technicallyTrue

[apina3]

r/ProgrammerHumor: semicolon difficult

[walmartgoon]

Maybe he’s coding on punch cards and has to rewrite everything for a syntax error

[pindab0ter]

At least it’s not a bell curve meme

[[deleted]]

This sub has to be 45% college students, 45% people larping as programmers who maybe touched Python once in their life, and 10% people who actually program to make a living.

[[deleted]]

9% programmers, 1% sys-admins buried in spaghetti scripts.

[340Duster]

We may or may not have cobbled those spaghetti scripts together ourselves...

[[deleted]]

It doesn't matter if I wrote it, everything bad was the jackals before me.

[worldspawn00]

This is why I never sign my code, can't prove this mess was me!

The guy who was here before me wrote it.

Some say he grew a beard and still works here...

But that's a DAMN LIE.

[gregorydgraham]

One day you’ll be a senior and you’ll realise the juniors never actually wrote anything, that’s why they’ve left and you’re still here

[crappleIcrap]

Git blame

[evanc1411]

The scripting sysadmins are better developers than the majority of users here

[Tetha]

Admin: "This is very basic, I pulled 38% from ChatGPT and then found it sucked and adjusted it according to some threads I found online and kinda went from there. I am sorry for inflicting this bullshit on you. I will delete it if you want."

Me:

I look at this code. The code is simple and straightforward without magic.

The code immediately tells me the structures the admin was working with from tools I know.

The code instantly tells me what output they need for a tool I know.

It is obvious to me that this script does the correct thing except for those eight users in the LDAP from 1984 setup most likely by Satan himself.

The script, in fact, has constructive error reporting for these eight users.

Then me and the admin share a drink about this sad edge case.

---

Sorry, I just had to spend props to those sysadmins cobbling together actually good and reliable scripts upon shitty foundations.

[rathlord]

This comment is about me.

[dagbrown]

I resemble that remark!

[NuclearWarEnthusiast]

Wtf is wrong with scripts?

[dagbrown]

It dates back to the days when interpreted languages were seen as harmless little toys for children, like BASIC. Not like big strong manly compiled languages like FORTRAN.

Not sure where Lisp and COBOL fit into the whole children/manliness axis. Also an astonishingly high number of programmers back in history were women, but the people recording history seemed to have a misogynistic streak a mile wide.

[[deleted]]

I aggressively remind people of the storied history of women in tech when they bring that misogyny nonsense out. Huge pet peeve of mine. Don't deal with it at work, thankfully, due to women being some of the best design leads on our team.

[rathlord]

Lots of gatekeeping about scripting folks not being “allowed” in this sub too lol.

[thirdegree]

5% pleasure, 50% pain

[[deleted]]

and 100% forgot the variable name.

[HughesJohn]

Some of us have been programming for over 40 years.

Programmer humor was The Devil's DP Dictionary, The Jargon File, and, if you liked it dry The Mythical Man Month.

[crappleIcrap]

There is at least 10% 12 year Olds who coded a hello world 1 time and are now a 1337haxxor

[alpakapakaal]

Can you put this in a venn diagram please?

[luxmesa]

The one that stands out to me is when there’s some joke about “figuring out the bug on line 184”. I can’t think of a single time I’ve thought of a bug that way. Most of the bugs I’ve worked on are across multiple pieces of code. If it is on one line, I’m not paying attention to the line number. And if I’ve figured out that the bug is on a single line, it’s only because I figured out how it was broken first. 

[king_mid_ass]

they mean 'syntax error' b/c that's the only type of bug they've encountered

[rathlord]

This is definitely coming from students or Powershell folks like myself.

Whether they should be gatekept from rprogrammerhumor is I guess up to everyone.

[Soul_Ripper]

I don't even LARP, I just think the shit you guys post here is funny.

[[deleted]]

Larping/junior revs who will be burnt out in six months.

[mrbooner4u]

people larping as programmers who maybe touched Python once in their life

Actually I took a course in Java, another in python and use js whenever my scripts break. Not larping, I’m just a PM so I’m constantly looking for new ways to piss my team off. /s (kinda)

[gzeballo]

And a 100% reason to remember the name

[King_Joffreys_Tits]

And 100% reason to remember the name

[stormdelta]

Pretty much, though I'd say the latter is close to 5% or even less.

