It's not so much an LLM thing as it is a data/curation thing. Idk the specifics, but I do remember back when I used it, chatgpt occasionally presented me with multiple responses, and asked me to pick the one that I liked best. It's like how Facebook/tiktok/whatever curate your feed by examining how much time you spend eg looking at one post vs another. There's nothing inherent about LLMs that cause them to prioritize emdashes, thats all the result of extra massaging the operator has applied to the model.

This is also why I feel it's important to not focus on perceived "LLMisms" as a way to detect slop. It's extremely trivial to hide that, and the ones that don't are low hanging fruit.

There are already plenty of package manager options in the C++ world. Having an "official" one arguably only helps improve the onboarding experience, but overall it's a chokepoint for the entire ecosystem. There are rarely "one size fits all" solutions to a problem, and there certainly isn't one for a problem as complex as software builds and packaging.

Let's not forget about the other classics, like "checking how X (statement) 'landed'" or whether "Y 'hit' (the way it was expected to)". I swear I've never read or heard either of those turn of phrase in any other context, so I have no idea where the LLMs picked them up. Somebody must have fed them executive briefs or something.

Then there the tiresome constant use of similes. Something can't just be. It has to be like something. "The similes were scattered throughout the LLM generated text, like pebbles on a beach."

Inserting linebreaks to make every sentence it's own paragraph.

Avoiding the use of commas and the word "and" like they were the plague. Even if that means making unnecessary new sentences.

Yes, CMake is crazy. And ugly. And inconvenient

How many years has it been since you last used CMake?

CMake suffers from some of the same perception issues as C++. A lot of the criticism usually boils down to the designers prioritizing backwards compatibility, a thing even critics would agree is a good thing. As an example, the OP shows a CMake and Meson snippet. The CMake one is 3 lines, the Meson one is 2. The extra line in the CMake sample is a version declaration for backwards compatibility, but the rest are identical.

If you look past your preconceived notions, you'll find that CMake is a good build system and very easy to use. It's also one of the few that fully supports C++20 modules today.

It's by no means a silver bullet, and the generator-based design isn't always the best choice, but its undoubtedly the best choice for the vast majority of C or C++ projects.

Make is fine unless you want to build on Windows. Then you kind of need something else. It is the very slow process creation infrastructure that kills Make as a tool on Windows.

For C/C++ make is a right tool for her job, but cmake is an improvement.

I’m personally all in on nix these days for dev work

As in the radicle that had an egregious issue that broke private repositories “oops!” because network traffic was unencrypted, and is backed by an extremely tiny team? I’m not really sure how radicle is better. I am unenthused by all current federated git attempts at the moment.

I don't care who the CIA sends, I'm not using CMake 🙏

the defects in software like Firefox are finite

That's a optimistic take. I don't think that a software as large as Firefox/Chromium can ever be 100% secure. Especially not with the fundamental design errors ( js-sandboxing) of the modern web.

In other words: at any given time, only one of [sandbox or renderer patches] needed to compromise the browser would be available in the patch gap

That's clever.

That entire world needs a cargo equivalent.

The one time I needed to compile a rust app, I followed the instructions on their github and it used cargo and it didn't work. Don't remember the issue now, but it instantly gave me the same yuck I get when forced to use pip or npm and it breaks in the same fucking way.

Had better luck compiling maven/gradle apps oh and yes, makefiles worked reliably for me so far.

But this is just a personal anecdote and I rarely have to compile anything myself.

We’ve been doing fine for decades, thanks though!

We don't have anything better, alas. All those build systems are crazy. Yes, CMake is crazy. And ugly. And inconvenient.

Lol it turns out that because AI is only good at regurgitating stuff that you put in all scrambled up, it's also an incredible legally-distinct copying machine.

So stay awhile, and they'll listen. They'll dream about your ideas, and then make something from them tomorrow and claim them as theirs. And if you're lucky, your job to do stuff will eventually be industrially cookie cuttered out of existence. Let's see how many lives jobs we can eliminate make easier! You won't even need to work (at anywhere that pays well or is creative) since we target the industries that are interesting and important to you, first! After we own revolutionize all of the means of production in those, you can and everything will be better!

Yes, I read it as the first too. They don't go into cross-boundaries at all.

There should be a tool recommender, which tells you the tool you'd want to use, depending on your preferences and use case.

"I built"

There's levels to prompting cluely. notcluely.in has a built in prompt engineering tool to save people's time. It also has a discount on cluely pro+ subscription.

Sadly, it always completely messes up flowcharts for me that are more than 2 next to eachother. It starts placing blocks in "random" places like putting a 3rd level if the flow chart by the first level and having crazy arrows going around.

I prefer excalidraw or the diagrams.net plugin because of this.

You should have committed with an actual emdash: —

Wow. That's incredible and a bit scary.

Now, internal legal scholars are pointing out the exact mechanical pitfalls from within the system’s own academic backyard.

Yeah no fucking way a human wrote that lmao

I have convinced teams to switch to just after rewriting their makefiles in a fraction of the time and size. There have been some make die hards but they gave in to the team once they saw the justfiles.

Luckily we didn't have to write C or C++. I think the reason why that has so many build systems is because of the lack of a package manager. That entire world needs a cargo equivalent.

LLMs right now massively overuse "it doesn't just X, it Y". Just like how they overuse "you are right to push back".

So I guess the excerpt raises suspicions even though it could just be the author writing that.

This is merely one instance/example of a deeper principle: avoid mixing layers of abstraction