a vibe coder just told me "more code is better"

@ariadne even fucking bill gates knew better. why do people want to be worse at this than bill gates

said vibecoder has a masters degree in computer science as opposed to my no-degree in computer science

@ariadne They obviously haven't heard the wisdom of Terry Davis.

@ariadne

dont ya just love the CS degree types??

@hotelzululima @ariadne now, now, #NotAllCSDegrees

@ska @hotelzululima you actually have a CS degree?

@ariadne @hotelzululima Why, yes - from 1998, which was a very different time.

@ska @hotelzululima in 1998 i was in middle school man

@ariadne @hotelzululima It was a very different time.

That said, I have to admit that apart from basic programming courses for data structures and stuff, what I officially learned working for my degree was mostly useless. The really formative stuff was what I was doing with my peers in the computer rooms, learning the basics of Unix, system administration, etc. Those were the actual skills I later used to get a job.

me: "you know nearly 200k LoC for an ircd in a modern programming language seems like a lot"

vibe coder: "more code is better"

me: "how so?"

vibe coder: "it has more features"

dude literally has a masters in CS from georgia tech, i don't even

@ariadne a degree is a proof that you can spend 5 years dealing with inane bureaucracy and focus on a few topics to the exclusion of all else

if you think of it that way, it's not inconsistent with this type of behavior

@whitequark sure, but still

@ariadne yea, it's still grim

@ariadne No, lean code; less code, but more efficiënt is better.

@AngelaScholder yes, we agree

@ariadne@treehouse.systems feed them 200 hamburgers then ask again

@ariadne watch me improve this whole thread: print()

@ariadne Imagine spending all that money just to be wrong more authoritatively.

@ariadne i feel like some people don't conceptually understand what code is

@ska @ariadne

now try starting in '71 with punch cards , 1130s, 360s/370s , teletypes and blueboxes

@hotelzululima @ariadne definitely one of the things I wish I had been born earlier for

@whitequark @ariadne As someone with an equivalent degree, yep.

@ariadne Some of those features may be unintentional.

@ska @ariadne

not and being 73 in the present day you don't..
(just glad I am somewhat still lucid although thats fading fast if I don't continuously refresh memories)

let me tell ya old age fucking SUCKS BIG TIME.. (and time ain't running backwards for moi anytime soon)

it just beats the hell out of the alternative.. lol

@hotelzululima

“No space left on device” —your brain, when you try to memorize something

@ska @ariadne

@pikhq

Bill Gates was actually competent as far as I know. One does not write a BASIC interpreter in 6502 assembly by being bad at programming.

@ariadne

@ariadne

Somebody ought to introduce him to the concept of cancer, then, because that's the logical conclusion of that illogical idea.

@ariadne
Me at 5: I want a huge house with space for every specific thing!
Me now : I want a house with a specific layout that I can adjust to do a few things I really want to do, and requires minimal maintenance.

@eldersea

Yeah, this is my fear with getting a bigger house. More house, more maintenance.

But perhaps I can mitigate by using the extra space to better organize things?

Not that I can afford a bigger house anyway. 😥

@ariadne

@brettm @ariadne And then make him smoke a whole carton of cigarettes.

@whitequark @ariadne it also comes with repeated social assurances of superiority that a lot of people *absolutely* will impose on their environment, in my experience, which again is entirely consistent

@ariadne @ska @hotelzululima I never went to university because in Germany that requires going to a "Gymnasium" level high school and I was never allowed to get a high school degree above "Mittelschule" level. I had to fight hard to get even that, because of my autistic meltdown I have been forced into Förderschule (special education) which normally has no useful degree at all.

My Mittelschule degree (with a very high grade) was barely enough to get into a job office sponsored special apprenticeship for software developers (Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung), but I completed that with a high grade and got a decent job at a regular company as a junior developer.

@hotelzululima @ska @ariadne
In my late pre-teen and early teen years, I was fascinated by the System/360 and System/370. The local IBM office was kind enough to send me the Principles of Operation manuals, and a few others. I've only ever had about three hours total of hands-on 370 l/303x, and very limited RJE to a 308x for a class.
Ultimately I got much more experience with DEC gear, including timesharing on a DECsystem-10, and hands-on with PDP-8 and small PDP-11 systems.

