Free Republic

A survey from AI biz Qodo finds robo-coding productivity gains are unevenly distributedExclusive Software developers largely appreciate the productivity improvements they get from AI coding tools, but they don't entirely trust their output, according to a survey conducted by AI coding biz Qodo. As a result, some potential productivity gains get lost to manual reviews deemed necessary to check the AI's work. Qodo offers "an agentic code quality platform for reviewing, testing, and writing code," so it has an opinion on such matters. For its report titled "The State of AI Code Quality 2025" – provided in advance to...

CodeSignal Ranks Ranks Top U.S. Universities in Coding A San Francisco company whose General Coding Assessment is widely used by major technology companies ranked Carnegie Mellon No. 1 this year and last year, while the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was No. 2.San Jose State University has shot past Stanford and UC Berkeley to a top-10 spot in a ranking of U.S. universities based on a standardized computer coding test. The school leapt to the No. 9 spot this year in rankings by CodeSignal, a San Francisco company whose General Coding Assessment is widely used by major technology companies to evaluate...

A bit of a surprise for you as you enter your weekend: somewhere around 20% to 30% of Microsoft’s code in “repos”, according to CEO Satya Nadella, is written by artificial intelligence (AI). This is, perhaps, not quite as surprising as it could be—at Meta Platforms , it is actually closer to half—but it still made investors take notice. Shares of Microsoft gained nearly 2.5% in the closing minutes of Friday’s trading. While at LlamaCon, Nadella noted the figure in question, and noted that that number was not standing still, either. In fact, the proportion of code written by AI...

Way back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding. Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to...

There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it.It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They were succeeded by programmers writing machine instructions as binary code to be input one bit at a time by flipping switches on the front of a computer. Assembly language programming then put an end to that. It lets a programmer use a human-like language to tell...

We all, at some point, have fantasized about giving our employers a big middle finger on the way out the door, whether we leave on our own volition or are pushed out. Well, a 55-year-old Texas man allegedly built an automated bird flipper in the form of a kill switch that crashed his company’s systems and locked people out of their accounts when he was fired. Satisfying as that may have been, he now faces up to 10 years in prison, according to the Department of Justice, for setting the trip wire on his way out the door. Here’s the...

Back in 2012, “learn to code” was an optimistic mantra. Born from a viral marketing campaign for one of the earliest coding boot camps, it promised recession-burned career-changers a future-proof option. But that was when the future looked somewhat different.Recent cohorts of aspiring software developers are now looking for jobs in a post-pandemic tech sector riven by rampant layoffs. The Coding Bootcamp subreddit, a community with 48,000-plus members, is teeming with recent posts from graduates who are struggling to find work. Prospects have gotten so dire that one of the leading boot camps, Launch Academy, recently paused enrollment, citing a...

Thank you for the kind introduction. I want to start by thanking President Macron for hosting the event and of course, for the lovely dinner last night. During the dinner, President Macron looked at me and asked if I would like to speak, and I said, "Mr. President, I'm here for the good company and free wine, but I have to earn my keep today." I, of course, want to thank Prime Minister Modi for being here and for co-hosting the summit, and all of you for participating. I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was...

Interview Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the Open Source movement, is ready for what comes next: the Post-Open Source movement. "I've written papers about it, and I've tried to put together a prototype license," Perens explains in an interview with The Register. "Obviously, I need help from a lawyer. And then the next step is to go for grant money."Perens says there are several pressing problems that the open source community needs to address.I feel that IBM has gotten everything it wants from the open source developer community now, and we've received something of a middle finger from...

The generative AI will change the way economy functions and businesses are run; it will be a game changer for in many verticals In a world driven by unprecedented technological advancements, there emerges a groundbreaking force that promises to reshape the very fabric of innovation: generative artificial intelligence. With its awe-inspiring ability to create, compose, and imagine, generative AI has surged to the forefront of scientific exploration, capturing the imaginations of researchers, entrepreneurs, and artists alike. From generating realistic images and synthesising music to aiding in drug discovery and revolutionising customer experiences, this cutting-edge technology possesses the potential to revolutionise...

During the period when social media was increasingly putting pressure on legacy media outlets, driving down their profits, a phrase crept into the national lexicon. “Learn to code.” While it was no doubt said in a derisive or at least humorous fashion by most, it carried an underlying assumption that most people accepted. Perhaps you should learn to code. That’s where the jobs of the future would be. But the period when that will be true may turn out to have a much shorter lifespan than anticipated. The rise of Artificial Intelligence and chatbot apps is already automating the work...

