Programmer Humor

I’ve never thought of it that way. I’m going to add copy writer to my resume.

No the spell just fizzled. In my experience it happens far less often if you start with an Abra kabara and end it with an Alakazam!

Conversely, code that works is also text

I asked ChatGPT with help about bare metal 32-bit ARM (For the Pi Zero W) C/ASM, emulated in QEMU for testing, and after the third iteration of "use printf for output" -> "there's no printf with bare metal as target" -> "use solution X" -> "doesn't work" -> "ude printf for output" ... I had enough.

It's pretty random in terms of what is or isn't doable.

For me it's a big performance booster because I genuinely suck at coding and don't do too much complex stuff. As a "clean up my syntax" and a "what am I missing here" tool it helps, or at least helps in figuring out what I'm doing wrong so I can look in the right place for the correct answer on something that seemed inscrutable at a glance. I certainly can do some things with a local LLM I couldn't do without one (or at least without getting berated by some online dick who doesn't think he has time to give you an answer but sure has time to set you on a path towards self-discovery).

How much of a benefit it's for a professional I couldn't tell. I mean, definitely not a replacement. Maybe helping read something old or poorly commented fast? Redundant tasks on very commonplace mainstream languages and tasks?

I don't think it's useless, but if you ask it to do something by itself you can't trust that it'll work without singificant additional effort.

And that's what happens when you spend a trillion dollars on an autocomplete: amazing at making things look like whatever it's imitating, but with zero understanding of why the original looked that way.

Well I've got the name for my autobiography now.

On one line of code you say?

*search & replaces all line breaks with spaces*

The ideal code is no code at all

Awwwww snap look at this limp dick future we got going on here.

My uncle. Very smart very neuronal. He knows the entire Internet, can you imagine? the entire internet. Like the mails of Crooked Hillary Clinton, that crook. You know what stands in that Mails? my uncle knows. He makes the best code. The most beautiful code. No one has ever seen code like it, but for him, he's a genius, like i am, i have inherited all his genius genes. It is very easy. He makes the best code. Sometimes he calls me and asks me: you are even smarter than i am. Can you look at my code?

You managed to get an ai to do 200 lines of code and it actually compiled?

It will have consumed the GigaWattHours capacity of a few suns and all the moisture in our solar system, but by Jeeves, we'll get there!

...but it won't be that impressive once we remember concepts like "monkey, typing, Shakespeare" were already embedded in the training data.

llms are systems that output human-readable natural language answers, not true answers

It confidently gave me one

IMO, that's one of the biggest "sins" of the current LLMs, they're trained to generate words that make them sound confident.

Man, I can't wait to try out generative AI to generate config files for mission critical stuff! Imagine paying all of us devops wankers when my idiot boss can just ask Chat GPT to sort all this legacy mess we're juggling with on the daily!

Bogosort with extra steps

That doesn't sound viby to me, though. You expect people to actually code? /s

Not reliably, no. Python is too dynamic to do that kind of thing without solving general program equivalence which is undecidable.

Use a static language, problem solved.

I'm going to laugh in Java, where this has always been possible and reliable. Not like ai reliable, but expert reliable. Because of static types.

For the most part "Rename symbol" in VSCode will work well. But it's limited by scope.