So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.

I have a theory (similar to that "it's been vibe coding all along" post) that it's a combination of wishful thinking, lack of knowledge of real science, and a lack of any liberal arts skills, that altogether produces this farce.

I think it's a good explanation for "the code has been battle tested because it's so old and widely used, if it had bugs/security issues, we would have discovered them by now", as well as the widespread "we invented a tech solution that is just a worse engineering solution". Looking at you, chain of self-driving cars.

The reason I do CS is because a professor of computer science lied to me about the kind of work I'd be doing to get me to enroll in the CS PhD program instead of math. Guy later physically threatened me in his office and plagiarized my work, but I'm not sure if this reflects poorly on computer scientists, academics, or CS professors.

Anyway I have a chip on my shoulder.

the students in my cs department are overwhelmingly promptfondlers and even my strong students are doing the "qualified praise" thing.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

i thought it was pretty funny <3

thinking about how often code will be like

[-1] * len(array) # -1 is a place holder because I don't know the vocabulary term "sentinel value"

and justified because "it just needs to work"

and now we have professional vibe coders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish

half as good as expert human

60% of what a senior can do

is there like a character sheet somewhere so i can know where i fall on this developer spectrum

the closest i've ever come to being an idea guy is saying 'yeah, i have ideas, they are [shit them out explicitly]. they are half-baked at best but let me know if you do anything with it'

coming up with ideas is fucking easy, for example:

pick a (palatable) villain from anything
put them in a setting that is banal but unusual for them
write jokes

BAM

trying to explain why a philosophy background is especially useful for computer scientists now, so i googled "physiognomy ai" and now i hate myself

https://www.physiognomy.ai/

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I appreciate this post very much. Thank you. <3

i have a potato that can study, send me your venmo if interested

i googled for discussion around how a VPN can protect (or not) against a MITM attack, and came across this:

We are a small team of men trained through stoicism, currently, as newcomers to cybersecurity, we’ve taken the biggest risk by betting everything on ourselves and the leverage we can gain by sacrificing everything that is not essential.

and while the technical parts seem fine based on a surface-reading, this thick as molasses STOIC MANLINESS of their red-teaming is the silliest shit ever

(ps: read their website in the voice of foghorn leghorn, it's pretty fun)

2. We’re likelier to be in a simulation run by whoever creates many simulations.

would love to ask these dorks "what is the event space of this probability distribution" and "have you heard of a category error"