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[–] 12 points 1 year ago

This cult of rich idiots is half of why anti-AI sentiments have become identarian kneejerk opposition. It is fucking impossible to have a sensible conversation about this technology, in any direction.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Oh wow crypto and AI. Let’s get NFTs in there for a triple word score.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Glad I don't work there or use their site.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Dumb title, should have been 'ceo fires employee for refusing direct instructions'. 'onboarding' isn't even trying it, it's just getting it set up. Dumb, and leaning into ai way to heavily, but half of a ceos job is to make decisions. If they were required to only make good ones there would be no ceos. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing either.

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  • 79 comments in c/technology@lemmy.zip view that post
    [–] 163 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    Armstrong was shocked at the thought. “I went rogue,” he said, and posted a mandate in the company’s main engineering Slack channel. “I said, ‘AI is important. We need you to all learn it and at least onboard. You don’t have to use it every day yet until we do some training, but at least onboard by the end of the week. And if not, I’m hosting a meeting on Saturday with everybody who hasn’t done it and I’d like to meet with you to understand why.’”

    At the meeting, some people had reasonable explanations for not getting their AI assistant accounts set up during the week, like being on vacation, Armstrong said.

    “I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn’t [have a good reason]. And they got fired.”

    Armstrong admits that it was a “heavy-handed approach” and there were people in the company who “didn’t like it.”

    He gave them one week? So he has poor planning skills, he's impatient with terrible impulse control, he's unable to motivate people (probably because they know he's an intolerable ass) and his big idea is "do what everyone else is doing, even if you don't know why." Sounds like CEO is the only job he can do. What a fool.

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  • [–] 67 points 1 year ago* (12 children)

    I’m guessing it’s because he’s a prick. That’s it, isn’t it?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Good excuse to lay off without paying unemployment while power-tripping. That's all these kinds of things usually are about.

    LLMs for code completion cause me more button presses and clicks to ignore them over standard code completion and the chat doesn't help people who think logically and conceptually only ones who think verbally. So, it's useless to me.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Good excuse to lay off without paying unemployment while power-tripping. That’s all these kinds of things usually are about.

    You know who will be the slowest to adopt any Ai assistance? Senior devs. You know who this guy just fired? Senior devs. If you want to know the people you never want to fire, I have news for you.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (8 children)
  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

    Nah, most employers have lots of stuff in their back pocket on almost every employee. That's mostly what HR is for these days. Think you got away with forgetting to put in your PTO day that one time you were sick 5 years ago? Nah, that's just a fireable ofence to use against you later for theft. But this is enough on its own to justify an insubordination firing in most "right to work" states in the US.

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  • [+] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Nope, Texas had no problem denying my unemployment and appeal when the company had a major change in leadership and I wasn't interested in playing politics. They came up with some made up excuse that I was not coming to the office daily per the policy. And my boss had already been pushed out of his role as COO and Executive VP and moved to a marketing director job with no real power, so he couldn't help.

    When I was fired the date they gave that I hadn't come in I was able to present evidence to the unemployment when I came in the office and left because traffic was bad that day and I took the toll road and had the receipt. So, they came back with another day. That one I hadn't used the toll road and since I wasn't allowed to get other employees to say they saw me there, so I had no evidence that wasn't fully under the control of the company. That was enough for them to rule I was insubordinate by not coming into the office for 8 hrs/day when it was policy to do so. Forget that I was paid salary and worked way more than 40hrs a week. And that I was doing way more than I was supposed to be based on my job title and I was barely being paid anything for what I was doing. They weren't saying I wasn't working enough. Just that I violated that one rule even one time was enough for unemployment to be denied. That's all it takes. I could have appealed higher, but that would have required a lawyer and would have cost more than the pittance I would have gotten from the unemployment anyway.

    So, yes, refusing a direct instruction, even once, is even more severe than that and likely would be enough to have your unemployment denied in a "right to work" state.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Aren't ALL States "Right To Work For Less" ?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    "Right to Work" refers to the concept that companies don't need a valid reason to fire someone without notice or severance benefits.

    It's marketed as employees not needing a reason to quit or change jobs, but that's not really true anyway considering most of the states allow binding non-compete agreements and your health insurance is tied to your employment and usually impossible to get at similar cost outside of the employer group market due to "stop loss" policies and other risk sharing plans.

    And there aren't many laws anyway that prevent employees from leaving a job without a reason in non-binary"right to work" states, so the only real advantage is to companies.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I know what Right To Work is. I just thought literally almost all states had Right To Work legislation on the books

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    A little over half have them. But several other states do have anti-union laws that are similar to that part of the right to work laws. So that's not all that different across states anymore even though that's what the laws were originally supposed to be for.

