ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
6hr ago
if America blew up a primary school in my country I'd start chanting Death to the Great Satan as well
They've been chanting that particular line for decades now though
ChickenOverlord
10hr ago
I'll try that later this week when I get a chance. Maybe next time I'm stuck in an awful meeting for two hours
I'm sure there are more, but these immediately come to mind. There are four of us trying to make these things work, and we all keep running into the same problems again and again. It's not just me - even people with dramatically different writing styles and thought processes are seeing the same thing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because a lot of people I know in real life are experiencing the same pain, but on the Internet it seems like I'm a huge outlier.
My most competent co-worker, a Russian guy who got his start writing assembly back in the 80's, was the most enthusiastic about/interested in AI person that I knew. He was always trying out the latest models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. He was also running his own local LLMs and diffusion models locally. He even dropped $4-5k on a DGX Spark late last year. And even he seems to be getting disillusioned/losing interest in AI, he doesn't seem to think it's going to be able to achieve anything remotely close to the promises and hype. Though I will note that the push from our upper management to use AI hasn't pleased him much either, especially since the project we've been working on for the past year (modernizing a giant mess created by our Indian coworkers. They weren't using package management at all, they were literally emailing around zip files full of DLLs for years, I got pulled into 4 hour long calls to fix dependency conflict issues in prod once every 2 or 3 months) was very much not aided by AI, but management insisted we find a way to use AI on the project regardless.
ChickenOverlord
13hr ago
this video is great and captures my frustration with a lot of the software developers who I have to work with
Sadly the parody developer in that video would be more competent than most of my Indian coworkers, so I wouldn't be surprised if AI could replace them. But instead it will be one of the slightly more competent Indians generating mountains of barely functional AI slop (instead of the small hills of slop my coworkers currently generate).
I feel Americans are far too quick to congratulate themselves on the topic of freedoms and rights.
Not at all. Our track record is far from perfect, but we still somehow manage to completely eclipse every other country on earth when it comes to speech rights, in spite of our failures and shortcomings. We can call our politicians idiots without getting arrested [1], and in the rare cases when cops have overreached for that sort of thing the courts have shut it down.
1: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-over-online-insult/a-70793557
Alright, AI bros, follow-up from last week. I was able to secure access to Claude Opus 4.6 at my job, and I gave it the same prompt that I had given to Sonnet. It overlooked the authentication part of the HTTP client library completely this time in what it generated. In a follow-up I asked it to extract out the common logic for the authentication portions specifically. It didn't do that, instead it generated a class with two helper methods.
The first helper method was just a thin wrapper around System.Text.Json for deserializing the response. There's an optional flag to pass in for when case insensitive deserialization is needed, and nothing else.
The second helper method was something for actually making the HTTP calls. The strangest part with this one is that it has two delegates as parameters, one for deserializing successful responses, the other for handling (but not deserializing) error responses. It didn't do anything to split out handling of the 2 different ways to authenticate at all.
The issues with what was generated (for both the API client as a whole, and for the authentication part of the code specifically) are numerous, here are a small handful that I identified:
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It assumes that an HTTP 200 code is the only successful response code, even though some endpoints return 202, 207, and more.
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It assumes that all endpoints return plaintext or JSON content, even though several return binary data, CSV data, etc.
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It didn't do null checking in several places. I assume it was mostly trained on C# code that either didn't do null checks correctly, and/or on code that doesn't use the nullable reference type feature that was added in C# 8 (back in 2019). Regardless, the null checks are missing/wrong regardless of whether nullable reference types are enabled or disabled. Also it always checks nulls with == or != null. This works 99% of the time, but best practice is to use "is null" and "is not null" for the rare cases where the equality operator is overloaded. Once again, I assume this is because most of the training data uses == and !=.
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It doesn't handle url query parameters (nor path parameters), it assumes everything is going to use a JSON body for the request.
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It uses the wrong logging templates for several of the logging calls. For example, the logs for an error response use the log template for logging the requests that are sent. Even more troubling is that it removed all the logic for stripping user secrets out of these logs.
There are quite a few more issues, but overall my experience with Opus was even worse than my experience with Sonnet, if anything. AI bros still in shambles. I definitely have zero fears that AI will replace me, though I'm still definitely fearful that retarded C-suite execs will think it can replace me.
