I don’t think you can blame anyone except him for not understanding that AI sometimes hallucinates. Hell basically every AI tool makes you read that before you start using it. I’m normally very reticent to blame users for using things incorrectly, but if it took him 3 hours to realise it was wrong here then I have to say that’s on him.

Come on has anyone else ever persevered with a hallucinated answer for 3 hours before realising it was a hallucination? Longest it’s taken me is like 5 minutes, and that’s only for things that aren’t easily googleable.

I suspect in the real world it’s frustrating enough for restaurants that it wouldn’t have worked out.

You’re pretty much tricking restaurant workers into one of those awful voice-based phone trees.

Plus there are so many things that can actually happen when you try to book a table on the phone - they don’t have exactly what you want but can offer you this time instead… they only have outside seating available… etc. etc.

Plus, just having a proper online booking form is clearly a better option and not totally uncommon these days.

This is silly, and not in an interesting way.

Actually chars() is pretty simple - it’s just UTF-8 decoding which is elegant and simple.

The complexity is all around unicode, not UTF-8.

Interesting. But can’t you do basically the same thing with @nonnull annotations? I remember using something like that a decade ago when I last wrote Java.

IMO automated changelogs like these are not especially useful. Better than no changelog I guess, but nowhere near as good as a proper changelog. But proper changelogs take actual effort.

IDEs tend to work out of the box while the likes of vim or emacs need configuration and have an initially steep learning curve.

Not in my experience. It’s very easy to design systems that break IDE support. People love adding all sorts of ad hoc build scripts that mean you can’t just press F5 or whatever. It takes discipline and caring about IDEs to not do that.

And while people might love tweaking Emacs and Vim, it isn’t required.

There’s definitely an element of snobbery, and also of being lazy about tooling. Do you think once you become a talented dev you lose all human vices?

Some of the smartest people in the world believe in an imaginary dad who lives in the sky and grants imperceptible wishes. Everyone is human.

I completely agree. Also almost all of the fancy editing you can do with Vim can be done just with multiple cursors, and it’s less annoying because you do it incrementally (rather than typing a long sequence of commands and then seeing the result), and you much less to memorise.

I agree. C2 continuity does matter for aesthetics sometimes, but not for a button.

Even KISS. Sometimes things just have to be complex. Of course you should aim for simplicity where possible, but I’ve seen people fight against better and more capable options just because they weren’t as simple and thus violated the KISS “rule”.

One example is creating an interface for every goddamn class I make because of “loose coupling” when in reality none of these classes are ever going to have an alternative implementation.

Sounds like you’ve learned the answer!

Virtual all programming principles like that should never be applied blindly in all situations. You basically need to develop taste through experience… and caring about code quality (lots of people have experience but don’t give a shit what they’re excreting).

Stuff like DRY and SOLID are guidelines not rules.

Thanks for highlighting your username - made me notice that you post a lot of nonsense here so I can easily block it!

AI AI blah blah AI.

Also why is HCL supposedly the 9th most popular “programming language” (which it isn’t anyway)?

There are some examples in the very first list I found googling for “cancel culture examples”.

Not all of them are political (e.g. cancelling someone for sexual assault is clearly not, and that Heineken one… how??), but a decent number are, e.g. number 6 is about as partisan as you can get.

It’s a fairly inevitable reaction to cancel culture. This was predicted and warned against when left-wing cancel culture was at its height, but people didn’t listen. Now we have right-wing cancel culture instead.

I wouldn’t recommend the Gang of Four book. Many of the design patterns they espouse are way over complicated from the days of peak OOP. You know, FactoryFactoryVisitor stuff. Usually best avoided.

Yeah, I use Claude/ChatGPT sometimes for:

• Throwaway scripts: “write me a bash script to delete all merged git branches starting with ‘foo’”
• Writing functions that are tedious to look up but I can fairly easily evaluate for correctness: “write a C function to spawn a process and capture stdout and stderr merged”
• Doing stuff in systems I’m not very familiar with: “write an OCaml function to copy a file”

I haven’t got around to setting up any of that agentic stuff yet. Based on my experience of the chat stuff I’m a bit skeptical it will be good enough to be useful on anything of the complexity I work on. Find for CRUD apps but it’s not going to understand niche compiler internals or do stuff with WASM runtimes that nobody has ever done before.

He’s right, zstd is incredibly popular, quite widely used and also generally believed to be the best compression algorithm overall.

They use QAM and similar because it’s the best way to transmit data over a small number of long wires. Exactly the opposite of wires inside a CPU.