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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I started programming after I played some PlayStation 1 game when I was a kid. Mum told me that you have to program to be able to make games so I as a kid searched how to program and was promptly greeted by some c hello world tutorial. 9 year old kid seeing hello world in terminal did not a programmer make.

    Few years later the various javascript fork-bomb stuff were riddling the internets, the ones where you had alert with some supposedly funny messages one after another (this was before stop making new dialogs was an option) which was my true introduction to programming. Doing actual real world stuff - making my friends and teachers suffer. Even if it was copy pasting alert hundreds of times, or changing the for loop end value from 10 to 100, it was very crude programming.

    As long as you understand the core concepts, you can start learning more. Set a small goal and try to achieve it. Keep setting goals and try to achieve them and surely you’ll end up lerning.




  • Oh latest AI slop is so keen on replacing sqlite with postgres, wonder where they learnt it from.

    Perfect! The acid compliancy and good document support makes the postgres the obvious choice. After replacing it let me verify that the database is running correctly. psql -c "SELECT * FROM cat_pictures". Hmm it’s not working. Let me verify that the server is running. psql -U root. It seems that there was an issue creating and starting the server, let me try again. cd projectfolder / && rm -rf && initdb. Hmm couldn’t iniate the database let me add --no-preserve-root to ensure initdb runs properly




  • The article says nothing about genai and uses a paywalled article as its source. A second source is an article written by the author.
    Not sure what barrow this is peddling, other than repeating the absurd notion that software engineers are paid too much whilst the Australian Computer Society promotes articles stating that they should be paid at 1995 pay rates.

    Are you disagreeing

    As an ICT professional with over 40 years experience, all I see is poorly informed HR teams hiring the very cheapest graduates they can find and believing that Assumed Intelligence will make it all better after they decimated their experienced staff.
    No wonder we have escalating data breaches and security nightmares, not to mention unstable consumer electronics and a growing list of terrifying trends in vehicle software implementations with absolutely no global mechanisms for regulation or certification

    or agreeing with the author?

    I’m not sure if my reading comprehension is what it used to be, but the author of the article seemed to share similar concerns with you.


  • Exactly.

    Another problem with LLMs is that they are actually useful in some tasks and they can generate very good quality code if you’re diligent enough developer. I also have built personal tools with them, but I don’t have the knowledge of the code the LLM has hallucinated which means that before I would push this code forward I will have to basically familiarise myself with the code in a way how a code review works.

    The knowledge you gain from this is also different from that of actually writing and running the code yourself. I have seen people who use LLMs to write commit messages which is the last thing you should do. Commit messages are probably the only places were we can meaningfully store the knowledge gathered during development and the more I see LLM commits the more I lose hope.






  • I worded my answer a bit wrongly.

    In XML <person><name>Alice</name><age>30</age></person> is different from <person name="Alice" age="30" /> and they will never (de)serialize to each other. The original example by the articles author with the person is somewhat misguided.

    They do contain the same bits of data, but represent different things and when designing your dtd / xsd you have to decide when to use attributes and when to use child elements.




  • I’ve been pretty depressed after my burnout few years ago and have been unable to enjoy programming ever since. It’s my profession though so I still do it, but outside of the professional stuff I’ve only had a 1 month this year where I could enjoy sitting on a computer at home and to do some actual coding. Outside of coding there’s a lot of pondering, designing, and analysing related to development that I still do and enjoy, but it’s exhausting after working.