It's also a way to literally advertise to AI companies that you have some data worth plundering in an increasingly dead and sloppy internet that has diminishing returns for training.
Not sure about Hopper, as I recall biographers of Lawrence of Arabia certainly made it seem like he was using the fog of war to do things he knew his superiors may object to.
Regardless, even if its misinterpreted it still has a kernal of truth and separate utility than your version, that is: the people in the field closest to the action have an operational awareness that may result in better decisions in times of urgency.
Yeah, when someone writes a vague prompt that simply says "Do what it takes to finish X" and the unleashed agents end up doing something lethal and illegal you would think its on the AI company to prevent any illegality and not the vague prompt writer.
>The implication that the solution to this is to somehow convince your direct competitors to do inferior in-person KYC for you is the most ridiculous thing.
People work with their competitors all the time (see Netfix vs Amazon). Whats ridiculuous is the claim that a scammer would prefer to show up physically at a bank and risk being exposed instead of operating remotely.
>leaking a selfie is pretty low down on the list of “bad stuff a bank could leak”.
don't some of them require a selfie while holding legible official documentation?
> Whats ridiculuous is the claim that a scammer would prefer to show up physically at a bank and risk being exposed instead of operating remotely.
Of course they wouldn’t prefer to show physically. What does that mean though? Are you saying no scammers showed up physically to banks, therefore banking fraud rates are less? Do you have a source for that?
> don't some of them require a selfie while holding legible official documentation?
You can of course do KYC as stupidly as you like (zoom calls anyone?) - Revolut (and their providers) obviously separate document presentation from the liveness check (and fyi this is a short video, not a selfie. The selfie they are talking about is just a capture from the video)
Is your argument supposed to be more convincing because you added the word "patently"?
>What does that mean though?
It means that when you find a way to bypass purely online identity verification checks executing fraud at scale is easier than the physical alternative. As you would say, this is patently obvious.
>Claude was consistently doing database operations in a for loop, where it could use batch operations.
>The code in the end is better than a lot of the code I've seen humans write.
It's a little amusing to see those two sentences written back to back with no hint of irony to be frank.
By the way, why didn't the "Multiple agents going over the same problem catch a surprising amount of dumb stuff that would otherwise slip through" catch it?
Who knows how many skills you would have to have added if you actually reviewed the 400k codebase...But don't worry that's not what I am advocating. I myself would also latch onto any excuse that allows me to avoid the realization that I have to review 400k (or half that) lines of code, primary one being that I will always have a desperate paying customer that will always be grateful for anything I give them.
Which comes to your most valid advice which has nothing to do with AI (now that many devs have access to it):
> Work for business people who want fast results
This is what well oiled outsourve shops used to do and I must say it is no easy feat to be able to line up a constant stream of desperate businness people out of thin air, especially for your regular "I just want to code" engineer.
My guess is you're in the honeymoon phase with most of these people. The outsource shops that survived would fire the client that became more demanding and less grateful and move onto more freshly desperate client pastures. It is true that sales, self-promotion, and marketing are more important than ever now...
>Set up excellent testing.
Is this the part that you hand code or constantly review yourself? I guess not, since you would have explicitly mentioned something that important. I would caution you not to be surprised when no one believes you have excellent testing when you've unleashed multiple LLMs on it and are not reviewing code anymore.
I do not believe you read my comment in good conscience.
>>Claude was consistently doing database operations in a for loop, where it could use batch operations.
>>The code in the end is better than a lot of the code I've seen humans write.
>It's a little amusing to see those two sentences written back to back with no hint of irony to be frank.
There is no irony because I have seen humans do the same thing. The difference is that the human was paid 50x more.
I do not understand your arguments around outsource shops. I get clients. They want something. I deliver. There is not a lot of complexity to this. I am not a world start programmer that has 50 clients to choose from.
>>Set up excellent testing.
>Is this the part that you hand code or constantly review yourself? I guess not, since you would have explicitly mentioned something that important. I would caution you not to be surprised when no one believes you have excellent testing when you've unleashed multiple LLMs on it and are not reviewing code anymore.
I set up excellent testing the same way a CTO would set up excellent testing: I give clear guidelines on the architecture I want to see on the project. I then review key parts and samples of it and give feedback. When it looks good I mark it as done and move on. Any bugs or defects always result in additional test coverage.
I'm happy to have a constructive discussion about this, but I do not appreciate your sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, condescending tone. It makes people not wanting to communicate with you.
> There is no irony because I have seen humans do the same thing.
Your original comment started with the sentence:
> I am currently writing a lot of code that I am not reviewing anymore.
