@0xabad1dea In programming these are the people, who get something that kind of works but they can't chase one outstanding bug from the AI generated code, nor can they even begin to understand how to find it as they don't really know what the code actually does.

I'm not seeing immediate threat to skilled software people any time soon, especially when the need to debug the AI slop starts to surface in a big way.

@0xabad1dea jfc, what rude awakening that guy will have some day.

@0xabad1dea the person, when they realize that LLMs are entirely composed of algorithms:

@0xabad1dea doesn't every generation have this sort of rhetoric? There's some new skill/technology that comes about, and the newer generation wants to learn that new skill. However, the older generation still wants to feel relevant and like their skills are more important. So they will criticize and discredit anyone trying to learn this new skill

@0xabad1dea There's this old joke, I don't even know where I heard it first, about the econ major wanting to improve a farmer's financial outcomes.

The econ major visits the farmer regularly for a full year, duly makes his observations and notes everything the farmer does down. He goes back to his computer and crunches the numbers, applies all the modern tools and statistics. Then he comes back to the farmer and says: "So, I've crunched the numbers and done the statistics, and well ...

@0xabad1dea Insults of a geek. Love it!

@0xabad1dea wait I've just got to hahahahahahhahahahaha oh that's so silly

Hahahahahahahah

@0xabad1dea an "economics major". All we need to know about the author's competence 🤡

@0xabad1dea

But this makes perfect sense to a Harvard econ student who will probably become a venture capitalist. Real engineering builds real things that really work and it is hard. You can make money from them, but it is slow. This is not how the US tech economy works. Nonsense (prompt🤦‍♂️ ) engineering builds phony things that never work and it is easy. VCs pump and dump the nonsense things to make lots of money really fast. This is how the US tech economy works.

@0xabad1dea least soulless econ major

@0xabad1dea also, obviously: "prompt "engineering"" ???

@0xabad1dea I can’t count the times I had to explain that quadratic complexity doesn’t scale.

“But it works” was the usual reply while pointing to an example 1/100th of the size of a real world use case.

@0xabad1dea > you quadratic insert operation

God-DAMN, this almost needs a content warning… 😅

@0xabad1dea reading the article, and it's even worse than you describe. Written by a clueless fool.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/18/wyche-harvard-ai-education/

@0xabad1dea
Just remember, an economist is someone that can tell you tomorrow what went wrong yesterday.

@0xabad1dea

A rusty needle in the crimson haystack trying to be discovered as a golden needle.

#AI #Insanity

@0xabad1dea isn't a prompt engineering class going to be essentially outdated next ChatGPT update?

@0xabad1dea Algorithms are theory now …

@0xabad1dea If you don’t understand the code that was generated, you don’t add any value to the equation.

Knowledge is power, go learn.

@0xabad1dea have these people considered enjoying the thing they spend at least four years studying.

@0xabad1dea

I love the insults and will have to remember/steal them.

@0xabad1dea Hm yes, because telling an LLM what you want it to do requires "skill" and "precision", and is a "very important skill to learn for the future."

@0xabad1dea Plot twist: these insults were generated with chatgpt.

@0xabad1dea They are not perfect. But they know more about you others and your past in the first place. Anfd can calculate your future and thoughts.

@0xabad1dea I don't know what I'm more impressed with: an econ major column inches blowing smoke up their own ass to expound on the value of a comp sci degree, or the editorial chain of command that let this travesty happen. Like, did they *want* to throw this fuckstick under the bus, or are they really that dumb?

@0xabad1dea
I'm more curious as to what possessed this economics student to write a hit piece about a completely different degree. Especially since this person seems to have completely misunderstood what computer science is about.

@0xabad1dea penetration tester

@0xabad1dea Haha, sorry, YMMD.

And i agree 102.5%.

@0xabad1dea Another brilliant mind wasted on economics when they could've done something useful and productive like astrology.

@0xabad1dea That's because Economics has shifted from the study of how people and society organise the distribution of scarce resources to the study of maximizing the hoarding of other people's resources. So an Economics major would expect in the same fashion, that comp sci should teach not how to develop new ideas, but how to steal other people's ideas.

@0xabad1dea as someone who does actually use AI coding tools for work AND has a CompE degree where I took a class on AI as a technical elective, idk how you would even fill up an entire course on prompt engineering. It’s just getting a statistical model to google stuff for you

This is like when I had a sales guy be shocked that I didn’t know how to do stuff with excel, like my guy in school I learned how to make the software not just use it

@0xabad1dea
It's the gambling the entire western worlds economic productivity along with all our natural resources and critical infrastructure that bothers me. If AI fails to kill us all the economic collapse due to AIs failure to meet investor expectations will kill us all.

@0xabad1dea “You empty hash bucket” is great. I’m totally stealing that one.

@0xabad1dea

Every now and then, we're treated to a spate of press decrying legacy admissions at the Ivys, and I just shake my head.

At least where the undergrad degrees are concerned, legacy admissions are almost the entire value proposition for the "normal" students.

Getting in to Harvard undergrad grants you entry into the legacy world where the Masters of the Universe, like this dipshit econ major, reside. It means you too can fail upward until you're a Ma$ter.

@0xabad1dea i always wondered how idiocracy began

@0xabad1dea

What a quicksort on an already sorted array

@0xabad1dea Of all the utterly useless bullshit degrees to get, economics is pretty close to the top. Of course someone studying absolute hogwash would say something like that. Economics is about as useful as weather reports were before satellites. Their models are so bad, they expect a pat on the back when they accurately predict the bleeding obvious more than 20% of the time.

@0xabad1dea Sounds like this person is one of the bubble sort.

@0xabad1dea

This comes really close to a question bubbling in my head recently: I, and every really good programmer I've ever known, got into this business because *we liked it*. I enjoy learning about these things. I find the act of writing code *fun*. When people asked me why I liked my job I enthused, "It's like being paid to solve logic puzzles!"

And they would shake their head in disbelief, because they didn't enjoy logic puzzles.

Vibe coding seems to me more like *work* than *fun*.

@0xabad1dea LLM needing an eng to be prompted aptly is in and by itself a good proof of why it's a fail.

@0xabad1dea why do astronomers waste time on useless theory like "orbital mechanics" and "general relativity" when they could be learning REAL skills like reading newspaper horoscopes

@0xabad1dea I used to complain about people insisting that universities teach skills rather than theory, because university is FOR theory. It’s not trade school. Now they’re insisting that we shouldn’t even teach skills?!? What the goddamn fuck?

@0xabad1dea Who….who do they think is making their evil stochastic genie?

@0xabad1dea if i were an economist working as the CFO of a startup i would simply tell the programmers to make the database consistent, available, and partition tolerant at the same time. only rubes believe in things like the "cap theorem"