Honestly when I accepted that clever code is bad code, my passion for coding died and now I just want to coast until I get fired and then go work at a phone repair shop
I think when I picked my major, I never understood what software engineering is, or even what engineering is. Honestly I shouldn't be complaining. So many people have it worse.
Coding would still be fun if it weren't a job, where we bend tech backwards to please the users (instead of teaching users to do the right thing)
This is just elitism. Its guaranteed to be faster to copy and paste your snippet into an app, and have the app automatically detect the transformation you want to apply.
Sure. I'm the elitist, the coder who can't keep his job for longer than 2 years because he doesn't have any soft skill.
At the moment I am literally considering quitting (my second job), working at a phone repair shop instead of programming, exactly because people at work prefer your kind of coders than enthusiasts like me.
Thank you for convincing me. I will become a phone repair technician instead. Have fun with your amazing programming career. You will do great. (This is the sarcastaball moment for me. Seriously I'm not even being sarcastic. You will do great)
> guaranteed to be faster
That's good for you. I still prefer to just write `pbpaste | base64 -d` into my terminal.
Sorry for wanting to solve problems in a different way
(Edit: @chrisan I am soft-banned from replying to you. The reply button is gone. Yes I know I should be open to new options. But I have suffered silently for years and everyone only hated me for my own ideas. So you have to excuse me when the flood gate opens. None of these have anything to do with you. I wish I could have said it back then to the people who actually shunned me)
(Edit: @HN, just delete my account. I am done with programming career. I will change the password shortly and never log back in)
If anything I'm concerned about future developers.
If we don't understand how things work under the hood, and future generations are discouraged even more from understanding them,
And if AIs can program and code for us,
Eventually one day we will forget how to program, how to fix low level coding errors, and how to fix a broken Linux kernel.
What happens then?
Yes it sounds like the slippery slope fallacy. But we have been slipping towards this direction for too long, even before AIs became a thing.
Maybe just step back and take a break, don't be so hard lined in your judgements.
I have no worry about future developers. There have been more contributions to linux in recent years than the early years. Programming has also gotten way more accessible to people. When I was a kid you might know 1 other kid who fooled around with basic on atari, now practically all my friends kids have had some exposure to programming. There are all kinds of hardware projects too and a whole community of makers that is blowing up
New deep dive tinkerers will always be around as you can't kill curiosity.
Hope you find some peace and people you enjoy working with - even if they have different opinions on how to do their job.
Many people living in these countries, know what's going on. They silently support the violent levels of censorship because they think our government is just as bad and often hypocritical (even though the US is objectively better in most reasonable cases)
IMO, the disagreement between the two political parties doesn't just cause domestic polarization, it also delays foreign progress towards democracy. People get jaded internationally from it. I'm hoping we can either have more parties or just help the two parties make up.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Democracy follows economic development, of the other way around. America and European countries all became more democratic after they became rich. Some autocratic governments can hinder economic development. Others, like in China and now Bangladesh, can be pretty competent about it.
Democracy _may_ follow economic development. Economic development (as in move past developing country phase) has essentially never followed early democratic development. Poor autocrats has a chance of becoming rich autocratic or rich democratic societies. Poor democratic societies largely stays poor, with historic consistency bordering on certainty. Best thing developing countries can wish for is competent autocrat and favourable geopolitical conditions.
Does it? By economic development do you mean relative to other countries or in absolute terms? The US was pretty democratic way before we were anywhere close to rich my 2023 standards.
That's good. And I am biased. I personally liked American and Japanese culture better anyways.
Growing up in China, everyone I knew keeps telling me our culture is fake, reconstructed from a pile of burning books and detached from both history and modern life, at least ever since Cultural Revolution.
But frankly every country is having a cultural crisis today. I just want to preserve some things more. And yes I know that is biased.
Yeah you are right that people are applying the wrong laws and expecting results. Ideally we would consider creating new laws. But it is hard to explain why a company's control over its own platform can be harmful especially if competition exists.
IMO the reason is that both customers and small creators end up losing in this scheme. They end up purchasing/making products often not for creativity or joy, but for necessity and FOMO. And yet these products are planned obsolescence. So even if this isn't a monopoly, it is exploitative.
I'm not sure whether the US can/should make a law against exploiting customers. But people should at least talk more about this weird tech environment we are in.
