Yoric

I actually am spending some of my money in an attempt to contribute to decrease some of these things, and investing bit parts of my retirement plans in others.

So, not entirely nothing.

But last time I checked (which was admittedly a while ago), JavaScriptCore didn't have one, no?

Yeah, I suspect the 2-3x amount of code, but I can't prove it yet. This will wait for the next report :)

I understand that some developers produce very poor code. Maybe in some companies it's the norm. Luckily for me, I've seldom worked alongside such developers.

In my company, the code Opus 4.8 is able to generate appears competent, but if you dig a bit, it contains way more timebombs than anything I've seen the team members develop.

I just wrote an internal report in my company.

My conclusion from the project I'm working on is that, as of this day, there is no way to have both this so-called 20x performance improvement _and_ any kind of quality. Or security if whoever is running the agent has any token in an .env anywhere on the same file system.

We'll see in which direction the CTO takes this. My bet is not on quality.

Eh, Firefox/Thunderbird had multi-threaded JS in SpiderMonkey in the late 90s.

Then it was removed it because it made garbage-collection a real mess (the JavaScript gc needs to walk through lots of C++ data, some of it may have specific requirements for destruction/finalization).

I hope it's better this time :)

Engineers over-engineer simple problems because their performance reviews reward technical complexity, not business impact.

Having tech led teams at both high-profile and low-profile tech companies, that is _not_ my experience.

Most engineers worth their salt value quality. Product Management generally doesn't see quality as a feature, therefore doesn't take it into account. For short-lived code, quality is indeed over-rated. For long-lived code, quality is the thing that determines whether you can keep improving or tuning other features or whether you'll miss deadlines. Sadly, retrofitting quality in an existing codebase is awfully expensive.

There's also one important, but often undervalued, aspect. Overwhelmingly, today's tech world has been built by neurodivergent engineers. In my experience, neurodivergent engineers tend to value getting to the end of things, rather than letting them drop mid-way. This can absolutely be seen as over-engineering, but it's often a cognitive scaffolding that will ensure that the work can be resumed (by them or anyone else) even after context-switching to something entirely different.

Whether it actually _is_ over-engineering often depends on how well the engineer is aware of the actual needs, rather than being spoon-fed instructions without visibility. Or on the maturity and skill of the engineer, depending on the case.

Directly at DeepSeek? It was my understanding (but I didn't check) that some other AI operators were providing (some of?) DeepSeek's model for cheaper prices.

Still, that's interesting. What do you get for that price? Only coding, or also e.g. image generation?

https://www.canirun.ai/?status=tight might answer that question

I'm assuming that you need to feed the human being (i.e. you) regardless of whether you use that human being for writing code or not. So, by this metric, there is simply no breaking even point. The cost of human + AI is always going to be higher than the cost of human.

The agent can disable the lints inline, so that's not sufficient.

Also, I haven't found a cross-platform + cross-agent mechanism to set permissions. Much less one that works.

Right now, I'm working on a hook that checks for changes in source files, but the plug-in system (at least of opencode) seems quite buggy.

Anecdotally, a few weeks into a Rust agent-first project, we're still trying to get the agent to maintain a minimum of coding discipline (e.g. don't use sync Mutex in tokio code). So far, the agent seems more interested in deactivating the linters than in complying.

Security? At this stage, I'm a bit afraid that it's a joke more than anything else.

Why on earth would AI labs be bragging about how little the product they sell actually costs them to make? You don't want to do anything that reduces it's perceived value to the user, that might make them less willing to pay for it.

Wouldn't they be bragging about it to investors? It feels like something that would matter a lot to them, and at least OpenAI kinda feels desperate to find them.

There's also the small question about whether a drop in inference cost would actually change anything about profitability, when training seems to get exponentially more expensive.

What do you mean about syntax mistakes and memory problems?

Something like incorrect SELinux configurations?

It seems that this era is a marketing experiment for Mythos.

We're running forward without any idea of how we can get agents to write code that is even remotely safe or secure. It _will_ blow up with increasingly large blast radiuses.

Go is pretty good at performance, but pretty bad at expressing domain-specific logics. Python is the opposite, but once you have isolated the parts that need to be optimized, it's quite easy to rewrite them in a native language (in particular, the Rust-Python bindings are really good, although in this project, it's C++).

Wasn't pepper the P in PNaCl?

When I was a manager in a start-up, ages ago, I argued the CEO against handing a (small) one-off bonus to one of my team members, and rather went shopping for a nice gift with the same sum. One of them was purely a transaction, the other one was a gift.

I believe that I was right.

WinRT is the Windows team final response to Longhorn, but lets do it with COM and C++, which started in Vista.

Not sure what you mean, I was using COM and C++ for Windows development in the late 90s.

So there is no elision, it is AddRef/Release all over the place.

...and constructing an object is an insanely complex (and expensive) operation.

Unless I'm missing something, this sounds awful.

It's quite possible this is because they weren't making enough noise about their AI strategy.

That's how I interpret the move, too.

When I worked at Mozilla, _everything_ was called a bug, whether it was a software issue, a problem in the office or some paperwork missing.

Much as GitHub calls everything an "issue" and GitLab a "work item".

At the very least, Cloudflare hosts web workers, which let a customer execute more-or-less arbitrary wasm code on their servers. If there's an exploit that lets you escape the wasm sandbox, copy.fail can be chained into (afaiu) an exploit against the Linux host. That's a pretty big risk.

Also, Cloudflare hosts some AI services, so it's possible that some consumers are running Python code in their containers, without the wasm sandbox.

I remember the words "peeking" and "poking", but this may have been specific to basic.

Do they finally meet a human being with an explanation on the position on the 18th round?

Well, that and the rush to upgrade for copy.fail.

Has Ubuntu published patches yet?

> In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

??

During the last 30+ years, the trend has always been to increase hardware use to save on development/thinking time. AI is the latest and most extreme version of it.

Argentina is hardly a free market country - https://borgenproject.org/hunger-in-argentina/

Are you by any chance moving the goalposts?

Yup.

I think we have all heard of (or are living through) mandates to prove that AI makes us more productive, or else...

We'll see how many of these actually works out.

Outsourcing happens when it is cheaper to build something somewhere else. Tariffs can compensate for that.

Is that free market?

Where are the starving people in capitalist countries?

The first example from the top of my head is Argentina.

A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing?

This very much depends on the industry. In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

The people who "rough it" in the wilderness still seem to be backpacking in hi tech equipment. I read about the kit that Lewis & Clark carried. No thanks. (Even on that "Alone" show, they bring hi tech equipment.)

No idea what you're talking about.

I would argue that profit maximization has had very many effects.

On the one side, it has succeeded at reducing costs, which has indeed given rich societies unprecedented access to consumer goods.

On the other, it has outsourced from us both jobs and knowledge, which has resulted in higher unemployment and dissatisfaction, with as consequences the political dominoes we see falling internationally. That and the shoddy US health system (which the rest of the world seems to have decided to follow, for some reason).

And there is the small fact that we're in the process of optimizing the planet to death, and that not-so-rich countries (as well as formerly-rich ones) have starved to death for this high standard of living.

So, let's appreciate our standard of living, but not assume that it's necessarily a good thing in the grand scheme of things.