Pulled up my phone and seriously thought this was a picture of me from like 15 years ago. Then I realized how common the look is among this industry.

Reminds me of a time a couple years ago when I took a brewery tour around Boston. Every. Single. Guy. Including myself and the driver/tourguide…looked exactly like this guy, with a beer gut and a plaid shirt.

Depends on the print.

Solid color or conservative pattern? Hard pass.

Pineapples or flamingos? Fuck yeah.

Is the idiot you?

Because I’m usually both the person writing it and the idiot trying to maintain it 6 months later.

Albeit not perl. Dammit Jim, I’m a Network engineer, not a programmer!

It would have to be a more obscure, archaic language that’s barely even spoken of on the internet.

I asked ChatGPT once about their proficiency in languages, both human and computer. They responded that they are most proficient in English and Python, largely because they are the most written/documented languages on the internet.

I forgot where it ranked other languages…I think it said it was pretty decent in Mandarin and most latin-derived tongues. I uninstalled the app so not about to go through my chats with it and try to find it.

However, ChatGPT is known to write in ways to appease the user, and I’ve almost exclusively spoken to it in English and asked it python questions.

I do wonder if somebody who primarily used ChatGPT in, say, French, and account history had a lot of C questions, if it would answer differently.

Why would anyone want to do that when there are dozens on stackoverflow?

Silly god! You just had to chattr -i !

“All-knowing” my ass. Half-baked deity can’t even gentoo.

And then…

The password manager can’t fill the form. You’ve got to change your 10-word, unique passphrase because it’s 3 months old. And you have to verify with a text.

Oh and then you have to type it in on your TV with a remote and on-screen keyboard.

Heh I’ve been making my wife do this since my 32nd birthday.

She still doesn’t understand binary and thinks I’m a nerd when I try to explain it to her.

Maybe this year, when it’s 1+8+32, things will click.

FOREVER*

Some day we’ll have haptic feedback so good on phones, it’ll feel like you’re stroking a furry wall.

If she is not 64 then she is 32.

If she is not 32 then she is 16.

overthere.sit(self)

Link shorteners and redirectors, especially new and lesser-known ones tend to get caught in the fray with things like Google Safe Browsing (which FF uses as well) and Smart Screen.

It’s because the original/shortened link gets reported and not the real/destination site. Then the domain (of the shortener/redirector) gets flagged, instead of the real site.

This happened to me at work this very week, with a redirector service that’s a part of our email security stack. FF and Chrome were both blocking links that were safe, because the redirector service itself was classified as sus.

Like a base, but for your data.

I asked ChatGPT if it would ever maliciously give me a wrong answer and it said no, so I believe it.

Ahh…I see the problem.

Sometimes I rubber duck with ChatGPT.

Honestly I’ve learned more in a few months of fixing its mistakes than I had in years of being on the job.

Ime Google AI is much worse about making up wrong answers to sound right.

If I’d ask ChatGPT and Google AI to help me craft a set of Ansible tasks to do something rather simple but also something I don’t do very often, like converting PEM certs + key to PKCS12…they’d both write a playbook that’s close, but ChatGPT would be much closer.

But they both say crazy shit sometimes. The other day ChatGPT told me Fedora 40 is the latest release and 43 is still in testing.

Mine.

I should state that I’m not a programmer. I’m a network engineer.

I work for a space (among other things) contractor, and there are days I feel like I’m mission control for Apollo 13.

Yeah I script more than anything…python, bash, powershell, etc.

Only terrible code I inherit is the stuff I wrote >=3 months ago. I’ll keep saying that three months from now, too.

Fork the repo.

Ask an LLM to rename all the variables and add comments and docstrings. Give it your style guide (assuming you have one).

Ask another LLM to check their work.

Done.

Disclaimer: I’m not a programmer, I’m a network engineer who dabbles in automation and scripting. But it seems to me that grunt work like this is what LLMs are really good for.

Also I only use short variable names inside of loops (for i in iterable…). Is that not how it should be done?