i saw a physicist on youtube this week saying they dislike AI in maths and physics but they use it in their research and "you'd be mad not to".

i can't honestly say how well that holds for physics, because i'm really quite amateur at physics and i don't think i'm well placed to judge.

but i'm decidedly not an amateur at computer programming and i absolutely have opinions.

i don't like AI in programming, i don't use it and i think if you use it by choice you spit in my face and shit on everything we've ever achieved in computing. is that 'nuanced' enough for you?

oh and it's shit. really fucking shit. if you think otherwise you have no business programming tbqh.

@dysfun if that particular physicist was strictly confined to computer-simulated theoretical work then I can very easily see why he'd think it was madness not to use fake-AI sludge—in a #physics culture that values sheer bulk of publication, sludge must seem like a godsend

@mxchara cosmology i think. i don't know, but my inference is they're just not very good at writing code and it's better at writing code than them.

and stuff like bevy "AI for code, not assets" can gtfo.

it's really bad to steal art, but it's fine to steal code because code isn't art and people put it online and scrapers "learn" to not obey licenses so it's TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

@dysfun I found it useful in some (rather limited) circumstances. Example: the AI-enhanced autocomplete in the IDE would generate the skeleton of a "for each" loop for me in a language in which I didn't know the syntax because I only used that language once or twice a year. That would save me several seconds of looking up the documentation.

@dysfun I absolutely hate this AI coding era, I'm actually encouraged to use it at work, I'd be also stupid not to use it, it does most of my work well enough that I don't need to care. Yes, it's bad, the problem is that it's good enough.

I guess it's worse for people who work on meaningful projects at good places. I just don't care as long as I'm forced to work at places where the only thing im doing is generating shareholder value. I'm not gonna care that it's bad code.

@sandornagy if management encourage you to use it, you're absolved for using it at work. they have made the decision, it wouldn't be right of you to stand in the way of them reaping the benefits

good news, a physicist has weighed in and they're not impressed with AI either https://icosahedron.website/@bstacey/117322075726473832

@dysfun just saw our org's roadmap regarding agentic ai and it is basically scripts that make money for anthropic or whoever. I look at each example and this could have been a script, in fact we had been asking for it for almost a decade but all the time the software development team refused saying we leave all the surrounding things to the tool to the end user. now they have taken a whole u-turn.

@TimWardCam Who needs a livable planet, anyway? Tim Ward does not have to open a language reference anymore, that's the important thing.

Jesus H. Christ, you sloperators are all raging fucking morons.

@viccie30 I don't have to open a language reference (which would in any case have been an intercontinental internet request, probably) because I've retired. So I'm no longer in a job in which I'm being badgered to use AI all the time (that wasn't by any means the only reason I left, but it was one of them).

@TimWardCam So you aren't pushed to use AI or have to open language references anymore. So you just use the LLMs to make sure you ruin some more clean drinking water for fun?

I have no clue what your OP was about then, honestly.

@viccie30 No. Because I've retired. The incident I described, which happened once, occurred when I was working.

@TimWardCam "I found it useful in some (rather limited) circumstances" does not make it sound like a one time thing, but I'm happy to let you keep digging.

And as they say, if you kill just one puppy, just to try it, it isn't so bad. You retired from the puppy killing farm now, anyway, so what's the big deal.

I swear, sloperators have no sense of morality or honesty, as you so aptly demonstrate.

@viccie30 I think this is the first time I've ever had to block two people in one day!