It makes sense a programmer will play with their electronic objects differently than someone outside the industry. It remains a toy to be played with. Subscribing mental health or personality implications is just plain wrong.

If we’ll take the toy analogy, compare someone cuddling plush animals or playing make-believe to someone violently stabbing them with a knife. Sure, the plushy doesn’t feel anything so it doesn’t amount to torture, but they clearly have a different idea of “playing” if “playing violence” is fun to them. The “something else” here would be whether they do it for the fun of violence or for the curiosity of cutting them open to see what’s inside.

I could just as easily suggest your insistence is an indication you have a personality disorder or inclination towards inhumanity for attempting to humanize objects.

I’d think you misunderstood me: It’s not about the text generation models for me, which you’ll find I took care to point out are not human, and that the string of numbers they spit out that translates to an imitation of distress doesn’t actually represent distress but rather the result of a pseudo-random algorithm that just happens to resemble it.

More realistically, I’m debating with AI or a troll paid by people building data centers

Nah, I may have different takes on some nuanced issues, but I absolutely hate the slopidemic as much as anyone here.

I’ve been the odd one out in a group where we’d practice discussing current business topics (English being my second language and working in a German company means I didn’t have a lot of practice) by consistently picking news articles or scientific papers about the problems, shortcomings, the environmental destruction, the effect it has on coding skills, about Ford having to hire back its engineers when it turned out that AI couldn’t actually replace them…

It’s perfectly possible to disagree on nuances while still sharing a common overarching opinion. Point in case:

I do think it’s important for the average person who may read this to know that it’s impossible to torture a non-living object, even when it’s coded to respond in complete sentences like a person.

That’s why I emphasised that it’s not the action I’m concerned about, but the intention behind it. I don’t give a fuck about its mimicry of feelings, and I endorse comprehensive testing of its response to all manner of inputs. I explicitly noted the difference to animal testing for that reason: there is nothing unethical about feeding a text processor some particular string.

And we may have discovered a method to piss off billionaires and waste more of their AI money. In that case, I heartily recommend all to play as they wish with LLMs and open AI. Have nonsensical fun with it because nothing of value is being lost!!

The tradeoff being that we’re also wasting more energy, contributing to environmental destruction and padding the “growth” in usage numbers, which corporate shareholders clearly care more about than actual profits and may be used justify further investments into data centers. The models have no value, but the resources their gluttonous hosts devour do.

For pissing off billionaires, I think clogging the water supply of their data centers would be more productive. I’m sure you could also make a fun game out of finding ways to sabotage them directly.

I’m also upset that a mainstream tool doesn’t support a niche feature.

(Mostly because I have to use certain tools at work because corporate bullshit and get annoyed when I’m reminded that the way I’m used to doing things doesn’t work here)

But if I was developing a tool for a certain audience, I would also prioritise the needs and habits of that aufience. And if that means leaving out regex because laypeople will only shoot themselves in the foot… I’ll bitch and moan and cry but ultimately comply.

If you’re seeking to prompt expressions of distress* from it for your entertainment, it kinda is a weird way to waste energy and water for personal gratification and I’d be worried why you’re so delighted by it, in the same vein that I’m concerned about people who love gratuitous torture scenes in games or movies.

Curiosity about the way the model handles such input is something else though, and frankly, I would consider that a reasonable part of any scientific inquiry into model behaviour*. The ethical concerns about human experiments don’t apply, nor do those about animal experiments, and testing the full range of linguistic “stimuli”* is perfectly sensible. Of course, the difference between science and fucking around is writing it down, but personal curiosity is also a good thing, so long as people remain aware of what they’re working with.

But anyone who feels the need to implement a Typescript compiler in Rust is a maniac and needs to be stopped

* Using human terms as metaphor, not because they’re equivalent but because it’s more convenient than variations of “sequence of numbers produced / consumed by a weighted random generator resembling…”

There must be something wrong with your hands. You code like a 5-year-old.

As a veteran FooBar instructor, I have touched dozens of codebases with my bare hands. Every one had very rough hacks, like my hobby projects.

Finding ways to save effort is smart.

Finding ways to trade quality for convenience isn’t. In the case of education, given its fundamental importance, quality is paramount. A mentor of mine phrased it as “learn to do it right first, then learn where you can get away with being sloppy”. Education is the “learn to do it right” part.

In the case of programming, figuring out where you can be sloppy (and how sloppy) is a matter of experience. A junior developer doesn’t have that experience. A senior developer might, but in my impression they tend to be way less excitable and preachy about using AI.

