hey the clock in my car is right again

@foolishowl a mathematician friend once told me she originally got interested in math because in the authoritarian country she grew up in it was one of the ways she could actually safely and/or successfully tell men when they were wrong. Just thinking about that this morning for no reason. @jonny

When AO3 is down but you have to advertise your HDG fic somehow

Enjoy all the discounted candy today, perverts.

Before LLM coding agents, it was quite possible for companies in high-income countries to apply the same basic approach to programming: a high-wage software engineer or product manager could hand off issues to an outsourcing company that would randomly assign them to one of many software engineers in a low-wage country.

Nonetheless, even companies that wanted to reduce wages mostly decided they wanted long-term employees working on writing code, instead of a random person with no context working on each issue. So they opened offices in low-wage countries and hired employees there. And there were still plenty of software engineers in high-wage countries.

Why? Because a software project isn't just the source code, it also involves a huge amount of human knowledge and understanding, both explicit and implicit. Some of it is very hard to articulate, and in practice most people don't even try.

A lack of such understanding might be fine for simple projects, where the exposed UI matches the internals enough that product management is sufficient. But beyond a certain level of complexity you need someone to understand the why and how of software in ways that the source code by itself cannot express. Thus, software engineers who were employees.

But now we have LLMs, which can be used for vibecoding without reading the code... with the exact same problems as 100% outsourcing.

And so you get projects like ParticleDB. To quote @aphyr 's assessment:

"ParticleDB was a fractal of correctness errors. LLM tooling repeatedly claimed that bugs had been fixed when, in fact, they had not. ParticleDB also seemed more difficult to understand than typical databases. ... [software engineers working on ParticleDB] seemed unable to explain the causes or resolutions of nearly every issue we found in ParticleDB." (https://jepsen.io/analyses/particledb-1.1.4)

Or, as he put it in a less formal summary: "When does 4 = 5? Why would strings become 8-bit integers? And how could an SQL table have rows with different columns? We don't know, but it's fun to imagine!" (https://mastodon.jepsen.io/@jepsen/117535799639100730)

(This post inspired by a idea from Hunter Madison: if you can replace the word "LLM" with "consultant" and an article still makes sense, it's not an article about programming.)

🎶 that's me in the corner
that's me with the Blåhaj
talking with the other guest at the party who is also petting a Blåhaj and wearing stompy boots and a collar about the pink wigs we'd each used for the Hot Topic look, monitoring how spiro affects potassium levels and how the pickle thing is not a myth

OK, it kind of loses scansion there

Frens, I have several projects that have potential to generate revenue to try and make it until I find a job, but I could use some help deciding on a direction.

Please, only vote if this is something you would use and support for a subscription or per-use basis

(P.S. this is a real request to try and replace income)

#WritersCoffeeClub Oct 31: How did this month's writing go for you?

Not great. I came to what I think are good structural decisions, but I'm well behind where I wanted to be in terms of actual words written.

"Play dom-jot, human?!"

A tiny bit of new progress over the past couple days brings the BEYOND EARTHSET word count up to 63,132.

i really, really don't get it. the topic i'm researching here isn't *all* that obscure—it's like a semi-expert level topic, not that far from the kinds of questions i'd expect academics to research in their own fields—and not only is the LLM incapable of producing an accurate answer to the question, it generates one confident lie after another in what looks like an attempt to cover up its tracks. how can so many otherwise reasonable-seeming people use tools like this for research? it's baffling

hey I have an extremely important question

is the hellraiser series part of the Addams Family extended universe? think about it

it’s very rude of me to slap the “LLMs are good at finding and fixing vulnerabilities” tide pod out of your mouth, I agree

how is it that in the last god knows how many years google has deigned to add like 15 billion pieces of user hostile crap to HTML but there still isn't a way for me to control animated image playback

I'd like to share the opening act of BEYOND EARTHSET (the part in the mystery up to the discovery of the body), but putting anything creative online today is... Euuuughhhrrrrhhgfrrhhh. I suspect that any artist I could potentially collaborate with will be having similar feelings.

(The style that @davidrevoy reaches in panel 4 of https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1166/the-aesthetic-rebellion is one that I'd kinda-sorta had in mind for a possible cover-art direction. If I were doing it all myself, I might start with local photographs, trace in pencil and progressively screw them up by hand before crudely scanning via camera and then colorizing weirdly in Krita. It's calling for... evocatively janky?)

Finally got a new dialogue written! The clue that rules out one of the suspects is deployed.

Clear cookies
Go to EU for 3 weeks
Visit same sites
Get better cookie options b/c GDPR
Accept necessary only
Return to US with fewer bullshit cookies
Profit

i genuinely believe that brian heywood and anyone who worked to get I-638 on the ballot should have to register as a sex offender

Ping Floyd
#ITBands

Sometimes I see a cover and instantly know what #FakeBookTitleFriday should be. By the way, anyone seen Mitch lately?