There was a senior dev at my first job that we called Lord Voldemort and he was the king of ungreppable variable names. Short, full of common characters, and none of them actually described what they were doing. I swear he only used characters that appeared in C++ keywords, so looking for fo would invariably tag every for statement in the file.

He also had hooks set up to notify when anyone was in his area of the code and you’d always get a two-hour phonecall where he’d slowly wear you down and browbeat you into backing out your changes. Every time I pulled a ticket in his codebase I’d internally shudder. He was friends and/or had dirt on the CTO so he just remained in that role and made everyone’s life hell.

I agree with you. Even if you never touch it, it’s nice to know what the libraries you’re calling are doing under the hood.

maybe this will work

...

...

...

linting and unit tests

I’m mostly talking about dry ingredients, which I can mash down, level off, leave heaping…

Most of the issues I had with cooking are a result of how recipes are. Recipe says dice a thing? How small? A teaspoon of something? The hell does that mean? I can fit a ton of stuff in there if I mash it down. Salt to taste? Forget about it. Pretty soon I’m operating in panic mode and maybe the recipe turns out but I’m too stressed out to enjoy it.

Enter Sohla’s cookbook, which explains everything. It’s part cookbook, part autobiography, and part reference manual. Her youtube videos are tremendous fun, too.

<3

“You love the boats. I do not, but I love what they mean.” sweeping gesture toward the window

Imagine being the ruler of that city and letting him get “cured” instead of having him infodump / give daily reports about this.

A thing that hallucinates uncompilable code but somehow convinces your boss it’s a necessary tool.

Better than my method:

• buy birthday card
• attempt to write “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!” in it and realize it already says that inside
• underline “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” and add two more exclamation points
• “love / sincerely / yours truly / — groucho”

If they can’t text me I don’t want to deal with them.

I’m fine with that. They’ve called us weird forever because they think it should bother us. IMO it doesn’t, but saying they’re weird bothers them even more.

A stool sample? Well I guess I could break the back off one of the kitchen chairs but I don’t see how that’s going to help.

As someone whose employer is strongly pushing them to use AI assistants in coding: no. At best, it’s like being tied to a shitty intern that copies code off stack overflow and then blows me up on slack when it magically doesn’t work. I still don’t understand why everyone is so excited about them. The only tasks they can handle competently are tasks I can easily do on my own (and with a lot less re-typing.)

Sure, they’ll grow over the years, but Altman et al are complaining that they’re running out of training data. And even with an unlimited body of training data for future models, we’ll still end up with something about as intelligent as a kid that’s been locked in a windowless room with books their whole life and can either parrot opinions they’ve read or make shit up and hope you believe it. I’ll think we’ll get a series of incompetent products with increasing ability to make wrong shit up on the fly until C-suite moves on to the next shiny bullshit.

That’s not to say we’re not capable of creating a generally-intelligent system on par with or exceeding human intelligence, but I really don’t think LLMs will allow for that.

tl;dr: a lot of woo in the tech community that the linux community isn’t as on board with

Also, telling me to relax is like telling a tree to do pushups.

I can hear this picture.

Steps to test: “Idk try some shit”

Yep. This is the way. Also, you’d be surprised how many devs don’t run through their own QA steps before asking other people to verify.

Yuck.

This reminds me of the time my group played a kobold campaign. We found a halfling scout and dealt with him. Then we made an improvised catapult and launched his corpse into the middle of his camp. And then we snuck in and wiped the rest of the halfling party while they were trying to figure out what was happening.

One of the guys in our party put skills in cooking and rolled a nat 20 making halfling jerky. A few sessions later a wizard or whatever granted us a wish, and we wished for our supply of nat 20 halfling jerky to never run out.

So now we’re rolling around the countryside raising hell and handing out halfling jerky to everyone because it is now the most powerful diplomatic tool in our arsenal. We never told anyone what it was made out of and pretty much any NPC who didn’t want to kill us on sight got a piece.

I don’t remember what happened to the party. I think our GM gave up in disgust after a while. Good times.