It’s a summary of code changes. The green + indicates how many lines were added, the red - how many were removed (though changed or moved lines are counted twice, once as removal for the old and once as addition for the new).

The OP is supposedly being asked to read and review thousands of lines of new code written by claude. Depending on the language and claude’s writing style, those lines may be very dense and hard to read, but even if they aren’t, reading code you haven’t written is always more difficult than reading your own.

Source?

Last I followed that conversation, rimu stated that it wasn’t about vote manipulation or spam, just about the outsized influence of people who spend more time online (for instance because they’re chronically ill and the offline world therefore just doesn’t hold any appeal to them).

Your comment took a few seconds to read in my inbox. If I made a post that took off and got a hundred replies, most of which are nice but don’t warrant an in-depth response, I could read and swipe to upvote each in a few seconds, leaving the ones warranting more time and a reply unread and going back for them afterwards.

If the intention is that people should comment or post more rather than (just) voting, making them vote less isn’t gonna achieve that. A comment is nowhere near a decent substitute for a vote. The difference in effort between “swipe” and “swipe, think of what you want to say, consider whether it’s too inane to be worth a comment, fret over the wording to avoid accidentally stepping on toes you care about, knowing that people may end up judging you for your choice of words anyway, or maybe even complain about you commenting too much in general” is monumental. The venomous treatment he’s been getting isn’t helping.

And even if he did comment, what if the other person replies in a civil manner? You’d like to reward and encourage that. If you’re out of votes for the day, the only thing you could do is reply “+” or some variant, which would probably result in people jumping down your throat for making such a pointless comment, similar to the “this” comments. “That’s what upvotes are for”, I’ve seen people argue. Which is entirely correct, but what if you’re out of upvotes? Do you just stop engaging for the day, knowing you’ll be frustrated anyway?

The bottom line is that a vote cap inhibits engagement. If we wanna prevent engagement bait and karma farming, we can simply not show anyone’s “score” on their profiles and moderate excessive outrage bait posts.

So this achieves nothing good, just punishes those that contributed most.

I never got the impression of hatred from him.

would debate anybody who disagreed with him

I mean, debate is the way to test arguments and refine understanding. If your understanding diverges from someone else’s (like mine does from yours here), is it wrong to point out why you think they’re wrong and either help them understand some part better or be taught by them instead?

I think that’s just a different mode of communication and using social media. I know he’s chronically ill and believe he describes himself as “cripple”, suggesting that his body has forsaken him, which makes IRL social activities difficult and painful.

The beauty of the internet is that you can interact with people there, even if your body can’t handle going to the pub or whatever. So I don’t blame him for leaning more on his mind than his body and being chronically online if the offline world is chronically hell.

Sad to see yet another active community member get consumed by hatred and frustration

I think the frustration is mostly at the fact that rimu is pursuing a policy other admins have advised against and it’s killing his fun. He has stated several times that he doesn’t think rimu is totally off-kilter and that he gets the motive, just doesn’t agree that it would have any beneficial effect on the fediverse.

That doesn’t sound like hatred to me, more the disappointment of seeing a working partner you otherwise respect take steps that make it hard for you to keep working with them.

Not just accounts, communities. He was managing a few communities he’d migrated over to piefed who would continue to be affected by that limit even if he switched account, essentially shadowbanning his votes at some point.

Moving a community means hoping that enough regulars see the notification to “jumpstart” the new community to the point the new posts show up in /all for the rest of the old community to pick up on it and realise they’re not subscribed. You’ll also need to keep reminding people posting in the old community to post to the new one instead for a while.

It’s kinda founding a new community for a topic that already has an established community, then trying to get that established one to join your new one.

That’s a lot of effort I can see him no longer wanting to do.

One of today’s… lucky? ten thousand, I guess

It was a cap. 240, as far as I know. Given that it would make him ration his engagement and caused him anxiety, he was fed up, but didn’t wanna move a third time.

He’d been unhappy with some stuff the Lemmy devs do for a while, but when kbin shut down, he moved to lemmy, and when piefed seemed like a reasonable alternative moved his accounts and communities to piefed.social.

Then rimu decided that a handful of most active users with hundreds or thousands of upvotes per day shouldn’t get to have such an impact, so he installed a daily cap for how many votes per user per day are counted, discarding the rest. Essentially, this limits engagement in an attempt to “even out” its distribution by cutting off the top. It’s an opt-out feature for other piefed instances, but on his own (piefed.social), he obviously activated it.

PugJesus, being one of those most active users, was quite upset with the prospect of having to ration his upvotes. By his own description, he’d easily fill out much of that cap just upvoting all the good-faith replies on his posts, let alone if he were to also engage in discussion elsewhere and equally use upvotes there to encourage good-faith conversation. It evidently caused anxiety and soured his experience.