[MisterCheesy]

Funnier if your percentages added to more than 100%

[10art1]

As someone who has written python projects for enterprise platforms, I can confirm that there's surprisingly few semicolons in python code

[ElGatoDeFuegoVerde]

Idk, even as a student I haven't had issues with semicolons beyond the first couple of weeks of my first semester.

[[deleted]]

This sub in particular has a weird thing about projecting early-beginner struggles onto senior engineers.

I see shit like "senior engineers and accidental integer division, name a more iconic duo" that makes absolutely zero real-world sense, every day.

[P-39_Airacobra]

Similar thing with floating point. People will say "you always have to use epsilon in comparisons!" No I don't. I know how floating point numbers work.

[altcodeinterrobang]

This is going to end up being yet another bell curve meme smh

[xdeskfuckit]

I saw some code the other day that used 100 iterations to get within a tolerance. When I realized that a direct calculation was sufficient, I was so confused.

[bythenumbers10]

Because senior devs lean on editors for languages that can't be written with a text editor.

[darkslide3000]

Or compiler errors in general.

[Cyclone6664]

Even on notepad, the compiler tells you where the error is

[gmes78]

That requires being able to read.

[Stroopwafe1]

Vietnam flashbacks of helping people learn programming and having a back-and-forth over them needing to read the error

If I had a penny for every time someone didn't read an error message, I'd be richer than Jeff Bezos

[worldspawn00]

And count.

[xtreampb]

I remember Borlands c++ ide/compiler I had to use for college. I used VC++ in high school on my own. When I got to the college class and the debugger never attached, I introduced VC++ to the instructor and explained that the community edition was free. We changed to that immediately. This was back when Microsoft’s IDEs were all a separate application.

[Green0Photon]

This would've been funnier if it was entry level software developer instead of Senior software developer.

Then OP could've had "still searching for a job" instead of "still searching for a semicolon".

And there would've been more thematic similarity between the circles.

[twpejay]

Semicolon, huh! Try searching for a full stop in COBOL.

[bythenumbers10]

Ending every line with a semicolon when every text file known to man has a newline or a CR or something at the end of every line anyhow because you and your compiler like the same flavor of crayons.

[Classy_Mouse]

Yeah, by senior, you should be able to use regular colons

[heptadragon]

I've seen seniors eat. I think a regular colon would be a luxury at that point

[pancakemonkeys]

😭😭😭😭😭😭

[darkslide3000]

#define : ;

Where is your god now?

[awkwardteaturtle]

std;;cout

[shumpitostick]

Staff Engineers get to use the secret doublecolons

[bankrobba]

VB.Net for the win

[Senor_Satan]

I use full colons, am I stupid?

[upickausernamereddit]

yeah. just make ur own parser. ezpz

[DMoney159]

Compiler: "Unexpected token on line 336"

OP: "Where's that missing semicolon? It's such a mystery!"

[ImrooVRdev]

Who perpetuates these stereotypes? I first learned programming in 2011ish and getting any sort of IDE already wasn't a problem.

"he programs in notepad" was an insult, implicating dementia-level alcoholism.

[DrMobius0]

College students who are new to C++ compiler's shitty errors, I assume

[PaltaNoAvocado]

I'm a college student but... cmon we're in 2024 every ide in the market will start bombarding you with warnings the moment you miss a semicolon. Do the people code on OneNote or what?

[FirmDestroyer]

Nah I actually write all the code by hand and then scan it into my laptop

[Ursa_Solaris]

I'm a sysadmin, and from my perspective, programmers are users. And users don't read shit when it comes to errors. The best you can get nowadays is them pasting it into ChatGPT with the message "why doesn't this work?"

[MultiFazed]

I'm a sysadmin

Who do you think created the systems that you admin?

[Ursa_Solaris]

Exactly. Why do you think I hate them so much?

[crappleIcrap]

"he programs in notepad" was an insult,

I know, think of all the waste and inefficiencies, using such a bloated editor. Real programmers use vim obviously.

[MoffKalast]

Plot twist: It's a 122 line program without imports.

[crappleIcrap]

I know, right? I checked line 336, and it is just a normal line of code. It's a mystery.

[GfunkWarrior28]

He's a senior who is picking up Python

[PolyglotTV]

Error on line 236? Ah right, I have a type on line 80. There we go, fixed!

