@juergen_hubert Was: Re: Drew DeVault on: https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html

@blogdiva This is EPIC! Thank you! Please forward to Ed Zitron immediately and of course I keep noticing sloppy journalism on the part of The Register and other mouthpieces lately.

@rysiek @timnitGebru The illusion of progress, indeed! I plan to do my initial experiments with Gemini as it is being massively subsidised at the open API gateway level via Opencode.AI, as opposed to using monthly subscriptions for the now arguably massively discredited Claude Code. That's if I even get around to it. So far just using project-wide find/grep/sed magic is working just fine for me, and traditional clang-tidy abstract syntax tree (AST) based refactoring is closer in grasp.

@timnitGebru Also, a lot of the FreeBSD related work I've been doing lately hasn't been writing software itself in anger, but hardware qualification: physically plugging hardware together, usually network adapters, switches, and routers, and evaluating compatibility. Using agents for any of this, whilst possible, would be like putting a hat on a hat, to borrow an expression from Seth MacFarlane in Family Guy. The human factor reigns supreme because of ISO OSI Layer 1.

@timnitGebru EMC++S: Embracing Modern C++ Safely. My appetite for actually using GenAI is wearing thin after the severe information security risk Claude Code and other frontends are known to pose, after the leak <48 hours ago. LLMs have suggested regular expressions to me, but their role has been pretty limited to that of a error prone natural language search processor for me. This suggests a far lower economic point of inflexion for GenAI driven advantage than that promoted for it.

@timnitGebru I am refactoring a mid 00s era C++ code base and so far, because of the subtleties of its architecture, I have found it better to do some of the "lame" refactorings by hand because of the risk an "AI" agent would misread things completely and make breaking changes. As this work proceeds the scope for GenAI is getting narrower and narrower, like, substitute include guards in C/C++ with pragma once, or specific changes suggested in John Lakos et al's EMC++S book.