The fact that CSS only supports multiline comments doesn’t mean multiline comments are good, it means CSS is badly designed.

Close notepad.exe. Open a real editor. Select the text you want to comment out. Press Ctrl-/

Yeah but… Don’t. Multiline comments are a bit of an anti-pattern at the best of times. This is a war crime.

AI is not capable of novel or complex stuff,

This seems to be both untrue and mostly irrelevant.

The recent FLT proof is clearly complex and novel.

But also a huge amount of programming is only barely complex and not really novel at all.

The biggest issues I’ve seen with AI so far are:

• The slop comments are just painful to read. I think this might mostly be Claude though, I recently switched to Codex and it’s way less annoying.
• It is so benchmaxxed to “succeed at all costs” it will often do stupid things just to make the test pass or whatever. To be fair a lot of humans are like that - “I dunno but it seems to work” attitude.

I expect they are for GitHub. GitHub is really well known and huge so it makes sense to set up specific scrapers for it.

This seems reasonable. Cry all you want but if even smaller sites are getting overwhelmed with bots imagine what it’s like for GitHub.

What are you talking about?

Ah the classic “it’s just maths therefore it can’t really think” nonsense. You’re just dirty water so you definitely can’t think.

Python is a poor choice IMO. It’s just too slow, even for web servers. Everyone says “oh it’s IO bound or database bound; Python doesn’t matter”) but in my experience it does.

Better choices:

• Go - very easy. Build in web stuff. Fast. Trivial to deploy.
• Typescript, especially via something like Deno’s Fresh. Much faster than Python, better type checking, and best of all you can use TSX-based templates instead of shitty text-based ones like Jinja.
• Rust. Definitely the hardest option, but on the plus side you will learn Rust and that’s a big plus.

They can be guided. For example I asked Claude to benchmark some SystemVerilog.

First it just did time ./run.sh and I was like “no, idiot. That’s going to include the compilation/startup overhead.”

So then it said “I’ll just increase the simulation time to amortise the startup cost.” Again I told it that was bad and to actually measure the time in SV.

So since SV has no wall-time functions, it used $system("date") or some bollocks like that. No! I said - use DPI-C.

Finally it did the right thing. Would it have been quicker to do it myself? Absolutely not.

Current AI is at lazy junior engineer level (but sped up 10000 times). You just have to make sure they don’t make lazy dumb decisions. E.g. they’re going to do everything in Bash if give half a chance.

Tbf to AI I think they’ve learned a lot of this from humans. I bet if you searched for $system in SV you will find a lot of hand crafted horrors. I’ve seen human-written C code that found an ELF symbol by system("nm ... | grep ... | awk ..."). I shit you not.

Yeah… when the only documentation is CLAUDE.md…

Still you can see why right? Improving docs/understandability for AI is good for them - they get more capable AI. Improving it for humans only helps other people, which is less of a priority.

Really? Because some of his hand-picked bug examples are “syntax highlighting is sub-par on GitHub.com”, “Google Analytics’ map view shows some cities in the wrong place”, “a weapon in a game works differently than intended in a way that isn’t noticeable to players”, “a Google hangouts call didn’t work once”.

Technically bugs but… Yeah let’s see his perfect software.

Tenure doesn’t mean much.

Well in a sense that is true. This guy is pretending like he’s the only one that sees bugs. In reality he’s the only one that isn’t able to understand priorities. If you’re constantly reporting every bug no matter how trivial, that is a problem. You’re wasting people’s time.

Never is a strong word. In cases where you don’t need strong cryptographic or statistical properties it’s totally fine. That’s 99% of cases.

Nobody is modding a single byte. You’re going to have a 32-bit PRNG at least. 32-bits mod 100 is easily random enough for almost every use.

I guess it’s a good thing to be aware of though.

Every core, honestly

Oh hi Claude.

Yeah these types of posts are kind of useless because you can never tell if it’s just because they’re giving off red flags.

What feedback did he get from interviews? Do people know you can ask for feedback?

Docs rarely give you information about anything except the happy path. StackOverflow did.

I mean if you’re a decent programmer, totally! AI hasn’t destroyed the job market quite yet. But I wouldn’t wait too long…

Yeah there’s no need to get angry. It’s just a job. If it doesn’t work without anger you can always get another one (or probably most people here can anyway).

For code at least. Makes sense. For maths I think radians are more elegant but you don’t have to worry about speed or precision there.