Music: Joyful song on skates

Bend Your Knees (for NPR's Tiny Desk contest) live at Southgate Roller Rink - Henry Mansfield

Somehow it's the drummer who impressed me the most. Which instrument do you think would be the hardest to play on skates?

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Links: Software Engineering in the face of AI

Your phone edits all your photos with AI - is it changing your view of reality? by Thomas Germain. "From simple enhancements to hallucinated facial features, modern phones choose how our memories will look."

No. You can't tell it was written by AI by Segun Famisa.

In this essay, I will argue that, your favourite “tells” that a document was produced by AI, at best, is wrong, and depending on your position, in life, at worst, is dangerous and harmful.[...]
So who trained [AI]? A lot of the early training, data annotations and other manual processes, happened with cheap labour in African countries. There are multiple sources that have revealed the hidden economy of workers that big-tech outsources these kinds of tasks to African countries with unstable political situations, weaker workers rights, and cheap labour.

Curious about how LLM's actually work? So What's The Next Word Then? by Matthias Kainer does a good job of explaining it, with diagrams. Via Martin Fowler's blog.

Relatedly, why AI isn't actually helping software companies. Dax Raad just dropped the most honest take on AI productivity written up by JP Caparas.

everyone's talking about their teams like they were at the peak of efficiency and bottlenecked by ability to produce code
here's what things actually look like:
- your org rarely has good ideas. ideas being expensive to implement was actually helping
- majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life
- they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend
- the 2 people on your team that actually tried are now flattened by the slop code everyone is producing, they will quit soon
- even when you produce work faster you're still bottlenecked by bureaucracy and the dozen other realities of shipping something real
- your CFO is like what do you mean each engineer now costs $2000 extra per month in LLM bills"

The only developer productivity metrics that matter by John SJ Anderson.

1. How often does the team routinely ship new versions of the software they build?
2. How often do things break when the team ships a new version?

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots by Lionel Dricot.

A programmer's loss of identity by Dave Gauer.

The social group I still identify with shares my values. We value learning. We value the merits of language design, type systems, software maintenance, levels of abstraction, and yeah, if I’m honest, minute syntactical differences, the color of the bike shed, and the best way to get that perfectly smooth shave on a yak. I’m not sure what we’re called now, "heirloom programmers"?

"Acoustic" programmers (like guitars)? "Thought-powered" programmers (like gas-powered cars)? I'm not ready to be an heirloom yet!

AI Data Centers: Power-Hungry, Water-Thirsty, and Rare-Earth Reliant by Daniel.