kescusay

kescusay , 9 months ago to world in Surveillance footage shows Hamas bringing hostages into Shifa Hospital on Oct. 7

No, it fucking isn’t. They weren’t there for treatment.

What I expect from hostage takers is brutality, murder, and the intentional targeting of civilians, which is what they did. If Hamas wants to be taken seriously as a government, and not what they are - a terrorist organization that is as bad, if not worse, for Palestinians as the oppression from Israel - then I expect something else: NOT TAKING HOSTAGES.

kescusay , 9 months ago to world in Surveillance footage shows Hamas bringing hostages into Shifa Hospital on Oct. 7

This will hopefully put to rest any notion that Hamas hasn’t been using civilian infrastructure as shields.

kescusay , 9 months ago to world in Fortified terror tunnel exposed underneath Gaza's Al Shifa hospital complex

Two things…

First, as samokosik says, if it’s being used militarily, it’s a military target. But second - and more importantly - I never said Israel should bomb hospitals.

There is no “should” in this clusterfuck. Everyone is guilty. Hamas happens to be the most guilty in all this, and should definitely be eradicated, but Israel should never have oppressed the Gaza strip or deployed illegal “settlements.” There is no good, clean solution now. Everything is fucked.

kescusay , 9 months ago to world in Fortified terror tunnel exposed underneath Gaza's Al Shifa hospital complex

No one should be surprised by this. It’s been well known for a long time that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure to shield their operations, and civilians themselves as human shields.

kescusay , 9 months ago to news in Oregon's first-in-the-nation drug decriminalization law faces growing pushback amid fentanyl crisis

Oregonian here. And… Yep. That’s it exactly.

kescusay , 9 months ago to videos in Study: Why Wikipedia is the Last Good Website

Now that is a motherfucking website.

kescusay , 9 months ago to videos in Study: Why Wikipedia is the Last Good Website

I think we will, I’ve been pretty happy so far with the lemmy community not putting up with the Nazis. (Defederating from lemmygrad was a fantastic move, for example.)

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in From design to game without coding - "...and this is the part where I'm starting to look for a new job"

Oh! Sure, I get where you’re coming from now, and agree. For example, precision writing for a large language model is going to be a prerequisite for software development jobs these days.

All I’m saying is that those jobs will continue to exist, contrary to the breathless declarations I’ve been seeing that my job is doomed.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in From design to game without coding - "...and this is the part where I'm starting to look for a new job"

For my job, I use Copilot, which is built on GPT-4, and I have zero concern that it’s going to replace me.

It’s very useful, don’t get me wrong. It makes generating new code in applications that already exist a breeze a lot of the time (minus hallucinations and other forms of mistakes, of course). But it simply can’t create whole new applications of any complexity from scratch, and requires actual developers to check the code it does create. It doesn’t actually know what you want, it’s just auto-completing based on what its model decides you want.

Again, it’s very good at that. But it’s not so good that you can replace a team of developers with just one… Or worse yet, with an MBA who thinks he can figure it out without paying anyone.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in From design to game without coding - "...and this is the part where I'm starting to look for a new job"

I’m sorry, but I don’t see it as significantly different. Code from the start is usually “hello world” followed by iterations to make it closer and closer to what you want. The syntax is more complicated (and far more flexible), but the process of narrowing in on what you want by adding more and more precise detail seems awfully similar to me.

kescusay , 9 months ago to technology in From design to game without coding - "...and this is the part where I'm starting to look for a new job"

Pretty sure the guy in the video is the developer of that application, and is joking (and hyping his app).

kescusay , 9 months ago to nottheonion in A Florida restaurant chain says boosting pay and offering better benefits helped it end its labor shortage

Our industries are completely different, but your story reminds me of my own.

I’m a software developer, and I used to work for one of those companies that does everything in its power to convince you they’re a great place to work except pay competitive software developer wages. Free snacks! Great onsite gym! Cool, open floorplan! Their turnover was high, they had no clear corporate direction, and they didn’t pay what anyone was worth, so there was no loyalty.

I got fired very likely for finding out profits were plummeting and the whole thing was a front for the owner’s side-hustle, a Bitcoin mining operation.

These days, it’s a shell of its former self, and the few people left who I genuinely liked and respected are all looking for other jobs. I have no doubt the owner will eventually end up in prison.

kescusay , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to technology in From design to game without coding - "...and this is the part where I'm starting to look for a new job"

Sure. I actually use AI - well, Copilot - regularly for my job, and I’m well aware of its capabilities. It’s useful.

Every line of code it creates also has to be checked, because it often produces code that either includes hallucinations (e.g., references to functions and methods that don’t exist) or - worse - code that contains no errors as far as the IDE is concerned, but isn’t what I needed.

It’s still helpful. I estimate that it boosts my productivity by around 25% or so, which is huge. But if I were replaced with some MBA - or even a junior dev or intern - because my company became convinced it didn’t need senior developers anymore and someone without my skills could just tell Copilot what to do, they’d either collapse or hire me back within a couple months (and you’d better believe they’d need to offer me the moon for me to accept).

Maybe someday, a large language model can be built that will produce the 100,000 lines of code, in five different repositories, each with its own pipelines, and all the auxiliary configuration files and mechanisms for storing/retrieving secrets and auth tokens and whatnot… that comprise just one of the applications I work on. Maybe.

But that day sure as heck isn’t here yet. Things like Copilot are tools for developers right now, not tools to replace us. Believing they’re capable of replacing us now is as wrong-headed as believing “no-code” tools would replace us fifteen years ago.

I honestly believe there’s a measure of jealousy in declarations that the days of software development by humans are numbered. What we do seems like magic to some people, and I think there’s an urge to demystify us by declaring us obsolete. It happens every few years when there’s something new (something created by developers, ironically) that purportedly does everything we do. Invariably, it doesn’t. If it’s good, like Copilot, it ends up in the toolbox alongside everything else we use. If it’s bad, like “no-code,” it doesn’t.

But until something comes along that can comprehensively see the big picture of a complex application and implement it without human intervention every step of the way, I’m not going to start looking for a job in a different field.

kescusay , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago) to technology in From design to game without coding - "...and this is the part where I'm starting to look for a new job"

Sigh… No, it’s really not. It’s a neat toy, and cleverly designed, but it’s not actually going to replace any developers.

I don’t think people actually understand how many moving - and disconnected - parts there are in a real application. What that video shows is something that has some built-in generic 2D physics components mashed up with GPT for interpreting drawings combined with text descriptions and guessing what you want from them.

It’s neat. It’s a step up from those JavaScript ragdoll physics games from ten years ago, where you could draw shapes and have stuff bounce off them in interesting ways.

Now tell it to store game saves somewhere. Now tell it to include a login screen, with OAuth integration. Now tell it to synthesize new, unique music - making sure not to violate copyright, of course. Now tell it to render its assets in 2.5D. Now tell it to include score sharing.

See what I mean? We are years - if not decades - away from AI being able to actually fully generate a useful, usable application from scratch, based on nebulous, imprecise instructions and guesswork. There are many, many things it simply can’t do right now, because doing them requires knowledge, and generative AI doesn’t know anything.

kescusay , 9 months ago to news in 17 years later, DNA leads to second arrest in reported sexual assault of Utah teen

That’s horrifying.