There's nothing to recover from, what are you even talking about? I'm not a token user (and I can't make predictions about the future and whether it will force me to use token but still). That the industry is collectively having a delusion about what constitutes good software (in all senses of the word - functionality and consequences for society) is clear to see, something I too fear we might never recover from, but I stand quite clearly on the side of people not of corporations hoping to extract more more more.
Thanks. You made me smile... Yeah I think this really depends on the companies management decisions. Currently I observe some sort of gold rush, buying AI and expecting more and more. I think that in two years it will be sorted out, people will realise how much did we really benefit from using AI, and what died in that time
The rule of metaprogramming is that it ends up just as convoluted and full of edge cases as regular code, just without a nice way to debug. The rule is also that it always seems like a fantastic idea at first and will solve so many isues.
I've been programming since 1994. I've seen a lot. I almost always end up despising any metaprogramming system and wish we'd just kept things simpler even if it meant boilerplate.
Honestly, this. The mainstream coding culture has spent decades dealing with shoehorning stateful OOP into distributed and multithreaded contexts. And now we have huge piles of code, getters and setters and callbacks and hooks and annotation processers and factories and dependency injection all pasted on top of the hottest coding paradigm of the 90's. It's too much to manage, and now we feel like we need AI to understand it all for us.
Meanwhile, nobody is claiming vast productivity gains using AI for Haskell or Lisp or Elixir.
I mean, I find that LLMs are quite good with Lisp (Clojure) and I really like the abstraction levels that it provides. Pure functions and immutable data mean great boundary points and strong guarantees to reason about my programs, even if a large chunk of the boring parts are auto-coded.
I think there's lots of people like me, it's just that doing real dev work is orthogonal (possibly even opposed) to participating in the AI hype cycle.
What hype? I have and will continue to be anti-BigAI from the very beginning. Until the mechanism is no longer that of a probabilistic model, the data gathering that of massive copyright infringment and the runtime that of a "let us burn more fossil fuels to power as many transistors as we can" I will continue to avoid it without any regrets about missed "productivity" or whatever.
That's not a technical problem though is it? I don't see legal scenarios where unverified machine translation is acceptable - you need to get a certified translator to sign off on any translations and I also don't see how changing that would be a good thing.
I was briefly considering trying to become a professional translator, and I partly didn't pursue it because of the huge use of MT. I predict demand for human translators will continue to fall quickly unless there are some very high-profile incidents related to MT errors (and humans' liability for relying on them?). Correspondingly the supply of human translators may also fall as it appears like a less credible career option.
I think the point here is that, while such a translation wouldn't be admissible in court, many of us already used machine translation to read some legal agreement in a language we don't know.
Again, citing the UK here, if you go to your doctor and get a prescription, all you need to pick it up is your name + address (said verbally over the counter) - no ID needed. I do not have statistics for the false pickup rates but I very much doubt it is anything to worry about.
In the US lots of prescriptions work the same. But some prescriptions and some over the counter (OTC) medicine requires presenting a legal ID to purchase because of a variety of laws.
Blood pressure prescriptions, no ID lots of times. OTC meds which are ingredients to make meth, need an ID.
> all you need to pick it up is your name + address (said verbally over the counter) - no ID needed.
Does it include controlled substances? Sure, I can pick up ibuprofen 800mg with just my name and DOB said verbally, but whatever is on schedule II (US term, but think Adderall) I required to show my ID.
When buying alcohol in a physical store, in the UK we have the "Challenge 21/25" schemes https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/facts/information-about-alcohol... such that yes if you look very young the cashier/automated checkout assistant will ask for your ID but in most cases, they will approve without checking anything. I do not see any positives to requiring identification for all transactions.
> I do not see any positives to requiring identification for all transactions.
It is not about requiring ID for all transactions, it is about when ID is actually asked for (which may not be every time), the information can be provided in a more privacy-friendly way.
What prohibits Google from offering a way to register your long-term app signing key without identity verification, publishing apps that are still verified by their automated tooling and then opting in to the usual denylisting/app store banning methods if those apps are malicious? This identity verification requirement is basically just an easy way for illiberal governments to find ways to crack down on apps they do not like (such as say, ICEBlock or whatever)
Banning all apps signed by the same key is already possible. Requiring signing keys to be anonymously registered with Google would add some friction to simply rotating your signing keys when you get caught doing something naughty (depending on how much Google account creation and key registration can be automated against Google’s anti-bot protection, though), but definitely not as much as full identity verification and payment of 25 USD (even if that isn't foolproof, either, and has the annoying side effect of unfortunately slowing down small-scale freeware developers at the same time, too).
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