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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
The Death of the Junior Developer
Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, thereās 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 weāll have AGI by then and itāll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineerās 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 Iāve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete Iād have two nickles. Which isnāt a lot of money but itās weird that it happened twice.
As a āseniorā 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 donāt have to baby them or āprompt engineerā 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 āsocket example I hate unix please make it gentleā. 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 donāt care because they were never doing real work in the first place.
this is such a sad slop. i wouldnāt guess itās yegge, itās 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 donāt alter the deal further).
Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.
Iām oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didnāt know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).
āDevOpsā is a word meaning āsysadmin who can still use the command lineā
@dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was āSysadmins are useless shit now because they arenāt software engineers and hell, they donāt even call themselves engineersā.
a euphemism treadmill of ākeeping shit workingā
@dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor whoās worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with āVenereal Diseaseā and passing through āSpecial Clinicā on the way to āSexual Health Clinicā. Same thankless job, just different labels.
Same basic lessons, tooā¦ āconsider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just metā, etc.
I donāt 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, donāt answer that please.
There are āsysadminsā who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to using the command line.
ā¦whatā¦ 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 weāre 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
iām at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes itās just not enough, cos itās Babbyās First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath
How do they sysadmin a server that doesnāt 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