My post from last week about using Claude Sonnet: https://www.themotte.org/post/3654/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/426666?context=8#context
Edit: Just saw a very relevant post over on Orange Reddit about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
Or it just outsources the pollution to China. Not saying to pollution from making solar panels is equivalent to the pollution from burning coal, but clean energy isn't quite as clean as many of its proponents like to portray it.
Was hard to find any hard numbers (most sources just talked about how much coal plants emitted, but not how much the tech to limit emissions costs per kwh). I did find this though: https://about.bnef.com/insights/industry-and-buildings/us-coal-plants-face-new-rule-capture-co2-or-shutter/
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
You also have to account for restrictions and regulations on coal and other sources. If coal and oil plants were allowed to burn as dirty as their 18th century equivalents, there would be no beating them on cost per kwh. Whether or not that would be a good thing is a separate question, but the comparison isn't a completely fair one because even without subsidies it's not a completely level playing field.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
If you have a target retirement (or investment or whatever) amount you need to solve some fairly simple algebra to figure out how much you need to invest per month etc. But I also think algebra is generally useful in a lot of different circumstances and knowing it makes a lot of financial planning easier.
ChickenOverlord
2d ago
Eh, I'd say at least a decent grasp of algebra helps quite a bit
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
We did it to both General Patton and Admiral Halsey during WW2, though in their cases it was more of a sidelining (to avoid a public scandal/embarrassment) as opposed to outright firing them.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
and, last but not least, are deprived of iced drinks and air conditioning
This one is actually true though:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/climate/europe-air-conditioning-heat-wave-intl-latam
Also getting iced drinks at restaurants in the Czech Republic was basically not a thing when I lived there in the late 00's.
ChickenOverlord
3d ago
Sweetheart, the fash won the drip game and the boys who are into ideological military uniforms want something edgier.
Real men prefer Rhodesian short shorts: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/3VO4IkoglIQ/oardefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEYCJUDENAFSFqQAgHyq4qpAwcIARUAAIhC&rs=AOn4CLBv2ZBVknXr8AjCuYTsGLFkGtROlQ
ChickenOverlord
4d ago
It is quite a postmodern self-parody, "there is nothing new only recycling of old" is quite self-aware.
Also worth pointing out that this isn't a new thing either, and goes back 3,000 years to the Book of Ecclesiates.
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
About 20 duplications
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
Gonna cost you a foreskin as down payment
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the latest model though
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
Sonnet has thinking
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
A team member did a full matrix test on models implementing solutions to multiple problems and then evaluated all implementations with said models. In the experiment, 5.4 was the undefeated and universal victor: 5.4 and 4.6 always preferred 5.4’s solutions.
Did he evaluate any of them himself?
I'm guessing it's a glitch, I was able to complete all 7 levels
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
I used the Cline plugin for JetBrains Rider, told it the path to the class, and asked it to extract out the duplicated logic throughout the class. So I could try again tomorrow with what you suggest (if that's even possible via the Cline plugin with Sonnet) and see if I get better results.
But my favorite part was when the AI assured me that its changes would so what I asked for without breaking existing fundtionality.
That said, the best and worst part if this is that it is pushing my incompetent Indian coworkers to use VS Code instead of VS because there is no Cline support in full fat VS and Cline is what the higher ups are mandating (I have a personal JetBrains subscription so that's what I'm using). .NET support in VS Code, especially for the many .NET 4.x projects we have kicking around (especially our WCF trash fires), is very lacking so I foresee my Indian coworkers' already pitiful productivity plummeting even further. I also forsee many requests for assistance coming to me and my Russian coworker (unsurprisingly he's the only other competent dev I work with regularly).
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
I work with a ton of Indians at my day job (about 80% in Mumbai, 20% in the US) and I make a point of looking people's surnames up since it's a decent (if imperfect) indicator of caste. The more competent of my coworkers (though this is an obscenely low bar, they're almost all awful) definitely tend to have last names correlating with higher castes.
ChickenOverlord
6d ago
Sonnet 4.6 is actually newer than the latest version of Opus, it came out a week or two later. So no, I didn't contradict myself. And Sonnet's training cutoff is about 6 months later than Opus's.
Microsoft already had Copilot start inserting ads into pull requests without consent a week or two ago, I think that counts as enshittification.
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