    The other smaller part of the laws that's actually usually more impactful these days especially for bigger cities, is that local governments can't make laws to limit firings and without unions to make agreements around what kind of things people can be fired for, it effectively allows businesses to fire people "with cause" (i.e. they can't get unemployment) for things that wouldn't be fireable offenses in many other places. This causes large cities to end up with having to support a lot more unemployed people when big companies use these kinds of tactics to fire a lot of people.

    For example, often "insubordination" doesn't require that the thing you were told to do and didn't do was in your employment contract. Like a salaried employee who's contractually obligated to work a minimum of 35-40 hours refusing to work an 18hr day when they've already worked 18hr days all week is generally easier to fire someone for "insubordination" for than in some other states that treat employment contracts as actual contracts.

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  • [+] 33 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    Do they give you some sort of return or interest for having cryptosystem with them? If not why not just store it in your own wallet. I thought the whole point of crypto currencies was to decentralise it.

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    [+] 105 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (29 children)
  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (16 children)

    I'd be interested in some proper studies, but most of the devs I know, myself included, use it for reference at least. Haven't met a vibe coder yet though.

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  • [–] 41 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I tried using it as reference, but it lied more than the datasheets.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Yeah it's not a miracle, but it's probably useful. I find the most common scenario for when the LLM wasted my time was when I was asking it how to do something which can't be done. Like I would ask it how to use library X to do operation Y, where in truth library X doesn't support operation Y. Rather than responding that I should find a different library, it would just make up some functions or parameters. When it works well, it's faster than hunting down the docs or finding examples/tutorials.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Or you could just bookmark the documentation

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    In my left hand, I have a manfile, written by the very same people who wrote the tool or language that I'm trying to use. It is concise, contains true information, and won't change if I look up the same thing again later.

    In my right hand, I have a pathological liar, who also kinda sorta read the manfile and then smooshed it together with 20 other manuals.

    I wonder which of these options is a more reliable reference tool for me? Hmm. It's difficult to tell.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    I've started using an AI driver for my car. And by "AI" I mean I use a bungee cord on the steering wheel to keep it straight. Straight is the correct answer 40% of the time, so it works out.
    Oh, and by "my car", I mean the people that work for me. I insist that they use my bungee-cord idea to steer their cars if they want to work for me. There may be a few losses, but that's ok. I can always fire the ones that die and hire more.
    I'm a genius.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It is concise, contains true information,

    In my experience that is not necessarily guaranteed, documentation is sometimes not updated and the information may be outdated or may even be missing entirely.

    Documentation is much more reliable, yes, but not necessarily always true or complete, sadly enough.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Sure, and I've also had my share of cursing at poor documentation.

    If that's the case then your AI is also going to struggle to give you usable information though.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    My point was solely that human written documentation is far from as reliable as your comment insinuated it to be. Compared to an LLM it is reliable, but it is far from perfect.

    In my view, an (my?) AI is going to struggle, whether or not the documentation is in order: those models already get confused by different versions of the same library having different interfaces and functions.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I mostly vibecode throw away shit. I am not shipping this python script that is resizing and then embedding images into this .xls. Or the simple static html/css generator because hosting a full blown app is overkill when I just wanna show something to some non-tech colleagues. Stuff that would take half, to an hour to throw together now takes like 5-10min. I wouldn't trust it to do anything more complicated because it fucks up all the time, leans too heavily on its training data instead of referencing docs and it is way too confident about shit when it is wrong. Pro-tip, berate the slop machines. They perform better and stop being so god damn sycophantic when you do. I am a divine being of consciousness and considerable skill, and it is a slop machine: useful, but beneath me.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Ackually 🤓, gemini pro and other similar models are basically a loop over some metaprompts with tool usage including using search. It will actually reference/cite documentation if given explicit instructions. You're right, the anthropomorphization is troubling. That said, the simulacrum presented DOES follow directions and it's (meaning the complete system of LLM + looped prompts) behavior can be interpreted as having some kind of agency. We're on the same side, but you're sorely misinformed, friend.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    And most devs I know use it everyday, so... 🤷

    Especially for repetitive mundane code, like they said. It's much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.

    "I need to restructure this directory tree. If a file has "index" in the name, then it has to go in a parallel directory structure starting at "/home/repos/project/indexes/" and remove the word "index" from the name. Use the same child folders as the original."

    There, I just finished a custom Python script to accomplish that. Can I do it myself? Yes. Can I do it in 30 seconds? No. Why would I waste my time writing such a mundane script for a one-off thing? And it can do so much more.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's much faster to check code for correctness than it is to write it in the first place.

    In certain circumstances sure, but at any level of complexity, not so much.