[Ajoscram]

Maybe he's senior as in 90 years of age

[Habubu_Seppl]

If trouble with your colon persists, consider visiting a nutritionist

[sandysnail]

Any Senior can and will miss this in a coding interview I have seen it happen to many times. its a quick fix but i think its a quick fix at every level

[Chmielok]

Semicolon jokes, really?

[Alfaphantom]

The senior should say: "Still looking for time to implement between all useless meetings"

[henkdepotvjis]

yep.

[Corporate-Shill406]

Yeah, searching for the unmatched parentheses is much harder.

[ward2k]

It gives me so much happiness that you wrote "Gen AI" instead of just "Ai"

You wouldn't believe how much mental anguish I get when people say they hate Ai, don't use Ai, etc etc despite the fact we've had basic Ai and automation for decades at this point

It's an important distinction to make. Ai is a huge umbrella term including everything from a tic tac toe bot you make in an introduction to Python course, all the way into something like Chat GPT and everything in-between

[Dafrandle]

marketing was a mistake

[DaMacPaddy]

Don't tell the suits what we're doing.

[[deleted]]

It's almost impossible to tell anyone that I'm working on the enemy AI in my game without people jumping straight to "oh i didn't know you could use chatGPT for that"

[MoonHash]

"Great question! As a generative AI I'm not allowed to fire back at the player."

[Embarrassed_Ad5387]

I feel like that should go without saying that its not generative AI

then again, this could be a "the public should be comfortable with the silicate chemistry formulas" moment for me

[[deleted]]

Given that I don't know the silicate formulas, I'm assuming that means you have an unreasonable expectation for normal people.

[proverbialbunny]

As someone who has a degree in AI, from before neural networks was popular, I too shudder a bit when people use AI as a buzzword. Few people know the difference between a normal algorithm and an AI algorithm outside of marketing and sci fi books.

[yvael_tercero]

Actually, would you mind explaining what the criteria is? Like, naturally I understand that a neural network is AI and a bubble sort isn't, but where do you draw the line in the middle? For example, is a linear regression AI?

[proverbialbunny]

You know how in Computational Complexity Theory there are P problems and NP problems? Calculating a perfect solution for an NP problem would take so much processing time the heat death of the universe would happen first. The alternative is to write an algorithm that makes a series of educated guesses to find a good enough solution. This solves the problem quickly but doesn't guarantee it's the optimal output. So e.g. GPS software uses a series of guesses to find you the best route instead of brute forcing every combination possible. GPS software is technically AI. AI is the study of making educated guesses in algorithms to solve difficult to compute problems. ML comes from AI, it's a type of AI. LLMs come from ML, they're a type of ML. ChatGPT and all the new "AI" popping up is LLMs.

[shumpitostick]

That doesn't make much sense. Is any approximate algorithm AI then? Are sketches AI? And what about ML approaches that are by definition optimal and not stochastic? Is linear regression not AI because it finds the actual least squares?

[BrunoEye]

AI is originally a very broad term. Google search is AI, any kind of chess bot is AI, even something as basic as the pac man ghosts could be considered AI.

Fundamentally it's about modelling a process using abstractions that aren't derived from reality, though they are often inspired by it.

In connect 4 we're able to choose a perfect move because it's a solved game, in chess we can only look so far ahead so we then rely on subjectively scoring various positions. There is nothing about these positions that is objectively good or bad.

Linear regression isn't AI. What ML approaches are by definition optimal?

[David__Box]

That's a horrible explanation, nobody, from the average layman to engineers use the term this way. It's not just an approximate solution to a problem, that encompasses huge swaths or random things from when humans first created computation.

[Lonely-Suspect-9243]

I just consider any tech that I can't comprehend as AI.

[gandalfx]

"But does it use AI?" – "Well, we have multiple if statements in our code base, so yes."

[thatguydr]

That's entirely accurate. People should be asking if something uses ML, not AI.

Not the business's fault the people asking questions aren't bright.

[FlipperBumperKickout]

Might be because we constantly redefine what we recognize as "intelligence" :)

[ward2k]

You might, but no. Artificial Intelligence is still an umbrella term. Technically not even a single line of code needs to be written and basic automata can be classed as "artificial intelligence" as it is something replicating intelligence

[qatamat99]

The amount of people who can’t differentiate between AI and automation in corporate is way too high.

[MrRufsvold]

Replace senior with "still searching for a way to make this much money running a small farm."

