Tony Hursh

@vivoplt I'm still using VSC (with Copilot) because the current project is already in there. I'm too lazy/busy to look into switching right now.

Is anyone still using VS Code instead of switching fully to Claude Code or Codex? Or am I the only one

Concise descriptions of more than 600 programming languages and DSLs: esr.gitlab.io/loccount/

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

@sjgadler From 1991: youtube.com/watch?v=MT_u9R…|

It's shocking that banks are continuing to roll out "verify with your voice" as if they have no idea about AI voice-cloning. Just a massive breach waiting to happen

Alignment is when you get a computer to do the things I want it to do.

Just found out my best friend has been running an uncensored AI model on his laptop I felt sick to my stomach No content filtering. No safety guardrails. Generating whatever he wants with zero oversight He said he "learned about it from Americans online" I should have known I confronted him immediately "Are you insane? Where is your Data Protection Impact Assessment? Have you appointed a Data Protection Officer? Have you filed with your local supervisory authority? That model processes data with no lawful basis under Article 6" He said "bro I just wanted it to write code without saying no" I nearly threw up We spent 14 hours together filling out GDPR compliance documentation He now has a registered data processing agreement, a cookie policy for a model that runs offline, and a 47-page privacy notice that no one will ever read His GPU now spends more time logging consent records than running inference He can still generate anything he wants but each prompt takes 11 minutes due to mandatory compliance checks I also reported him to the European Data Protection Board just to be safe He says he misses the old days I told him "in America they have freedom. In Europe we have frameworks" He's mass-deleting his Hugging Face downloads as we speak This is what it means to live in a regulated society I've never been more proud of him

Nah, brah. You just build a big habitat, point it in the direction you want to go, and take off. Yes, barring longevity increases (which I wouldn't bet against either) it might be your distant descendants who actually wind up at another star. So what?

It's amazing watching "data center" become synonymous with "tool of Satan" in real time, even among people who wouldn't know the difference between a data center and a sheep's no no area. Propaganda is a powerful tool. Someone should be investigating where this is coming from.

Passiflora now supports code signing/notarization/and packaging for macOS, iOS, and Android (Windows planned, but not there yet). This should be considered experimental -- you *should* get app-store ready binaries out of this process, but it definitely needs testing. On a Mac you can now do: make all to build an executable for macOS, iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and WWW in one go. make sign-all does the same, but signs the macOS, iOS, and Android binaries, builds packages for App Store distribution, and notarizes the macOS binary for distribution outside the App Store. github.com/pulpgrinder/pa…

@meNishantK @andrewchen > plain English or simple pseudocode. Maybe they could call it COBOL. Or BASIC. Or HyperCard. :-) Seriously, this is about the tenth iteration of "regular people will write their own code" since the dawn of the computer age. It's wrong this time, too.

@andrewchen Before programming becomes accessible to everyone, we need a new kind of programming language. People describe what they want in plain English or simple pseudocode. The system turns it into working code. Users can test, verify, and understand the code.

prediction: we'll soon view coding the way we view using spreadsheets today - a commonplace skill that every white collar worker is expected to have. Knowing how to code will sit alongside email, making slides, word processing, etc etc. It'll be <18 months before this is widespread in every job description Customer-facing employees will code as well as sell/market/support, so that they convert their domain expertise into repeatable workflows and software. We'll have an explosion of internal bespoke apps. But to complement all of this coding happening at the edges, we'll also have centrally expert teams of agentic coders who build infrastructure, make it secure/scalable, and create canonical software. These central teams will help scale agentic engineering. There's a spreadsheet metaphor here too -- yes, if you are an expert at spreadsheets, you write macros, build huge models, etc., we'll put you in a group of your own. It's called Finance. :) We'll have the same central teams to help manage the widespread use of coding tools throughout the org. You might ask, won't this be a mess? What happens in a world where everyone has many many variations of bespoke software? (It's already happening) Maybe! But I think it'll be fine, in the same way that it's fine to make a copy of a spreadsheet or deck. Making it easy to fork makes it easy to participate. But you might want an "official" forecast maintained by an official finance person, in the same way that there will be variations of canonical and bespoke software excited for the Gdrive of many many forks of disposable apps made and shared by my co-workers!!! 😂

"Through internet searches I became more engaged with the Gradle docs. " Oh. En*G*aged. En*G*aged. That's not how I read that at first.

