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How I got a Root Shell on a Credit Card Terminal
Root shell on a credit card terminal
Will 'Vibe Coding' Transform Programming?
A 21-year-old's startup got a $500,000 investment from Y Combinator — after building their web site and prototype mostly with "vibe coding".
NPR explores vibe coding with Tom Blomfield, a Y Combinator group partner:
"It really caught on, this idea that people are no longer checking line by line the code that AI is producing, but just kind of telling it what to do and accepting the responses in a very trusting way," Blomfield said. And so Blomfield, who knows how to code, also tried his hand at vibe coding — both to rejig his blog and to create from scratch a website called Recipe Ninja. It has a library of recipes, and cooks can talk to it, asking the AI-driven site to concoct new recipes for them. "It's probably like 30,000 lines of code. That would have taken me, I don't know, maybe a year to build," he said. "It wasn't overnight, but I probably spent 100 hours on that."
Blomfield said he expects AI coding to radically change the software industry. "Instead of having coding assistance, we're going to have actual AI coders and then an AI project manager, an AI designer and, over time, an AI manager of all of this. And we're going to have swarms of these things," he said. Where people fit into this, he said, "is the question we're all grappling with." In 2021, Blomfield said in a podcast that would-be start-up founders should, first and foremost, learn to code. Today, he's not sure he'd give that advice because he thinks coders and software engineers could eventually be out of a job. "Coders feel like they are tending, kind of, organic gardens by hand," he said. "But we are producing these superhuman agents that are going to be as good as the best coders in the world, like very, very soon."
The article includes an alternate opinion from Adam Resnick, a research manager at tech consultancy IDC. "The vast majority of developers are using AI tools in some way. And what we also see is that a reasonably high percentage of the code output from those tools needs further curation by people, by experienced people."
NPR ends their article by noting that this further curation is "a job that AI can't do, he said. At least not yet."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Atari Means Business with the Mega ST
Cinematography of “Andor”
The Workers Who Lost Their Jobs To AI
"How does it feel to be replaced by a bot?" asks the Guardian — interviewing several creative workers who know:
Gardening copywriter Annabel Beales
"One day, I overheard my boss saying to a colleague, 'Just put it in ChatGPT....' [My manager] stressed that my job was safe. Six weeks later, I was called to a meeting with HR. They told me they were letting me go immediately. It was just before Christmas...
"The company's website is sad to see now. It's all AI-generated and factual — there's no substance, or sense of actually enjoying gardening."
Voice actor Richie Tavake
"[My producer] told me he had input my voice into AI software to say the extra line. But he hadn't asked my permission. I later found out he had uploaded my voice to a platform, allowing other producers to access it. I requested its removal, but it took me a week, and I had to speak to five people to get it done... Actors don't get paid for any of the extra AI-generated stuff, and they lose their jobs. I've seen it happen."
Graphic designer Jadun Sykes
"One day, HR told me my role was no longer required as much of my work was being replaced by AI. I made a YouTube video about my experience. It went viral and I received hundreds of responses from graphic designers in the same boat, which made me realise I'm not the only victim — it's happening globally..."
Labor economist Aaron Sojourner recently reminded CNN that even in the 1980s and 90s, the arrival of cheap personal computers only ultimately boosted labor productivity by about 3%. That seems to argue against a massive displacement of human jobs — but these anecdotes suggest some jobs already are being lost...
Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers Paul Fernhout and Bruce66423 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.