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I still want to get into coding the OG manual way (because I enjoy pain and disappointment apparently) but now it seems like a waste of time since vibe coders and 13 year olds already are lightyears ahead of me. Also I have no reason to learn it, all apps are already built xD
all apps are already built
Couldn’t be further from the truth. You also have to consider competition.
Can’t think of anything that could serve a major need right now, but I absolutely identified things in my life where I could use a preexisting tool to accomplish my goal, but it’s much less hassle for me to use the one I made for myself. You don’t have to transform the world, sometimes you can help yourself with a minor inconvenience and then put it out there for anyone who might find themselves with the same inconvenience.
I’m in the same boat. I used to be an amateur front and back end web developer. Almost made a text based RPG in middle school. I had to stop when shit got crazy in high school and college, but I don’t feel like any programming is worth my time right now. I’m focusing on gardening and maybe some cooking. You know, human activities that we can still enjoy.
Yeahh exactly. AI has pretty much ruined computer based fun now. Which in some ways is good, we should all learn physical hobbies again and not be reliant on tech. I still enjoy my hobby desktop computers though, I just enjoy learning how it really works under the surface.
I started with C++ and went to Java to .NET to Javascript and now to Terraform.
I know this is all a joke but there’s something definitely different with the ones above and the ones below. There’s a bit of satisfaction you can get sometimes when you’re working with memory directly and getting faster feedback (yes, there’s more math back then and it wasn’t easy to look stuff up, for sure). However, there’s new challenges nowadays … there’s so many layers on top of layers. I feel as though Stack Overflow and ChatGPT are so needed because the error messages and things we give are obfuscated or unclear (not always any library author’s fault as there’s compatibility issues, etc)
We’re doing serverless stuff at my current company and none of our devs run code locally. They have to upload it using CDK or Serverless Framework to run on the cloud. We don’t use SST so we can’t set breakpoints but like that’s a lot of crap inbetween just running your code already. Not even getting into the libraries and transpilers and stuff we use. I spent like a few weeks over Christmas to get our devs to run the code locally. Guess what? None of them use it because they’re so use to uploading it. I was like, "you can put breakpoints in it! you can have nodemon and it instant reloads! nope, none of them care … "
First learning is last learning.
Same reason we still do
console.log("FUCK").First learning is last learning.
I’ll be the dumb one to ask: what do you mean? Is this that making a mistake that costs a lot is the best teacher, because you only have to mess it up once to learn it forever?
Pretty sure they mean people don’t learn something again when they already learned it. Once you learn how to do something, willingness to learn it again but a different way dries up, and so you stick to bad habits as long as they ‘work’
It’s a mantra about teaching people and then expecting them to forget it. Doesn’t work. They’ll default to what they already know.
My freshman English teacher got married in October and I called her by her maiden name the entire year.
Like all programming mantras, it’s not universally true, but it’s annoyingly reliable. It reflects the shape of the human brain.
I just uh… thought about this a little bit further and I think it’s kind of like a situation between truth and circumstance and shit on top of shit. as well as who does it serve and for what?
The missing middle section was documentation and QA getting worse
Well yea, when you train the entire 2nd generation of coders on a book that is “For dummies” what did you expect?
Don’t forget the third gen’s JavaScript: The Good Parts
I’m 19 and in the past, apparently.
I turned 40 two days ago. Get off my lawn!
When you turn 40 do they issue you a lawn or do you not turn 40 until you have a lawn?
You get a lawn and white New Balances at 30. At 40 you get nearsightedness and additional back pain.
You are issued a lawn IF you have chronic back pain. Otherwise you have to wait until you’re at least 50.
Love the shoutout to Margaret Hamilton
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Obligatory Grace Hopper
No, I don’t think so. It’s true that many of the earliest programmers were female, but there were very few of them, and that was a long time ago.
In a way, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, but she never even touched a computer. The first programmers who did anything similar to today’s programming were from Grace Hopper’s era in the 1950s.
