Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting 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 Awful you’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 cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
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
That's a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with "I focused too much on trying to make easy cash". Fuck it, I'm going to write out a sidenote:
On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming's public image after it bursts.
On one front, there's the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.
On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble's dealt to artists, and AI's continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers' failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.
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.
I'm sorry, that's messed up.
Thank you for the expression of sympathy. The good news is I actually love computer science, it fucking rules.
Also, I recorded this professor screaming at me and have documented all the plagiarism. I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint. He may not get in any real trouble (universities will always go to bat for abusive researchers as long as they bring in grant money), but news will get out eventually.
I hope you whoop his ass (legally speaking)
I am internally screaming
not that I blame you for this choice (in fact I get it), but it fucking suuuuuuuucks how many places and structures are overly protecting abusers. and it sucks even more how many people are being harmed out of that path as a result.
echoing what o7 said: sorry, this is messed up, it shouldn't be this way
<3
I studied computer science because I was a huge computer nerd growing up. I always loved programming and learning everything I could about how computers worked. Learning new programming languages felt like uncovering a new universe of knowledge -- knowledge I could use to create things. I spent endless hours studying computers and learning to do amazing things with them. It was fun. It still is.
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.
Very similar situation to mine, but i went into electronics engineering instead of CS because i didn't think i would like to write software for a living. I now write software for a living, go figure.
Also agreed on the "doing it" thing. I hear people around the office talk about letting AI write things for them and i'm like no, i want to write it myself. i like doing things.
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.
Remember FizzBuzz? That was originally a simple filter exercise some person recruiting programmers came up with to weed out everyone with multi-year CS degrees but zero actual programming experience.