Software Development With AI

 ... is enormously productive, within limits.

Among other things at work, I develop Groovy-coded customizations for a large Jira instance. Jira is the world's top project tracking tool. Groovy is a Java derivative that is used by a Jira plugin called ScriptRunner which allows you to access Jira's API and do anything you want. I don't have a development environment, so I work directly on the live production system. I have hundreds of users, tens of thousands of live tickets and a 10-figure gross budget worth of work riding on the use of Jira.

I joke that working on the live production system while people are using it is like fixing a car as its being driven down the freeway without the driver or passengers knowing. I've been doing it this way for years because my employers don't want to spend the money to get me an apprentice, much less pay for a development system and all that it entails.

C'est la vie. I rather enjoy it.

I have been using AI, read: ChatGPT, for almost as long as it's been around to help me with my coding. Being an old man, I didn't want to learn Groovy. I never learned Java and the whole thing sounded like a lot of work. As a result, I ask AI the same basic syntax and coding questions over and over until I learn by osmosis. I'm a perfectly adequate Groovy developer now.

I don't use AI to do system design. While not a real software professional, I have done enough large scale software design to see the picture of interdependencies in my mind's eye. I don't trust anyone or anything to modify it. An apprentice will change all that, after he gets a year or so of development under his belt.

As a result, AI works at the function level, within a class structure in Groovy. I use it all day every day by feeding it my source code and whatever error I might be seeing. I'd say it has at least doubled my output. Customers are getting features in half the time because of AI and because I don't ask it to do anything large scale that I don't understand, I maintain control over the design.

If I let it run wild and it made a mistake, I could end up with a database mass casualty event. Everyone's week would be ruined and my reputation irreparably harmed.

AI At Catican Bayou

At my river house in Alabama, my backhaul is Starlink. Mostly farm country, Baldwin County's fiber is sparse and data rates to the houses are DSL speeds. That's unsatisfactory for a VRBO. On rainy days, the guests will want to pacify their tiny tots with streamed episodes of Paw Patrol, particularly the ones where the puppy team cooperates with ICE agents and pepper sprays a pack of Democratic Socialists during a protest. A DSL connection would result in toddler tantrums and 1-star reviews.

A look at the river in Alabama as of the writing of this post.

Starlink does fine, giving me about 80-100 MBps throughput. I'm not anticipating hosting an OnlyFans site or downloading NOAA's complete data set, so 80 MBps is plenty. All I need is the ability to stream 1-3 videos simultaneously.

My internal network is a mesh system made up of 3 Netgear Orbi WiFi nodes. I use this at home and the mesh allows me much greater reach than a single WiFi router. I imagine I'm paying a throughput price for this, but it does the most important job, giving me a lot-sized footprint of good 802.11 coverage.

At the river, I installed a Raspberry Pi, affectionately known as Riverpi, to act as my controller. I added it to my small Tailscale network which includes my home Linux server, my laptop and desktop PCs and my phone. If you haven't heard of Tailscale, it allows you to create a VPN between remote systems. It's awesome.

Unlike my Jira installation at work, I allowed AI to write absolutely everything I needed on the Riverpi. I don't bother to read anything it writes. I think it's called vibe coding. I give it loose specs and then it treats me like a child and walks me through what needs to be done. When I encounter errors, I cut and paste the errors into my AI chat session and it works me through the necessary corrections.

As a result, with only a few hours of work, I now have a remotely accessible system that captures images from my ReoLink camera at the end of the boat house, serves up a page of weather data taken from some free Internet source, tells me the status of all the devices on my network by gathering information from my Orbi primary node and hosts a page telling me the status of the Riverpi.

At no time did I bother to understand what it was doing any deeper than absolutely necessary. I had AI walk me through setting up the Riverpi as a drive on my PC and laptop so I can access the files in /var/www/html from File Explorer. I open the sources in Dreamweaver and dutifully paste in whatever inscrutable nonsense AI gives me.

It might be good code. It might be a tangled mess. I don't know and haven't bothered to look. What it does is work.

Assessment

I would never, never do this at work. There is way too much riding on the success of that project. When customers find bugs, I can't trust anyone but myself to fix them. If the design ever got away from me, and right now, there are parts that are at the very limits of my ability to remember all I've done, I'd be cooked.

At the river house, who cares? If the thing blows up because AI told me to CTRL-A delete and I went along with it, I can just wait for my next visit, do a factory reset and start over.

From time to time, I ask AI to teach me this or that in Groovy and it always does a good job. Despite my best efforts, I'm learning the language and enjoying it.

I think that's the sweet spot for AI at work. Have it solve very small, bounded problems on a system you understand down to the nuts and bolts. Ask it to teach you small lessons you need to learn. 

