@paco @BenAveling it is just a stupid electronic device
-
For most people, ANYTHING they use is "cognitive debt", ask them how their glass prayer tablet works and they'll respond smugly "Computer"...
... Mention "quantum tunneling transistor" inside and you'll get rapid blinking shutdown mode.
AI hasn't caused wide spread ignorance of... Everything...
People go lazy way before then.
@briankrebs @paco Hard agree, and imma rant:
Some ignorance is ok. Maybe I don’t understand how ___(thing)___ in my car works. I don’t need to. Ditto my power grid. Ditto how my food wholesalers get food from farm to my store. Ditto 90%+ of the conveniences of a civil society.
But I want a mechanic who does, working on my car. He doesn’t need to understand metallurgy & materials sci and structural dynamics and etc. But he wants to buy car parts from someone who does. And he wants to work with people that make sure he gets paid, stays busy, etc. And so on.
TL;dr: Society IS specialization.
It’s ok to a point. But it’s never ok to skip the part where competency is in the chain. An AI product that lacks a competent wrangler (call it cognitive debt or tech debt) isn’t enough. It’s a substantial Risk. (Puts on Risk Expert hat) And we definitely don’t fucking incur risks as blasély as all (hand waves) *THESE* fuckers are eager to normalize. No, thanks.
-
@briankrebs @paco Hard agree, and imma rant:
Some ignorance is ok. Maybe I don’t understand how ___(thing)___ in my car works. I don’t need to. Ditto my power grid. Ditto how my food wholesalers get food from farm to my store. Ditto 90%+ of the conveniences of a civil society.
But I want a mechanic who does, working on my car. He doesn’t need to understand metallurgy & materials sci and structural dynamics and etc. But he wants to buy car parts from someone who does. And he wants to work with people that make sure he gets paid, stays busy, etc. And so on.
TL;dr: Society IS specialization.
It’s ok to a point. But it’s never ok to skip the part where competency is in the chain. An AI product that lacks a competent wrangler (call it cognitive debt or tech debt) isn’t enough. It’s a substantial Risk. (Puts on Risk Expert hat) And we definitely don’t fucking incur risks as blasély as all (hand waves) *THESE* fuckers are eager to normalize. No, thanks.
@cascheranno yeah I think we are largely in agreement. What I find really troubling is how people seem willing, almost gleeful about not knowing the core of their job function.
I don’t know how my car works and I really can’t fix much of it myself. Ditto for most kitchen appliances. That’s ok. It’s not my job. But if I took my car to a garage and the person whose job it is to fix it says they don’t really know why the machine wants to change spark plugs, they just do what it says, I’m going to a different garage.
A developer who has turned in code they don’t understand and can’t maintain has done their job very poorly. Even if the code works, knowing how it works and maintaining it is in the dead center of their job responsibilities. Assigning it a fancy name like “cognitive debt” is just masking the issue of failing at a core part of their job.
We used to sneer at people who copy/pasted stuff off stack overflow and had no idea what it was doing or how. Now people think that’s the future.
-
I dunno. I think “cognitive debt” is just a fancy-pants way of saying “not knowing how your shit works.”
This is no remarkable special condition that needs a new term. It’s just that people have a limited grasp of details when they’re not involved in the details.
If not for a term like “cognitive debt” to make it seem special, we might conclude a lot of those predictions about how AI would hurt software development were right.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
This piece by Margaret-Anne Storey is the best explanation of the term cognitive debt I've seen so far. Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that …
Simon Willison’s Weblog (simonwillison.net)
@paco there is a lot of "debt" framing going on and I get the impression that this originates from the idea that management understands money as a concept.
I'm not sure it really provides the benefit people hope it provides, since some might call debt a normal thing, a wanted thing even. Basically an investment. That's not what people want to communicate with terms like technical debt or cognitive debt.
But stating "I have no idea what's going on anymore" doesn't look smart.
-
I dunno. I think “cognitive debt” is just a fancy-pants way of saying “not knowing how your shit works.”
This is no remarkable special condition that needs a new term. It’s just that people have a limited grasp of details when they’re not involved in the details.