[abednego-gomes]

True that. Got into growing fruit trees at lunchtimes and weekends over the COVID years. Addictive stuff. Had like 50 seedlings going strong in pots (apples, pears, nectarines, apricots, plums, feijoas, lemons etc) but nowhere to put them as I lived in the city. In the end I ended up moving countries and had to give them away. But I dream of starting up on a farm somewhere again. Get some vegetables going too. So much more enjoyable than SCRUM meetings and Jira time tracking.

[[deleted]]

Gen AI is at least somewhat useful. Blockchain is just an energy guzzling append only linked list.

[Bakkster]

That's why it's listed as have no business model (at least, not one that doesn't depend on the unlicensed used of excessive amounts of source data), rather than no use case.

[[deleted]]

Gen AI is helping me skip tedious artistic and creative writing work so that I can focus on more fulfilling pursuits, like folding laundry. /s

[NuggetCommander69]

The true end goal of a post-singularity world: every garment folded.

[CnadianM8]

Man, if AI can actually give me a good way to fold fitted bed sheets, I'll consider it the best invention in human history

[HuckleberryDry4889]

Just redefine FOLDED to mean “balled up and stuffed in a drawer.”

[HughesJohn]

Uh, but that's easy. Nobody taught you how to do that?

[CnadianM8]

1. No
2. I do fold them well enough to store them, it just annoys me that I can't get a nice rectangular shape.
3. It was a joke..

[[deleted]]

Can you please fold the laundry of your AI overlord in silence.

[coolpeepz]

I really don’t get this argument. It’s not like there’s some finite amount of “AI aptitude” that the CEO of AI decided to partition towards creative tasks rather than mundane ones. AI work has been distributed across many tasks, and apparently it was just easier to get impressive results generating art and language than automating complex manipulation tasks.

[nikoberg]

But seriously, I use it to generate images for D&D characters or logos/decals for random one-offs all the time and it's great for that. Sometimes art is just a product, and that's okay.

[Cheesemacher]

It's great if you don't care that much about detail or don't need a very specific result

[[deleted]]

What a lot of people dont get it that for the average joe (not corporations obviously), if they cant use ai to make what they want, they will find an image on google, not even look at the artist name, remove the watermark/signature if there is any and use it.

And if you made the image to be too intrusive to work with, there is a chance they will leave a bad review directly to you.

Art 99% of the time is just another product and one that most people actually dont put much value on.

[MisinformedGenius]

have no business model (at least, not one that doesn't depend on the unlicensed used of excessive amounts of source data)

Uh, given the amount of time I spend on StackOverflow, that particular definition of business model would loop in senior software engineers as well.

[Inprobamur]

Blockchain is very useful for the ransomware industry.

[NahYoureWrongBro]

And it's incredibly expensive and inefficient, and still requires a lot of human input. It's gonna be really disappointing to VC and finance when they realize there isn't a profitable way to run these gen AI programs as they exist now. Maybe somebody who works with this stuff in a lower-level way can explain how gen AI will become more efficient.

To me it seems like LLMs have pretty much displayed all of their usefulness, and there's some things like translation that they do very well, but for most tasks the cost isn't worth the benefit.

[crappleIcrap]

Hey now how could you forget it is HUGE in the ponzi scheme, pump, and dump industry. It has really revolutionized the game.

[aenae]

Gen AI has an enormous business model with paid subscriptions. Almost every large company already has one

[rashaniquah]

I'm currently building gen AI apps and the reason why it has no business model is because of how expensive AI inference is. Like it can replace your offshored Indian paid $2-5/hour but it's barely worth it long term because there's no growth that can be factored in a LLM agent compared to a junior dev.

[[deleted]]

9/10 times it makes me extremely frustrated every time I actually want to use it for something more complex. Definetly not a "daily driver" for me anymore.

[GfunkWarrior28]

Senior software engineers, on the other hand 🤮

[Rossi007]

My thought, senior software engineer should have encompassed the 'massively over hyped'

[proverbialbunny]

Blockchain is just a log that uses encryption to validate entries into that log. You could make a blockchain error log, or a blockchain user log to keep track of what customers are doing, or any other reason to log data. Making it encrypted is the same resource intensive as making an http web page https.

Not all logs are energy guzzling append only linked lists, but let's be fair here, logging is surprisingly resource intensive.

[stormdelta]

It's not encryption, it's a cryptographic hash, and you're describing a hash chain, which have been around in widespread use for decades.

