Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Hereās a fun oneā¦ Microsoft added copilot features to sharepoint. The copilot system has its own set of access controls. The access controls let it see things that normal users might not be able to see. Normal users can then just ask copilot to tell them the contents of the files and pages that they canāt see themselves. Luckily, no business would ever put sensitive information in their sharepoint system, so this isnāt a realistic threat, haha.
Obviously Microsoft have significant resources to research and fix the security problems that LLM integration will bring with it. So much money. So many experts. Plenty of time to think about the issues since the first recall debacle.
And this is what theyāve accomplished.
https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/exploiting-copilot-ai-for-sharepoint/
I have to share this one.
Now donāt think of me as smug, Iām only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: Iām pretty good at Vim. Iāve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. Iāve pulled off some impressive stunts with Vim macros. But here I sat, watching an LLM predict where my cursor should go and what I should do there next, and couldnāt help but admit to myself that this is faster than I could ever be.
Yeah, flex your Vim skills because being fast at editing text is totally the bottleneck of programming and not the quality and speed of our own thoughts.
The world is changing, this is big, I told myself, keep up. I watched the Karpathy videos, typed myself through Python notebooks, attempted to read a few papers, downloaded resources that promised to teach me linear algebra, watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym.
Wow man, you watched 3blue1brown videos at the gymā¦
In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the universityās AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldnāt give less of a shit about the things I had been concerned about. Was this code written with Pure Vim, was it written with Pure Emacs, does it not contain Artificial Intelligence Sweetener? They donāt care. Theyāve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldnāt they? Next question. Concerns about āis this still the same programming that I fell in love with?ā seemed so silly that I didnāt even dare to say them out loud.
SIDE NOTE: I plea the resident compiler engineer to quickly assess the quality of this manās books since I am complete moron when it comes to programming language theory.
Of course, like everyone else present at the Big Bang, I clapped and was excited and tried everything I could think of ā from translating phrases to generating poems, to generating code, to asking these LLMs things I would never ask a living being.
āLike everyone else in my social circle, which I confuse with the entirety of the world, I am easily distracted by jangling keysā
As someone not versed in the relevant deep lore, did emacs vs vim ever actually matter? Like, my experience is with both as command line text editors, which shouldnāt have nearly as much impact on the actual code being written as the skills and insight of the person doing the writing. I assumed this was a case where you could grumble through working with the one you didnāt like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.
It doesnāt matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.
