A writer friend I have says that if she were looking at just her own financial security, she’s super grateful for AI, because she’s pivoted into fixing AI written articles from places that laid off all their human writers. Being a contractor, her hourly rate is way higher than times when she’s been employed full time as a writer, plus it takes way longer to rewrite a broken article than it would’ve done to just write a decent article from scratch (and they insist that they want her to fix the AI articles, not rewrite them from scratch. I assume this is because the higher ups have their heads so far up their arses that they’re not willing to acknowledge that they shouldn’t have laid off the humans).

The work isn’t as fulfilling as proper writing, but she’s getting paid so much compared to before that she’s able to work less than she was before, and still has money to put into savings. She’s still living super frugally, as if she were still a typical, struggling writer, because she was expecting that this wouldn’t last for very long, but she’s been at this for quite a while now (with a surprising amount of repeat business). She thought for sure that work would begin to dry up once the financial year ended and companies went “holy shit, why are we spending so much on contractors?”, but last we spoke, it was still going strong.

I’m glad that at least someone human is making bank off of this. And if it was to be anyone who lucks into this, I’m glad that it’s someone who has the extremely poor fortune to be laid off 4-5 times in one year (and this was pre-AI — she was just super unlucky)

I’m a biochemist who got into programming from the science side of it, and yeah, code written by scientists can be pretty bad. Something that I saw a lot in my field was that people who needed some code to do something as part of a larger project (such as adding back on the hydrogens to a 3d protein structure from the protein database) would write the thing themselves, and not even consider the possibility that someone else has probably written the same thing, but far better than they be can, and made it available open source. This means there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel by people who are not wheel engineers.

I find it so wild how few scientists I’ve spoken to about this stuff understand what open-source code actually means in the wider picture. Although I’ve never spoken to a scientist in my field who doesn’t know what open source means at all, and pretty much all of them understand open source software as being a good thing, this is often a superficial belief based purely on understanding that proprietary software is bad (I know someone who still has a PC running windows 98 in their lab, because of the one piece of essential equipment that runs on very old, proprietary code that isn’t supported anymore).

Nowadays, I’m probably more programmer than biochemist, and what got me started on this route was being aware of how poor the code I wrote was, and wanting to better understand best practices to improve things like reliability and readability. Going down that path is what solidified my appreciation of open source — I found it super useful to try to understand existing codebases, and it was useful practice to attempt to extend or modify some software I was using. The lack of this is what I mean by “superficial belief” above. It always struck me as odd, because surely scientists of all people would be able to appreciate open source code as a form of collaborative, iterative knowledge production

You make a compelling point

Your comment felt like it made my blood pressure spike, because I have heard people saying this 100% without irony

That is a much better name for it, especially because some of the ways in which veteran code gets creaky does feel analogous to age

I wish that the code was open source, because it’d be super interesting to be able to look under the hood of a game like Rollercoaster Tycoon

I use Fedora, but I frequent the Arch wiki often enough that I feel like an honorary Arch user.

(((gnu)imp)tk)lib)object)

Indeed, that is the healthier way to go about things.

Personally, I struggle with that kind of compartmentalisation, but I would probably be healthier if I could do that. I have never lasted long when doing work that I’m not passionate about, and when I am passionate about work, it’s hard to not bring it home (even if that’s just working on stuff adjacent to the task).

I know a lot of people who work in academia, and it’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing to see how people’s research interests end up bleeding into basically all elements of their regular life. I think some people are just wired that way. I wish that they had the freedom to engage in that in a more healthy way, free from the additional bullshit that Capitalism heaps onto them, making the dynamic so toxic.

However, given that we do live under such oppressive economic conditions, “work to live, not live to work” is an essential mantra to aspire towards, especially the people who put their whole heart into their work. It’s not ideal, but it is necessary to learn if we want to survive without burning out.

I don’t use Arch, but I am eternally grateful for their excellent documentation.

I am also grateful to you for your comment, because this is a good idea

Having a development folder is such a good idea that I feel silly for not thinking of it sooner. Thanks for the idea.

Something I find cool about this book is that it’s so well known that people who haven’t even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how “enshittification” caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they’d been experiencing.

It’s a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they’d had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they’d struggled to find anything that wasn’t soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.

They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say “all of this is basically just saying you don’t care what job you have, as long as it’s a non-bullshit job”. They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes

I don’t have any specific examples, but the standard of code is really bad in science. I don’t mean this in an overly judgemental way — I am not surprised that scientists who have minimal code specific education end up with the kind of “eh, close enough” stuff that you see in personal projects. It is unfortunate how it leads to code being even less intelligible on average, which makes collaboration harder, even if the code is released open source.

I see a lot of teams basically reinventing the wheel. For example, 3D protein structures in the Protein Database (pdb) don’t have hydrogens on them. This is partly because that’ll depend a heckton on the pH of the environment that the protein is. Aspartic acid, for example, is an amino acid where its variable side chain (different for each amino acid) is CH2COOH in acidic conditions, but CH2COO- in basic conditions. Because it’s so relative to both the protein and the protein’s environment, you tend to get research groups just bashing together some simple code to add hydrogens back on depending on what they’re studying. This can lead to silly mistakes and shabby code in general though.

I can’t be too mad about it though. After all, wanting to learn how to be better at this stuff and to understand what was best practice caused me to go out and learn this stuff properly (or attempt to). Amongst programmers, I’m still more biochemist than programmer, but amongst my fellow scientists, I’m more programmer than biochemist. It’s a weird, liminal existence, but I sort of dig it.

Something that I’m disproportionately proud of is that my contributions to open source software are a few minor documentation improvements. One of those times, the docs were wrong and it took me ages to figure out how to do the thing I was trying to do. After I solved it, I was annoyed at the documentation being wrong, and fixed it before submitting a pull request.

I’ve not yet made any code contributions to open source, but there have been a few people on Lemmy who helped me to realise I shouldn’t diminish my contribution because good documentation is essential, but often neglected.

Vim has long since won the war. I say that as an emacs user who is familiar with using vim because it’s installed by default on the vast majority of computers I interact with nowadays

I used to do this, because it didn’t seem to cause any issues — until it did, and I lost a lot of data.

It does mean something to them, but not in a way that will stop you from getting laid off; what it means is that after laying you off, they’ll quickly come to regret it and scramble to try to fill the knowledge gap they now have. I know a few people who were called up by the company basically begging them to help. A couple of people I know were able to leverage this to get a short term position contracting (at exorbitantly higher rates than their salary way), and a few others instead just cackled in schadenfreude.

Do you have a link? Because if you tell me you found it but don’t tell me where, then that may put you at risk of being in the same ring of hell as people who comment “nvm, solved it” to their tech forum posts.

This isn’t useful to me at the moment, but nonetheless, I really appreciate when people like you take the time to share knowledge in this way.

There is a special place in heaven for the people who do this, just as there’s a special place in hell for people who reply to their own forum post about a complex technical problem.

(Side note: I tried the find the xkcd where he is yelling at his computer after finding a forum post from someone who has the exact same computer problem as he does, but the original poster hasn’t updated it. Alas, I couldn’t. If anyone knows which one I mean, I’d appreciate you pointing me to it, because it’ll drive me mad until I remember how to find it)

This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I’m glad that it exists; you’re delightful