What Drove You to Madness?

I've been building my own PHP and JavaScript libraries without actually using any existing open-source ones.

Self-taught, didn't learn about the fun stuff until recently.

Now I'm so far behind in technology, I feel outdated.

Hey maybe you can create one of those super fundamental dependency libraries that XKCD talked about

Less of this AI slop please.

At this occasion I think it adds to the insanity. It makes it look like the nurse is a pationt too, with her trying to roll away a normal chair
I disagree slightly. Memes are ai slop territory
- My thoughts are the same, as long as it's not so bad you can't not notice it, I think it's fine.
- Nah, ai slop should stay in the facebook boomer corner and die.
- Yes but not when it’s something that’s basically just a stock photo. Ill take a big ass watermark across real faces over slop any and everyday.
- I disagree, memes should be mspaint

Being forced to create something in Microsoft poverapps and create a backend with power automate

Implementing support for UK postal codes validation / parsing.

Ew AI slop

But mom it was my turn to write this comment!

I know this post is more about the committing on LLM "fixes", but find the other reasons more interesting.

Similar to the date & time library there are a couple of other things that look easy at a first glance, but get complicated very quickly, because it has so many special cases:

lexicographic sorting (different languages sort things differently)
Postal address formatting (different standards in different countries, with many different context sensitive rules)
string handling
...

Complains about using ai with ai generated slop.

How can you tell?
- How can you not? Like there are specific tells as the other user pointed out, but aside from that so much AI slop just has this absurd uncanny valley quality that Im actually kinda blown away that other people don't immediately see it.

I feel like the LLM guy should be the psycho doctor doing unethical experience with the clinic patients...

The guy in the back with no text is me trouble shooting for 8 hrs when I could have read 5 minutes of documentation.

This happens when I outsource reading the docs to AI agents.

wait… there was a function for that? Why did you tell me to build this house of cards

I too, tried using regex to strip html tags. This was in php with hardly any knowledge of oop.

A university education really improved me there, since they trained you in Java to a high degree within 20 weeks (alongside stuff like UML). PHP is a fine starter language, but as applications grow, a more native oop approach with build-time validation, really made me a better developer.

Code Didn’t Break — They Did

The product manager nurse also goes crazy, trying to push a wheel-less wheelchair.

Tried to do a proper analysis of a bug in homologation that's preventing our future customer to test the product, while N+3 and N+4 demand twice-daily updates through video call with ten other managers on it. Two weeks of proper madness, that was.

Stopped the meetings for one fucking day and we had it fixed before 5pm.

Tried to understand what options were available on a JS package, which mangled the options before passing them on to another JS package, which mangled the options before passing them onto another JS package, ...

I built an MSI file once.

What, manually, without reaching for schema.msi?

Actually , either way is crazy
Oh yeah well I got an RMA from MSI customer support once so top that.
- I don't want to top that. And I'm so sorry you had to go through that.

At my last job, there was no planning of work/projects. Like, there was a general plan of "We need feature X by Q3 and here's what it should do", but nothing about breaking work down into smaller units or prioritizing different tasks.

The manager would drop an email: "Hey, can you do ...." and that was it. Now it's another thing to throw down the waterfall. Big surprise, the same bastard would harp about how the project was underperforming!

Most recently:

I had to parse an html table with a column of printed python dictionaries, the dicts wrapped a mixed delimiter list of SQL statements of various types.

It’s truly an abomination.

I’ve never had to use pythons AST module to parse data before…

🤮
- It was 900mb raw and compressed to 1.6mb after cleaning.
  
  That’s how much junk data there was.
  
  Combing through that log is the only way to prove and identify where a big was introduced so I can fix it.

I tried out shell coding with copilot (xml manipulation and merging).
I gave up. Not worth the sanity.

Hum, i made a minimal RSS and Atom reader shell script based on sed and awk regex. I'm mostly fine, you just need to pick the relevant bits and ignore the rest, remove all newlines beforehand, about 10 regex strings in a case switch. And feed it to iconv, f*king • things. But html is, where the nightmare starts.

Edit: the heck, • is a •

I've been doing some shady shit with regex lately (parsing .md files for interactive TTRPG sheets), but I'm glad to have not been touching XML