Flutterby™! : Google shuts down Alpha Fold for Gemini

Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project As It Focuses On Gemini.

Via.

I'm working on a feature that... I mean, it's kinda cool, but there's a lot of conceptual thinking that I don't think has underlaid it, so it's clear that we're exploring the idea space and not building something deep here. [sigh, yeah, I'm feeling this]

So I asked Antigravity to implement it. And then, of course, I had to go into the code and fix it.

I'm thinking a lot about code quality today. With the ProPublica report that Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough (Via, and acknowledging that it's kinda a puff piece for Anthropic), it's clear that Microsoft's software development processes have been broken for years.

Anyone using MacOS can tell you that Apple's software development processes are seriously fucked up.

I'm not, of course, the only person to notice this. In a thread about how disappointing it is that CS professors are deep in LLM boosterism, [object Object] @zzt@mas.to observes that:

it’s a straight line from this to “the AI can solve anything if you throw enough tokens at it” from someone fundamentally incurious about both how problems are solved and how computers solve problems

and their incuriousity was honed and rewarded in the CS program that granted them a degree in spite of their lack of knowledge on anything other than how to take an exam and get a good result in a job interview shaped like an exam for a company whose mission is to use technology to accelerate and cover for genocide

Anyway...

If Gemini is regurgitating the code that's out there, we have a severe code quality problem. Even worse, we have a severe "how we think about code" problem.

I keep thinking about how, in the early '90s (and into the noughts), we enthusiastically brought the online world to the meatspace world because we said "this is an amazing community, we need the world to be this!", and in so doing we destroyed the online world.

And how we said "we need to teach everyone how to program", and we did, and this is the world we got.