this article is incredibly long and rambly, but please enjoy as this asshole struggles to select random items from an array in presumably Javascript for what sounds like a basic crossword app:
At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.
Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway.
ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this), selecting a random item between 0 and the areay’s length minus 1, and maybe storing that index in a second array if you want to guarantee uniqueness. there’s definitely not literally thousands of libraries for this if you seriously can’t figure it out yourself, hackerman
I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like
"s""c""a""r""*""k""u""n""i""s""*" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem, one that could easily consume the better part of an evening.
fuck it’s convenient that every example this chucklefuck gives of ChatGPT helping is for incredibly well-treaded toy and example code. wonder why that is? (check out the author’s other articles for a hint)
I thought that my brother was a hacker. Like many programmers, I dreamed of breaking into and controlling remote systems. The point wasn’t to cause mayhem—it was to find hidden places and learn hidden things. “My crime is that of curiosity,” goes “The Hacker’s Manifesto,” written in 1986 by Loyd Blankenship. My favorite scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers” is
most of this article is this type of fluffy cringe, almost like it’s written by a shitty advertiser trying and failing to pass themselves off as a relatable techy
I’m not sure the power loom analogy works, because power looms are (to my non-weaver knowledge) fit for purpose. if power looms’ output required significant rework by a skilled weaver (being paid significantly less for essentially the same amount of work done more tediously, per my point above), relied on stolen patterns from all of the world’s handweavers, and they were crushingly inefficient to run per woven piece, I seriously doubt history would remember them as a successful invention
unfortunately, we’re living in uniquely awful times, and decades of tech’s strange, manipulated culture have turned many programmers into nihilistic utopians with no ability to think things through on a systemic level. generative AI as a whole is nothing but an underhanded wage reduction tactic, but (by design) our industry doesn’t have the solidarity to fight it in any way that works (see the Writers’ Guild’s successful strike)
The power loom analogy works very well, actually. Their spot in history is, in part, because of who got to write the history books.
The inventors and entrepreneurs who developed them spent lots of time spying on weavers - who understandably weren’t cooperative, when they found out what the machines were intended to do. The quality of their products was so shoddy that the weavers’ first attempt at a legal challenge actually tried to have them defined as fraudulent, because they figured the poor-quality fabric would ruin the reputation of the English textile industry. In the early days, they actually did require frequent fix-up jobs.
Not all of the entrepreneurs who built factories were monstrous assholes; some of them were quite considerate people who paid professional weavers a decent wage to work for them (these weavers still often hated their new working conditions). Some did this out of legitimate concern for their communities (it was a smaller world, and many of them personally knew the very people whose jobs they were degrading), and some did so because they were afraid that Luddites would break into their factories and destroy all the expensive machines. Most of them were put out of business, they were easy to undercut by owners who instead used indentured children taken from orphanages.
They did drive the price of clothing down, but unfortunately that didn’t directly translate to all-around increased economic prosperity immediately: Aside from all the weavers being put out of business, entire communities suffered economic collapse because they were built around those weavers’ income.
You’re right that programmers often have little class consciousness. I’m a union member myself (and so are most of my programmer friends and colleagues) - but unfortunately, I’m not sure how much some unions in a tiny country can do against the economic might of Silicon Valley.
huh, explained like that the power loom analogy does much better than I thought in encapsulating this anxiety; at its core, it’s a (very justified) fear that we haven’t learned anything from history and that the loudest and most foolish of our profession are gleefully marching us towards an awful fate
I’ve been doing some reading on the origins of technolibertarianism (though as with all my reading I’m far behind where I’d like to be) and it’s fucking insane the lengths Silicon Valley has gone to in order to make unionization a taboo topic among American tech workers
Totally agree.
IMO a better analogy would be clothing sweatshops rather than the power loom. Same utilitarian effect of textile affordability increases. Same ethical fuckery with exploitation of labour.