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Honestly I use a couple of AI tools so I’m probably a total hypocrite but I’m starting to feel a bit depressed about all of this. Before long we’re going to find that we automated everything fun and creative and only have the jobs the robots are *supposed* to be doing left for us.

I don't resent the tech, it's amazing and I already use it all the time - what I resent is that the grifters who last week posed as Web3/Metaverse consultants are now directly undermining professionals of all stripes with this, because they want to pay less for our services.

"i MaDe ThIs In TeN mInUtEs WiTh ChAt GpT a FrEeLaNcEr QuOtEd Me A wEeK" - ok then, go and deploy that "serverless function" it just wrote you to a live env. What's that, you don't trust yourself to do it? You don't know what a live env even is?

No, it's not the tech, it's the parasitic industry that sprung up around it, as happens with all tech.

@hjk101 all languages are great, all languages are shit. I don't really mind any off the bat, the problems arise when someone has written anything in any of them. JS and PHP encourage different types of technical debt, but both are fine provided nobody writes anything in them.

@daniel-wu I figured it'd bundle chromium (and I guess node makes sense) but damn, that's still a lot bigger than I'd expect it to be, and the incremental thing is insane. I wonder if this is just the way now, or we'll ever look back on this era as the age of bloat. I never fail to feel exasperated as another npm i eats up half a gig of my HD with mostly unused shit.

@thebiochemic right. If you're inheriting a codebase, it's likely going to be a flavour of shit.

@daniel-wu not used electron beyond tinkering years ago, is that the project folder size or the actual executable?

There never seemed like a grand plan for it, at the time I recall Facebook getting lots of really, really bad press, even by their standards. Every week there was another whistleblower, another scandal, from depressed teens to fake news to genocide (https://tinyurl.com/474dx9bb), then all of a sudden this big announcement of...not much, really. A sinister video of Zuck sounding like an eight year old describing the computer game they're going to make, which will do literally everything imaginable, with nothing much to back it up.

Credit to him though, if credit is the word: it did get the fifth-wheels of tech (who have mostly since updated their LinkedIn titles to 'AI expert') talking a lot of crap about the Metaverse, and a lot less sense about how awful his company were.

I could be wrong, but the whole thing seemed like a dead cat to me. 2021 had this *and* NFTs, it truly was the year of the Tech Grifter.

@fckIE Figure it's from this:

https://thestreet.com/technology/...

@PaperTrail this is spot on. The only people who are remembered for more than killing themselves tend to have killed other people as well - it's unlikely that anyone else has done much to outshine 'suicide' in terms of noteworthiness, so that's what they're remembered for.

Someone I knew killed themselves a few years back. He is, I won't say hated, but not remembered fondly by those closest to him, because he caused so much hurt, caused people to ask questions that only he could answer - could I have helped? did I make it worse? what made him do it? - and now never can.

Those unanswered questions, those scars, will likely never heal for them. That is what they carry with them for his memory.

I rarely do backend but give me Node over a PHP haystack any day - even then, the language is rarely the issue with a shonky codebase, just a convenient distraction from shitty code.

In a country like the UK, where drinking holes are often only a misheard comment away from a pub-wide fight breaking out, gay bars/pubs are a good bet for a good night. Nobody actually cares if you're not gay, if you get hit on, it's flattering, and crucially, the bouncers aren't there to get a sly blow or two in when a fight breaks out, but to weed out the pricks who cause them in the first place.

@Oktokolo fully expected this to be from him, still not entirely convinced that it isn't.

I have noticed in close to two decades doing this shit that the neckbeard contingent of engineering teams has dropped right off - and to be honest, I miss it. Rather have someone rolling their eyes at me because I don't play Magic than some "ninja" on an electric skateboard who is happy to do unpaid work in the evenings for a pat on the back.

Otherwise, you're right. The most important skill I've had in all my time on the job is that I'm not bad at making people laugh. Coding skills count for a lot but if you want the 'weird genius' niche you have to be likeable, or at least so oblivious that others can make fun of you quite openly.

@jassole let's not get into things you can't realise, daresay there isn't enough internet.

@jassole night night cupcake. Hope tomorrow goes better than today did. Doesn't seem too high a bar.

@jassole alright mate, I'm going to bed now, the missus is giving me earhole. Try to imagine that.

@jassole they do, this has been a fun discussion, even with some weirdo trying to derail it. Go watch a Sargon video and wish you were American.

@jassole lol "virtue signalling", what is this, the BTL of a 2016 Paul Joseph Watson video?

Man, I feel sorry for you, every six months you come back here and try to fit in but you can't help yourself. Try being less of an obnoxious, bitter plonker and you might find this quite a rewarding community. Literally nobody here gives a fuck about your photocopied opinions.

@jassole dude nobody likes your whiny edgelord shit here, sorry that you got roasted on your post but it happens every time you do so - talk about tech or fuck off. This is devrant, not r/incelchat.

@Demolishun and bald heads, and one droopy eye, and legit shell enterprises...now you mention it, the similarities are too uncanny.

@Oktokolo I'm not American, so its ability to project military power isn't a primary concern of mine, but I take your point. Still, this isn't the same thing. The CEO of Lockheed Martin is nowhere near as rich or personally influential, and atmospheric flight is pretty well-done by now. Worldwide, there are hundreds of such companies. The US contracts several, and they rely on that for their money. They are the client.

If the USA ends up relying on SpaceX, the dynamic has reversed. This isn't LM bidding for the chance to make a fighter. This is the US govt bidding for the chance to use SpaceX. That's not good.

@Demolishun true, but I don't know that one changes the other. The world's probably always been controlled by shady groups with interests contrary to mine or yours - but even then, you'd imagine that someone in that group with Elon's twitter output would be sat down in the secret volcano HQ and told to grow up a bit. It's an interesting phase we're entering and I salute him completely trashing his reputation as a polymath and an emotional adult, but I have no idea where this all ends.

@spongessuck you take my point. When I was a kid we were like 'wow, Bill Gates has 1bn in the bank' - now, Elon Musk can turn an entire satellite array that an engaged army depends on, on or off on a whim/temper tantrum. Whoever it is, whatever side they're on, that creeps me out. At least we have some paltry mechanisms for influencing or changing governments. He answers to nobody but himself.

@Demolishun no, I did the same with Facebook. It wasn't even about it being manipulated by the state, more that it was manipulating me - you don't want to be the product, but that's basically the model now. Too many days wasted on a stupid platform that then knew too much about me.

For this reason, I'm quite happy that he's destroying Twitter, and I don't want a replacement, I just find it funny how he is doing so in the belief that he knows better than the engineering team: I've worked under enough PMs who "know the code" (spent a night on codeacademy) to know the type when I see it.

When we're getting into his wealth bracket, I don't know that there's even much difference between an individual and a government, it's an entity that is too powerful, full stop - so I don't really see it as any better than it was.

We're at a kind of mega-oligarch phase, and like you, I quite want to watch something burn, just not sure what it'll be yet.

@Demolishun I'm not sure how I feel about billionaires owning private space programs when national governments can't afford to anymore, it was always inevitable but something about that does creep me out a bit.

@CoreFusionX I thought he was pretty cool at first, interviews etc he seemed like a clever and thoughtful guy, but after a few months of posting incel-level memes and basically running Twitter into the ground (which is a valuable public service to perform, just...he didn't mean to), I'm not sure.

I don't hate him, just find him a bit cringeworthy, and re. childish, only one of the two of us has ever posted an NPC meme with a straight face.

@Oktokolo even a fucked clock is right twice a day