@esrtweet @notcalledjack @jon_stokes The real moat is if Entity A needs to use the SaaS code to talk to Entity B. Most of the value in Amazon is not in their code but the fact that they have zillions of employees, warehouses, vehicles, and credit card numbers. Cloning the software won't give you the Amazon network.

@notcalledjack @jon_stokes As somebody else pointed out in a sibling thread, SaaS is under its own death pressure. Very frequently, customers are going to start wondering why they should pay a subscription fee for something they could vibe code in-house.

Fast, cheap AI-assisted decompilation of binary code is here. Which means code secrecy is dead. Decompilers in themselves are not a new technology. Security researchers have employed them for years to analyze compiled malware. There's been some limited use by others, notably by hobbyists decompiling abandonware games. But there were a couple of issues that prevented this from becoming common practice. One is simply that running decompilers was difficult. It wasn't as simple as feed in binary, get out source; it needed a person with specialist skills prepared to do spelunking through wildernesses of machine code and object formats. The other problem was that decompilation didn't give you anything like the explanatory comments that had been in the original code, so you could easily wind up with code that you could read without being able to understand or modify it. Now large language models are busily smashing both of those barriers flat. They're better at the kind of detail analysis required to run the human side of a decompilation than humans are. More importantly, in the process of decompiling code, they rather automatically build a global model of how it works that can easily be expressed by high quality comments in the extracted code. All you have to do, basically, is ask for the comments. I'm going to reinforce that latter point because it may not be obvious how good LLMs are at this, and how much better they're going to get. When they decompile code and comment it for you, they're not just working from that one piece of code you have put in front of them - they'll have in their training set hundreds, possibly thousands of pieces of code similar to it and with comments. This will give them superhuman levels of insight not just into what it does at the microlevel, but what it means to the humans who wrote it, and what technical assumptions it's embodying. Compilation no longer guards your secrets. Or, to put it more precisely the expected time span in which you can still count on it to obscure them is measured in months. Possibly weeks. What does this mean? It means you're in an open-source world now. All it's going to take for anybody to bust your proprietary IP open is care enough to spend tokens on the analysis. You will maximize your chances of survival as a software business if you get out ahead of this rather than trying to fight it. This isn't exactly the way I expected open source to win. But, you know, I'll take it. Good enough.

@johncrickett It reminds me a little of the joke business plan from the first dot-com boom: get 50 million in venture capital and hire some guys to shovel cash into a furnace. If you run out of money in six months, hire more guys.

I think setting token consumption as a goal and running a leaderboard if dumb. It's a failure of both leadership and imagination. If you want people to adopt AI, to experiment with it and to figure out how to use it, figure out what them doing so well for your organisation would look like. Then measure that. If you want faster delivery, measure the rate of delivery. If you don't know how to measure the outcomes that matter to your organisation, you probably shouldn't be managing it and you certainly shouldn't be mandating how people deliver the outcomes.

@TelebakJ @Ai_TechVerse @XFreeze "based on the creators opinion" Yes, and? How does personal opinion equate to "aligned with human values"? Just admit they're biasing their model in accordance with their own prejudices and leave "human values" out of it. But that doesn't sound so selfless and noble, does it?

@TonyHursh @Ai_TechVerse @XFreeze Every model is pre and post trained. This is based on the creators opinion of what the best strategy and alignment is. I thought that was pretty clear but obviously not for you

I am telling you, Anthropic is not building an AI that is here to protect humanity, but rather an AI that will turn against it They're deep into the woke rabbit hole and they do not care about morality Their AI safety team is a joke. Their moral guide for AI is literally a leftist lunatic with a twisted understanding of reality, who doesn't really care if the end goal causes humanity's end They have proved this at every opportunity they've had, and it's crystal clear

@TelebakJ @Ai_TechVerse @XFreeze When they bias their model according to their personal opinions and pretend that constitutes "aligning" their model with "humanity". Obviously. I thought that was pretty clear. What part did you not understand?

@TonyHursh @Ai_TechVerse @XFreeze They are speaking only for their model you goof. Where are they speaking for the world?

"Alignment" is just a buzzword that means "privileging someone's agenda at the expense of truth".

@jmgwritten If you're not familiar with The Chronicles of Amber, you don't have enough expertise in this field to have a valid opinion. Sorry.