V0ldek

Not using gmail for personal email hurts me both socially and professionally, & has probably kept me out of the running for jobs

Wait, I'm sorry, what? Can you elaborate on this?

I used to argue with people that from all of the giants (the FAANG nonsense) MSFT was "the good guys" because they were doing god's work with FOSS. I still think .NET is an amazing technology and everyone working on it should be praised.

But then I got actually hired by MSFT and... you quickly realise this is just surface level shit. No one in management could give less of a fuck about open-source, or anything other than Growth™ for that matter. I speedran disillusionment and quit after little more than a year. In the end, it's just a big corpo doing big corpo shit. It has no values. It has no morals. It has no vision, other than that of a high $MSFT number.

If MSFT did anything good it's despite internal pressures and incentives, not thanks to them.

A corporation can never be good, it can only be properly constrained.

MS Teams often got problems over around 50 to 80 participants

As honourable mention, MS Teams is also uncontrollable, overblown jank that

• doesn't work in a browser despite being built in Electron
• is complete shite on Android, despite bring built in Electron
• barely works on Windows, thanks to being built in Electron but despite the fact that it's built by the Windows people

And even at its best behaviour it randomly loses messages while eating up way more CPU and RAM than possibly justifiable for a glorified IRC UI.

No wonder Zoom won out over that one, if you tried to use Teams in 2020 you barely could.

I don't know what this qualifies as but

Hey, sounds like that's your problem? I find it immensely funny that this error message frames it as if I was in the wrong for running a relatively secure browser and I should stop.

Sneer: Also I don't understand what "x.com" is, I typed in "twitter.com" into the bar...

The reality (in the US at least) is that a CS degree is sold as vocational program by the universities, and many jobs list a CS degree as a requirement or a desired skill. The author’s students paid almost $7000 for her course alone.

Well, it's very hard for me to have a discussion about philosophical merits of education when the context is the USA where education is so fundamentally fucked. It might as well be that the best course of action for the well-being of students is to make sure they at least get bang for their buck, but that's a systemic problem one level below what I'm talking about even. I don't want to discount this as a reality for actual people on the ground - I think then the correct position is not my waxing philosophical about contents of courses, but rather nailing everyone against free public education in the US government to a fucking wall.

and many jobs list a CS degree as a requirement or a desired skill

This is, I think, a symptom of this push-and-pull between industry and academia. The industry would want to have a CS degree mean that they're getting engineers ready to patch up their legacy code, because they would much rather have the state (or the students themselves in the USA case) pay for that training than having to train their employees themselves. But I suggest that the correct default response to industry's wants is "NO." unless they have some really good points. Google can pay for their employees to learn C++, but they won't pay a dime to teach you something they don't need for their profit margins. Which is precisely the point of public education, teaching you stuff because it's philosophically justified to have a population that knows things, not because they lead to $$$.

I'm probably projecting a baggage of dozens of conversations with people that unironically argue that a CS university should prepare you for working in industry as a programmer, but that's because I can't really discern the author's perspective on this from the text.

In either case,

to teach actual competence despite it

I think my point is that "competent programmer" as viewed by the industry is a vastly different thing than a "competent computer scientist" in a philosophical sense. Computer science really struggles with this because many things require both being a good engineer and a good scientist? For an analogy, an electric engineer and a physicist specialising in electrical circuits are two vastly different professions, and you don't need to know what an electron is to do the first. Whereas in computer science, like, you can't build a compiler without knowing your shit both around software engineering and theoretical concepts.

Let me also add that I think I never wrote a post where I would more like people to come and disagree with me. I might be very well talking some bullshit based on my vibes here, since all of this is basically vibes from mingling around with both industry and academia people...

While I agree mostly with the blunt of the thesis - 80% of the job is reading bad code and unfucking it, and ChatGPT sucks in all the ways - I disagree with the conclusions.

First, gen AI shifting us towards analysing more bad code to unfuck is not a good thing. It's quite specifically bad. We really don't need more bad code generators. What we need are good docs, slapping genAI as a band-aid for badly documented libraries will do more harm than good. The absolute last thing I want is genAI feeding me with more bullshit to deal with.

Second, this all comes across as an industrialist view on education. I'm sure Big Tech would very much like people to just be good at fixing and maintaining their legacy software, or shipping new bland products as quick as possible, but that's not why we should be giving people a CS education. You already need investigation skills to debug your own code. That 90% of industry work is not creative building of new amazing software doesn't at all mean education should lean that way. 90% of industry jobs don't require novel applications of algebra or analytical geometry either, and people have been complaining that "school teaches you useless things like algebra or trigonometry" for ages.

This infiltration of industry into academia is always a deleterious influence, and genAI is a great illustration of that. We now have Big Tech weirdos giving keynotes on CS conferences about how everyone should work in AI because it's The Future™. Because education is perpetually underfunded, it heavily depends on industry money. But the tech industry is an infinite growth machine; it doesn't care about any philosophical considerations with regards to education; it doesn't care about science in any way other than as a product to be packaged and shipped ASAP to grow revenue, doesn't matter if it's actually good, useful, sustainable, or anything like that. They invested billions into growing a specialised sector of CS with novel hardware and all (see TPUs) to be able to multiply matrices really fast, and the chief uses of that are Facebook's ad recommendation system and now ChatGPT.

This central conclusion just sucks from my perspective:

It’s how human programmers, increasingly, add value.

“Figure out why the code we already have isn’t doing the thing, or is doing the weird thing, and how to bring the code more into line with the things we want it to do.”

While yes, this is why even a "run-of-the-mill" job as a programmer is not likely to be outsourced to an ML model, that's definitely not we should aspire the value added to be. People add value because they are creative builders! You don't need a higher education to be able to patch up garbage codebases all week, the same way you don't need any algebra or trigonometry to work at a random paper-pushing job. What you do need it to is to become the person that writes the existing code in the first place. There's a reason these are Computer Science programmes and not "Programming @ Big Tech" programmes.

These people are nothing less, and 100% nothing more, than your childish glee at getting to play the villain in an RPG.

I'm pretty certain I get more glee from my RP than they ever experienced in their lives.

Why are you posting stills of Man in the High Castle to sneerclub, I don't get it

It can’t be that hard

woo boy

My chair at TUM uses Mattermost for most internal communication. I'm aware of a couple different academic institutions that do that.

EDIT: Perhaps of important note, we're talking Computer Science systems people. Like, kind of an environment where you're professionally obligated to have strong opinions about Linux distributions.

In all cases it's self-hosted. I don't know anyone who bough hosting. If I get my hands on our sysadmin I could share more.

As for "switched" - I was at one company only that had an official/unofficial Slack and we were given stern talkings to about never ever sharing any company information through it. It was specifically for watercooler banter. Basically "treat it as a personal non-work environment". Specifically because our security officer was aware that Slack is not end-to-end encrypted and that's just an immediate dealbreaker in any sane company that handles sensitive data. God I miss that CSO, I didn't know how good I had it.

Microsoft has Yammer because they always need to choose the worst possible tool in existence.