@tempest's comment on 'NYT r-slur who self-describes as a "coder" writes about robots taking our jerbs :marseygigar-slur:'

The author of this article is hilarious. Here are some choice quotes:

>At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.

:marseylaugh: How the fuck does that take you multiple attempts, require you to Google shit, and then eventually take so long that your incrementally less r-slurred friend has to get ChatGPT to do it?

>when I was in high school I went to the Borders bookstore in the Short Hills mall and bought “Beginning Visual C++,” by Ivor Horton. It ran to twelve hundred pages—my first grimoire. Like many tutorials, it was easy at first and then, suddenly, it wasn't. Medieval students called the moment at which casual learners fail the pons asinorum, or “bridge of asses.” The term was inspired by Proposition 5 of Euclid's Elements I, the first truly difficult idea in the book. Those who crossed the bridge would go on to master geometry; those who didn't would remain dabblers. Section 4.3 of “Beginning Visual C++,” on “Dynamic Memory Allocation,” was my bridge of asses. I did not cross.

Out of curiosity I looked up the table of contents of this book: https://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip063/2005032051.html

Contents
1\. Programming with Visual C++ 2005
2\. Data, Variables, and Calculations
3\. Decisions and Loops
4\. Arrays, Strings, Pointers, and References

Thats right, this guy got filtered right after the chapter that explains if and for statements :marseylaughpoundfist:

Theres more r-sluration just after this paragraph as well, where he struggles to write a Hello World program and frames it as an epic intellectual struggle:

>I remember the moment things began to turn. I was on a long-haul flight, and I'd brought along a boxy black laptop and a CD-ROM with the Borland C++ compiler. A compiler translates code you write into code that the machine can run; I had been struggling for days to get this one to work. By convention, every coder's first program does nothing but generate the words “Hello, world.” When I tried to run my version, I just got angry error messages. Whenever I fixed one problem, another cropped up. I had read the “Harry Potter” books and felt as if I were in possession of a broom but had not yet learned the incantation to make it fly. Knowing what might be possible if I did, I kept at it with single-minded devotion.

The rest of the article is equally braindead, it looks like hes a CRUD front end dev or something. He brags about some of his high-octane :marseyairquotes: "craftsmanship" here :

>A few months ago, I came home from the office and told my wife about what a great day I'd had wrestling a particularly fun problem. I was working on a program that generated a table, and someone had wanted to add a header that spanned more than one column—something that the custom layout engine we'd written didn't support. The work was urgent: these tables were being used in important documents, wanted by important people.

This really makes the rest of the articles pseudointellectual posturing extra hilarious to me.

This isn't really drama but I thought it was funny, so there :marseysunflower:

Theres a hackernews discussion but I don't think any of them read the article (or maybe they are all equally :marseybrainlet: ) because almost nobody is pointing out how retarded this article is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38257094

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X ching/chong :marseymaidgeisha:

Anarcho-Syndicalist-Trotskyist-Stalinist Cuban Revolutionary :marseyrevolution:

8mo ago #5384322

At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.

:#marseyrofl:

51 Context

Robo7 zoz/zozle X 8mo ago #5384447

Isn't this like literally 2 lines in C#?

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lalilulelo s/a/d Robo7 8mo ago #5384670

def randlines(dict_file, n=100):
    import random
    d = open(dict_file, 'r').readlines()
    return random.sample(d, min(n, len(d)))

21 Context

W1P4W8W8 she/bitch An educated, strictly organic, ortho molecular aware patriotic Aryan princess 卐_卐 lalilulelo 8mo ago #5385644

>Import statements inside a function body.

>reading the entire file into memory

>not using a context manager to clean up your file handles

:marseypuke:

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lalilulelo s/a/d W1P4W8W8 8mo ago #5385685

Selecting random lines with uniform probability requires processing the entire file to know how many entries there are

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tempest me/me lalilulelo 8mo ago #5395191

strictly speaking you could just keep a list of (offset, length) pairs, randomly select N of them, then seek around the file to read the actual data out. It's technically two reads but as long as the number of lines you're pulling is low it probably won't matter, and worst case you've scanned the file twice (which is likely still in the OS cache).