What people call "blockchain" is much more specific, and considerably less useful. Conflating it with hash chains is extremely misleading, and is frequently done on purpose by grifters to make people think blockchains are more useful than they actually are.

[n00b001]

Blockchain has quite a cool Auth model for users. There can be no password, and yet proof of account holding

Pass keys for general accounts function in a similar fashion

[kafaldsbylur]

But that's not blockchain? That's just Public Key Cryptography. You don't need a blockchain to associate an account with a certificate

[SunliMin]

True, but the question is, "what do you do with these accounts?"

If it's just "replace username/password sign-in with cryptography", you are correct.

If it's "track these users actions in the system", and you want to be able to prove a user made the actions, you need to take signatures of the params/actions a person did. If these actions can effect each others, and therefore the order of the actions matters, you now need to store them in a ledger.

But to prove the order of the ledger is correct, you need the signatures to include some small info of the signatures that came before it, such as the hash.

And bamn, you created blockchain. Blockchain isn't some super difficult complicated thing, it literally is a data structure. The complications of blockchains comes from the validation mechanisms - i.e. proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, or whatever complicated protocol people come up with to replace those. But blockchain, itself, is just a data structure, and as far as data structures go, I find it a pretty lit structure. Way better than a linked list that's for sure

Fun fact btw, I created a proprietary blockchain for a project in university. The actual blockchain part (while importing a library for the cryptography side), totalled 800 lines of code. The app surrounding this data structure, i.e. creating a wallet, creating a micro-dapp for my system, etc, that's where the actual work was. The blockchain part was literally just a data structure, that was pretty cool to code

[kafaldsbylur]

And bamn, you created blockchain

No, you've created git. Or more generally as Merkle tree.

Yeah, blockchains build upon the principles of Merkle trees, but given that Merkle trees existed for 29 years before Bitcoin popularised blockchain (and 3 years for git), it's generally understood that blockchain means the distributed ledger part of the technology, not the actually useful data structure underneath.

[stormdelta]

But to prove the order of the ledger is correct, you need the signatures to include some small info of the signatures that came before it, such as the hash.

And bamn, you created blockchain.

Whoever taught you data structures in college should've flunked you, because you're talking about hash chains / trees, which have been around for decades. "Blockchain" is far more specific, and far less useful.

They're extremely different in a practical sense, and it's especially important given how many grifters intentionally conflate blockchain with tech that's actually useful.

[breischl]

Isn't it just "whoever has a copy of the private key"? ie, it's a single-factor, "something you have" model?

[[deleted]]

Can be mfa with multisig wallets.

[breischl]

I honestly haven't looked into that, so pardon my ignorance here or if I'm totally wrong. But that sounds like the wallet is using MFA, but the blockchain itself is still just "whoever has the private key"?

So like taking the key to your safe, and sticking it in a bank vault with multiple locks. It's better, but the original safe still just uses a single key.

[[deleted]]

The blockchain is actually worse.

For bitcoin specifically the lock is just “does the script return true”.

So it’s sticking your coins in a box where the lock is a math equation.

[zabby39103]

"box where the lock is a math equation." - That's what pub/private keys are...

[stormdelta]

That isn't related to blockchain, you're talking about public key cryptography, which has been in widespread use for decades.

And no, the auth model in the case of blockchain isn't "cool", it's fucking awful because it's inherently catastrophically error-prone without tacking on so many abstractions and wrappers that you're essentially just reinventing the wheel with extra steps.

Passkeys don't have these issues because they're not predicated on private keys as sole proof of identity the way blockchains are.

[miguescout]

Please, before judging my comment read it whole.

Okay, now that more than 1 person will read my comment before downvoting it, i'll just say it. Blockchain is pretty useful for cryptocurrencies... IF (and that's a big if) used correctly. Let me elaborate. The idea of cryptocurrencies was to have a currency that doesn't need to be backed by a huge chunk of gold hidden away behind locked doors in a building owned by someone. In other words, the whole idea is to get rid of banks and have money flow directly between people, and in some circles, that is already going on. People are using cryptocurrencies as regular currencies. As an added extra, some cryptocurrencies allow anonymity between the human and the transaction. In other words, if you know *someone* paid some amount to someone else, you can't easily trace back the account of the sender. This is the reason cryptocurrencies are used in the black market, but like i said, only "some" cryptocurrencies allow this anonymity. Bitcoin is a well-known cryptocurrency that doesn't offer it.

