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The Rise of Whatever

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Re: The Rise of Whatever

#171

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tehnub wrote: post #146
chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

Pair programming with coworkers over the years, many seem to have trouble with the keyboard, to the point where pressing right parenthesis is a significant burden and they don’t use right or down arrow to get out of the span but actually move their hand to their mouse and click out.

I've said it in another comment (might be here or Reddit, I don't even know anymore) and it feels like basic skills are just overlooked or taken for granted these days - computer use, mouse / keyboard / typing skills, reading comprehension, writing ability, communication skills, etc.

I'm nowhere near a hiring position but if I was I'd add assessing that to the application procedure.

It feels like this is part of a set of growing issues, with millennials being the only generation in between gen X / boomers and gen Z that have computer skills and can do things like manage files or read a whole paragraph of text without a computer generated voice + RSVP [0] + Subway Surfers gameplay in the background.

But it was also millennials that identified their own quickly diminishing attention spans, during the rise of Twitter, Youtube, Netflix and the like [1].

I want to believe all of this is giving me some job security at least.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentati...

[1] https://randsinrepose.com/archives/nadd/ (originally published 2003, updated over time to reference newer trends)

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#172

Post by Cthulhu_ »

_thisdot wrote: post #164
chrismorgan wrote: post #100

> Like, just to calibrate here: you know how some code editors will automatically fill in a right bracket or quote when you type a left one? You type " and the result is "|"? Yeah, that drives me up the wall. It saves no time whatsoever, and it’s wrong often enough that I waste time having to correct for it. I have not yet figured out why anyone would choose this behaviour in a text editor. You have to press somethin…

I have this turned on in my code editors and Obsidian. The main advantage is reducing the cognitive load. You don’t have to double-check whether you remembered to close your string, bracket, or parenthesis — it’s just there.

You don't have to anyway, a syntax error will show up on your screen pretty much immediately.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#173

Post by Shorel »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #124
Shorel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still the guy doing google-fu and rtfm. The skill has not been obliterated. We still need to fix the slop written by the LLMs, but it is not that bad. Some people copy and paste snippets of code without knowing what it does, and in a sense, they spread technical debt around. LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline. The issue I see is that the amount of code having this level of…

> LLMs lower the technical debt spread by the clueless, to a lower baseline. Yeah? What about what LLMs help with? Do you have no code that could use translation (move code that looks like this to code that looks like that)? LLMs are real good with that, and they save dozens of hours on single sentence prompt tasks, even if you have to review them. Or is it all bad? I have made $10ks this year alone on what LLMs do,…

A lower baseline of technical debt is a positive thing.

You don't want more technical debt.

Ideally, you want zero technical debt.

In practice only a hello world program has zero technical debt.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#174

Post by Epora »

dwedge wrote: post #152

It's probably just me but I really struggle to read this whiney tone that became common around ten years ago. It's not about the subject matter itself, it's about the jokes that are always sad somehow, the font choice, the tone of the language. Some kind of perpetual-victim style of writing.

[dead]

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#175

Post by elric »

zpeti wrote: post #132
dalemhurley wrote: post #111

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…

I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.

What do you mean? Europe has had SEPA payments pretty much since the Euro came out. And most of Europe had functional bank transfers using online banking (including international ones) long before the Euro was a thing.

Edit: Do you mean that the speed of the transfers was the problem?

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#176

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

Semaphor wrote: post #168
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my 40s and don't have a microwave oven because I don't see the point of it... when I lived in a rented apartment, I got gifted one because how could I not have one? I tried it for a few days and just didn't find it useful. When I bought my own apartment and renovated the kitchen, I didn't bother to install one.

The use is heating up single portions of leftovers.

Which can be done in an induction cooker almost as fast, with the result tasting better, and without the need of a specific appliance that takes up considerable space.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#178

Post by Cthulhu_ »

gyomu wrote: post #10

Broadly agreed with all the points outlined in there. But for me the biggest issue with all this — that I don't see covered in here, or maybe just a little bit in passing — is what all of this is doing to beginners, and the learning pipeline. > There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing. They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge th…

> When you're a beginner, it's totally normal to not really want to put in the hard work. You try drawing a picture, and it sucks. You try playing the guitar, and you can't even get simple notes right. Of course a machine where you can just say "a picture in the style of Pokémon, but of my cat" and get a perfect result out is much more tempting to a 12 year old kid than the prospect of having to grind for 5 years before being kind of good.

Fair point; I think this feeling is exacerbated by all the social media being full of people looking like they're good at what they do already, but it rarely shows the years of work they put in beforehand. But that's not new, compare with athletes, famous people, fictional characters, etc. There's just more of it and it's on a constant feed.

It does feel like people will just stop trying though. And when there's a shortcut in the form of an LLM, that's easy. I've used ChatGPT to write silly stories or poems a few times; I look at it and think "you know, if I were to sit down with it proper I could've written that myself". But that'd be a time and effort investment, and for a quick gag that will be pushed down the Discord chat within a few minutes anyway, it's not worth it.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#179

Post by quonn »

zpeti wrote: post #132
dalemhurley wrote: post #111

> "live in some futuristic utopia like the EU where banks consider "send money to people" to be core functionality. But here in the good ol' U S of A, where material progress requires significant amounts of kicking and screaming, you had PayPal." I remember when PayPal came to Australia, I was so confused by it as I could just send money via internet banking. Then they tried to lobby the government to make our bankin…

I don't get this sentence. It's pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too. We only had SWIFT and CHAPS too like in the USA. The EU isn't some banking haven with ultrafast transfers. If they are talking about the new legislation about fast transfers (SEPA), that came 1 decade after paypal.

> pretty damn hard sending money in the EU too

You literally enter an IBAN and the transfer will appear in the other account the next day. And if you need the money in the target account immediately (within 10 seconds) you can do it, too, by checking a checkbox for a small fee and that fee will drop to ZERO across the EU in October 2025.

Re: The Rise of Whatever

#180

Post by OvbiousError »

> Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency

As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.

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