R tidyverse (specifically ggplot) is used by pretty much everyone in the scientific field. Probably the only implementation of a plotting system that has the least friction.

Autohotkey is the most arcane fucking language I’ve used, idk why someone hasn’t rewritten it in something clearer.

Bosses will never understand this and discourage refactoring until months later nothing works and everything has to be rewritten…

I’ve only been programming seriously (for work) in the last two years and honestly don’t get the copy pasting memes. I get copy pasting a 1-3 line terminal snippet sometimes, but idk how people are getting away without actually writing their own code.

Rclone is superior IMHO, you have to explicitly name the output folder. Used to think it was a hassle but in hindsight being explicit about the destination reduces mistakes.

I use GNU find every day and still have to google about the details. Only learnt about - delete the other day, good to know the position matters.

Wouldn’t syncing automatically every few days give you the same protection though?

Did woodworking before I started software engineering, and I feel like the general attitude to craftsmanship applies well to coding.

You don’t have to wait, they’re doing it now.

This made me realise it would probably be trivially easy to make QR code stickers that first lead to a phishing page (please enter your payment details) followed by a link to a restaurants actual online ordering page.

Those restaurant ordering apps look so dodgy anyway I bet a quarter of people wouldn’t suspect a thing.

People write regex in notepad and complain it doesn’t work on the first try…

Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredible. But it’s still a variation of the Chinese room experiment, it’s not a real intelligence, but really good at pretending to be one. I might trust it more if there were variants based on strictly controlled datasets.

I write a lot of bash and I still have to check syntax every day, but the answer to that is not chatGPT but a proper linter like shell check that you can trust because it’s based on a rigid set of rules, not the black box of a LLM.

I can understand the syntax justification for obscure languages that don’t have a well written linter, but if anything that gives me less confidence about CHATGPT because it’s training material for an obscure language is likely smaller.

For the love of God, if you’re a junior programmer you’re overestimating your understanding if you keep relying on chatGPT thinking ‘of course I’ll spot the errors’. You will until you won’t and you end up dropping the company database or deleting everything in root.

All ChatGPT is doing is guessing the next word. And it’s trained on a bunch of bullshit coding blogs that litter the internet, half of which are now chatGPT written (without any validation of course).

If you can’t take 10 - 30 minutes to search for, read, and comprehend information on stack overflow or docs then programming (or problem solving) just isn’t for you. The junior end of this feel is really getting clogged with people who want to get rich quick without doing any of the legwork behind learning how to be good at this job, and ChatGPT is really exarcebating the problem.

I will never understand people in programming who do stuff in tedious/inefficient ways without stopping to consider the alternatives. 9/10 if it feels stupid, it probably is.

The problem here is that every junior programmer thinks they write clean code when they really really don’t. Often I find the act of writing comments makes you go back to the code and clean things up, so it’s still worth encouraging comments.