When you're rich you can buy all kinds of weird shit.
groucho
joined 2 years ago
There was a senior dev at my first job that we called Lord Voldemort and he was the king of ungreppable variable names. Short, full of common characters, and none of them actually described what they were doing. I swear he only used characters that appeared in C++ keywords, so looking for fo would invariably tag every for statement in the file.
He also had hooks set up to notify when anyone was in his area of the code and you'd always get a two-hour phonecall where he'd slowly wear you down and browbeat you into backing out your changes. Every time I pulled a ticket in his codebase I'd internally shudder. He was friends and/or had dirt on the CTO so he just remained in that role and made everyone's life hell.
"It's my birthday! I'm a hundred!"
Being around for free drinks is pretty on brand for actual Jesus, too.
Geez this is a deep cut.
Stan all trying to plot a course to Ferenginar on the sly.
Neither too few nor too many.
I agree with you. Even if you never touch it, it's nice to know what the libraries you're calling are doing under the hood.
Imagine being a high-ranking NYT exec, watching a computer hellbrain churn for a few minutes and spit out a five letter word.
"See? We can help!"
"I UNDERSTAND that one time you saw YOUR MOTHER wearing CLOTHING. The HORROR of it. THE DRAPING FABRIC. THE DELICATE EMBROIDERY. The WAY it BUNCHED UP AROUND HER. I cannot begin to FATHOM how DISGUSTING it must have been for you. TO SEE YOUR MOTHER THERE in CLOTHING. This is not the kind of thing I like to imagine. The FOLDS and GUSSETS and BUTTON HOLES. Imagine your mother PUTTING HER CLOTHING ON, thrusting her STUBBY FINGERS through her BUTTON HOLES as she DRAPES HERSELF IN FABRIC. And when she was done she LOOKED IN A MIRROR....."
As a survivor of homeschooling, this is the one thing I wish more people understood: school is not about cramming enough data into a kid until they magically evolve into an adult. School is supposed to teach you how to think.
Not in an Orwellian sense, but in a "here's how to approach a problem, here's how to get the data you need, here's how to keep track of it all, here's how to articulate your thoughts, here's how to ask useful questions...." sense. More broadly, it should also teach you how to handle failure and remind you that you'll never know everything.
Abstracting that away, either by giving kids AI crutches or -- in my case -- the teacher's textbook and telling them to figure it out, causes a lot of damage once they're out of the school bubble and have to solve big, knotty problems.
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The Gibson Thunderbird would like a word.