In the late 1960s there were a lot of women working in computer programming relative to the size of the field, but the field was still tiny, only tens of thousands globally. By the 1970s it was already a majority male profession so the number of women was already down to only about 22.5%.
That means that for 50 years, a time when the number of programmers increased by orders of magnitude, the programmers were mostly male.
Depends how far you go back. The top half is pretty representative of the professional dev team I was in in 1992.
“Creates a whole game in assembly” is probably referring to roller coaster tycoon, which was written by a man. (lots of other games were written in asm, like many NES games, but I’d wager RCT was what they were alluding to)
That was my immediate thought. There were many that came before RCT, but it has the distinction of being (possibly) one of the last in an industry that had already moved on to higher-level languages to do merely half as much.
So were “computers”. It used to be a job, delegated mostly to women. The JD is doing calculations day in and day out.
The moon landing by hand wouldn’t have been as funny without the body builders first.
We need to bring back 2010-2012 rage comic memes. All we needed was a badly cut-out blonde wig to trans Derp’s gender.
The glory days of Derp and Derpina
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The large initial percentage of female coders was due to computer having been a female job, because secretary was. Their role within companies didn’t change, what changed is that they were using machines to do the computing instead of doing it by hand.
We’re kinda lucky to have the woke trifecta (Ada, Grace, Alan) (first programmer (woman), inventor of compilers (woman), absolute unit (gay)) to keep the chuds at bay. Even if we weren’t all socially inept nerds (or pretending to be so to bosses) there’s only so much you can do, culturally, if the population is growing exponentially. Uncle Bob (yes I know he’s a chud) did the maths at some point IIRC it was something like the number of programmers doubling every two years. Which also means that at any one point in time roughly 2/3rds of programmers have no idea what they’re doing, which explains the javascript ecosystem.
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You can throw Margaret Hamilton in there, who was in charge of the software team that landed people on the moon. The picture of her standing next to a printout of the Apollo guidance software is iconic.
At first I thought this was the Wicked Witch of the West’s actress and thought she must have been multitalented. Then I looked it up to verify. Nope, same name, different women.
If you want famous actresses who contributed to technology, you want Hedy Lamarr:
At the beginning of World War II, along with George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers.
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Hey now. Searching stack overflow circia 2011 to 2018 was an Art. You had to know enough to find the correct question that wasn’t deleted because a mod thought it was a duplicate of another question
After a while you got know which stack overflow questions were a waste of time, and you used that knowledge for years.
Before that you had to hang out on flipside or other gamedev sites and show your worthiness before begging for information.
I was so proud when they shared the DS hack (basically a homebrew SDK made by trial and error by some people) so that I could make small games on it.
Also to find the actual correct answer three comments down because the one that was voted highest worked, but was actually a really shit way to do the thing being asked
I often found the correct answers in the comments of an answer
Still do.
Yeah OK, but back then, an office suite was like 500 LOC.
People have been hm unable to quit vim since before I was born.
I swore up & down that I’d learn at least two ways of exiting VIM. I even went through basic training to learn all the shortcuts, but it interfered with my regular workflow, so I dropped it “for a bit”. It’s been a year and I can’t remember a damn thing.
Some say they are still trapped there, to this day…
May the :helpgrep be ever on their side
tar --help
(joke)
YOU FOOL! THE ACTUAL COMMAND WAStar -?That dash looks an awful lot like an em-dash
Normal:
-Em:
–That reminds me of this Elle Cordova short: https://youtube.com/shorts/ky0YOo7_Y0o
I’ve never understood why people are so intimidated by tar
It is sticky and pretty much ruins clothes.
One reason is that tar supports both traditional style args “tar tf <filename.tar>” and unix-style args “tar -tf <filename.tar>” but there are subtle differences in how they work.
Literally the only time I’ve ever run into that is when I was trying to manipulate the path it extracted to. In 99% of cases I’m doing tf, xf, or cf plus flags for the compression type, etc, and those differences are irrelevant.
