Diomidis Spinellis

Today we launch a new run of the popular and award-winning free massive online course (MOOC) on the use of Unix Tools for data, software and production engineering. More than 7,500 learners enrolled on edX. Now, a further reason to follow the course is to improve your understanding of AI Agents' actions and your interaction with them. More information at https://www.spinellis.gr/unix/?utm=md260508

Vibe coding toward the incident horizon

We are living through a golden age of generative AI: a time when progress is both breathtaking and somehow still unable to reliably open a PDF without hallucinating the author’s middle name. The curve is real, the funding is real, and the demos are so real that they must be watched on a stage with dramatic lighting, because ordinary lighting reveals too much.
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Read the complete text at https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260302/?utm=md

@aburka@hachyderm.io Indeed averages can be misleading, especially when releases combine multiple elements. I plan to plot rainclouds to improve our understanding.

@jaj@mastodon.social At the time C was so new that they were experimenting with its facilities and libraries. According to https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-history-man/man3.html printf was indeed first documented in V4; see the man page https://dspinellis.github.io/unix-v4man/v4man.pdf#page=193

Several news outlets reported the amazing discovery of a 1970s Fourth Edition Research Unix magnetic tape. I incorporated the tape’s source code into the Unix History Repository hosted on GitHub and studied the code’s composition. Here's what I found. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223/?ms261223