Large-scale vibe coding is for hobby-level work only.

Arday Was Just A Catalyst

 ... or maybe he was an indicator. I'll leave it to you to come up with the right descriptive word.

Dig this. The professor who pursued the Arday story and brought his fraud and fabulism to light, Nathan Cofnas, used to teach at Cambridge, but was hounded out of the university for uncovering Arday's deceptions and the university's willing compliance. From there, he went to Ghent University in Belgium. Ghent is no slouch, ranking as the second best university in Belgium and in the top 100 globally.

Ghent just suspended Cofnas.

Ghent University in Belgium announces it is taking “appropriate action” …against the academic who *exposed* the Arday plagiarism.

The rectors says they attach great importance to academic freedom, but it “may be restricted to protect the rights of others.”

Cofnas is convinced he's about to be fired.

I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.

The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.

 Who is Petra De Sutter? Well, he is the Rector of Ghent. He's also convinced he's a woman.

Rector Paul De Sutter, who goes by 'Petra' nowadays (shielding him from criticism), is an insult to science itself.

He hates real scientists and truth. Paul even denies the existence of binary biological sex. When I had a debate with him on national television about transgenderism, he lost badly and tried to get me kicked out of university out of spite.

Paul, leading member of the far-left Green Party, is also extremely incompetent. During his four year tenure as minister responsible for state companies, our two biggest state companies Bpost (postal services) and Proximus (telecom services) lost respectively 80% and 65% of their market value.

Take the claims about the debate by Dries Van Langenhove with a grain of salt until you've seen it for yourself. I haven't and I haven't even looked for it. I found sufficient corroborating evidence to believe "Petra" is indeed a loon who thinks he's a woman.

And so here we are. Jason Arday, a man who was clearly mentally ill, was vaulted into one of the most prestigious positions in one of the greatest universities on Earth by a pack of moral perverts and now supported by an autogynephilic man in a similarly prestigious university, himself holding a position of great consequence after having demolished a pair of large, state-run enterprises.

Matt Walsh's pithy take on the whole thing might be the best summation of what has happened to our top schools.

This Is A Fetish

Dig this.

When Jason Arday was named Cambridge's youngest black professor, the BBC made at least 5 documentaries about him and gave him his own radio series.

This is a fetish. It's gross. I feel like I've been given a view into a guy's bedroom where he likes to dress up in a French maid costume. 

It's not just Cambridge, it's all of them plus the newsmedia.

Arday Or Arday Not?

Apparently, the answer is Arday not.

That's some black humor, dark pun intended, after Jason Arday committed suicide following his public unmasking as a complete fraud and fabulist and his dismissal from Cambridge.

Well of course he did. Anyone listening to him spin his tall tales for even 10 minutes would have seen that he was a mentally ill compulsive liar. What was it, 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 5 on a broken leg? My goodness, any of his stories would have been enough to convince someone with even an ounce of sense that this guy should be seeing a psychiatrist, not the inside of the Cambridge faculty lounge.

And yet, there he was.

Arday was a pitiful person worthy of compassion, not censure. Yes, he had a habit of tarring accusers as racists and took steps to have them face court proceedings any time he was threatened, but what of that? Of course he did. The entire, rotten education, entertainment and news industries filled his head with twaddle about white supremacists and racial justice. The problem was never with Arday, it was always with Cambridge and its ilk.

You can substitute the names "Claudine Gay" and "Harvard" and save for the suicide, the story would be the same.

Our education system is very, very ill.

It was at that moment that Professor Wilson realized that his equations for diversity, affirmation and success gave him an unsolvable set of contradictory inputs.

Bonus Cambridgery

Arday is just the tip of the iceberg. From this X post comes the content below. Cambridge is hiring these people on purpose. 

Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan:

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.

Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’

Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. 

During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.

She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’

Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’

Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together.

Gay? Arday? No Way!

By now, you've probably heard about Cambridge's very own Baron Munchausen, Jason Arday. His meteoric rise through the ranks of academia was originally assumed to be due to his brilliant achievements, but in the end, it was discovered it was due to his possession of one crucial characteristic that all upper-echelon universities crave: he's black.

If you haven't been following the story, it's really simple. He is a pathological liar and fabulist as well as a plagiarist. The leadership at one university after another fell over themselves to recruit and promote him until he ended up the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge.

If you haven't been following the story, it's worth some digging. I'm not kidding about the Baron Munchausen thing. In addition to stealing other peoples' work and taking it for himself, the guy claimed all manner of perfectly preposterous accomplishments including running several ultra-marathons in a single month. The more you read, the more pathetic ... Arday? No, not him ... Cambridge? Yes, that's it ... Cambridge becomes.

