Seminar2250

Thank you for the expression of sympathy. The good news is I actually love computer science, it fucking rules.

Also, I recorded this professor screaming at me and have documented all the plagiarism. I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint. He may not get in any real trouble (universities will always go to bat for abusive researchers as long as they bring in grant money), but news will get out eventually.

So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.

I have a theory (similar to that "it's been vibe coding all along" post) that it's a combination of wishful thinking, lack of knowledge of real science, and a lack of any liberal arts skills, that altogether produces this farce.

I think it's a good explanation for "the code has been battle tested because it's so old and widely used, if it had bugs/security issues, we would have discovered them by now", as well as the widespread "we invented a tech solution that is just a worse engineering solution". Looking at you, chain of self-driving cars.

The reason I do CS is because a professor of computer science lied to me about the kind of work I'd be doing to get me to enroll in the CS PhD program instead of math. Guy later physically threatened me in his office and plagiarized my work, but I'm not sure if this reflects poorly on computer scientists, academics, or CS professors.

Anyway I have a chip on my shoulder.

the students in my cs department are overwhelmingly promptfondlers and even my strong students are doing the "qualified praise" thing.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

i thought it was pretty funny <3

Firefox appears to support tab groups^[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups] if you'd like to try it.

If you're a big dork like me and don't like installing extensions, you can use Tab Groups in Chrome (or any Chromium-based browser). I save groups as sort of temp (ephemeral if I want to impress promptfondlers) bookmarks categorized by whatever miscellaneous stuff.

You can close the group and every tab will reopen when you open the group. When you delete all the tabs, the group is removed from the top of the browser window.

thinking about how often code will be like

[-1] * len(array) # -1 is a place holder because I don't know the vocabulary term "sentinel value"

and justified because "it just needs to work"

and now we have professional vibe coders

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish

half as good as expert human

60% of what a senior can do

is there like a character sheet somewhere so i can know where i fall on this developer spectrum

fn silly is what it is

the closest i've ever come to being an idea guy is saying 'yeah, i have ideas, they are [shit them out explicitly]. they are half-baked at best but let me know if you do anything with it'

coming up with ideas is fucking easy, for example:

pick a (palatable) villain from anything
put them in a setting that is banal but unusual for them
write jokes

BAM

Number magic?

they use numerology.ai as a backend

"we encode shit as numbers in an arbitrary way and then copy-paste it into chatgpt"