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Programming Leftovers
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Sharon Rosner ☛ Software as Craft: a First Look at Syntropy
This is also one of the reasons why the recent AI “revolution” doesn’t really resonate with me. They say about us software developers that we always are looking to automate our workflows, but personally this is not what’s driving me. I don’t mind spending a few more minutes on writing another REST controller, or another Javascript keyboard event handler, or just copying files and manually setting up a new server. And I find in many cases I spend more time thinking about a problem than actually coding the solution!
To me this is all part of the process, it’s all enjoyable, and since I’m my own boss, I have the luxury of taking my time. My clients know that I’m dependable and available when there’s a problem, and that I get the job done, so I can concentrate on the process itself, and not worry so much about velocity.
This is also why I like to make my own tools, instead of just blindly relying on some ready-made frameworks or libraries. It’s not only about freedom, it’s also about the joy of creation, and the deeper understanding and knowledge of the lower-level aspects of the system I’m building, be it parsing HTTP requests, putting together SQL queries, issuing system calls, forking, trapping process signals etc.
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Miguel Grinberg ☛ I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
About a year ago I wrote on this blog about how coding with LLMs would not work for me, even if there were no ethical or environmental concerns preventing me to use them. I'm not going to repeat the arguments I made that time because my views on the subject haven' t changed. What has changed, however, is that the number of contributions I receive on my open source projects has gone up, and nearly all are now made with LLMs.
The other day I had a very depressing thought regarding this. All these people who submit drive-by pull requests to my projects are pushing me to spend more and more of my time reviewing and merging code that was extruded by machines. Cory Doctorow refers to people that perform this function as reverse centaurs. He calls these "frail and vulnerable people being puppeteered by uncaring, relentless machines." Ouch!
Am I a reverse centaur now? Is my new purpose as a seasoned software engineer and open source developer to spend my days reviewing LLM code, in spite of having decided that I do not need nor want this technology myself? As you can guess from the title, I'm never going to become a reverse centaur. Let me tell you how I resist the forces that want me to be one.
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Perl / Raku
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John D Cook ☛ RSA munitions T-shirt
Back when the US government classified strong encryption as “munitions,” RSA public key cryptography was illegal to export. In 1995, Adam Back protested this by creating a terse, obfuscated implementation of RSA in Perl code and used it as an email signature.
The code was also printed on T-shirts. The shirt was classified as munitions because it contained source code for strong encryption. More on the shirt here.
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[Old] Cypherspace Internet Securit ☛ Original post, on cypherpunks
Here's a bit of perl code which implements RSA encryption and decryption and is small enough to use for a signature: [...]
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Rust
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Graphics Stack
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It's FOSS ☛ There is a New X11 Server, Written in Rust, With the Help of AI [Ed: Only utter fools would trust slop for this kind of test]
Yserver is a vibe-coded project that ditches legacy code to work cleanly on modern GNU/Linux systems.
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