I used something recently where it wasn’t possible to use the traditional-style args. I think it was a “diff”, which meant I needed a “-f”. It wasn’t a big deal, but, occasionally it does happen.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. This thread started because I said I’ve never understood why people talk like tar is some indecipherable black magic. Common tasks are easy and there’s a man page for everything else.
tar -eXtract Ze Vucking File
I was about to say
tar -CompressZeVuckingFile; great mnemonic and I use it every time!Thanks! This will definitely help me to remember it from now on.
Me 6 months from now:
tar -EZVF
Me in 6 months "
how to install winzip using terminal"
Nobody wants to deliberately use the wrong compression type when extracting, so modern tar will figure out the compression itself if you just point it at a file. So
tar -xf filenameworks on almost anything. You don’t need to remember which flag to use on a.tar.bz2file and which one for a.tar.xzfile.That doesn’t give me a memorable mnemonic though.
tar -eXtract File
yeah, but then how am I supposed to remember “tar” ? :P
Tape ARchive -eXtract File
I got tired of looking up the options for each possible combination of archiving + compression, so today I have a “magic” bash function that can extract almost any format.
Then for compressing, I only use
zip, which doesn’t need any args other than the archive name and the thing you’re compressing. It needs-rwhen recursing on dirs, but unlike “eXtract” and “Ze”, that’s a good mnemonic.It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).
That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.
And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).
I almost never create a tarball, so I have to look up the syntax for that. Which is as simple as
man tar. But as far as extracting it almost couldn’t be easier,tar xf <tarball>and call it a day. Or if you want to list the contents without extracting,tar tf <tarball>. Unless you’re using an ancient version of tar, it will detect and handle whatever compression format you’re using without you having to remember if you needzorJor whatever.It can be easier if you’re used to the dash before the arguments; it’s optional but you can put them:
tar -cf # Compress File tar -xf # Xtract File
The fact that the div center search needs a year on it got me lol
Loving my nearly frontend free development life. I use Stackoverflow or Google maybe 2-3 times a month these days, not sure if I qualify for the upper row :(
I feel attacked by “how to center div 2025”
Super easy!
<center> <div> </div> </center>.parent { display: grid; place-items: center; }couldn’t be easier in 2025.
probably a lot less performant than doing it the old fashioned way. sometimes that matters. you should have the non-grid non-flex method half committed to memory. abusing flex or grid to save 2 lines of code is not a great practice, and having only one child element is usually a pretty clear sign that flex/grid is the wrong tool for the job
at the end of the day though do whatever you want, in fact why not just write a javascript function to recenter it every frame at 60fps cause 99.9% of the software 99.9% of people interact with is pure shit made by developers who don’t care for users who don’t care.
we live in a slop world, made by and for slop people who love slop. can you tell i’ve been awake for 30 hours? anyways…
I hope you get some good rest :)
One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn’t be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn’t powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn’t be fun enough.
It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
There’s a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer’s memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.
the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape
Holy hell, that is OLD old. We’re talking about the beginnings of digital time here. Had the first web constellations formed yet? How fast did you crank your CPU?
You couldn’t crank your CPU in the olden days, it’d make games run in fast forward.
To be fair, unlocking the frame rate on console-to-PC ports still fast-forwards many games including Nier: Automata or breaks the physics like in Skyrim.
It doesn’t have to be this way, any more, but it still is because… Lack of expertise? I really can’t think of anything else?
Yeah, I played it a lot, and a similar one called aviator which was a kinda flight sim. There wasn’t really much of an internet back then but stuff was easy to copy on tapes.
Elite Dangerous is the most recent installment of the series started by that game
It’s 2025 and I have no idea what the current way to center something is. Then again, my job is that of a backend engineer so it’s rare I’m outputting anything that isn’t a log statement. They can pry tables and center tags from my cold, aging hands.
It’s <center>, obviously.
IMO tables should be more used for… tabular data. Shocking, I know, but the amount of websites that try to emulate a table with
divs anduls out there is crazy.
Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it’s called job security. Where’s my medal?
I have to say, I’m pretty sure those guys were in the past too.
Getting to keep your job is your medal then.
