But oh boy is it a flashy good-looking structured cool code! It doesn’t work, but it’s cool!

Purely out of curiosity, I used the Cursor IDE for a personal project involving a lot of math-y stuff, and this really wasn’t my experience.

Not only was most of what it produced wrong (ran just fine, but mostly produced complete garbage), the code quality was absolute shit. Overly long functions, often with parts that repeated, kept shoving more and more parameters into those overly long functions, no sense of using abstractions to cut down on code length etc. etc.

Might have partially been a question of language choice; I was using Julia, and there’s definitely not going to be as much training data for it compared to something like Python (🤮), and a lot of the code that is out there has been written by people who aren’t coders but scientists

Fuck me am I glad I’m out of the corporate world

I wish users would report their problem istead of what they think is the solution.

And when they do report the problem, they should report the actual problem they had and not what they think the problem is.

So instead of eg. “my computer’s been hacked!”, it’s actually “I saw a scary error dialog I didn’t understand”

I know so many ops people who are practically functional alcoholics and I’m not surprised at all

I hope you wear the velcro shoes for your own sake

I wonder what the daily recommended allowance of irony is

I mean I’m like 99.9999% sure the post itself is satire, but what worries me is that I’m not sure if the concept of “higher order vibes” is itself satire or not

mOvE fAsT aNd BrEaK tHiNgS

Hanlon’s Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often. Also, I really didn’t say we were “under attack”

I absolutely don’t know, but my guess would be spambots or somesuch

(is great (oh (really (like-p lisp you))))

Doing stupid things because stupid people do stupid things too 👌

Comparing apples to oranges doesn’t make any more sense just because someone else does something even dumber.

In fact, maybe we should run offices like that. Just breed developers in a closed system

At some point going as far as trying to genetically engineer an even larger hamster instead of just changing the design so that it could use multiple smaller but parallel hamsters

But doing anything about it now might hurt shareholder profits in the next few quarters, so let’s just wait until things get even worse – then we can start murdering scapegoats and pray for our neofeudalist techbro overlords to save us

Wonder how long it’ll take the “masses” to realise that this situation can’t be solved peacefully anymore

Conservatives certainly didn’t. They’re stupid enough to think that what Musk and Trump are doing is Freedom™

Yay thank you. I don’t like posting stuff like this without attribution and my image searches just kept turning up imgur and reddit links

“Gaymas” sounds like a delightful holiday

I think my dumbest customer story isn’t programming-related but still related to computers. I worked in a small computer repair shop about 3000 years ago, and one day a customer comes in with their family computer that’s “not working.” It turned out to be full of viruses and malware, and when we started working on it it turned out this was due to somebody visiting shady porn sites and clicking on download buttons left and right. I explain the situation to her and then recommend steps on how to avoid this happening in the future, so how to browse safely, antivirus software etc. She feelt a bit embarrassed and says that it’s her son, and that she’ll give him a talking-to.

A few weeks later the same customer comes back with the family computer and this time she’s visibly annoyed, and curiously she’s brought along the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The computer’s got viruses again, and it’s my fault. Why? Because she’d had a talk with her son who had then sworn up and down that he’ll mend his filthy ways. When new viruses cropped up, his explanation was that obviously they’re in the keyboard, mouse and monitor too, and since they hadn’t been in the shop they were still infected and we were just too incompetent to have known this. Naturally she believed her son over my word, and started demanding that we remove the viruses from all the peripherals. I tried for a very long time to explain that it’s just not possible (this was a time when PS/2 connectors were still pretty common and that’s what they had so it wasn’t even theoretically possible), but she wouldn’t budge because her son was a computer whiz (he wasn’t) and a Good Boy™ and would never lie, so clearly I was either incompetent or lying.

Finally I just relented and said “OK you got me, it’s possible your viruses came from the peripherals but I just didn’t want to mention it because removing them is so time-consuming and difficult”. I took all their hardware in and had it unfucked in pretty short order, and I looked at the browser history to make sure that it really was a reinfection via the web, which it was (I remember Pamela Anderson featuring in a lot of the searches, which we techs giggled at.)

I kept their hardware at the shop for a couple of weeks; it’s a tricky and demanding job to remove viruses from mouses, keyboards and monitors, remember? When writing the bill I charged her double the time I actually put in – she didn’t want to pay at all because she felt it was our mistake but at that point my boss, who was a formidable lady, practically put her boot up the customer’s ass and made her cough up the money.

She left in a huff never to be seen again, thank the gods.

Aww, someone’s throwing a cissy fit