This is probably the least surprising thing ever.

CocaCola is like the symbol of capitalism. Everything they produce is corporate slop. GenAI is a perfect fit – soulless, artless, hastily slapped together bright pictures that ultimately don’t matter and carry no value. The world is not better with CocaCola ads, and it would be no worse without them. They’re just there, to be lost in time, forgotten. Like tears in the rain.

Literally the same shit as during the war against work from home.

Hey look, they are more productive, get their work done faster, don’t have to spend 10% of their life commuting, and have more freedom. OUTRAGEOUS!

(Only this time there’s no actual productivity boost, but they’re still preemptively mad?)

searches for who tf this is

Wikipedia:

Lol, this is the most passive-aggressive way of saying “known for absolutely nothing of value to anyone or anything” I’ve seen.

“You’re a VP of customer success?” he asked another attendee. “Congratulations on your position that did not exist five years ago!”

Okay what the fuck is a “VP of customer success” though, that’s a title so made up money laundering has to be involved, no?

Neural nets are much better at processing language than anything produced by the Chomsky school of linguistics.

Hey mate, did you get your PhD or a fucking Nobel in linguistics by any chance? No? Just talking about shit you apparently have no idea about?

I didn’t even know you could be a crank about linguistics, that’s pretty amazing. What other otherwise really boring fields are you going to tackle, geodesy?

I can’t get over how absolutely awful everything and everyone involved is here.

The terrible Windows kernel, the awful MSFT practices, the horrible engineering decisions, and the propretiary AntiVirus market that shouldn’t exist as it is an afront to everything good and beautiful in this world. People who shouldn’t be trusted with a soft cushion out of concern that they’d wreck havoc, but vested with so much real power they can bring down airports, hospitals, half of the global infrastructure to a screeching halt.

We should be suing Bill Gates’ parents for damages their frivolous decision to bear children caused.

The fall from grace of StackOverflow is something both mesmerising and horrifying.

An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.

How the fuck did we get here? First the AI debacle, now this. Joel Spolsky always appeared as a reasonable guy, I wonder how much him stepping down is intertwined with SO making some of the worst possible calls in the past few years.

I think most of this was caught immediately when the announcement was made (like the edited live coding), and in any case I can’t stand watching this video to the end. “This scared the pants off every software developer in the world” no. No it hasn’t. That’s just not true. Why do you even say that. The immediate first reaction of any SE with even a passing awareness of how marketing of software tools works and not completely high on genAI farts was “ye that won’t work” and, fucking shocking, it doesn’t work, wow, no way.

People were trying to sell you that software engineers will be obsolete because “codeless apps” like 10 years ago. Wizards were supposed to eliminate jobs because they’d generate code so well. Knowing SQL was supposed to be completely obsoleted with ORMs. I’m too young to have been there but apparently XML was supposed to “solve networking” or something nonsensical like that.

Those ads aren’t targeted at software engineers. They’re targeted at execs. It’s execs who get all excited that they can start firing their expensive and pesky developers that complain so much. Software engineers worth their salt don’t buy this shit because bollocks like these come as part of the job description.

Anyway, trying to frame it as “it was supposed to be this revolutionary tool to replace developers” without mentioning that this is a song that’s been sung for fucking decades is a disservice to the topic. Nothing makes executives as wet as the thought of not having to deal with those fucking “specialists” that they need to pay actual salaries and can’t huff down their necks 8h a day with a whip to use if they don’t hit KPIs. And that’s extremely important to have in focus when you talk about shit like this and wonder “why did they raise so much money”. Because VCs hate labour that’s why. The answer is always that.

I’m really tickled by the fact that we can’t fully automate trains yet. I never thought about it, but put into perspective how asinine self-driving cars are if we can’t achieve the same thing with a train, something that is vastly more tractable and less chaotic than road traffic.

This is twenty percent logic, ten percent myope

Fifteen percent concentrated power of cope

Five percent incel, fifty percent lame

And a hundred percent reason to forget his name