Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • dovel@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    2 days ago

    I have to share this one.

    Now don’t think of me as smug, I’m only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: I’m pretty good at Vim. I’ve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. I’ve pulled off some impressive stunts with Vim macros. But here I sat, watching an LLM predict where my cursor should go and what I should do there next, and couldn’t help but admit to myself that this is faster than I could ever be.

    Yeah, flex your Vim skills because being fast at editing text is totally the bottleneck of programming and not the quality and speed of our own thoughts.

    The world is changing, this is big, I told myself, keep up. I watched the Karpathy videos, typed myself through Python notebooks, attempted to read a few papers, downloaded resources that promised to teach me linear algebra, watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym.

    Wow man, you watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym…

    In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the university’s AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldn’t give less of a shit about the things I had been concerned about. Was this code written with Pure Vim, was it written with Pure Emacs, does it not contain Artificial Intelligence Sweetener? They don’t care. They’ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldn’t they? Next question. Concerns about “is this still the same programming that I fell in love with?” seemed so silly that I didn’t even dare to say them out loud.

    SIDE NOTE: I plea the resident compiler engineer to quickly assess the quality of this man’s books since I am complete moron when it comes to programming language theory.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      The myth of the “10x programmer” has broken the brains of many people in software. They appear to think that it’s all about how much code you can crank out, as fast as possible. Taking some time to think? Hah, that’s just a sign of weakness, not necessary for the ultra-brained.

      I don’t hear artists or writers and such bragging about how many works they can pump out per week. I don’t hear them gluing their hands to the pen of a graphing plotter to increase the speed of drawing. How did we end up like this in programming?

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
        11·
        1 day ago

        @nightsky @techtakes Back when I was in software dev I had the privilege of working with a couple of superprogrammers (not at the same company, many years apart). They probably wrote *less* code: it was just qualitatively far, far more elegant and effective. And they were fast, too.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      watched 3blue1brown videos at the gym

      Ahh, getting brain gains while also getting your gain gains. Gotta gainmaxx

      I would delete a field in a struct definition and it would suggest “hey, delete it down here too, in the constructor?” and I’d hit tab and it would go “now delete this setter down here too”, tab, “… and this getter”, tab, “… and it’s also mentioned here in this formatting function”, tab. Tab, tab, tab.

      wtf? Refactor functionality exists. You don’t need an LLM for this. There are probably good vim plugins that will do this for you. Clearly this 15 year vim user is still a vim scrub (takes one to know one tbh).

      I started following near, who was talking about Claude like a life companion. near used Claude in every possible situation: to research, to program, to weigh life options, to crack jokes.

      Near needs to touch some fucking grass.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      The books look alright. I only read the samples. The testimonials from experts are positive. Maybe compare and contrast with Lox from Crafting Interpreters, whose author is not an ally but not known evil either. In terms of language design, there’s a lot of truth to the idea that Monkey is a boring ripoff of Tiger, which itself is also boring in order to be easier to teach. I’d say that Ball’s biggest mistake is using Go as the implementation language and not explaining concepts in a language-neutral fashion, which makes sense when working on a big long-lived project but not for a single-person exploration.

      Actually, it makes a lot of sense that somebody writing a lot of Go would think that an LLM is impressive. Also, I have to sneer at this:

      Each prompt I write is a line I cast into a model’s latent space. By changing this word here and this phrase there, I see myself as changing the line’s trajectory and its place amidst the numbers. Words need to be chosen with care, since they all have a specific meaning and end up in a specific place in latent space once they’ve been turned into numbers and multiplied with each other, and what I want, what I aim for when I cast, is for the line to end up in just the right spot, so that when I pull on it out of the model comes text that helps me program machines.

      Dude literally just discovered word choice and composition. Welcome to writing! I learned about this in public education when I was maybe 14.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        1 day ago

        Dude literally just discovered word choice and composition. Welcome to writing! I learned about this in public education when I was maybe 14

        Possible upside of the AI bubble: getting high school English teachers the barest amount of respect from Administration.

        • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          Possible upside of the AI bubble: getting high school English teachers the barest amount of respect from Administration.

          And, arguably, the humanities as a whole getting some begrudging respect - even if only because STEM is looking unimaginably stupid by comparison right now.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        14·
        2 days ago

        Words need to be chosen with care, since they all have a specific meaning and end up in a specific place in latent space once they’ve been turned into numbers and multiplied with each other

        If I am ever that pompous, please just deliver me to the farm upstate

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          1 day ago

          I wonder what’d happen if this person read, like, any international code at all

          go for some malware shellcode! you can find italian php! russian perl! it’s great!

          (and that’s before one even gets to the variety of stuff that existed/exists as completely separate tech bases - russian pdp clones, japanese minicomputers, etc etc)

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      2 days ago

      They’ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them.

      Is that the same AI that’s been available for barely two years?

      What a drama queen.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      Of course, like everyone else present at the Big Bang, I clapped and was excited and tried everything I could think of — from translating phrases to generating poems, to generating code, to asking these LLMs things I would never ask a living being.

      “Like everyone else in my social circle, which I confuse with the entirety of the world, I am easily distracted by jangling keys”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      As someone not versed in the relevant deep lore, did emacs vs vim ever actually matter? Like, my experience is with both as command line text editors, which shouldn’t have nearly as much impact on the actual code being written as the skills and insight of the person doing the writing. I assumed this was a case where you could grumble through working with the one you didn’t like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.

      • aio@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        16 hours ago

        honestly the only important difference between them is that emacs’s default keybindings can and will give you a repetitive stress injury (ask me how i know…)

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        2 days ago

        If nothing else, it’s a trap discussion. The only real answer is “they’re both fine.” Anyone who seriously argues that one is far superior to another probably needs therapy. Joke discussions are fine and signs of a healthy brain.

        E: when I think vim, I think of bram moolenaar, may he rest in peace. When I think emacs, I think of richard stallman, who can go fuck himself with a rake.

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
          5·
          20 hours ago

          remembering fucking stupid flamewars on comp.editors over vi variants, and then there’s Sven Guckes (vim) and Thomas Dickey (nvi) having a lovely discussion

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            20 hours ago

            This is like learning about the christmas truce in WWI.

            Also, I had to search both those guys. RIP Sven Guckes, I’m sure I have more to thank you for than I’ll ever know (unless I go back and check the commits). Thomas Dickey, I hope Luigi Mangione’s defence is going well.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          it’s also a great test for knowing whether you’re dealing with a mature/competent developer or not

      • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.