Posts by tamegeek42

Software veganism

The whole anti-AI crowd is like vegans, but for software. The software vegans are loud, they are not educated on the subject beyond the misinformation they amplify in their echo chamber, they are wrongly focusing on the wrong part of the subject when it comes to environmental impact (hint: the vast majority of inference is to appease corporate metrics, not serving anyone, which is equivalent to burning thousands of barrels of oil every day just to see them burn), they are combative, they can't shut up about it, and they force their worldview upon others even when it hurts other people.

On the latter point, you can't force your preference of not using LLMs (I hear you!) onto other people by rejecting LLM-assisted security reports. The attackers have no such qualms. They will discover and exploit the same vulnerabilities. The only people suffering will be your users. That's the quickest path to irrelevance. Don't cry that "vibe-coded AI slop" subverted your software; you did the subverting just fine.

This is the point Linus made. Nothing matters more than the users of the software. We have to use all tools at our disposal to ensure that one goal.

Don't call it an IDE

Fleet was a code editor, just like VS Code and Atom before it. Code editors are NOT IDEs. Totally different use cases. If the most respectable IDE company is pushing code editors in place of IDEs the entire software engineering profession is beyond cooked. This is a regression. That's how we used to painfully and slowly write code 25 years ago. What is this madness!?

Everyone here is complaining about the wrong thing

If you are a paying client not only data collection is turned off by default, but you can disable the AI features either on a per-project basis, or with a global killswitch which surgically removes the AI assistant from the IDE. They expose this information upfront in the configuration page. So, for the use case of paying professional clients that everyone here is incensed about it makes zero difference whatsoever.

The worrying bit lies in this phrase "In some cases, such as for non-commercial users, this data sharing will be enabled by default". The non-commercial licenses are Community editions (e.g. PyCharm CE), early access program users, and free non-commercial licenses given to qualifying FOSS projects' contributors. The whole "if you're not paying for the product the YOU are the product" approach is very icky and looks very self-defeating to me. It turns people away from the product, and they get to train their models on code written by people who are not doing professional development. Ugh. Um. Okay, then.

Absolute trash

Every single article by Mr. Goodwins is some kind of click-bait hot take at best. I wish The Register had a feature which allowed me to hide articles by a particular member of the staff.

Vibe administering

I spat out my coffee at that!

That said, I have used LLMs as a lazy way to jog my memory for tasks I don't do frequently enough to have them in working memory. They are very good for this, as long as you understand that they can and will hallucinate non-existent command line arguments. Like the Russians say, trust, but verify.

Let me see if I get this straight. The FSF wanted this guy to pay damages and have his life destroyed because that does not set a legal precedent. Instead, the guy says he can't have his life destroyed without even fighting for it. Makes sense. Seeing that he's adamant on the appeal, FSF thus decides... to not help him at all, letting him go through with an appeal without any means to realistically have a fighting chance. An appeal which if (when?) it fails will be the first domino piece to kill the GPL. I see.

https://tenor.com/view/it%27s-fine-im-fine-its-fine-im-fine-fine-everything-is-fine-gif-4044255692100841679