https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117537776055163844
There’s a major state sponsored misinformation and smear campaign towards GrapheneOS in the Netherlands and Germany. The misinformation campaign includes unsubstantiated security claims not holding up to scrutiny to scare people away from it. They’re also heavily misrepresenting who uses it overall.
These smear campaigns conflate GrapheneOS with forks and modifications of it sold by shady companies. Those usually include a device management app to remotely manage the devices of their customers as if they’re employees. These are largely not GrapheneOS devices or have preinstalled malware apps.
France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands are becoming increasingly authoritarian surveillance states with an ongoing crackdown against privacy. It’s happening throughout the whole EU and it’s likely both secure devices and end-to-end encryption without backdoors are going to end up outlawed.
There are a bunch of companies based in the EU selling phones with drastically worse privacy and security than an iPhone including Jolla, Volla, Murena and iodé. These products are effectively backdoored by not providing standard privacy and security patches/protections while misleading users.
Completely honest opinion here as a software developer, if you don’t use AI in coding now, you are probably not working effectively. That’s the unfortunate reality. To be clear, I am not talking about vibe coding, that’s something completely different.
Saying “I don’t follow GrapheneOS because they accept generated code” is your view, then you probably can’t use any piece of software that is still actively maintained.
To me it’s ironic that you mention GrapheneOS account is too paranoid, while being paranoid about AI code yourself, just because it has “AI” in it
If you do use GenAI to generate code, it is extremely hard to both review the output thoroughly, and be faster than writing it by hand.
For some cases, like code auditing, it might not matter. But for much of software engineering, a substantial part of it is a continuous learning process - learning requirements, constraints, specs, what the code should do, its structure, and so on.
And GenAI short-circuits that - you invariable understand less of the code. This is not different from a student of physics or high-frequeny electrical engineering which does his or her homework on Maxwell’s equations with ChatGPT: They might get a result quickly, but at the cost of really understanding the matter.
Again, there might be cases where this does not matter. For a throw-away web page or a script used once, it might be good enough. But in most cases, understanding what you do does matter.
This is why on the rare occasion I ask AI to solve a problem I use a fake scenario. Then I still have to generally rewrite the output and understand it. Usually I just want to solve a new problem I’ve not encountered and im just looking for the basic concept. But I generally agree with you, any short circuiting understanding has bad longterm consequences.
Yeah - it’s a unrealistic to try to avoid “AI code”, whatever that may be. We know that Microsoft is using it for Windows. There are patches in the linux kernel that were generated with the help of AI. Google is using it for Android development. And Apple, too. So this user here is going around smashing a small, independent OS for using AI while posting from a OS that was created with AI.
yea, AI is fine as long as we use it to write annoying boilerplate and dig up random bullshit in massive old codebases.
Just don’t use it to code a whole feature without ever looking at the code afterwards and you’re good…
I hate how AI operates in general, and I wish my company didn’t pay a subscription for the fuckers and just allowed us to get local-only tools…but on the actual coding side AI is fine.
We’re AI purists around here. 🙄 And yes, it’s silly to expect any given code to be free from all AI use.
Got stuck on a PowerShell script. It was apparently an odd use case, only found one page that said anything about it, and the documentation wasn’t great. Used ChatGPT to write it, and of course it didn’t work, BUT it gave me an idea I hadn’t considered and showed me a path I didn’t know was possible.
Spent 8 hours banging my head before thinking about an LLM (this was 3 years ago). Took another 30-minutes to get it working after some help. You’d be a fool not to use AI for cases like that.
But you wouldn’t be doing the work would you. No, you would just be using someone else’s work.
Tell me you don’t write code without saying so out loud.
There’s a difference between copying code from git, forums, or stack exchange and having a autocorrect bot that hallucinates (coding agent)
Im neither in the pro or anti ai game nor did i program anything since i finished school so i dont know if or how much ai uses someones elses code… But in general why do you think it is important to do the same work again if somone already found a solution? I mean for example in 99% of the cases you wouldnt expect someone to reinvent the pythagorean theorem? I dont think that the original coder cares too much about who uses the code after they get paid (if its paid work) and if there are problems, ai cant find or steal you still need to let money flow to some coder? The second thing i think about is that you dont have a chance stop ai anyway so why not trying to find solutions to the problems that come with it?
So the end justifies the means, great argument.
didnt mention any “mean” but wanted to ask you what you think the mean is, because you wrote about that. I also didnt mention any “end”? Just wanted to understand why you think what you said was a bad thing, thats it. I dont even have an opinion on that topic i just found it interesting how you come to your conclusion (because i heard about that opinion also in many non ai topics before and never got it. I have the theory that its something about equality on effort? Idk maybe you can tell me why you see things that way).
I don’t think you understand what ends and means are. It seems to me that you are arguing that the efficiency gains (ends) constitute a justifiable use of AI (means).
I know the expression and didnt talk about any gains (or methods to reach them) of ai in my first comment. Just wanted to know why kiwitb thinks what he/she said is a bad thing. Kiwitb concluded that i think that the gains of ai justifiy the means, which is not was i was talking about at all. So i asked kiwitb what he/she thinks the means are, that kiwi thought i was refering to in her/his comment