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 youā€™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 cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

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

  • dovel@awful.systemsEnglish
    0Ā·
    29 days ago

    I have to share this one.

    Now donā€™t think of me as smug, Iā€™m only trying to give you a frame of reference here, but: Iā€™m pretty good at Vim. Iā€™ve been using it seriously for 15 years and can type 130 words per minute even on a bad day. Iā€™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 couldnā€™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 gymā€¦

    In Munich I spoke at a meetup that was held in the rooms of the universityā€™s AI group. While talking to some of the young programmers there I came to realize: they couldnā€™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 donā€™t care. Theyā€™ve grown up as programmers with AI already available to them. Of course they use it, why wouldnā€™t they? Next question. Concerns about ā€œis this still the same programming that I fell in love with?ā€ seemed so silly that I didnā€™t even dare to say them out loud.

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

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      1Ā·
      29 days ago

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

      ā€œLike everyone else in my social circle, which I confuse with the entirety of the world, I am easily distracted by jangling keysā€

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0Ā·
      29 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 shouldnā€™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 didnā€™t like but would still be able to get to the same place, but this would seem to disagree.

      • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
        1Ā·
        29 days ago

        It doesnā€™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.