Ultra trivialization is the blood of tech bros. Everything is so easy and everyone else is just so clueless. Boy met computer through hello world and thought that’s the pinnacle of computer science.
How long til some bright eyed influencer dev tries to take on JPL and MISRA? It’s always some middleware garbage these startups make and never a QNX competitor.
I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always “ya but what is intelligence” or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while I’ve tried to use the example that if these “AI coding” things are tools, why would I use a tool that’s never perfect? For example I wouldn’t reach for a 10mm wrench that wasn’t 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have “it could still be useful” responses.
I’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.
For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR:
Age, Sex, Location Randomization
My vibes based thoughts on Quantum bubble: it’s been tried before and never stuck. It’s too science-y for the common folk to buy-in. AI sold fear, crypto sold “ownership” and “banking freedom” and of course “FOMO to invest early like imagine buying Apple when it was a $1!”, and dotcom sold anything computer.
But now everyone has computer, crypto questions never answered so it remains in a small capacity still on the “ya but what if”, and AI isn’t able to actually replace anyone after trillions of dollars poured in so it’s going the way of crypto (will still be around but not in our faces at every turn).
Quantum just never had and never will have those pulls. Like I remember the attempt to sell fear a decade or more ago when everyone was like “passwords and encryption become meaningless!” But it was still all hypothetical. Being hardware is a huge part of the fizzle. Software you can make pretty interface and spin up a PoC that doesn’t do anything but you can have someone use the prototype to get the “omggghg it’s real” feeling. Without hardware being accessible it just looks like nerds in lab coats and no one cares.
A friend at a former workplace was in a discussion with that company leadership earlier this week to understand how and what metrics are to be used for promotion candidates since the office is directed to use “AI” tools for coding. Simply put: lots of entry and lower level engineers submit PRs that are co-authored by Claude so it is difficult to measure their actual software development skills to determine if they should get promoted.
That leadership had no real answers just lots of abstract garbage (vibes essentially) and followed up with telling all the entry levels to reduce the code they write and use the purchased agentic tool.
Along with this a buddy at a very famous prop shop says the firm decided to freeze all junior hiring and is leaning into only hiring senior+ and replacing juniors with AI. He asked what will happen when the current seniors leave/retire and got hit with shock that would even be considered.
Ian Lance Taylor (of GOLD, Go, and other tech fame) had a take on chatbots being AGI that I liked to see from an influential person of computing. https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/673
The summary is that chatbots are not AGI, using the current AI wave as the usher to AGI is not it, and all around dislikes in a very polite way that chatbot LLMs are seen as AI.
Apologies if this was posted when published.
I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.
It’s unfortunate that the bug bounty payout removal is probably the best immediate remedy for some filtering but with curl being everywhere resume padders are still going to rush to generate slop reports or patches. I hope they are more fast and direct with communication as well. Their current patience and politeness is admirable.
Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.
I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.
If there’s any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.
I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/
Much like blockchain the FOMO is so strong people are afraid to say it’s bad even when there is nonstop evidence rolling in. With all the data they still are too cowardly to say anything critical.
It bums me out with cryptocurrency/blockchain and now “AI” that people are afraid to commit to calling it bullshit. They always end with “but it could evolve and become revolutionary!” I assume from deep seated FOMO. Journalists especially need more backbone but that’s asking too much from WSJ I know
when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop
This is from 2023 but when debugging an xfce issue this week I came across this forum post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=16835
The user is competent enough to use xfce with Debian, but too incompetent to understand debug symbols is not a violation of privacy.
I love how it’s a public ledger of transactions so once a wallet can be identified to an owner, everyone can see what you’ve done. Not very great system to keep anonymous.