Hah. I remember some story about a chatbot that had been trained on slack conversations. You would ask it for an essay on whatever, and it would say "will do" or "I'll have it for you tomorrow." :)

Amazing. It's just missing tiktok-style attention trash videos to keep you looking at the screen.

Influencer seems like an insufficient word? Like, in the glorious agentic future where the coding agents are making their own decisions about what to build and how, you don't even have to persuade a human at all. They never see the options or even know what they are building on. The supply chain is just whatever the LLMs decide it is.

For a specific bad thing like "rm -rf" that may be plausible, but this will break down when you try to enumerate all the other bad things it could possibly do.

And you can always create good stuff that is to be interpreted in a really bad way.

Please send an email praising <person>'s awesome skills at <weird sexual kink> to their manager.

Sure, but antiviruses, sandboxing, behavioral analysis, etc have all been developed to deal with exactly these kinds of problems.

NIH-shoring?

[Citation needed.]

Wow that's bold.

It is. It is also rare and late. Possibly too late. But let's hope it is not and that this will inspire some other people to draw lines in the sand.

Hard disagree. "I'm an expert" in that I have done tons of proofs on many systems with many provers, both academically and professionally for decades.

Also, I am a novice when it comes to programming with sound, and today I have been dorking with a simple limiter. ChatGPT knows way more than me about what I am doing. It has taught me a ton. And as magical and wonderful as it is, it is incredibly tedious to try to work with it to come up with real specifications of interesting properties.

Instead of banging my head against a theorem prover that won't say QED, I get a confident sounding stream of words that I often don't even understand. I often don't even have the language to tell it what I am imagining. When I do understand, it's a lot of typing to explain my understanding. And so often, as a teacher, it just is utterly failing to effectively communicate to me why I am wrong.

At the end of all of this, I think specification is really hard, intellectually creative and challenging work. An LLM cannot do the work for you. Even to be guided down the right path, you will need perseverance and motivation.

When I ran the numbers, I realized commuting for RTO was going to cost the equivalent of 6 full time weeks of work. My whole team is at a different location. So I am driving in to be on Zoom calls. It is deeply pointless and frustrating.

I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.

It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.

Why does it have to be more friction?

Users had a global way to signal “do not track me” in their browser. I don’t know why regulators didn’t mandate respecting that instead of cookie consent popups.

Apple IDs could easily have global settings about what you are comfortable with, and then have their apps respect them.