The absolute epitome of non-AI slop has got to be these creepy videos that were on YouTube back in ~2017:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

Its exactly the kind of thing you’d expect would be the product of AI, but it actually came before AI. I think a lot of it was procedurally generated though, using scripts to control 3D software and editing software, so different character models could be used in the same scenes and different scenes could be strung together to make each video.

I think a similar thing happens with those shovelware Android games. There’s so many that are just the same game with (incredibly poorly done) asset swaps that I think they must just make a game once and then automatically generate a thousand+ variations on it.

In my opinion a single weird person doesn’t warrant an entire complaint post with 100+ comments of discussion (which, yes, I know I am adding to).

I, too, have wished to be able to easily embed prolog, or at least its reduced non-turing-complete version, datalog, into a less declarative language.

Also, I think integration with answer set programming for static code analysis could be useful. This is sort of a mid-way point between test driven development and something like the type level programming in languages such as Haskell or semi-automated theorem proving in languages like Coq.

It’s a tool, useful in some contexts and not useful in others.

In my opinion this is a thought terminating cliche in programming and the IT industry in general. It can be, and is, said in response to any sentiment about any thing.

Now, saying what sort of context you think something should or should not be used in, and what qualities of that thing make it desirable/undesirable in that context, could lead to fruitful discussion. But just “use the right tool for the right job” doesn’t contribute anything.

I agree with you then, you can’t make a good webpage if your boss tells you to fill it with garbage.

If your motivation is to see old html pages, with minimal style, well it’s impossible to do them reliably.

Not only should your site be legible without JS, it should be legible without CSS, and infact without rendering the effects of the HTML tags (plain text after striping the tags).

At one point in time this was the standard, that each layer was an enhancement on top of the one below it. Its seems that web devs now cannot even imagine writing a news article or a blog post like, something that has the entirety of its content contained within its text. A plain .txt file renders “reliably” on anything. You are the one adding extra complexity in there and then complaining that you’re forced to add even more to deal with the consequences of your actions.

“Fine” might be overselling it a little bit.

I would say its ‘comprehensible’ if you’ve read the book, but its still not great.

Assuming the light really was being powered by the flash from the lightning this is a pretty crazy demo of just how little power LEDs consume.

So did they take the firefighter out afterwards and shoot him as part of the staging?

However, this fuckin’ half-in/half-out state has become the engine of a manifold of security issues, primarily bc nobody but nerds or industry specialists knows that much about it yet. That has led to rushed, busy, or just plain lazy devs and engineers to either keep IPv6 sockets listening, unguarded, or to just block them outright and redirect traffic to IPv4 anyway.

Its kind of interesting to me how conservative the IT industry is with stuff like this.

The industry loves to say “move fast and break things” or “innovate and disrupt”, but that generally only applies to things that can be shat out in a two week long Python project (or shat out in 2 weeks after publicly funded universities spent years figuring out the algorithm for you). For anything foundational, like CPU architecture, operating systems, or the basic assumptions about how UI should work, they’re terrified of change.

I understand your frustration and I apologize for reading into your comments something you didn’t mean. I, too, wish people would say what they mean and mean what they say, and that when you say something its taken to mean what you said.

Unfortunately very often people will make a very reasonable (even factually true) point as a preamble to support something very unreasonable. If you agree with the reasonable point the person will then act like you agree with the unreasonable one. This is not only more time consuming and tiring to argue against, it also lends a great deal more credibility to the unreasonable point than it is really owed. To the uninformed reader to looks like the two sides of the argument partially agree, when nothing could be further from the truth. Its immensely frustrating to have your words used against you like this, so many people try and preempt it by jumping straight to (what they assume to be) the unreasonable point and arguing against it directly.

This is toxic for actual discussion. It means that good faith actors have to add all sorts of qualifications and clarifications about where they stand before they say anything about anything, which is tiring in itself. But its the world that we live in. If someone makes an unqualified comment about the CO2 emissions of volcanoes in a thread about anthropogenic climate change people are going to assume that they don’t think climate change is real. And, operating that way, those people will be right more often than they’re wrong.

Then you should probably be a little more explicit about that, because I have never, not once in my life, heard someone say “well you know wearing a seatbelt doesn’t guarantee you’ll survive a car crash” and not follow it up with “that’s why seatbelts are stupid and I’m not going to wear one”.

I want you to imagine that your comments in this thread were written by an engineer or a surgeon instead of a programmer.

Imagine an engineer saying “Sure, you can calculate the strength of a bridge design based on known material properties and prove that it can hold the design weight, it that doesn’t automatically mean that the design will be safer than one where you don’t do that”. Or “why should I have to prove that my design is safe when the materials could be defective and cause a collapse anyway?”

Or a surgeon saying “just because you can use a checklist to prove that all your tools are accounted for and you didn’t leave anything inside the patient’s body doesn’t mean that you’re going to automatically leave something in there if you don’t have a checklist”. Or “washing your hands isn’t a guarantee that the patient isn’t going to get an infection, they could get infected some other way too”.

A doctor or engineer acting like this would get them fired, sued, and maybe even criminally prosecuted, in that order. This is not the mentality of a professional, and it is something that programming as a profession needs to grow out of.

1. Some sort of sex thing
2. This comes to mind, even though its specifically for dads:

Yeah, I really wish it wasn’t like this, but replacing a phone’s OS is a lot more like flashing a custom bios than installing an OS on a hard drive.

How hard is it to just say “I don’t like that scent”?

The thing to understand about large organizations is that appearances matter a lot and the people working in them have to look busy. This is well known phenomenon among low level employees but it applies to managers and even executives too (who have to put on a show that they’re increasing shareholder value and that their company is special somehow).

So, why do advertisers care if someone says “fuck” but not about someone whose spewing pseudointellectual misogynistic bullshit? Because there’s someone whose job description is “brand value” and if they’re not upset about something then they don’t look busy. The amount of “fucks” per minute is a really simple metric that (now that speech recognition is as good as it is) is really easy to measure. In other words its an easy way to look busy.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that the guy’s boss is probably a conservative anyway, and so doesn’t mind the misogyny so much, but looking busy is the main reason.