Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow

w/e 2023-11-05 (Phil Gyford’s website)

On the one hand I still really enjoy writing code and making something work and look good (ish) and put it online where anyone in the world can see it. It’s still like magic. And is still some kind of personal affirmation, a way of saying “here I am!”, of enjoying that it’s noticed by someone, somewhere.

True.

On the other hand, the maintenance. It’s not like this is new to me, keeping things going for years, decades. And I try to make things as easy as possible – keep things up to date, make things in similar ways, stick to reliable and boring technologies, don’t start too many things, etc. But, especially when several things aren’t quite working right, it’s such a weight.

Also true.

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

Chat is rarely a suitable interface for most tasks. Here, Maggie Appleton explores and prototypes some alternatives.

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

A handy round-up of recent wrtings on artificial insemination.

Artificial Guessing

Artificial Intelligence sounds much more impressive than Artificial Guessing in a slide deck.

Robin picks up on my framing.

Instead of brainstorming, discussing, iterating, closely inspecting a product to understand it and figure out what to show on a page, well, we can just let the machines figure it out for us! This big guessing machine can do our homework and we can all pack up and go to the beach.

ongoing by Tim Bray · The LLM Problem

It doesn’t bother me much that bleeding-edge ML technology sometimes gets things wrong. It bothers me a lot when it gives no warnings, cites no sources, and provides no confidence interval.

Yes! Like I said:

Expose the wires. Show the workings-out.