2 Context

W1P4W8W8 she/bitch An educated, strictly organic, ortho molecular aware patriotic Aryan princess 卐_卐 lalilulelo 8mo ago #5387330

You have to read through the whole file, but you don't need to slurp the entire thing into RAM to do it. I think you could read it line by line and keep or drop each individual line according to some random probability.

lalilulelo s/a/d W1P4W8W8 8mo ago #5387402

How do you choose that probability, given that you don't know the number of lines beforehand? If you choose wrong, you'll significantly favor lines at the start or end of the file, and if it's not fast, you'll be generating random numbers for every single line.

Short of loading the whole file into memory, which for a dictionary is probably fine, you're looking at streaming through the whole file twice, once to count newlines and once to randomly select items.

W1P4W8W8 she/bitch An educated, strictly organic, ortho molecular aware patriotic Aryan princess 卐_卐 lalilulelo 8mo ago #5387432

You added the requirement of uniform probability, not in the original spec. Are you a product owner?

For most files types, you could probably ballpark the number of lines by looking at the size on disk (especially if you know what the data is) and that would get you close enough.

lalilulelo s/a/d W1P4W8W8 8mo ago #5387703

This is a p0 business requirement it has to select words properly, our customers rely on only the best. Please do the needful, this will come up during your performance review :marseymad:

6 Context

More comments

CokeIntranet ayyy/lmao :marseysnappyautism:

vlad is a Russian vampire name :marseysnappyautism:

lalilulelo 8mo ago #5386005

Found 75 Coins!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling

8 Context

89wc th/thh kalm lalilulelo 8mo ago #5384975

pfft

cat words.txt | sort -R | tail -100

11 Context

fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck they/them 89wc 8mo ago #5385565

sort -R words.txt | head -100

89wc th/thh kalm fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck 8mo ago #5386274

:marseybabykiller:

usernaw valid/boy :marseysurejan:

lalilulelo 8mo ago #5384782

why would you import in the function

lalilulelo s/a/d usernaw 8mo ago #5384859

Because I wrote it in ipython and copied what I did, and I forgot to include it until I already started the def.

Marbee me/ow usernaw 8mo ago #5385713

That's not PIP37 compliant. :marseysoylentgrin:

AllFunAndGames gig/gle everything is absurd Robo7 8mo ago #5385692

shuf -n 100 <FILE> is probably the shortest way, you don't even need to code it

Marbee me/ow AllFunAndGames 8mo ago #5385707

Using POSIX compliant programs and/or BASH doesn't count. It MUST be in an approved language like javascript or javascript and it must be the lowest big O notation. We're going forward with other candidates. :marseydisagree:

KindaCray little/bit/cray Just a bit crazy Marbee 8mo ago #5386035

The shuf command isn't even POSIX though.

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89wc th/thh kalm Marbee 8mo ago #5392896

BASH programs are real programs. :marseyindignant:

Marbee me/ow 89wc 8mo ago #5392899

They are but codecels don't understand. They just compile dey kode in dey IDE, install interpreters and lie.

3 Context

89wc th/thh kalm Marbee 8mo ago #5392934

find / | grep faggotry | xargs -I@ sh -c "rm -rf @"

Marbee me/ow 89wc 8mo ago #5392955

XARGS ISN'T SAFE :marseysoylentgrin: You need to use a rewrite in a safe language with input sanitation.

lain yaml/toml If you’re not remembered, then you never existed. :marseylain:

Robo7 8mo ago #5384555

I'm thinking you could do it in three lines of PowerShell

Follower of Christ :marseyandjesus: Tech lover, IT Admin, heckin pupper lover and occasionally troll. I hold back feelings or opinions, right or wrong because I dislike conflict.