Lol it's funny to summarize this discussion as: "we don't want to make a (seemingly) positive change because too many people rely on us to live in their 'backwards' ways".
Thats fine, but then you say "we're going to make a new html6, and if you put DOCTYPE html6 at the start of your page, then legacy behaviours like that will be dropped and we'll start doing the right thing by default"
And there's absolutely no problem with it. Except that it won't happen due to the standard bodies losing face after they made a lot of noise with their decision that HTML 5 was the one true standard that would never get replaced.
Microsoft also acted like Win10 would be the last one, and here we are with Windows 11. I doubt anyone gave a damn about that. Normies don't have values when faced with not getting their shiny.
What should be more damning, IMO, is that there are barely any grassroots or community members on WHATWG, who has acted like they are more important than W3C. Both have drafted and approved of things that have damaged the Web. I am looking forward to the inevitable protocol split between "linkable documents" and "apps in a common virtual machine". The complexity desired from web app authors is directly opposed to the sort of things that plain HTML and CSS were doing 15-20 years ago.
It'd be nice if Google and friends just worked on the app side of things, on their own protocol, instead of commandeering the Web.
If everyone can band together and generate N fake clicks for every 1 real click, And provide N wrong Captcha answers for every correct answer,
Then we might just be able to send a message to advertisers and those "data anal-lysts"
Question is: Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things? What if I use a bot instead? (Maybe that's why the author eventually abandoned this project)
> Will I be held liable for randomly clicking on things?
If you count this, some sites might think you're a bot or otherwise hint that they don't want to serve you. I've had Google make me solve captchas occasionally because I was using Ad Nauseam.
> NEVER paste code you don't understand into the development console
Tech companies have long achieved security by simply locking people out of choices that they shouldn't make.
I'm suspecting that Google will soon lock people out of Chrome's developer tools unless they can prove they are a developer (with a certificate that's tied to the website they are debugging)
Frankly I say we let them delete all public backups of internet culture. Eventually there would be a backlash when this goes too far.
Lots of games, websites and TV shows would be gone. Let them.
Don't make local backups either. Or at least encrypt the backups and make sure they will be lost when we die.
*Let DRM and Copyright become the modern equivalent of book burning.*
Let people forget. Let it be the government's problem to preserve knowledge and history. And let it decide when the cost is higher than whatever benefits we get from strict authoritarian levels of Copyright protections
Nah, people just need to wake up and start building own infra.
Everyone just waits for some white knight to pour money at infra
to backup stuff for them. No, DO sth usefull. In good old days
people used to have small web servers to host personal and friends webpages.
Yeah, it could not scale and your site could be DoSed, but thats another problem
with todays internet, noone gives a fuck up about abuse..
Anyway, layer your virtual Internet.. All the toys are here. VPNs (wireguard, OpenVPN, tinc-vpn, ...), Routing (Quagga, FRR, bird). Build infra, have fun.
Neat project is DN42, but they are more for testing and research.
We need more such networks for content, gaming and other interesting stuff.
Yes but book burning had backlash, too. And frankly if we are really that stupid then we didn't deserve tech and culture in the first place. Might as well delete wikipedia. Let people forget everything, then evolution will take over. /s
"We should delete data so that people get upset" is just shy of "we should shoot some kids so people will finally get upset". If we're going for over the top statements anyway.
When we look at the actual current US sociopolitical climate, we see that people don't actually care about either of those things. Quite the opposite, they are more than happy to burn books.
So what we can expect instead is that they'll care even less about a bunch of folks hitting the delete keys that wipe out several generations worth of historical record because it happens to be digital. If anything, they'll cheer about it.
It's just shy of it by the part where people rather than important information die; the structure of the argument is exactly the same. "We should do the thing we want to not have happen so much and to such a severe degree that people will finally get upset enough to want to stop us, but we better do it *a lot* because we know they won't care otherwise" is a truly idiotic argument to make when the thing you're doing can't be undone, and your goal is to not have it happen at all.
Whether it's information deletion or human deletion, you can't undo the damage you're doing, so what the hell are you talking about when you pretend it's something to consider?
I think when I picked my major, I never understood what software engineering is, or even what engineering is. Honestly I shouldn't be complaining. So many people have it worse.
Coding would still be fun if it weren't a job, where we bend tech backwards to please the users (instead of teaching users to do the right thing)