Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
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The Death of the Junior Developer
Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there's no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we'll have AGI by then and it'll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer's time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.
If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I've read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I'd have two nickles. Which isn't a lot of money but it's weird that it happened twice.
As a "senior" programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don't have to baby them or "prompt engineer" stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.
Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for "socket example I hate unix please make it gentle". Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don't care because they were never doing real work in the first place.
this is such a sad slop. i wouldn't guess it's yegge, it's so far from his style when he used to write himself.
Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they don't alter the deal further).
Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.
I'm oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didn't know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).
"DevOps" is a word meaning "sysadmin who can still use the command line"
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was "Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren't software engineers and hell, they don't even call themselves engineers".
a euphemism treadmill of "keeping shit working"
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who's worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with "Venereal Disease" and passing through "Special Clinic" on the way to "Sexual Health Clinic". Same thankless job, just different labels.
Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.
I don't feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before
Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, don't answer that please.
There are "sysadmins" who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to using the command line.
..what... What would they use instead?
having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux
I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted
then there are others
i'm at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes it's just not enough, cos it's Babby's First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath
How do they sysadmin a server that doesn't have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?
RDP, duh
how dare you deny them their bounty of GPUs for every server in the rack