Mastodon Feed
stray thought:
I've heard of the term "Software Engineer" referred to as being "stolen glory", because engineering as a practice has long had MUCH higher standards than software development, when it came to reliability/quality/etc, because the stakes were usually so much higher, and the study required for qualification were correspondingly high.
LLMs seem to be leaning on this further: Software developers have embraced the idea that we can spit out any low-quality, unreliable, even straight-up dangerous garbage that, as long as it seems somewhat productive, is "valuable enough". They have dropped the floor on what we're able to achieve while deskilling many of us who at least were developing the skills required for quality production. Most importantly, they're making it so leadership actively discourages taking the actual time to make sure something won't fucking kill someone.
I was looking at a certain open source project's page and there was a link to its associated consultancy. On the front page was a gif of a prompt for an app generator LLM utility, and the first fucking prompt that showed up was "Write me an application that will act as an X-ray analyzer, looking for anomalies and reporting on them", and that was just obviously the most fucking irresponsible thing I'd seen all day. Imagine having some non-expert just write something that will put people's actual lives on the line like that, and sell it as if it has any qualification to make reliable diagnostics. This is the level of brazen irresponsibility we're dealing with.