I may or may not have done this haha. I’m a threat to any working piece of software, just enough knowledge to be able to break shit and too little knowledge to avoid breaking shit. I think after all these years I’ve mostly learnt my lesson though. The package manager is the boss, and if I don’t like it I have to work around it without upsetting the package manager

Good meme. However I do think that most people starting out will not really have to deal with any of those issues in the first few years apart from maybe the pip/venv/poetry/etc choice. But whatever they’ll pick it’ll probably work well enough for whatever they’re doing. When I started out I didn’t use any external libraries apart from pygame (which probably came pre-installed). I programmed in the IDLE editor that came with Python. I have no idea how I functioned that way, but I learnt a lot and hat plenty of fun.

I think autism falls onto this category for me. I wasn’t diagnosed until my early 20s. It did hold me back and probably made some things way harder than they should be. But likewise it also fuelled my desire to constantly learn new stuff. Especially when I was younger my interests would constantly switch around. My mind was constantly hyper-focused on the few topics that I was interested in at that moment. Anything else was deemed irrelevant.

This made me struggle with anything that didn’t interest me, but I managed to just about get by in those subjects. But more “logic driven” subjects like math, chemistry, physics, and biology would constantly feed me with new interesting information to dive into. Throughout highschool and especially throughout university (Computer Science) this effectively became a way for me to learn without much effort. Whenever something is interesting to me, the information is just absorbed and I’d spend my free time still thinking about it. Many lectures in uni just led to an overwhelming stream of new ideas and as a result to me playing around with the concepts explained to me

Autism definitely isn’t a “super weapon” like some people seem to claim, but certain parts of it can be very useful traits in the education system and beyond.

All those with a known number attached (or when I’m expecting an unknown call). Probably 70-80%. But I rarely call, maybe like once or twice a month

The “Forgetting How Your Own Code Works” is real. I’ve looked at code, thought to myself “what fcking idiot wrote this garbage”, only to see my own name next to it. It’s a very humbling experience

I was just about to post the same thing. I’ve been using Linux for almost 10 years. I never really understood the folder layout anyway into this detail. My reasoning always was that /lib was more system-wide and /usr/lib was for stuff installed for me only. That never made sense though, since there is only one /usr and not one for every user. But I never really thought further, I just let it be.

I try to steer as many people as I know to Signal, but I don’t want to be the type of person who accepts no compromise so I also use a bunch of others. Whatsapp is the most common, as pretty much everyone here in the Netherlands uses it. I used to use Telegram, but nowadays I trust it less than Whatsapp and all my Telegram chats have moved to Signal. SMS is only there for backup and older people who don’t use other apps. And Discord is there for people who want their messages to never be read, because that app is a dumpster fire that constantly makes me miss messages.

Maybe the phrase “white ones are better” triggered some moderation bot?

Sometimes I look at the memes around here and wonder wtf y’all are doing. Like, neither my code nor the code at the place I work at are perfect. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a merge do this. Maybe some of the most diverged merges temporarily had a lot of errors because of some refactoring, but then it was just a few find + replaces away from being fixed again. But those were merges where multiple teams had been working on both the original and the fork for years and even then it was usually pretty okay.

Not everyone is a native English speaker. You get what they’re saying, stop being so rude

Video games are honestly incredible. The prices have stayed relatively the same for a very long time, despite inflation, and yet the quality has shot up immensely. On the one end you have the AAA games like Cyberpunk, Jedi: Survivor, and RDR2 which look absolutely stunning. I’ve spent significant amount of time in games like those just being in awe with the graphics, taking screenshots. These worlds are so big and immersive, and there are so many tiny details.

Then you have the huge indy/smaller game scene. There are so many good games these days, it’s impossible to play them all. Factorio, Satisfactory, Celeste, Stardew Valley, Valheim, BAR, the list goes on and on. And all for a low price or even no money at all.

I always thought LibreOffice was shit and it always felt like I was using a “replacement”. However, after finally using Word again after many years I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually not miles ahead and also quite shit. The docx format is bad, so Word is still better at dealing with it purely because it’s their format, but LibreOffice honestly has a nore logical but uglier design. The Word top bar is pure pain

Yeah definitely this. The improvements are insane compared to 10 years ago. It’s just annoying that techbro’s and CEOs have decided that it’s the next big thing and will shove it into anything. To too many people AI is a tool that’ll solve any problem, even if it’s usually a very wasteful and unpredictable solution.

Luckily we seem to be hitting the hype plateau and people are getting increasingly sceptical. I’m just hoping it won’t lead to another AI winter. There’s still plenty to gain and figure out, but we don’t need the insane hype that exists now.

No, people just don’t like crypto because it’s a huge waste of energy that has no use for the average person at the moment and is only used by rich people to get richer without much regulation. Don’t get me wrong, it might definitely be useful when used correctly in the future. Not wasting as much energy by ditching proof of work, becoming actually useful for normal transactions, etc. But right now it’s just an overhyped technology for obnoxious cryptobros.

From the train dataset that was frozen many years ago. It’s like you know something instead of looking it up. It doesn’t provide sources, it just makes shit up based on what was in the (old) dataset. That’s totally different than looking up the information based on what you know and then using the new information to create an informed answer backed up by sources

No. ChatGPT pulls information out of its ass and how I read it SearchGPT actually links to sources (while also summarizing it and pulling information out of it’s ass, presumably). ChatGPT “knows” things and SearchGPT should actually look stuff up and present it to you.

Imo it’s both overblown and very impressive. Deep neural networks are capable of many things that we didn’t even imagine 10 years ago. We’ve made huge leaps.

The problem is that every company is putting “AI” in everything and techbro’s and managers are heavily overvaluing the technology. Most companies don’t need AI. In many cases there are way better methods to do the thing they want to do. The fridge or washing machine doesn’t need AI, the website of whatever company doesn’t need an AI assistant, and most people don’t need an AI accelerator in their laptop or phone.

I work as a Java programmer, which means that I spend about 50% of my day complaining about Java. Why doesn’t it have enums like Rust? Why are there no tuples? How many goat sacrifices do the Java gods require to support named optional arguments to functions like Python? In the remaining time I have meetings, write docs, write tests, and sometimes even code. Nothing to complain about though, seeing how we are treated compared to people I know who work as taxi drivers or in elderly care, we programmers are basically treated as gods.

As for music, I like Hardstyle and Drum and Bass primarily. Examples: “Phuture Noize & Devin Wild - Waves”, DnB: “Telomic & Susan H - Underwater”. I’ll be visiting the DnB festival “Liquicity festival” this weekend so I’m very hyped right now

My Thinkpad almost turns 10 this year and I still use it. It’s still quite snappy for normal browsing and programming work on the go. Because I had 2 batteries for it that were easily switchable, the battery that I’m using now is not yet completely dead and will take me 1-2 hours of programming.

It has had its screen replaced due to someone kicking my bag and breaking the screen, and I’ve had to replace the keyboard at one point after showering the laptop in tea. But the ease with which you can replace stuff like the keyboard is awesome. The thing is definitely built to last

Oh I never knew, but it seems true. On his Wikipedia page both researches are mentioned. It’s so impressive how these researchers are behind so many different but interesting papers.