Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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. If you’re wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)
(EDIT: Changed “29th February” to “1st March” - its not a leap year)
this is nearly as dumb as elon’s “show me your 5 best lines of code” shit while he was err, downsizing twitter. What are you supposed to do when a code review flags some bad code? fondle your prompts repeatedly until that part gets fixed? Sounds like a solution that will often be much less efficient than making edits by hand. Maybe they just don’t do code reviews now, that would be cool.
It seems clear that every single company that makes money off of software is or will soon be in a race to the bottom on software quality and that’s just amazing, i love it for everyone. I choose to laugh rather than cry.
A lot of younger people who are being conditioned to accept this stuff just weren’t around to experience how unstable and unreliable the vast majority of PC software was in the 1990s, and a lot of more senior-level people must have willfully forgotten. I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. The difference was that in the 90s, the major PC companies could port their enterprise-grade OSes with proper memory protection down to the consumer level, as hardware advanced and running a more complex OS kernel was no longer a big demand. Even then, it was an uphill battle, especially once you threw widespread networking and dubious internet-sourced malware into the equation.
End-user software has already seen a decline in quality and increase in user frustration during the cloud era, as many apps have become siloed blobs of JavaScript running on top of an extra copy of your web browser engine. I’m concerned that we’re headed firmly back to the bad old days now, without the release valve of better underlying software stacks on the horizon. The main solution will likely be to rip a lot of this crap out and start over (which is already a pretty widespread approach anyway, my credit union is going on their 3rd online banking “upgrade” in 5 years). But that completely zeroes out the “productivity” gains, not that anyone touting such things will ever measure it that way. I suppose the cost of re-stabilizing the software industrial base will be counted as GDP gains instead.
When I do code review these days, sometimes I genuinely can’t tell whether I’m talking to the person or to the slop extruder. It often ends up with me repeating the same comment over and over again.
Had an email chain the other day like that. Must have went back and forth with the guy five times, every time ending my response with some permutation of “we’re still looking into it, I’ll keep you updated.”
His last response to me was incredibly similarly worded to an AI being told it’s wrong, which was hilarious because I was the one who told him what he was saying didn’t apply to the situation. Setting on his personal install of a tool vs a company wide configuration that needed to be adjusted. Then he ended it with “But is there any way I could ask you to continue looking into this?”
Reported his ass to management. I literally told him I was doing that as my first fucking response. Having an AI take over your correspondence after you asked me for assistance is beyond anything remotely ok.
Edit: Thankfully my boss thoroughly enjoys playing “This is how much money you burned by wasting this much of my team’s time.” with other departments. He’d better not retire anytime soon.
god this sounds exhausting