60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler
Now I wonder, is this a) the most extreme case of "young developer hybris" ever seen, or b) they don't actually plan to implement the existing functionality anyway because they want to drastically cut who gets money, or c) lol whatever, Elon said so.
But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this: [...]
Labrador retrievers ;_; You're getting too good at this...
Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).
On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for "this was published before the slop flood gates opened"? There should be.
(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)
A day later and I'm still in disbelief about that windsurf prompt. To make a point about AI, I think in the future you could just show them that prompt (maybe have it ready on a laminated card) and ask for a general comment.
Although... depending on how true the true belief is, it might not have the intended effect.
Trying to imagine the person writing that prompt. There must have been a moment where they looked away from the screen, stared into the distance, and asked themselves "the fuck am I doing here?"... right?
And I thought Apple's prompt with "do no hallucinate" was peak ridiculous... but now this, beating it by a wide margin. How can anyone claim that this is even a remotely serious technology. How deeply in tunnel vision mode must they be to continue down this path. I just cannot comprehend.
Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust -- and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that it's too similar to C++, and I wanted away from that... That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.
Reuters: Quantum computing, AI stocks rise as Nvidia kicks off annual conference.
Some nice quotes in there.
Investors will focus on CEO Jensen Huang's keynote on Tuesday to assess the latest developments in the AI and chip sectors,
Yes, that is sensible, Huang is very impartial on this topic.
"They call this the 'Woodstock' of AI,"
Meaning, they're all on drugs?
"To get the AI space excited again, they have to go a little off script from what we're expecting,"
Oh! Interesting how this implies the space is not "excited" anymore... I thought it's all constant breakthroughs at exponentially increasing rates! Oh, it isn't? Too bad, but I'm sure nVidia will just pull an endless amounts of bunnies out of a hat!
That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)... ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I've had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).
Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.
But "AI"... it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn't. There's nothing to learn from resulting failure, except "don't use AI".
In this case, given shopify's general behaviour, I won't be sad at all though if they crash and fail.