens)

• Post #3153655

  Sometimes I wonder how much of my AI skepticism is fuelled by the fact that a decent chunk of $dayjob is getting tools originally written for Linux to play nice with Windows dev environments, so a significant subset of the documented functionality doesn't work (with no written caveats), and plenty of the publicly available example projects don't work either (since they assume execution from a Linux environment, where WSL itself qualifies, but a Windows client to a WSL service doe...

• Post #2470523

  "It’s making developers dramatically more effective, but it’s also introducing security vulnerabilities, increasing technical debt, and producing code that can be difficult to maintain." is one heck of a sentence that appears to be relying on a rather novel definition of the word "effective" to be in any way coherent. (It's a pull quote from https://thenewstack.io/acm-vibe-coding-ai-agent/ that pretty much brought my brain to a juddering halt from the...

• Post #1902403

  Random thought: tales of golems often include some kind of motivating script stored in the golem's head. System prompt?

• Post #1825547

  Interesting read from @bert_hubert last year on what useful things may be left standing when the LLM bubble inevitably pops: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/

• Post #1770609

  Tip for anyone writing conference talk submissions: it's potentially fine to put tantalising hints for the audience in your proposed abstract & description. It's *not* fine to leave the *reviewers* guessing as to what you're actually going to talk about (that's part of why there is a whole separate field for notes visible only to reviewers!).

• Post #1570831

  Starting to think I may need to follow a colleague's example and indefinitely set https://nohello.info/ as my status at work.

• Post #1408362

  I wonder how many CPU cycles are currently being burned generating full written transcripts and expansive summaries for meetings that could have been adequately summarised by sticking a few bullet points in the meeting chat before anyone signs off.

• Post #1378267

  Summarising my thoughts on the notion of organisations overriding rational tool evaluation processes with "though shalt use LLMs" AI mandates: "All staff are now expected to regularly swing hammers, and will be measured on the frequency and enthusiasm of their hammer swinging, regardless of whether or not any of their tasks involve embedding nails in wood".

• Post #681833

  Oh, it just clicked: LLM hype is what you get when you stack outsourcing hype on top of no code hype and tech silver bullet hype. So it's not one hype cycle, it's multiple hype cycles running in parallel, and it may not be clear which of them any given proponent is afflicted by.