NEW YORK, NY—When Huffington Post writer Brutto Chalet discovered he was being let go earlier this year, he decided he was going to do what all Americans do when they lose their job: learn to code. There's just one problem: he suddenly realized the code he was working in was binary. "Excuse me, professor?" he said to his programming teacher. "Yeah, hi. Brutto Chalet, he/him. Did I hear you correctly? Are we only allowed to work in binary code? Are there non-binary options for us to work with?" The teacher said that they would just be learning to program atop...

The basic need is not that of changing all file names (multi commander has that in the menu) but that of changing the case of all the characters within a text that begin with http and end with html. The situational context (take deep breath) is of html files which used to work on a Windows server, but being now on a Linux server which are case sensitive - and with a unresolvable glitch (read on), then it seems that unless one can edit a server's httpd.conf then clicking on a link that begins with a upper case letter can...

America's STEM classrooms are devolving — wasting valuable class time with toys, barely applicable coding games, and victim-mentality nonsense.If you ask any administrator about the future of education, he’ll likely mention the blending of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: STEM. Indeed, it’s so attractive to schools, billions of dollars are spent every year by corporations, startups, and the U.S. federal government in an 1850s-style “gold rush” of gadgetry and glittering lights. To stand out from the competition and get into classrooms, curriculum developers, policymakers, and advocacy groups have begun to scam the education market by forsaking common-sense STEM principles in...

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d be having 15-hour workweeks by the end of the century. But by the time it was 2013, it was clear that the great economist had gotten something wrong.Welcome to the era of bullshit jobs, as anthropologist David Graeber coined it. Since the 1930s, whole new industries have sprung up, which don’t necessarily add much value to our lives. Graeber would probably call most jobs in software development bullshit.I don’t share Graeber’s opinion, especially when it comes to software. But he does touch an interesting point: as more and more processes are automated,...

Mzoudi was a liaison to al Qaeda, witness said. A man claiming to be a former Iranian spy testified Friday that Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second man to be tried for an alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks, was involved in the preparations to hit the World Trade Center. The witness, who goes by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri, took the stand at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg and claimed that Mzoudi, was "responsible for part of the organization" of the suicide attacks that destroyed the twin towers in New York and damaged the Pentagon. Zakeri testified Mzoudi...

COBOL is celebrating 60 years since its specifications were signed off. Darling of Y2K consultants, the language is rapidly approaching pensionable age, but many a greybeard owes their career to it. It arose from a desire to create a language that could straddle the computers of the era. Each manufacturer had its own way of working, which, while OK if a company always stuck with one maker, made portability of programs or skills a tad tricky. If only there was, say, a COmmon Business-Oriented Language? Wouldn't that be splendid? Mary Hawes, a programmer of Burroughs machines, put forward a proposal...

Enough with "learn to code."  As this article points out, that's terrible advice.  Coding isn't beanbag, and if you don't have a problem-solving mindset, you won't be good at it.  It's like telling people to buy power tools and become home-renovators.  Having a tool doesn't inform you about when and how to apply it. What's the problem we are trying to solve here?  Is it to meet a need for more coders or to provide a way for unemployed people to earn a good wage?  I expect that it is the latter, so let's ask: do we need more software developers and software engineers?  We already have many...

Talk about girl power! Speaking at a Women’s History Month event, Ivanka Trump revealed she’ll be taking a computer coding class with her 5-year-old girl Arabella this year. Why? The First Daughter admitted she’s ‘trying to do her part’ when it comes to banishing gender stereotypes — and we are ALL about it! Leading by example, Ivanka Trump, 35, wants to encourage women and girls across the country to learn about computer science. And to show just how important it is for females to get involved in the tech field, the First Daughter announced that she and her daughter Arabella...

By Nahema Marchal | 2:58 pm, December 29, 2016 When the issue of “fake news” came to prominence at the end of this year’s election cycle, traditional media outlets were the firsts to engage in relentless finger-pointing. Journalists everywhere deplored the spread of misleading, lazily reported and, in some cases, totally fabricated stories that had been facilitated by social media. That’d be ignoring — of course — that in a competitive media climate where virality and accuracy go head-to-head, editors will often go for a catchier headline, at the expense of factual accuracy. And as one writer at HEqual noted,...