I presume we're still talking about software. Auditing proves what?
Accountants audit that the books are consistent. It's extremely hard to fake consistency and do fraud, especially when there's 3rd parties involved. The edges of the arithmetic get nailed down, because bank payments were sent and invoices paid. So the internal consistency is checkable and valuable.
But software. Are you proving it does what you want? But you didn't write down what you want. Or maybe you're into spec-driven development, or detailed wikis, or whatnot, so you did. Most people aren't, though, and those docs are already out of date anyway.
I think there's something here, because we're all telling our agents what we want the software to be. So maybe you could audit against that. But this isn't the same as accounting.
So I think this (AI-written) thing is mostly interesting because of some of the comments, in which commenters lament Cringely putting out this kind of stuff in the lead-up to his death, which they also manage to verify with an obituary.
It reads like it too. I don't fully understand why a sentence like "It's the signature that costs." makes it into machine output (It costs... what? What does it cost?) But here we are.
According to a HN post, and basically nothing else that I can seem to find.
Who knows, maybe he's still alive and posted the death notice himself. Dude is/was a compulsive liar. There's still to this day no actual evidence that he genuinely has passed away (unless I'm just unable to find it)
What's it audit?
I presume we're still talking about software. Auditing proves what?
Accountants audit that the books are consistent. It's extremely hard to fake consistency and do fraud, especially when there's 3rd parties involved. The edges of the arithmetic get nailed down, because bank payments were sent and invoices paid. So the internal consistency is checkable and valuable.
But software. Are you proving it does what you want? But you didn't write down what you want. Or maybe you're into spec-driven development, or detailed wikis, or whatnot, so you did. Most people aren't, though, and those docs are already out of date anyway.
I think there's something here, because we're all telling our agents what we want the software to be. So maybe you could audit against that. But this isn't the same as accounting.
So I think this (AI-written) thing is mostly interesting because of some of the comments, in which commenters lament Cringely putting out this kind of stuff in the lead-up to his death, which they also manage to verify with an obituary.
Same here. Apparently he really liked AIs, although given his history that's not surprising.
[delayed]
Pangram flags this 100% AI written.
It reads like it too. I don't fully understand why a sentence like "It's the signature that costs." makes it into machine output (It costs... what? What does it cost?) But here we are.
To me it read like a human was pointedly imitating AI , but with a more antagonistic tone. Maybe he asked it to write the article "in his voice".
It never was about X. It was Y.
Didn’t Cringely pass away recently?
According to a HN post, and basically nothing else that I can seem to find.
Who knows, maybe he's still alive and posted the death notice himself. Dude is/was a compulsive liar. There's still to this day no actual evidence that he genuinely has passed away (unless I'm just unable to find it)
This is supposedly his obituary:
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/mark-stephens-obit...
This post is also dated in July, which would have been before he passed away if that post was accurate.