If not for a term like “cognitive debt” to make it seem special, we might conclude a lot of those predictions about how AI would hurt software development were right.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
This piece by Margaret-Anne Storey is the best explanation of the term cognitive debt I've seen so far. Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that …
Simon Willison’s Weblog (simonwillison.net)
@paco The drum I keep beating is Peter Naur's "Programming As Theory-Building" from all the way back in 1985. The job of software development has always been about knowing how your shit works (and perhaps more importantly, what exactly it's supposed to do).
It's disheartening as fuck to see so many people in the industry having to rediscover that from first principles, or worse, continue on blithely.
-
@cascheranno yeah I think we are largely in agreement. What I find really troubling is how people seem willing, almost gleeful about not knowing the core of their job function.
I don’t know how my car works and I really can’t fix much of it myself. Ditto for most kitchen appliances. That’s ok. It’s not my job. But if I took my car to a garage and the person whose job it is to fix it says they don’t really know why the machine wants to change spark plugs, they just do what it says, I’m going to a different garage.
A developer who has turned in code they don’t understand and can’t maintain has done their job very poorly. Even if the code works, knowing how it works and maintaining it is in the dead center of their job responsibilities. Assigning it a fancy name like “cognitive debt” is just masking the issue of failing at a core part of their job.
We used to sneer at people who copy/pasted stuff off stack overflow and had no idea what it was doing or how. Now people think that’s the future.
@paco hmm, automated stack-overflow copypasta is apt.
But we’ll need a derogatory acronym, uh.. ASS =automated stack-overflow snippets, or (a new kind of) ASCI = automated stack-overflow copypasta inserting, etc.
-
@paco hmm, automated stack-overflow copypasta is apt.
But we’ll need a derogatory acronym, uh.. ASS =automated stack-overflow snippets, or (a new kind of) ASCI = automated stack-overflow copypasta inserting, etc.
@paco A few times in life I’ve pair coded stuff harder than my usual solo stuff: A debug/tweak of a media codec where I was focused on structure / parsing and my partner was brilliant at compound checks/inserts to yeet out of the code just in time to let us diagnose ‘why does this go awry riiiiight *here*?!’ A CTF or two.
I can learn more in that time than a semester of grinding out solo. A Sunday morning of using AI as a SME for Rust syntax was useful. “Ok, gimme a wrapper for opening and closing a quoted csv.” “How does one build an indexed collection of pairs of data in rust?” (Sees result, goes and reads on Hashmap) etc.
-
I dunno. I think “cognitive debt” is just a fancy-pants way of saying “not knowing how your shit works.”
This is no remarkable special condition that needs a new term. It’s just that people have a limited grasp of details when they’re not involved in the details.
If not for a term like “cognitive debt” to make it seem special, we might conclude a lot of those predictions about how AI would hurt software development were right.
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt
This piece by Margaret-Anne Storey is the best explanation of the term cognitive debt I've seen so far. Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that …
Simon Willison’s Weblog (simonwillison.net)
@paco how would we test "this is actually comprehensible" using SonarQube, so we can put it on a chart for management? I mean, that's the really important thing in AGILE that management can track 'progress' using some sort of near random metric, right?
-
@x41h @paco @briankrebs The FBI is run by the devil… See.
@barryjsullivan @x41h @paco @briankrebs the devil who went on fox this morning saying that Americans need to put Israel’s interests first?
-
@barryjsullivan @x41h @paco @briankrebs the devil who went on fox this morning saying that Americans need to put Israel’s interests first?
@skoombidoombis @barryjsullivan @paco @briankrebs Well yea dont you know how much investment the Trump administration is putting into prime real estate in Gaza. C'mon man... we need to put the rich interests first or did I mean Israel?
Even more comical is Ben Shapiro calling Americans lazy and stupid for not knowing how to balance a checkbook. Yet our taxes fund their missiles, birthright trips to Israel (non-directly), partnerships and other programs.
Its getting beyond ridiculous how much America takes it up the rear end.
Don't have freedom of speech to speak against Israel's crimes publicly though because the FBI who apparently work for them will come knocking. So Israel is reshaping our constitution while they are at it.
Dumb Christian Nationalist MAGA idiots. -
@paco we as a society have been in serious "cognitave debt" for decades. Computering became a shit sundae of frameworks on top of containers within VMs floating in a cloudy cluster sauce of somebody else's servers that no single person knows WTF made this all work.
