Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    4 months ago

    The Death of the Junior Developer

    Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, thereā€™s no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess weā€™ll have AGI by then and itā€™ll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineerā€™s time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 Iā€™ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete Iā€™d have two nickles. Which isnā€™t a lot of money but itā€™s weird that it happened twice.


      As a ā€œseniorā€ programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I donā€™t have to baby them or ā€œprompt engineerā€ stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

      Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for ā€œsocket example I hate unix please make it gentleā€. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros donā€™t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      this is such a sad slop. i wouldnā€™t guess itā€™s yegge, itā€™s so far from his style when he used to write himself.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      4 months ago

      Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they donā€™t alter the deal further).

      Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.

      Iā€™m oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didnā€™t know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).

        • Mike Knell@blat.at
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          4 months ago

          @dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was ā€œSysadmins are useless shit now because they arenā€™t software engineers and hell, they donā€™t even call themselves engineersā€.

            • Mike Knell@blat.at
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              4 months ago

              @dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor whoā€™s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with ā€œVenereal Diseaseā€ and passing through ā€œSpecial Clinicā€ on the way to ā€œSexual Health Clinicā€. Same thankless job, just different labels.

              • rook@awful.systems
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                4 months ago

                Same basic lessons, tooā€¦ ā€œconsider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just metā€, etc.

              • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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                4 months ago

                I donā€™t feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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          4 months ago

          Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, donā€™t answer that please.

              • self@awful.systems
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                4 months ago

                having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but weā€™re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux

                • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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                  4 months ago

                  I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted

                  then there are others

                  iā€™m at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes itā€™s just not enough, cos itā€™s Babbyā€™s First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath

                • V0ldek@awful.systems
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                  4 months ago

                  How do they sysadmin a server that doesnā€™t have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?