Even if he were to use an account from a different instance, that restriction still affects the communities. Having migrated three times already (idk what the third one was, but given how much effort even one move for a whole community can be…), PJ was tired of it and didn’t wanna migrate again. So he did what rimu wanted:

Stop engaging.

(He’s around, occasionally, but not nearly as active, nor does he post as much. Can’t blame him. Sure isn’t helping that there’s a certain subset of people that hate him for various reasons. He’d probably respond if I summoned him, but I’m not sure I want to drag him back to that topic and make him feel like he has to comment.)

Sources:

• his farewell post: https://feddit.uk/post/52137875
• a more recent comment: https://feddit.uk/post/54413451/27149417

Half a byte: 4 bits

“sure yes you can hard code everything. You’d just go against basic coding conventions. The way i am being treated is making it hard staying technical. Even when the versions are being hard coded it doesnt resolve the problems with the files. But like you demand i wont say anything anymore and try magic to fix these files.”

So i wrote 2 whole things, explaining all analytical steps i took and again that i didnt say i can not connect to the files but the files cant be altered Connection: yes Query: no

From my own autistic experience, people tend to get irritated when I try to explain my reasoning or analytical steps too much. At some point, you just have to accept that they’re not gonna get it.

When I’ve had a similar situation (much less hostile, thankfully), I just implemented it as told, documented it and let it break to show them why it wasn’t working. They took me seriously after that.

But also, when you’re on the way out anyway, don’t put too much effort into doing things “right”. You don’t owe them competence. They already think you’re incompetent. If they want you to add tech debt, that’s the most legitimate way to take revenge.

I wish they’d put me on leave like i asked when i got told i get laid off.

Honestly, it’s very reckless of them to not do so. I know we had an incident where a laid-off colleague (well, contract didn’t get extended, but the result is the same) pulled some nasty shit on his last day. Management learned from that and the next time they had to fire someone, they first revoked all access, then had them surrender all company devices and wipe company data off their private devices with security watching, then put them on leave for the rest of the contract. Just safer that way.

(This is not an encouragement to take any revenge on them. That might land you in legal trouble. But you can’t get in trouble for doing exactly what they tell you to. If their instructions are stupid, that’s not your problem.)

This company, and i know it, leaves me wanting to from now on build even less friendly ties to collegues of future companies

I think the difficult part is figuring out which of your colleagues are worth building ties with. I have some that I’m friendly with, some I’m more “professional”, some I pull a face when I see their message pop up and put off reading it for as long as I can.

Some companies are shit. Not all of them are.

The whole thing is obviously fucked up, but one thing that stuck out to me was this:

one of the translation of the word into german is “time note”

Technical names being oriented around specific localisations are one of my pet peeves. Particularly when I’m trying to explain something to an international colleague who doesn’t speak German and can’t find the relevant, unintuitively named objects. Bonus points when the name itself is in German.

The safety things were: check that the repository exists before calling it. If not exists create it.

I could see an argument here, depending on your business context, that a missing repository shouldn’t be a “silent” fail in order to catch potential data entry errors. If the assumption is that the folder will always be there, it might be worthwhile to throw if that assumption turns out to be false.

I had a “silent” fail logic built into one of my products that ended up heavily distorting the results when it eventually turned out that the input data was heavily skewed due to sloppy human work.

Of course, given the general situation, I assume that your solution was sensible in your case. The response of “shut up” doesn’t exactly sound like “there is a good reason we want this to fail if it isn’t there”.

Before trying to send a SQL Query to the Database, check that the connection is established and open.

Uhhhhh… So, like, basic SQL connection handling? And they took issue with that?

If ever anyone brings up the stereotype of Germans being hyper-accurate to the point of being anal, I think that company is the counterexample.

My job in data analytics occasionally involves pulling printing volume data. Does that count as “anything to do with printers”?

Because fuck trying to aggregate by printer location when the location string is manually entered by humans with different “standards” and varying adherence even to their stated standard.

Yeah, I know that my instance’s admins have announced they’ll be shutting down their Tesseract frontend. As I said, I expect others will as well for the reasons you mention, but I haven’t kept track (and don’t see their posts pinned to my feed obviously) so I didn’t want to assume.

Right, IDK how the proper term is in English, but who will bring this to some relevant authority that will initiate that prosecution? Will any particular authority care enough to prosecute? Is there any realistic chance that this will result in legal consequences?

I mean, yeah, sure. But who’s gonna sue or press charges?