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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Memorization is just repetition, and you can build successes and reinforce it for yourself by keeping things very, very small. If even a “simple number guessing game” is too complicated for you to remember at this point, that’s not a mark of shame, it might sound simple but one of most important things you can learn as a programmer is that a lot of things that seem or feel simple really aren’t. There’s sometimes a lot of hidden complexity, and your brain needs to form the internal tools it needs to unpack and untangle that complexity. Eventually you’ll develop the skills you need to see the specific issues making it more complex, but for now, all you can do is simplify. If there’s a part you’re not remembering how to do, discard it. Make it a sidequest. Iterate on one feature at a time, test it and see if it works the way you expect. Refine, and you’ll learn a little bit from each refinement. Keep doing little refinements and you’ll start learning stuff more permanently. It’s like any skill, you have to practice.

    If you read through a foreign language dictionary page by page, of course you’re not going to remember all the words. It’s huge. It’s overwhelming. Our brains can’t learn that much in a single pass. It’s all about doing little bits at a time. The absolute minimum required to get off the ground. Gradually, not overnight, you’ll learn it all.

    There’s a reason the stereotypical “first program” is:

    print(“Hello world”)

    It’s actually a good starting point. It’s all you need to get started, plus the workflow you need to compile/run it, which shouldn’t be changing a lot once you’ve got it established. Other than that, you can build tiny baby steps on top of that. How do you print “Hello again” after “Hello world”? Does it print on the same line or does it print on the next line? Try it out and find out. Learn what it does. Play with it. What’s next? How do you let the user type something? Maybe you need to look for some examples. Try them. Not just the first one that works, try them all. See if they do anything differently. Don’t copy and paste huge complicated messes of code blocks if you don’t understand them, because you’re getting back into the “reading the dictionary” problem, but a line here or there is something you can start to pick apart and understand what it’s doing as you go. Use your programs to explore and understand what the program is doing, not to create a “finished product”. Nothing’s ever really “finished” except by accident when at some point in the distant future you realize you haven’t needed to modify it in ages. Otherwise, programs are things you change as you go, and you learn something each time you change them.


  • No, AI psychosis has done so much damage to open source and software engineering as whole already, the professional thing to do is to start to call it out for what it is. And sometimes that means intentionally making people mad, like that project that instructed the AI to put self-disparaging remarks into the author’s PR to both mock the author and make it obvious they used AI. He may not be the hero we deserve, but he’s the hero we need right now.

    Maybe you do get more flies with honey than with vinegar, but vinegar is useful too. Fuck AI (at least in many of the forms it is currently being used and pushed in)




  • Yeah he should’ve known better. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the story behind it are famous for a reason.

    “In the 19th century, the historical Zaporozhian Cossacks were sometimes the subject of picaresque tales demonstrating admiration of their primitive vitality and contemptuous disregard for authority (in marked contrast to the more civilized subjects of the authoritarian Russian state). … Mehmed demanded that the Cossacks submit to Ottoman rule. The Cossacks, led by Ivan Sirko, replied in a characteristic manner: they wrote a letter, replete with insults and profanities. The painting exhibits the Cossacks’ pleasure at striving to come up with ever more base vulgarities.”

    Now thanks to Putin we all know where Zaporizhzhia is, and it illustrates quite effectively how they react to such demands.








  • Yes, I don’t hate the technology, I hate all the evil companies abusing this technology for profit, fascism and death, which is very close to all of them.

    But they are not the only ones working on the technology, and even though they have stolen many of people’s entire lives worth of work for making these models and not only didn’t compensate them, but in many cases replaced them and terminated their employment, in many cases we are stealing it right the fuck back from them and making it open to everybody, because fuck them. It doesn’t belong to them in the first place, it belongs to all of us. We can’t put the genie back in the lamp or the toothpaste back in the tube, but we can make sure we are keeping our own data for ourselves once we take these monstrous, bloated, oligarchs down. We will not the libraries of Alexandria burn down again, and we won’t let them have the only copies.

    I won’t pretend I don’t have various issues with open weight models using this technology, but they’re more like “I don’t like systemd’s philosophy or developers” level of issues, not “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

    With the evil companies, I absolutely DO have “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.



  • Yeah it’s really upsetting. Some of the most genuinely intelligent and insightful people I know have talked exactly like that (many still do), and I know they’re people because a) I’ve met some of them, and b) they were doing this before generative AI was a thing. Generative AI stole the natural styles and voices of our best and brightest and is wearing them like a fucking Edgar suit. It’s sick.