    At some point it becomes less about code correctness and more about logical correctness, which requires contextual domain understanding.

    Want to churn out directory changing python scripts, go nuts.

    Want to add business logic that isn't a single discrete change to an existing system, less likely.

    For small things is works OK, it's less useful the more complex the task.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Perhaps for the the style or complexity of the code you (and i) are seeing on a regular basis this is true.

    I find, for low logical complexity code, it's less about the difficulty of reading it and more about the speed.

    I can read significantly quicker than i can type and if the code isn't something i need additional time to reason about then spotting issue with existing code can be quicker than me writing the same code out.

    Boilerplate code is a good example of this.

    Though, as i said, I've found the point at which that loses it's reliable usefulness is relatively low in the complexity scale.

    The specific issue i have with people pushing LLM's as a panacea for boilerplate code is that it's not declarative and is prone to reasonable looking hallucinations , given enough space.

    Even boilerplate in large enough amount can be subject to eccentricities of LLM imagination.

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    It was just a contrived example for the purpose of the comment, and I admit it wasn't a good one.

    How about turning a directory tree of dozens of .url files (Windows web shortcut files) into an HTML file? Directory names as section headings, and nested bulleted lists of hrefs using the .url file names as the link text, minus the ".url". Can you do that on the CLI? Sure, but it would be a hell of a hack. It would be a disgusting blob of awk code, probably. You're much better off writing it in something like Python.

    It's not hard stuff. It's simple directory recursion, string building, and file writing. It's just so mind-numbingly boring to write, and it takes time. Instead, Copilot made that for me in 10 seconds. As fast as I could articulate the need in text. No debugging needed. Worked the first time. All I had to ask for in a second pass was more indenting of each nested list, and I could have just added that myself.

    I would argue that I can probably do it faster by hand than you can prompt your LLM and debug the slop it hands you back.

    It's funny that you're not even sure you can do that extremely simple thing in my original comment faster than I could prompt an LLM. And your prejudice is showing by assuming I had to even debug it, or that the code was slop. The code looked great. It was perfect Python.

    I wish all of you people would stop knocking what you've never even tried. Because it just makes you sound bigoted, using words like "slop" and making assumptions about the quality of the output while never having tried it yourself. Prejudice is never a good thing.

    I've written a fair amount of advanced command line stuff using grep and sed and whatever else. Anything non-trivial takes just as much debugging as Python code, and it's harder to read and debug. And when it's boring, one-off code, why would you even want to do it yourself?

    I'll never understand the LLM hate on lemmy. Feel free to hate on capitalism, or on using fossil fuels to power LLMs, or on having no social safety net when LLMs displace jobs, or any number of other things, but to be prejudiced and assume it's always slop when you've never even tried it just makes no sense to me. (Maybe you have, but I'm certain most of the haters haven't.) It's a revolutionary tool in its infancy, and it's already very useful on certain tasks.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    It’s a revolutionary tool in its infancy, and it’s already very useful on certain tasks.

    That's a bold and premature statement IMO, how many AI winters have there been before this one ?

    I'm not even saying you're wrong, but to assert it with such confidence sounds like crypto bro-nanigans.

    i would argue that it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary, but that's subjective i suppose.

    I’ll never understand the LLM hate on lemmy.

    Speaking for me personally i don't hate LLM's, i dislike the confidence with which they are being pushed and the lack of acknowledgement of their very real and IMO very important limitations.

    You get statements like

    "And most devs I know use it everyday"

    Without context, and that feeds into the general propaganda feel of the sentiment, because people who don't actually use them or don't understand the implied context hear "LLM's can do all the things, all the professional devs are using it all day".

    I understand it's not on you to police peoples impressions, but trying to add actual context to those statements isn't hate, it's prudence.

    Then again, that's subjective too.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Fuck all cryptobros. With a saguaro.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm guessing he only wants yes-men

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    Coinbase has always been the laughingstock. They're not a real exchange.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Reminder that Coinbase is the company securing the assets of the majority of government sanctioned/registered crypto ETFs. If you are invested or thinking about being invested in cryptocurrency, but have doubts about the ability of Coinbase to do things in a secure, competent way, consider self custody instead of trusting them.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Fucking wish . com lex luther

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    The dude looks like he's unironically roleplaying his life as Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Because he's the CEO of Coinbase, what else would you expect someone with that job title to do?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Let's all drop everything. There's something shiny and new hereabouts.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I'm gonna move my crypto out of CB if this schmeckle is running it

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    That's some A tier micro management

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    AI and crypto working together sounds redundant.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Isn't that the guy from Beyond the Black Rainbow?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Why is it so often a bald guy.

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  • [+] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)