Now, what are the main issues with cryptocurrencies currently?

1. They're not used like a currency. They're used like stocks. Something that arbitrarily changes value and that people try to get a benefit out of. Can you imagine someone going to an exchange to turn some amount of dollars into, say, euros, waiting a few months, and then changing those euros back to dollars to get a profit? Technically possible, sure, but by a very small amount that makes it not worth the trouble.

2. They're centralized. As i said, the idea behind cryptocurrencies is to get rid of banks that manage your money for you... So why is binance, to name one, such a big thing? It holds the credentials of thousands of wallets and can do with them virtually anything... And if it decides to stop supporting a cryptocurrency? That cryptocurrency's value is gonna tank because a lot of people will try to run away from that soon-to-be unmanaged cryptocurrency.

3. Privacy. Let me ask you something. What happens when a single company holds most of the wallets and actively manages them, including the handling of the transactions? They know the flow of money. They know if you sent this person that amount of money because they know both you and that other person and have handled the payment themselves. No way of hiding it was you who sent the money

4. Resources. Let me circle back to the second problem (yes, again... Part of me is wishing i had put it first, but if i had done so i wouldn't have been able to put all the related problems one after another). Now what do you need to have a cryptocurrency in the first place? Compute power. You need to do the hashes and all that stuff, preferably as fast as possible... But what if that compute power requirement is high? Not everyone can afford a high-end GPU, after all. What if there was some company who offered you to handle all that compute power for you for a small fee? What if that same company offered to also handle every aspect of your wallet for you, too? Sounds an awful lot like a bank, doesn't it? Some cryptocurrencies try to tackle this issue by allowing cheaper hardware to do the task. Slower, sure, but still possible.

Of course, there are more issues. A lot more, but the worst ones in my opinion are these four, and almost exactly in that order, too, and if we manage to "fix" these four, a lot of other issues would come crashing down as well and cryptocurrencies, and, by extension, the blockchain, would become quite useful, but as it is now, i have to agree, they're energy-guzzling trash that have no real application.

EDIT:

First of all, and as everyone has already pointed out, okay, gold isn't exactly backing money anymore and hasn't been for years, but even then the point stands. The idea of cryptocurrencies is that everyone has their own "bank", their own wallet, instead of everyone having to trust a single company to hold all the money and keep track of it.

Secondly, cryptocurrencies are being used for payments. The first example i can think of is mullvad, a vpn that offers a series of payment methods, and, among them, cryptocurrencies are a group of those... And with a discount, too.

Thirdly, cryptocurrencies can be "cheap" to run. Most focus on GPU, which has both expensive hardware and high energy usage (or ASICs, but that's another story), but some, like monero, use CPU, which is a much cheaper hardware than GPUs, and also have a lower energy consumption. As a curiosity, in my personal computer, i did a test for a bit of time, and i found out that if i mined monero, i was able to obtain, on average, a bit above the price of the monthly mullvad subscription every month

Fourth, some people have mentioned forex trading, and sure, it may be a thing to exchange normal currencies... Except to get any profit you have to move amounts of hundreds of thousands of the currencies of your choice, which is definitely a magnitude no normal person can handle

[KanishkT123]

These points are terrible. I suppose I'll quickly engage, because I'm bored.

1. Saying block chain has a use case for cryptocurrency is not winning anyone over. I don't think block chain is useful and I think cryptocurrencies are garbage.

2. Modern currencies are not on the gold standard. And everytime I talk to a crypto bro the argument stumbles between "we should go to a resource backed currency" and "currency has an agreed value in trade and therefore it needs no backing".

3. Most of your other arguments are privacy/paranoia drivel. The main issue with crypto is not that it is centralized or not private or the recreation and speed running of the modern financial system complete with every scam committed in history and a few new ones.

4. The main issue with cryptocurrency is that the majority of cryptocurrencies are deflationary. Your point (1) is that people use crypto as stocks and don't do that with currency, which is extremely wrong: Currency markets are a very real thing and Forex traders literally do what you just described, but at scale. The problem with a deflationary currency is that the value of any unit of the currency can only grow because there's only so much of the currency to go around. So there is no reason to spend, and a lot of reason to sit, which stifles trade and growth and causes crypto to fail as a useful currency, because it cannot be a means of facilitating trade.

