So basically, this guy is wrong.

I’ve had this (controversial) theory for a while that I’ve yet to see proven wrong. Before AI, it’s basically been known that most programmers “age out” of the craft, because it’s really difficult to keep up with it forever, and most people in middle of the bell curve simply can’t do it. Big tech used to get sued for ageism all the time, because they would do shit like only promote or hire young people (which is illegal).

The aging millennials of today were the young rockstar ninja programmers of the past 2~3 decades, but now most of them are getting too old to keep up. That’s why you see AI psychosis hitting the older coders harder than anyone else, since it provides a convenient way to not face the realities of aging. It’s easier to think you can still be a rockstar by “pivoting” to AI, than it is to admit that you don’t have the energy or motivation to keep your skills sharp. Tim Sweeney (and to a certain extent John Carmack) come to mind as high profile examples of this.

A pre-AI version of this is pivoting to management. That’s what pretty much everyone does, and it’s common to find people like that who haven’t written a line of code themselves in years. But I guess becoming an AI cheerleader is easier to do, and the number of open management roles certainly isn’t big enough for everyone.

Don’t use AI. Don’t do it. People telling you “it’s great for learning” are full of shit and going off of gut feeling, not experience. These LLMs have only been around for a few years, and have only gotten semi competent at generating code for even less time. There is no data or evidence that it helps people learn programming, and plenty of evidence that they do the opposite.

So avoid it. Pick a simple project, and see how far you can get. You will probably fail, but that’s the point! You’ll most likely find something interesting or tough to focus on in the middle of it, and you’ll learn a whole lot about whatever that is, and it’ll stick with you long after you’ve abandoned that project.

My advice is to start very small, and avoid anything GUI related. Write like a bare bones terminal only blackjack game, then add a high score table, persist those high scores to disk, etc. If you fail even at step one, that’s fine! Just try something else, like tictactoe, Simon says, or a non-game like an app for converting between Fahrenheit and Celsius.

Ask for help on a programming forum somewhere with real people.

Of course I sound silly. You’re putting your words in my mouth.

Honestly fuck capitalism for taking us down this road.

Capitalism has nothing to do with this. It’s corruption, incompetent politicians, and a lazy populace who would rather bitch online than go out and vote (something I’m definitely guilty of, but am actively working to change)

The direction things are going are to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a very small group of assholes. There is no economic or political system that can fix the problems those assholes have been exploiting to pull this off. The only thing that can prevent that is an informed and energized population of voters.

Like, we all want to see Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc in prison. It feels like they’re untouchable, but literally all it would take to do that is to spend a few minutes filling out a ballot to get rid of the career politicians who have been in office too long (and thus are more likely to be corrupt). Even local elections matter.

I see you’re deep into AI psychosis, so you’re brain isn’t working at its full capacity.

Slop means “high volume, low effort garbage,”

and

Slop is a measure of quantity (and to a certain extent, effort), not of quality

Are saying the same thing. Your last paragraph is also incoherent, so I won’t even go into that.

Turn off the AI waifu. It isn’t real.

This is tiring. Any AI generated thing is slop. Slop is a measure of quantity (and to a certain extent, effort), not of quality. Why? Because quality is subjective, and thus a useless point of comparison. You might think those AI generated studio ghibli rip offs are ugly/disgusting, but my mom thinks they’re “cute”.

So stop with this tiring “NoT eVeYtHiNg Ai Is SlOp” cope. The question people like this really want to ask is “will you still think I’m cool if I use AI???”, and that’s also subjective, and thus pointless. I personally will never think anyone who uses generative AI is cool, especially when they reveal how pathetically desperate for approval they are by making posts like this.

That never seems to work with wine

Wine has nothing to do with double clicking. You can set up your desktop environment to do this if you want. Wine requires environments to run apps (aka wine prefixes), and the way I do it is I reuse one environment as much as I can.

Nowadays, I just reuse the wine prefixes Heroic creates, since it usually installs a good chunk of dependencies. Lazy, but it works and saves disk space.

I hate these kinds of comments that have no other purpose than to sling shit and start arguments.

Since this is a programming community (and giving you the benefit of the doubt, I assume you’re not a vibe coder), you know your argument is nonsense. Writing something in Python doesn’t automatically make it slow or use a lot of RAM or whatever. Synapse is shitty because Synapse is shitty. You can write slow and inefficient software in any language, and it feels really tedious to type this out because it’s obvious and common sense.

Yeah, tbh it’d be pretty immoral if someone gets lead poisoning just because they shot up an elementary school. Big Gun really needs to be taken to court over this scandal.

There are a lot out there in C++ land, and I’m sure C has a lot too. You can’t really go wrong with any if them tbh, just check if it has a lot of stars and go for it. I’ve used microprofile before and it served me well. You can view live data from an embedded webserver.

Perfetto is a powerful one from Google, but I’ve never used it.

Also, don’t overlook gprof. That works via auto instrumentation done by the compiler, so it’ll give you the most detailed look at performance with zero work from you (besides interpreting the sometimes massive amount of info)

I think the general path to enlightenment looks like this (in order of experience):

1. Learn about patterns and try to apply all of them all the time
2. Don’t use any patterns ever, and just go with a “lightweight architecture”
3. Realize that both extremes are wrong, and focus on finding appropriate middle ground in each situation using your past experiences (aka, be an engineer rather than a code monkey)

Eventually, you’ll end up “rediscovering” some parts of SOLID on your own, applying them appropriately, and not even realize it.

Generally, the larger the code base and/or team (which are usually correlated), the more that strict patterns and “best practices” can have a positive impact. Sometimes you need them because those patterns help wrangle complexity, other times it’s because they help limit the amount of damage incompetent teammates can do.

But regardless, I want to point something out:

the more these doubts are increasing and leading me to believe that most of it is just dogma that has gone far beyond its initial motivations and goals and is now just a mindless OOP circlejerk.

This attitude is a problem. It’s an attitude of ignorance, and it’s an easy hole to fall into, but difficult to get out of. Nobody is “circlejerking OOP”. You’re making up a strawman to disregard something you failed at (eg successful application of SOLID principles). Instead, perform some introspection and try to analyze why you didn’t like it without emotional language. Imagine you’re writing a postmortem for an audience of colleagues.

I’m not saying to use SOLID principles, but drop that attitude. You don’t want to end up like those annoying guys who discovered their first native programming language, followed a Vulkan tutorial, and now act like they’re on the forefront of human endeavor because they imported a GLTF model into their “game engine” using assimp…

A better attitude will make you a better engineer in the long run :)