@hotelzululima @ska @ariadne
The DEC experience, which led me to BSD 4.2 Unix on VAXen, probably was more valuable to me than IBM 360/370 experience would have been, but I've always felt like I missed out somewhat by not getting to learn much about the IBM mainframe world.
I've tried running MVS 3.8 and DOS 26.2 on Hercules, but struggled with the former, and didn't get the latter installed successfully.

@hotelzululima @ska @ariadne
Main motivation for trying to run MVS or DOS was to use the PL/I compiler. PL/I was the first high-level language I "learned," but only from books and writing programs on paper. I've never had a chance to compile and execute a PL/I program.
The next high level language I learned was BASIC, on an HP 2000 Time Shared BASIC system. It seemed so primitive compared to PL/I.

@hotelzululima @ska @ariadne
Then, once I had access to a DECsystem-10, I taught myself FORTRAN-IV, Macro-10 assembly, and Algol-60. At the time, I wanted to learn Pascal, and a compiler for the DEC-10 existed, but I don't think the site had it. Finally learned that with UCSD Pascal on a microcomputer, and later Turbo Pascal.

@hotelzululima @ska @ariadne
The first languages I got _paid_ to program in, as a student, were 6502 assembly, XPL0 (very obscure), Microsoft BASIC, Turbo Pascal, and, in 1984-1986, Ada-83.

@brouhaha @ska @ariadne

shudder.. System 360 BAL as a student analyst (helping other students debug their code& read program dumps) & yes XPL... lol a compiler generator - nerd nirvana in 71!! and others way too many to count including a Intel MDS80 8080 dev system running 8080 ISIS, that OS was "different"...
pdp 11s 9Ls and 8s in the engineering center & main campus 'puter center, former NucE building(with a decomissioned research reactor in the basement) place was a trip,
1970s

@hotelzululima @ska @ariadne
XPL0 != XPL

XPL0 has Algol-like syntax but BCPL-like semantics.

@brouhaha @ska @ariadne

ah.. looked at algol-60 decided Burroughs did NOT really have a future... sigh...nice language though

@hotelzululima @ska @ariadne
People criticized Pascal for not standardizing the features needed for "real software," so everyone did their own extensions. Algol was like that but fffn moreso.
Burroughs (Unisys) still sells and maintains that product line to this day. It may not be as well known as IBM big iron, but I'd say they were fairly successful. The other 1960s computer companies are long gone.

@brouhaha @ska @ariadne

did the burroughs hardware survive?..

ie
unisys?? inherited/acquired our work from ARIX/Arete far as I know

thats the ARIX/Arete HW/SW combo we were trying to cert for b2 on the TMAC project and failed ,

crap was NOT ready for a b2 cert...

was all 68k based on ATT 5.3.x and MLS 1.1.x

@hotelzululima @brouhaha @ska nah that shit runs on emulators now on x86 machines

@brouhaha @ska @ariadne

'puter shit was so fucking simple in those days... nothing like today where its complexity for complexities own sake... and dont even get me started on LLM biases towards complexity

he vibe coded his own crypto

@dysfun he prefers gpt-5.6 terra for most tasks

@ariadne
how bad is it compared to my crypto profs hand written blowfish impl whose init code set the diffusion array to all zeroes (becoming equivalent to 64 bit xor with every word swapped)

@charlotte I havent looked

@ariadne

Humanity is literally turning into the [Pakleds] as we speak. 🤦‍♂️

@rl_dane please make our ship go

As autistic who's using AI as part of my toolkit as open-source dev and currently IT student in college, my BS detector and pattern recognition is giving me signs of possible AI psychosis for me.

Also more code doesn't mean more productivity for me, it's a lot like the bus factor of one meets AI slop documentation wise.

@ariadne

@ajhalili2006 yes, the language they generate is tuned to be very persuasive and sycophantic. I suspect that is both to make the product more acceptable and, frankly, more addictive.