Then you give an example of catching a bad pattern the LLMs used when you actually reviewed the code, after you mentioned you had multiple agents set up to catch each others mistakes. That is the irony. You're mentioning that LLMs engage in basic bad coding patterns that are not caught by multiple agents, hence underlining the importance of human review.
> There is no irony because I have seen humans do the same thing.
Yes, but you were reviewing the humans. You're not reviewing the LLMs.
> I set up excellent testing the same way a CTO would set up excellent testing.
Knowing LLMs can make basic coding pattern mistakes (as you mention) but still unleashing them on your tests without routine human review that makes sure that test suites have not been negatively affected after each iteration seems like the polar opposite of consistantly maintaining excellent testing throughout the software development process.
>There's been plenty of evidence that nothing is recorded or sent back, hardly "absence of complete proof".
You may have a different understanding of the word "complete" than the standard definition.
Unless you are claiming the verifiers kept the watches being tested under constant survellance for several years, the proof you are alluding to may only prove that it is not routinely sending or recording data. It does not prove they can't turn it on whenever they feel like it, or when obeying a time-limited and geofenced mass surveillance order.
I mean, anything with a microphone or camera (and some things without) can theoretically be used to listen to/record you at any given time for a myriad of reasons.
If you are worried about such a device being on your person, I think the easy solution is just not to wear or buy one.
In theory any device with a microphone and an internet connection can record everything and send it off to some remote server, but in practice there was really no evidence of this happening on any significant scale for a long time. It is easy to see how this would make a difference for most people. But already there was an attitude among some people of "we all carry a microphone in our pocket, there is no privacy anymore".
Then voice-activated devices came out which (without making a secret of it) started recording after detecting some watchword, of course there were false positives but most normal people didn't really seem to care about that. Again this was used by the most paranoid or anti-technology people as an argument that "see, they're really recording everything like we've been saying all along".
Now a device comes out which explicitly and openly records everything within reach and applies AI analysis to it, and the precise people who should be most against it act like it's no big deal because supposedly this was already happening anyway - while, on the contrary, I think this is precisely the moment where the line is being crossed in a way that will have actual negative consequences on society, and this is the time to take a stand against it.
So ironically we see that the hyper-activistic all-or-nothing attitude is actually working against the very interests that its proponents claim to want to protect.
Debatable, and clearly not clear. It's weird to say this when there are obvious counter examples staring us in the face, not least of all the founder of the company he just left, of who (Dario) people could have said the same thing when he left OpenAI.
Granted, there is less likelihood now then there was then but this much is clear: if he starts his own company, he may make more.
Forgive me for being cheeky, but presumably this is not why you said anecdata.
You presumably said anecdata because you were describing your own personal sessions with Claude. Your original comment is written as someone who is assuming the AI is doing a deep deterministic analysis of its own internal systems in order to respond to you. It could simply be aping some discussion on the same topic within its training data, which if sensible is, as you say, not entirely worthless...
Fair. I should have reigned in my emotions and written that first comment with a lot less conviction and not jumped to my conclusion. It’s a topic I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about and got a bit too excited when a relevant thread popped up where I could chime in.
1. is a bit contradictory or at the least a "devils in the details" wishful fantasy which hasn't been showcased convincingly in the wild yet (by "the wild", I mean software eng shops and corps). It's assumed the devs who have taste were able to implement their taste fine pre-AI, sure, but the whole gotcha in 1. is that the ones with good taste currently are not confident in implementing their good taste while simultaneously "producing good results quickly using AI".
I disagree. There is a lot of boilerplate to write and mundane things to check, which AI can speed up a lot. I'm not talking about 'software engineering' here, but about 'programming', which consists of a lot of write DTO->write rest interface->write interface->write simple select query->map response. The good taste here comes from the architectural design and the UI design.
The amount of 'software engineers' who couldn't design a table to be readable or a flow to be intuitive is off the charts. AI neither helps nor harms here, it just makes implementing good and bad decisions faster.
Since the discussion was related to the job security of a programmer with good taste, I'm trying to read your comment from that perspective.
If I am understanding you correctly, you are claiming that an AI will not design a table to be readable unless a programmer with good taste is prompting it. Did I understand you correctly?
If so, then yes we are going to arrive at different conclusions, because my claim is that the table made by the programmer with no taste will be acceptable to the client, hence good taste won't save the other programmer because good taste will require more guiding and interference by the programmer. And then the client will just go with the no taste implementation.
If the programmer with good taste truly does not lose any time implementing their solution when compared to the other programmer, as you claim, then yes the client will go with good taste since all else are equal.
I just find those assumptions hard to believe at this stage.
It's a story as old as time so I'm frankly less amused by it. The old school censors always saw every "data" that was taboo under the sun prior to censoring it for public consumption.
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