This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Are there really swarms of "junior devs" out there writing code so menial that their whole job can be replaced by an LLM? This is just totally discordant with my experience. Back when I started they threw an active codebase at me and expected me to start making effective changes to a living system from the get. Sure, it wasn't "architecting whole systems", but there is no way you could type the description of the first intern project I built years ago into an LLM and get anything resembling the final product out.
These systems that claim to write code just aren't there. Type in simple code questions and you get decent answers, sure. They perform well on the kind of thing that appears in homework problems, probably because they're training on homework problems. But the moment I took it slightly off the beaten path, I asked it how to do some slightly more advanced database queries in a database I wasn't familar with, the thing just spat out a huge amount of plausible but totally incorrect information. I actually believed it and was pretty confused later that day when the code I wrote based on the LLM's guidance just totally did not work. So I am incredulous that there is really any person doing a job out there which could be replaced by this type of program.
The junior devs graduating college over the past 5 years are drastically less capable than before. There are fully diploma'ed CS majors who do not understand basic data structures. Yes, this is a problem.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, or close to it. Used to be stack overflow was full of them trying to get real devs to do their work for them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link