unfortunately AI tools do exist in the company and there are some expectations of use on some teams but it varies depending where in the product you work. anything OS, kernel, bootloaders, filesystem, etc is a strict no AI policy. All the front end teams seem to use something sparingly, couldnt tell you what it is or why.

without revealing too much personal info, companies like mine aren't too hard to find but they tend to be somewhat old school. Lots of C programming, some assembly, and digging into the guts of stuff. Anyone doing firmware, infrastructure (like all the big storage guys), or even some of the trading world is highly sensitive to genAI tools because of the risk. Especially if you ship a box rather than some fully cloud connected always updating app. The companies may even say they do something with or about AI then you talk to the loader or kernel team and they will say "absolutely not". I cannot tell you over the years across a few jobs how often I hear management lamenting how we can never fill recs because we need actual C people or someone not afraid of a terminal debugger. And two of these shops are hugely popular in the tech world. Hope these hints help

sorry to thread hijack but I have been trying to hire software devs and during interview process we reveal our zero-AI policy for the product codebase (corporate allows it for "debug tooling" in limited amounts). weirdly many candidates are disappointed to hear this and unwilling to proceed.

in a way we find it refreshing because we want to hire folks that know and learn things. but it is wild how many have expectations to set up an ide day one and it start churning out patches

cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.

Gentoo is firmly against AI contributions as well. NetBSD calls AI code “tainted”, while FreeBSD hasn’t been as direct yet but isn’t accepting anything major.

QEMU, while not an OS, has rejected AI slop too. Curl also famously is against AI gen. So we have some hope in the systems world with these few major pieces of software.

The ffmpeg social media maintainer is an Elon fan so when he purchased Twitter and made foolish remarks about rewriting it all in C and how only hardcore programmers are cool that write C/assembly they quickly jumped on it.

https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/1598655873097912320

Ya maybe it’s a way to attract more contributors or donation money. Felt a bit weird after Elon was shitting on all the people who built Twitter and firing them.

I’ve been wanting to go back to some sort of DAP full time but I’m not a huge fan of Android being the experience. Anyone got recommendations of a non-Android based DAP so I can cut the streaming services out for good?

I miss my Creative Zen back in 2008.

I’m convinced the proliferation of AI art comes from a generation of digital inhalants.

Is “triangle man” a slur I’m unaware of or a goofy name to be calling someone for whatever reason?

I love how it’s a public ledger of transactions so once a wallet can be identified to an owner, everyone can see what you’ve done. Not very great system to keep anonymous.

Ultra trivialization is the blood of tech bros. Everything is so easy and everyone else is just so clueless. Boy met computer through hello world and thought that’s the pinnacle of computer science.

How long til some bright eyed influencer dev tries to take on JPL and MISRA? It’s always some middleware garbage these startups make and never a QNX competitor.

I bump into a lot of peers/colleagues who are always “ya but what is intelligence” or simply cannot say no to AI. For a while I’ve tried to use the example that if these “AI coding” things are tools, why would I use a tool that’s never perfect? For example I wouldn’t reach for a 10mm wrench that wasn’t 10mm and always rounds off my bolt heads. Of course they have “it could still be useful” responses.

I’m now realizing most programmers haven’t done a manual labor task that’s important. Or lab science outside of maybe high school biology. And the complete lack of ability to put oneself in the shoes of another makes my rebuttals fall flat. To them everything is a nail and anything could be a hammer if it gets them paid to say so. Moving fast and breaking things works everywhere always.

For something not just venting I tasked a coworker with some runtime memory relocation and Gemini had this to say about ASLR: Age, Sex, Location Randomization

A friend at a former workplace was in a discussion with that company leadership earlier this week to understand how and what metrics are to be used for promotion candidates since the office is directed to use “AI” tools for coding. Simply put: lots of entry and lower level engineers submit PRs that are co-authored by Claude so it is difficult to measure their actual software development skills to determine if they should get promoted.

That leadership had no real answers just lots of abstract garbage (vibes essentially) and followed up with telling all the entry levels to reduce the code they write and use the purchased agentic tool.

Along with this a buddy at a very famous prop shop says the firm decided to freeze all junior hiring and is leaning into only hiring senior+ and replacing juniors with AI. He asked what will happen when the current seniors leave/retire and got hit with shock that would even be considered.