fabio

fabio, 1 day ago to random

I’ve just had to debunk some more pseudoscience garbage shared by my mother on Facebook. The only reason why I still use that platform every now and then is just to make sure that my family doesn’t go completely off the basket case tangent with conspiracy bullshit.

This time, after chemtrails, vaccines that cause autism, Covid intentionally spread by the government, climate change that doesn’t exist, new world order secretely decided in Davos, freemasons and Jews ruling the world, gender theory pushed by a cult of paedophiles, and Putin and Trump as the only saviours, it was the time for the landing on the moon that didn’t happen.

The arguments used by the guy (“there are no signs of the source code that was used by the Apollo missions and the lunar module didn’t have enough thrust to take off”) could be dismantled with a simple Github link and a quick round of the Tsiokovsky rocket equation.

But the original post had hundreds of reshares, while my response didn’t get a single reaction. And my mother, who quit school at the age of 12 and has no clue of what either specific impulse nor escape velocity are, didn’t understand anything of my explanation anyway, and tomorrow she’ll probably just reshare some more bullshit that she wants to believe in.

Does anyone have family members or close friends who are also stuck in this vicious conspiracy cycle that apparently can’t be broken with any efforts of reasoning? How do you cope with that? It is becoming utterly depressing from my side. The conspiracy-inclined side of social media has features that resemble too much those of a cult. I’ve fought to take my family out of a cult years ago, just to see them plunge into another one. The time required to debunk bullshit is high, while the time to reshare it basically zero, and I feel like it’s a war I can’t win. Wondering if there’s a way out that doesn’t end up affecting our own mental health even more.

fabio, 5 days ago to ai

#NetBSD joins the ranks of software projects that ban #AI generated code.

How they are going to enforce such ban is an obvious question lingering in the air.

Does it include only cases like “hey #ChatGPT write a suite of unit tests for this class”? Or also cases where #Copilot simply autocompletes a for loop while I’m typing it?

In the latter case, how would a hypothetical reviewer enforce the ban? How would the for loop autocompleted by Copilot, or the boilerplate population of hashmap values, look any different than one I would write myself?

And if the issue is with any code that isn’t directly written by a human, then why stop at modern AI generation? Why not include LINTers and traditional IDE autocomplete features?

I have no doubt that the projects that are announcing these no-AI policies have good intentions, but it’s probably time for all of us to have an honest talk.

Code completion isn’t a clear cut binary feature. It’s a big spectrum that goes from the old exuberant ctags to ChatGPT writing whole classes.

And code completion shouldn’t be banned. If it makes a developer more productive, and if the developer understands the code that is being completed, then such bans are akin to a “drivers should only use cars with manual transmission because we feel that it’s more manly”. It’s a conservative and elitist act of shunning out new productive tools because we can’t understand them and regulate them properly.

And more people need to call out the bluff: in cases where the AI only completes a few lines of code, its basically impossible to tell if that snippet was written by a human or an AI assistant.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/05/17/007240/netbsd-bans-ai-generated-code?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed