Programmer Humor

God has no hand in programming. He's just as confused as us.

You're young. Back in my day, we bought a book called "Advanced Algorithms for C vol. 3", and we manually typed the code from it if it didn't come with a CD.

Now we're still pasting code from stack overflow we don't understand, we're just getting it from an LLM

messages moderator about it, banned from subreddit for no reason given. Or at least that is how i imagine how it would go

INTERCAL's PLEASE Politesse Checking

I use SO all the time and I truly had no idea... You mean a lot of answers are submitted by users who used AI?

You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:

• “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
• “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
• “No, you don’t want to do that.”
• “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
• etc.

I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.

Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can't have a bit of humanity in there... Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.

SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a "generic public" rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I'm sure I'm not the only contributor they pushed away :/

Why would you think it would be different

CF: We defended your website from 69,420 bots today!

The 65,000 users: 👁️L👁️

Oh thank god, I thought it was just me and that my IP had been flagged for some reason.

Thread closed because that's a stupid question and you should feel bad about yourself.

SO used to be good, but they have this problem right down in their core concept that makes sure the content gets outdated fast.

And that's the concept that every question can only be asked once.

That makes sure that everything gets outdated as soon as possible.

• Q: Can X be done in framework Y? (asked in 2012)
• A: No.

Now it's 13 years later, and framework Y can do X since 5 years, but you can't ask again, because your question will get closed as a duplicate to the outdated one from 2012. And since every time someone asked this question again in the last 13 years the question just got closed, google will just link you back to the question from 2012 claiming that framework Y can't do X.

I hate that so many projects are moving from public support forums to fucking Discord channels. God forbid a tech project be expected to maintain a public indexable forum and website. You can't search it unless you join the channel, it's not well organized at all, and the invite link probably expired 3 months ago. Fuck you if you didn't join while it still worked I guess.

Eh, I hate its culture, but I regularly find useful excel or regex answers on StackExchange.

I almost always prefer SO answers because there was chance someone had the same issue I was seeing. Documentation only shows how things should work and dedicated forums are very hit or miss.

This AI blocklist for uBlacklist and uBlock origin should help.

THAT is the problem... we cannot filter them out. The real enshitification of the web has barely began.

Yeah, that site was good before they started rejecting every useful question.

It used to be much better than anything else that came earlier. Nowadays the odds are even that you'll find your answer on the experts-one.