Daily Tech News 18 September 2023

• ChatGPT is not coming for your programming job - unless you are a very bad programmer. (Wired)
  
  Programming is hard. Or rather, programming well is hard.
  
  It's rather like painting: Anyone can pick up a brush and do a quick doodle, but Rembrandts are far and few between.
  
  It's actually worse than painting: A painting just has to be pleasing to the eye to be passable (it requires more to be great, of course). A program has to work. And a program of even moderate complexity can be a machine with half a million interoperating components, every one of which exhibits non-linear response.

  FORTRAN was supposed to allow scientists and others to write programs without any support from a programmer. COBOL's English syntax was intended to be so simple that managers could bypass developers entirely. Waterfall-based development was invented to standardize and make routine the development of new software. Object-oriented programming was supposed to be so simple that eventually all computer users could do their own software engineering.

  None of that happened, because programming is a fairly specific skill.
  
  What did happen is that programmers could use these new tools to accomplish more complicated tasks more quickly.

  We've introduced more and more complexity to computers in the hopes of making them so simple that they don't need to be programmed at all. Unsurprisingly, throwing complexity at complexity has only made it worse, and we're no closer to letting managers cut out the software engineers.

  ChatGPT - or its open-source successors, like ArbitraryCamelid-7B7 - could make a difference in certain areas such as feature tests and pen-testing. But LLMs won't and can't by their nature replace programmers, because they don't understand what they are doing in the first place.
  
  The LLMs, I mean. Often the programmers too, but the distinction is, not always.
  
  We'd require a different, older, and harder form of AI to do that, and right now nobody is even looking in that direction.

• The Mac didn't bring programming to the people. (Eclectic Light)
  
  Because the people can't program.
  
  That is, most individuals have neither the interest nor the aptitude - the two very often go together. If you do have the interest, you can probably learn.
  
  
  
• Catala is a programming language for legislation. (GitHub)
  
  You can annotate laws with code that provides a mathematically precise definition of the requirements and outcomes of the text.
  
  The problem with this is that (a) legislators can't code, (b) lawyers can't code, (c) judges can't code, and (d) laws tend to be deliberately vague. What good is a law if you can't abuse it to your own benefit?
  
  
  
• Roblox game developers got duped by malicious NPM packages that used custom compression techniques to sneak past automated filters. (Cyber-Oracle)
  
  How this differs from non-malicious NPM packages I am not sure, because the core problem seems to me to be NPM rather than the hackers.
  
  
  
• Embattled game engine developer Unity has closed two offices and canceled an all-hands meeting after receiving death threats... From its own staff. (The Register)
  
  The call is coming from inside the house.
  
  
  
• Speaking of malicious packages, remember when Unity merged with malware developer IronSource? (PC Gamer)
  
  That was last year.
  
  
  
• Formatting Text in C++: The old and the new ways. (Marius Bancila)
  
  I mostly program in Python these days. I'm about to embark on a project that will require the use of C++, which is rather like swapping an electric chainsaw for a lump of obsidian.
  
  The examples shown here - old and new alike - are hopelessly antiquated nonsense. Not the fault of the author but of the language itself.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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