When I was a kid I had a disc that had some 100-200 SNES games burned onto it. No idea how we got it… My guess is my dad got it from a friend or something.

I played the shit out of Earth Defense Force, Knights of the Round, and Gundam Wing: Endless Duel with my Dreamcast. Though my mom made me stop playing Gundam Wing because one of the Gundam was called Deathscythe and Satanic Panic was in full swing.

Chicago-style pizza too.

But yeah, the diversity isn’t as significant as the comic would lead you to believe.

Just because a lot of people are using them does not necessarily mean they are actually valuable. You’re claim assumes that people are acting rationally regarding them. But that’s an erroneous assumption to make.

People are falling in “love” with them. Asking them for advice about mental health. Treating them like they are some kind of all-knowing oracle (or even having any intelligence whatsoever), when in reality they know nothing and cannot reason at all.

Ultimately they are immensely effective at creating a feedback loop that preys on human psychology and reinforces a dependency on it. It’s a bit like addiction in that way.

So completely unqualified to speak to the experience of being a software engineer? Ok.

So you’ve just been talking out of your ass for the whole thread? That explains a lot.

Yeah, fortunately while our CTO is giddy like a schoolboy about LLMs, he hasn’t actually attempted to force it on anyone, thankfully.

Unfortunately, a number of my peers now seem to have become irreparably LLM-brained.

It is, actually. The entire point of what I was saying is that you have all these engineers now that reflexively jump straight to their LLM for anything and everything. Using their brains to simply write some code themselves doesn’t even occur to them as an something they should do. Much like you do, by the sounds of it.

No, good engineers were not constantly googling problems because for most topics, either the answer is trivial enough that experienced engineers could answer them immediately, or complex and specific enough to the company/architecture/task/whatever that Googling it would not be useful. Stack overflow and the like has always only ever really been useful as the occasional memory aid for basic things that you don’t use often enough to remember how to do. Good engineers were, and still are, reasoning through problems, reading documentation, and iteratively piecing together system-level comprehension.

The nature of the situation hasn’t changed at all: problems are still either trivial enough that an LLM is pointless, or complex and specific enough that an LLM will get it wrong. The only difference is that an LLM will spit out plausible-sounding bullshit and convince people it’s valuable when it is, in fact, not.

Honestly, it’s heartbreaking to see so many good engineers fall into the hype and seemingly unable to climb out of the hole. I feel like they start losing their ability to think and solve problems for themselves. Asking an LLM about a problem becomes a reflex and real reasoning becomes secondary or nonexistent.

Executives are mostly irrelevant as long as they’re not forcing the whole company into the bullshit.

Based has been around forever, it’s not some new slang.

cut -d ' ' -f1 master race

Not only does it not speed up work, it actually slows down work: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/

vimtutor is the starting point for learning vim, but it’s fairly surface-level. To actually learn vim, you should read through the user manual by typing :help usr_01 and hitting enter in vim. It’s also accessible online here: https://vimhelp.org/usr_01.txt.html#usr_01.txt.

It’s a fairly quick read, about 40ish pages that are reasonably short and is intended to be read straight through like a book. It provides a good overview of all of vim’s features.

Note: this is distinct from the reference manual, which is much, much larger and isn’t intended to be read straight through.

Why does a graphics card app know how fucking old you are?

That is pretty immaterial to the issue. The issue is that when it comes to security, it’s extremely poor form to rely on unintelligent mimicry.

I’m also in my 30s. I’ve been to a bunch of “girly” concerts with my wife and have had a great time at all of them.

It’s much easier to enjoy life when you let go of notions of what you should or should not be enjoying. Music doesn’t need to be gendered. You can just enjoy it for what it is.

In fact, I’d extend the idea to countless other facets of life: there’s so much pointless gendering in society that does a huge disservice to everyone, men included. I’ll give you a dumb example: I used to hold the notion in my younger years that if I were given a purse to hold, that I had to hold the purse in such a way to telegraph that it wasn’t actually my purse. Like grasp it like some kind of ape man or something. Like… What is the fucking point in that? It’s so goddamn dumb and childish. Now I often take turns holding my wife’s purse (it can be a bit heavy because it also doubles as a diaper bag for our toddler) and don’t give a single fuck about doing so.

I can give you countless other examples where I was raised with incredibly damaging ideas ultimately stemming from toxic masculinity that I have painstakingly excised from my psyche.

Yeah, pretty disappointing to see from the Guardian.

Um yeah, definitely. My TV has never had Internet connectivity, not should it.

It convinces people it improves their performance. It doesn’t in reality: https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown.

I obviously understand that they are AI in the original computer science sense. But that is a very specific definition and a very specific context. “Intelligence” as it’s used in natural language requires cognition, which is something that no computer is capable of. It implies an intellect and decision-making ability. None of which computers posses.

We absolutely need to dispel this notion because it is already doing a great deal of harm all over. This language absolutely contributed to the scores of people that misuse and misunderstand it.