zerosleeps

This is a great article by No One’s Happy. Like the author, I’ve been struggling to articulate my thoughts on the explosion of use of large language models and I think this post gets as close as any that I’ve read.

This is the part of the phenomenon I find hardest to write about. The tool did not make him a worse colleague. It made him able to impersonate, for months, a discipline he had never trained in, and the impersonation was good enough that the institutional incentives all bent toward letting him continue. Perhaps it’s a failure of management, but I have been finding management to be so eager to embrace AI that they’re willing to accept the risk.

I am yet to be convinced that AI poses a serious long-term threat to my industry. This might age like milk, but I’m quietly confident that in about 3 years from now - when all these little bits of software built by people who don’t know what they don’t know and which have quietly become critical components of their respective businesses, start to fail/require changes/shit the bed because of bugs and security flaws - demand and respect for professional human software developers will be higher than ever.

The downstream costs are accumulating quickly … What is less remarked upon is the same dynamic playing out inside organizations: time wasted using AI on tasks that did not need it, on artifacts no one will read, on processes that exist only because the tool made it cheap to construct them. On decks that spell out things that previously didn’t even need to be said or were assumed.

This post from Kirill Bobrov is a fun read.

Amen to this one:

I don’t know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there’s another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

When did everyone decide to stop calling email addresses email addresses? I feel like everything I look at and everyone I talk to at the moment has started referring to the address as just “email”. “What’s your email?” “Enter your email.”

No. An email is an email, and you send an email to an email address. If we start calling the address an email, then we don’t have any words left to refer to an actual email.

Yesterday morning a huge chunk of the east coast of Australia changed from AEDT (Australian Eastern Daylight Time) to AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time) thanks to DST (Daylight Saving Time) ending.

We went from %DT when %ST was in effect, to %ST where %ST is not in effect.

These names and acronyms are crap. The whole concept of daylight saving time is crap. We, like every other household in the country, have a few things with clocks that need to be manually changed. It takes me 5 minutes.

5 minutes × twice a year × 10 million Australian households = 100,000,000 minutes = 69,444 human days. Every year.

What exactly does it save?

While I’m on the topic of logging in Django, it makes me sad and a little bit grumpy that when you take Django out of the box, it doesn’t default to showing you what it’s doing with your database.

Here’s a LOGGING configuration that takes care of that, and sends everything from django.db.backends to a file in the project’s root directory during development:

LOGGING = {
    "version": 1,
    "disable_existing_loggers": False,
    "handlers": {
        "db_backends_file": {
            "class": "logging.FileHandler",
            "filename": BASE_DIR / "db_backends.log"
        }
    },
    "loggers": {
        "django.db.backends": {
            "level": "DEBUG",
            "handlers": ["db_backends_file"]
        }
    }
}

It’s important to note that django.db.backends only generates output when the DEBUG setting is True.