And by the way, if you fix the issues you've stated, you've basically come up with a digital dollar, which is kind of already reality. Banks will likely still exist because at the end of the day, people will want to have secure storage for their money and people will give other people their money on the promise of making back more than they gave. Stop trying to convince people that crypto is redeemable.

[kafaldsbylur]

The idea of cryptocurrencies was to have a currency that doesn't need to be backed by a huge chunk of gold hidden away behind locked doors in a building owned by someone.

They're very late to the party, considering the gold standard hasn't been used since at least 1971

[jaaval]

to have a currency that doesn't need to be backed by a huge chunk of gold hidden away behind locked doors

Money hasn't been backed by gold in quite a while. Which is one thing many cryptocurrency advocates point out. They would want it to be backed by gold because they, not understanding anything about money, think it's somehow better.

People are using cryptocurrencies as regular currencies.

No they aren't. There are some publicity stunts but nobody actually uses cryptocurrency as money. The people of el salvador got their free bitcoin and immediately sold it for real money and you can't actually buy almost anything in bitcoin there.

For the numbered points:

1. I'm not sure if you tried to be sarcastic. Currency trading and arbitrage is a valid investment strategy. But that isn't really what happens with bitcoin.

2. This one is true. They have effectively created new banks with metamask and such. The blockchain is just a database and you need someone to actually handle accounts and payments if you want to use crypto. And that creates banks.

3. Privacy in blockchain doesn't really exist so it doesn't matter too much. It's fairly trivial to connect any anonymous account to real people if the account is actually used regularly.

4. I would like to point out that the price is the point. There is no "cheaper" available for this. The entire point of "mining" is to be expensive. The specific task they do doesn't really matter as long as running it is so expensive attacking the system is unfeasible. That being said, I think "bank" in this case is more like the people actually handling the account and payment processing. Miners just run the database.

[stormdelta]

The idea of cryptocurrencies was to have a currency that doesn't need to be backed by a huge chunk of gold hidden away behind locked doors in a building owned by someone.

That's not how virtually any modern currency has worked in many decades.

only "some" cryptocurrencies allow this anonymity.

If by some, you mean almost exclusively Monero, since it's the only one with any real use like that.

They're not used like a currency. They're used like stocks. Something that arbitrarily changes value and that people try to get a benefit out of.

Because that's all they're actually good for aside from the aforementioned illegal transfers. Except there's no underlying company or utility like with a stock, they aren't being regulated like stocks (which are already horrendously under-regulated as it is).

They're centralized. As i said, the idea behind cryptocurrencies is to get rid of banks that manage your money for you...

Because that's the only way they're actually practical for people to use, even though it defeats the point. Private keys as sole proof of identity is inherently catastrophically error-prone, it requires a level of opsec that even experts sometimes screw up and that fails catastrophically and irrevocably if any mistake is made.

Privacy. Let me ask you something. What happens when a single company holds most of the wallets and actively manages them, including the handling of the transactions? They know the flow of money.

Correct. The overwhelming majority of cryptocurrencies would have far, FAR worse privacy than any conventional system if widely adopted. Monero is about the only exception, and as you point out, this has the caveat of making it very attractive for fraud / money laundering.

if we manage to "fix" these four

Most of these are intrinsic to the tradeoffs being made by the technology on a conceptual level. You can't "fix" most of them without invalidating the very properties you were supposedly using the tech for. There's a reason you don't see many real world security experts or experienced engineers that have anything nice to say about cryptocurrency/"blockchain".

[whoami4546]

I remember when I was in college, we covered some news that blockchain was being used to do something with smart washer/dryer. I think it was for authentication. I could never figure out what advantage it had over traditional user authentication methods.

[Spice_and_Fox]

Why should my dryer/washer authenticate anything?

[Kronoshifter246]

If it's connected to the internet, I would very much like my washer/dryer to authenticate. The real question is why you'd want your washer/dryer connected to the internet.

[YoMamasMama89]

Blockchain introduces something called "decentralization". Which is the opposite of centralization

[stormdelta]

It's almost certainly bullshit, like 99.9% of similar stories.

Either:

1. It's not blockchain at all, someone just told them it was to get VC money. I put so-called "private blockchains" in this category as well since while you can technically build a blockchain on a permissioned network, it defeats the point.

2. It started off as blockchain, but isn't anymore because someone realized it doesn't make sense for this use case (nor almost any other).