You can substitute Claudine Gay from Harvard in here and get the same results. The Daily Wire crew recently did some investigative journalism, something that disqualifies their staff from ever landing jobs at any of our prestigious newspapers, and discovered that Heidi M. Anderson, president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, was also a massive plagiarist and her tenure as president is shot through with accusations of anti-white racism. She's black, you understand.

Any condemnation of Gay, Arday or Anderson is met with shrill cries of "Racism!" That's the tell.

What the desperate leaders at all of these universities are fighting is not white supremacy, but the very real possibility that the mountains of racial IQ data might be correct. They've tied themselves to the railroad tracks of racial interchangeability, if not white inferiority and now they're trying to keep from being run over by the train labeled "Reality." 

I'm not saying the data is correct or that it isn't the result of cultural forces. I don't really care either way. Genesis 1:27 tells me how to treat each person whether that's a white tweaker sitting next to me at a Waffle House in Arkansas or a black theoretical math student in class with me at UCSD back in the day. Like the evolution debate, I don't have a dog in that fight.

That leaves me free to speculate. If the average IQ for blacks is 90, say, and Harvard accepted only people with an IQ of 130 or above, then given the demographics of the US, you'd expect for the student population (6,700 or so) to have about 200 blacks in it. That's roughly 1 in 33.

Using that as a baseline, you might expect the faculty of the top shelf universities to have the same ratio.

They don't. Not only do they not have that ratio, they're positively obsessed with getting black representation as high as possible.

If the IQ data is true, then the only way to do that would be to hire lots of people like Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and Heidi Anderson, which is what we're seeing.

You can't blame Arday and Co. They're just playing by the rules and rationally taking the opportunities offered to them. It's easy to point the finger at the plagiarists and yarn-spinners, but the moral universe the progressives have created has told them to ignore Commandment 9, the one about bearing false witness, when it comes to finding employment.

Can you blame them for doing what they did?

Ugh

It's been quite the adventure here in Alabama. I'm working full time while getting a fairly long list of tasks accomplished to get our river house ready to be a vacation rental. It's all going rather well and I'll be done in a week with the place ship shape. However, these endless 11 and 12 hour days are a grind.

I celebrated rather freely last night, having completed one of the most important tasks a bit ahead of schedule. A potent mix of alcohol and tobacco, you know. The results this morning have been dreadful. Naturally, I found just enough energy this morning to sit in front of the computer and type out some doggerel with the help of ChatGPT.

I could just hear Basil Fitzallen now in full Terry Thomas mode nursing a similar situation...

"You know, I'd hate to encounter great-great-uncle Reginald Fitzallen in the afterlife right about now. He fell under a hail of poisoned arrows from a group of enraged savages while exploring the Zambezi for the Royal Society. I've been laid low by tobacco and cocktails."

“Reginald, you understand, had been feverish for three days. Spear wound in the thigh. Lost two bearers to crocodiles. Nonetheless continued upriver because he'd promised the Society accurate measurements of the damned falls.”

Basil regarded his coffee with profound distaste. “I, meanwhile, consumed several perfectly agreeable drinks and smoked rather more tobacco than was strictly indicated.”

Bobby, looking equally bedraggled, looked over the rim of his cup. “Heroic.”

“Quite.”

“Did you at least discover anything?”

“Yes. Apparently there is an upper limit.”

“Important scientific work.”

Basil sighed. “The Fitzallens have always made sacrifices in the advancement of human knowledge.”

“Your great-great-uncle explored the Zambezi.”

“And I established the maximum safe dosage of Three Old Men tobacco.”

“Royal Society ought to hear about it.”

Basil considered this. “I rather think we'll keep it within the family.”

General Beauregard was lying nearby looking perfectly healthy despite having eaten something unspeakable he found beside the river. Basil stared at him.

"That animal consumed half a decomposing nutria yesterday.”

Bobby nodded. “Seems fine.”

“That hound is absolutely insufferable.” 

Who Has The Best Selection Of Lodge Cast Iron Skillets?

In South Alabama, it's this place. They have them all.

Buc-ee's is new to Alabama. This one is right off the I-10 in Robertsdale. Being a California boy, I'd never been inside a Buc-ee's. It was amazing. I've never seen such retail energy and this was on a Tuesday afternoon. The place was a frenzy of joyful purchasing. I don't mean that in a condescending, superior way, I mean that with genuine admiration and affection.

I didn't get a stuffed beaver, but I did get the Lodge battleship, their biggest skillet, a 15" monster. Buc-ee's had the entire line. Who knew?

I just realized I need to go back and get stuffed beavers for the granddaughter and the new tot next door.