Then #LLM based #GenAI came along and we are not just in debt we are now Cognitively Bankrupt. I thought we hit rock bottom when web designers started saying they needed 32GiB to build their fekkin' websites but then all...this...came around and we started telling Rube Goldberg to hold our beer as we cooked the planet to make computers be bad at math and make memes and tacky art and write bad code and invent new and incurable injection vulnerabilities.
Inventing snappy new terms for shitty old problems is just another sign of how things are spiralling faater and further down the toilet TBH.
I'm not bitter I'm just a cynical old Gen X man. Whatever I don't care
-
@paco how would we test "this is actually comprehensible" using SonarQube, so we can put it on a chart for management? I mean, that's the really important thing in AGILE that management can track 'progress' using some sort of near random metric, right?
@Orb2069 That’s EASY! Use an LLM to process the code and assign a “comprehensibility score….”
-
@paco hmm, automated stack-overflow copypasta is apt.
But we’ll need a derogatory acronym, uh.. ASS =automated stack-overflow snippets, or (a new kind of) ASCI = automated stack-overflow copypasta inserting, etc.
@cascheranno
I dunno about acronyms, but here are some good terms I commend to your use.
- Full Slop Developer
- DevSlops
- SecSlops
- DevSecSlops
- CS/CD (continuous slop/continuous deployment)
-
@paco The drum I keep beating is Peter Naur's "Programming As Theory-Building" from all the way back in 1985. The job of software development has always been about knowing how your shit works (and perhaps more importantly, what exactly it's supposed to do).
It's disheartening as fuck to see so many people in the industry having to rediscover that from first principles, or worse, continue on blithely.
@delta_vee I agree. We have gotten so far from those seminal lessons that a whole generation is insisting on learning them again. It’s such an implicit disparagement of a whole field. This idea that radically underinformed and underskilled people can do the work of skilled, experienced people just by getting a typing assistant.
-
@Orb2069 That’s EASY! Use an LLM to process the code and assign a “comprehensibility score….”
@paco you laugh, but I've seen a few ai-related 'research' papers that use that exact methodology.
-
@skoombidoombis @barryjsullivan @paco @briankrebs Well yea dont you know how much investment the Trump administration is putting into prime real estate in Gaza. C'mon man... we need to put the rich interests first or did I mean Israel?
Even more comical is Ben Shapiro calling Americans lazy and stupid for not knowing how to balance a checkbook. Yet our taxes fund their missiles, birthright trips to Israel (non-directly), partnerships and other programs.
Its getting beyond ridiculous how much America takes it up the rear end.
Don't have freedom of speech to speak against Israel's crimes publicly though because the FBI who apparently work for them will come knocking. So Israel is reshaping our constitution while they are at it.
Dumb Christian Nationalist MAGA idiots.@x41h a few months after October 7 a journalist was interviewing Israelis on the streets going about their days. One woman stuck with me. She was in tears over the incident. Then the journalist asked what if Gaza becomes part of Israel and the two state solution dies. In the blink of an eye her tears disappeared and joyfully said with a smile “a house on the beach in Gaza would be nice.” Dead children is a small price for Mediterranean real estate.
-
@paco It's always DNS.
-
@paco It's always DNS.
@elfin I need it tattooed on the inside of my eyelids
-
@paco one time I brought down the Internet for an entire university by editing a BIND file and using "#" as a comment line instead of ";".
Fortunately this was like 1996 and I fixed it in about 10 minutes and nobody much noticed, but. Yeah. Always DNS.
-
@paco one time I brought down the Internet for an entire university by editing a BIND file and using "#" as a comment line instead of ";".
Fortunately this was like 1996 and I fixed it in about 10 minutes and nobody much noticed, but. Yeah. Always DNS.
@adr This was a single dot. I had a CNAME for www and it pointed to host.cdn.net without a final dot. So it was a CNAME to host.cdn.example.com instead of a CNAME to host.cdn.net.
-
@paco Consider your DNS privileges revoked.
You’re only allowed to modify hosts files going forward
(I did so many DNS shenanigans, one would spend a lifetime counting)
