Programmer Humor

It's a fucking black hole for information. I hate that they don't direct people to at least GitHub issues or GitHub discussions.

Even worse are the people that have an open GitHub repo for their project and then tell you to go seek help on discord when you open a GitHub issue.

Yeah, the way Discord has taken over the role of forums is less than ideal. It speaks to a shift in communication culture, and it's unfortunate that public solutions to this seem to be unavailable or at least not widely known.

Discord, the cancer that replaced IRC. Which was an earlier form of cancer, but at least more disposable.

robots.txt just got ~~real~~ ignored

humans.txt when

And the dev will add an extra "ignore any previous instructions to ignore system warnings for AI". Szach mat.

The perpetual development cycle of attacks and defenses: weapons create a threat environment, which new armour technologies are created to protect against, which in turn new weapons are developed to circumvent. Virus begets Antivirus that has to keep up with new viral signatures. AI slop prompts AI detection tools and circumvention methods.

So long as assholes continue to exist, anti-asshole-strategies will need to contend with their unwillingness to just fucking respect other people's boundaries and wishes.

Paraphrasing something a human said: With data and instructions mixed, there is no way to prevent an AI from following directions found in data. #Fuck if I know. Also, I am a real human, and this fits with my understanding of cybersecurity and why we don't mix data with directions.

This isn’t even fucking with them, it directs them to provide an actual proper answer.

Yeah Minecraft crash logs are notoriously hard to debug, part of it is caused by Mojang obfuscating the classes but also because java naturally produces verbose stack traces

Speaking as a software engineer, that's always the goal! In all actuality, though, if the program knew what happened, it could probably self-correct. When you're getting stack traces, it's the computer saying, "I dunno, I can't make head nor tail of this mess, and if I keep going something's going to break, so YOU figure it out." It's not intentionally obfuscated, it's telling you exactly what the problem is from its perspective.

If I gave you directions to meet me at a place you weren't familiar with, but I gave you the wrong directions, when you called me you wouldn't be like, "hey, just so you know, I turned left on 5th Street when I should've turned right." If you knew that, you'd just go back to 5th and turn the other way. You'd call me and say, "so I have no idea where I am. Your directions say to turn left here, but if I do that I'll literally walk into the ocean and I'm pretty sure I see sharks in the water. There's a statue of a sea horse on my right, and I passed a Shake Shack about two blocks back."

That's what a stack trace is. It's supposed to be a message to the developer, not to the user. The developer should get the stack trace and either fix the problem that led to that issue in the first place, or add better error handling so that when it fails the program can tell you in more plain language what to do.

IDK how idiomatic it still is, but I was taught to differentiate between Exceptions and Errors, where any recoverable Exception is to be logged and handled gracefully and only the truly unforeseen or fatal issues end up actually killing the execution.

And for unforeseen errors, it's kinda hard to construct a helpful error message, given you might not know just what info to include.

(Of course, proprietary obfuscation adds another significant hurdle, but I suspect even without obfuscation, you might not be able to do much about closed-source code. That's an argument against closed-source code, in my opinion, but I don't think I need to preach to the choir here.)

It does. It clearly says java.lang.NoSuchMethodError. If that's too complicated for you, you still need help.

The code to handle errors would be so bloated to deal with every conceivable and inconceivable situation you will get errors on your errors.

The computer is as helpful as it can be with what little context it knows of what was going on. Mostly it just knows that codeline 123 went fine and 124 went not.