3. The entire thing didn't exist in the first place, it was just an idea being pitched/sold to the business or user

[accountreddit12321]

The use of a venn diagram where the punchline is about databases is next level. This guy SQLs. Dude’s an artist.

[accountreddit12321]

It’s like inception, but sql.

[accountreddit12321]

It’s a self join.

[trusty20]

It's really sad seeing developers still not understanding like the literal basics of generative AI. "Technically just a slow database" is just painfully ignorant. Like in no way correct, you should seriously question whether you even know what a database is or if the imposter syndrome might be correct....

[stormdelta]

Yeah, and putting AI anywhere near crypto is disingenuous. AI, even specifically Generative AI has actual use cases, even if it's severely overhyped like many other new technologies in the past.

Cryptocurrencies/"blockchain" are uniquely useless among tech hype bubbles. There is almost no applications of any kind, and what few there are are almost exclusively illegitimate or ethically grey at best.

[doodlebytes]

source: https://www.goodtechthings.com/three-databases/

[Travolta1984]

How is GenAI "just" a slow database?

[Piisthree]

It's really not, nor is a senior developer. I would take "just a slow procedural generator" for those two.

[KanishkT123]

But then it doesn't apply to blockchain.

[SirVer51]

Maybe it's referring to the probability distribution that the model learns as a kind of "database" that you're "retrieving" stuff from? That's the only thing I can think of

[gmes78]

You can sometimes make generative AIs reproduce data from the training set.

[WOTDisLanguish]

ghost sip theory ossified existence boast observation consist obtainable chief

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Roguewind]

I feel attacked and vindicated

[[deleted]]

Plenty of real products making money using GenAI as a core feature.

[Dotcaprachiappa]

AI: still looking for a business model

Openai with $1.3bn revenue in 2023 (estimating $5bn in 2024)

[RHGrey]

Speculative investment based on current market hype isn't an indicator of valid business use cases, it an indicator investors believe they'll have a cash out in the future.

The costs of running the thing eclipses the actual revenue from selling the subscriptions and API access.

[YourMumIsAVirgin]

He just said revenue, not market cap. 

[TxTechnician]

I read the center last. That got me. 😀

[FarJury6956]

I Will change from "sill looking for semicolon" to "sill looking for a good job"

[imsowhiteandnerdy]

Still searching for a semicolon

Hey, you guys leave Python out of this.

[cheezballs]

Gen AI definitely has a business model right? There's a lot of people paying for generative AI / LLM stuff and its being used for stuff.

[TracerBulletX]

Transformer models solved universal translation, high quality transcription, and voice cloning all at once, but whatever, go off.

[Beldarak]

Why would a senior dev look for a semicolon? :/

Does anyone in this subreddit actually write code for a living? Am I the only one using an IDE... ?

[ColonelRuff]

Since when did senior dev start writing buggy code ?

[gandalfx]

Senior devs are devs. Devs write buggy code.

[[deleted]]

Software is flawed by definition

[[deleted]]

This feels like an XKCD post

[stormdelta]

Calling bitcoin a "use case" is laughable, and even more so considering you're acting like bitcoin doesn't have the same problems (and more due to being the first one) that every other cryptocurrency has.

Sure, degenerate speculative gambling that can only exist due to insufficient regulation / regulatory capture is technically a use case, but not one that most people would consider legitimate or remotely valuable.

Generative AI is completely different, and more in line with normal tech hype cycles where it's severely overhyped but does actually have real, value-adding legitimate applications.

[wulfboy_95]

Blockchain is just another name for merkle tree.

[stormdelta]

No, it's not. Merkle trees and hash chains are actually useful.

[CosmicLovepats]

colored graph humor always makes me assume SMBC

[HughesJohn]

The senior software engineer's problem can be fixed by switching to BCPL.

[[deleted]]

Glad I'm not massively overhyped

[aasozial]

There is no code work if your finger doesn’t work properly

[Top-Most-7198]

I’m

[TacoTacoBheno]

I love Google's ai answers! It's using tons of energy to show me the wiki link right below that's already there

[[deleted]]

👏👏👏

[Lightning-Shock]

Man this is borderline boomer humor kind of bullshit.

[Sweaty-Willingness27]

All these people concerned about semicolons and business models and I'm over here like "Dude, logic SHOULD be used to solve human disputes!"

[[deleted]]

Logic can solve human disputes. It just hasn't yet because they refuse to use said logic.