V0ldek @ V0ldek @awful.systems

Posts

9

Comments

989

Joined

2 yr. ago

All of those people, Krauss, Dawkins, Harris (okay that one might've been unsalvageable from the start, I'm really not sure) are such a great reminder that you can be however smart/educated you want, the moment you believe you're the smartest boi and stop learning and critically approaching your own output you get sucked into the black hole of your asshole, never to return.

Like if I had a nickel. It's hubris every time. All of those people need just a single good friend that, from time to time, would tell them "man, what you said was really fucking stupid just now" and they'd be saved.

Clout is a proxy of power and power just absolutely rots your fucking brain. Every time a Guy emerges, becomes popular, clearly thinks "haha, but I am different, power will not rot MY brain", five years later boom, he's drinking with Jordan Benzo Peterson. Even Joe Fucking Rogan used to be significantly more lucid before someone gave him ten bazillion dollars for a podcast and he suffered severe clout poisoning.

Not really any more insane than any other white-collar corporate job I've seen in my life

Spoiler: there are no actual dragons in either book 😞

This is always what you get when your fundamental belief is "capitalism good", so no matter how close you get to "and the problem is capitalism" you can never actually get there, like in a crazy version of edging.

What I'm saying is that libs are philosophical gooners

"Engineering a Compiler" is a better read than the Dragon Book anyway

Every time I learn one single thing about how academia works in the USA I want to commit unspeakable acts of violence

I was thinking about ethics in game journalism in software engineering and I think it might be easier to create a whitelist than a blacklist:

What are some serious software/hardware companies that have NOT participated in the AI bubble? No AI nonsense in their marketing slides, no mentions of AI on their landing page, etc.

More recursion means more intelligence.

Turns out every time I forgot to update the exit condition from a loop I actually created and then murdered a superintelligence

On the other hand, I’m sure people are going to come up with excuses even for this by blaming the user, his mental illness, his mother or even society at large.

I mean, I am going to say it but not as an excuse. Should companies that supply these products be held accountable as the criminals they are? Yes. Is this all downstream from the fact our society hasn't treated mental health as a serious matter, therapy access is garbage, all the while being a young person in 2025 is a hopeless string of horrors and anxiety? Also yes.

Torment Chatbot That Kills You is a bad thing to create, but also no one would be chatting with the Torment Chatbot That Kills You if society hadn't utterly failed them beforehand.

C is a terrible programming language and I think we must be clear and open about it when teaching it. But it is perfect for what it is: a showcase of how terrible all those low-level details are, how pointers work and why you don't want to rawdog them, etc.

... thank almighty fuck

I'm sorry but this is zero percent surprising like ye of course he is, he was addicted to anime porn before AI generation probably

That's because we haven't helped them achieve their full potential

I don't think you'll be broken by learning Python, but in my opinion to be a good programmer you need to understand at least one layer of abstraction lower than what you're implementing. So, as an example, once you learn how to code in Python using idk numpy, you absolutely must learn how numpy works under the hood. And that means C, because you cannot escape C.

I teach people Rust and I always say that you kind need to know the nightmare that is C/C++ to be able to fully appreciate what Rust does for you and how it builds a much more sensible programming model on top of the same set of basic concepts we use and have always used to talk to silicone. And then you can write web apps with Rust and never even touch a raw pointer in your life, but it will make you an infinitely better Rust developer if you understand what's going on below you.

This works surprisingly well across the entire SE stack IMO, e.g. if you're using React you should be fully aware of the layer below you - raw JS and HTML. If you're coding in C you should be aware of assembly and memory models. If you're using SQL to query a database you should be aware of logical plans. If you're a project manager you should be aware of what software engineering entails and what people in your team actually do day-to-day.

I'm glad this exists even though I vehemently disagree.

I would bounce right off a course like this. I fucking hated the webdev course we had. I don't care about websites. Writing a program in C that finds a shortest path in a graph and dumps it to the terminal? Fuck yeah, that's where the dopamine lies.

I agree that teaching people Java or Python as the first language is a bad idea, but for me it's not because they need something simpler that has tangible results - that's the opposite of what my experience tells me! I want them to write code in C that doesn't produce any GUI at all. They need to know how to test code that has no visible buttons to click. How to debug code just using a debugger. Having a tangible result other than just a dump on the terminal is a blight, it makes people lazy. It's very easy to determine that the program works because when I click through buttons in the GUI it does what I expect. When you have a library that doesn't have a GUI but just does things to objects in memory you can't take a shortcut, you need robust testing to convince yourself it does what you want. If you are GUI-centric, they will think that the only code that matters is the one that they can see from the front-end. This is precisely the way people get taught coding now with Python - it doesn't actually matter what is the code, it matters that you get a plot that looks right at the end.

The way to enlightenment lies in having 200 lines of C code that segfaults but only sometimes and having to figure out where the bug is using nothing but a debugger and your brain to analyse the code you wrote. That's how you learn how a computer actually works underneath, and once you get through that then stuff like Java or Python is small potatoes. You'll get the high-level language because you've seen the nightmare underneath the surface.

If the problem is that people don't feel motivated to do that and need a pretty website to feel like coding is fun then idk maybe they should train in something different? If having to debug broken code feels bad then you might want to do something else that's more rewarding. It's fine if there's like 50% fewer programmers but they're more conscious of all the layers between the user and silicon on average and fixing arcane problems scratches their itch.

Watch till end the third option made me choke on my drink it was way too funny

We should have a cognitohazard tag

Finally, after years of research, we have managed to connect the smartest Orca to a text-to-speech device! What great wisdom will those superinteligent creatures bestow on us? How can we solve our world's problems?

Eat the rich.

... What?

Like take your billionaires, right, roast them and then eat their flesh. Burn their yachts too. We can help.

Don't they just radiate animal magnetism

Sorry darling, but according to my game-theoretical model this discussion ends in my victory in every possible combination of moves, so can we just skip to the point you apologise?

Where... where are you going