this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

ah but did you tell them in CP437 or something fancy (like any text encoding after 1996)? 🤨🤨🥹

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?

That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.

[–] flowerysong@awful.systems 7 points 22 hours ago

My favourite was a junior dev who was like, "when I read from this input file the data is weirdly mangled and unreadable so as the first processing step I'll just remove all null bytes, which seems to leave me with ASCII text."

(It was UTF-16.)

You've got to make sure you're not over-specializing. I'd recommend trying to roll your own time zone library next.