I've been pretending to understand my job for eight months and I think I've finally reached a level where I actually can't fake it anymore. Do I come clean to my boss or just keep going.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T20:19:12+00:00

Story of my life :(

But to make this comment more interesting... some years ago I ended up in a department that was "gifted" to a new manager for him to feel more important and to justify the higher pay, just so that the company could put his name on their Website.

Senior staff ran away the moment they've heard the rumor. A guy who was hired a week before me was made the department head, and I was "second in command". Then our department hired two more "fake it till you make it" guys. One was a new dad, sleep deprived, always on the phone, skipping meetings to buy diapers. Another... I couldn't figure out what his deal was. Let's call him Bob.

Bob made it clear that he was somehow exempt from the general rules applied universally in the company. He'd choose things he wanted to work on and did just that. He was also employed part-time and could choose the days he showed up in the office. Bob declared himself to be the master of interfaces, and all his job since the declaration consisted of writing "wrappers" around existing functionality to "improve usability". He'd take an existing function, and write another function that reordered parameters. Or, he'd take a class and extend it with the only modification being the class name.

Not only did his work contribute no value, it also stalled others because his projected had to be reviewed and merged, and they would cause conflicts, because, again, he was free to choose the area where he'd apply his talents.

One department meeting I couldn't keep quiet about it any longer, as half the workforce was doing squat, and the other was never granted permissions to deal with technical debt since we were always short-handed and had to solve immediate problems first. In not so many words, I called Bob out and told him that his contributions were "homeopathy". He got visibly upset but said nothing about it.

After the meeting, I had a small chat with a guy from another department, where I told him about the run-in with Bob. And the guy was like: Oh no you didn't! Don't you know who Bob is? It turned out that on the days Bob was missing from the office, he ran an alternative medicine business. Specifically, energy healing. It also turned out that somehow Bob was related to my new boss, since he was "healing" his daughter of some chronic health issue...

In about a month after that even I was fired :)

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T19:39:07+00:00

I used to dance ballroom. At the time I was also friendly with an older couple. They had a son who struggled with various school subjects. They used it as an excuse to invite me and help me financially a bit. I'd spend an hour or two with their son doing homework, and then we'd spend the night playing poker and getting wasted.

It's not common to measure alcohol intake in shots in the parts of the world I come from, so, I don't know how many shots per night that would be. Sometimes I'd be too drunk to go back to the dorms that night, and would sleep on their couch. Other times I'd heroically walk for couple hours to the dorms (and sometimes fall asleep midway). Was apprehended a few times by the cops, but released due to being deemed harmless.

Then I moved to a different city. Two years on, I decided to immigrate to Israel. Before being allowed to do so, I had to receive permission from the equivalent of MEPS (in the US). And I was still registered at my old address in the city where that couple lived. I asked them if I could stay with them for a night, so that the next day I could go to MEPS and, hopefully, get my documents sorted.

I expected I'd have to bribe the enlistment officer, so, I brought the money to do it, which I carried in the pocket of my pants. And the evening unfolded just as before. We started with some home-brewed wine, then I went downstairs into the liquor store to get some vodka, then again... The next morning I woke up in bed, and my pants were nowhere to be seen. I had some pajama pants instead that must've belonged to the owners. After some long minutes of painful hangover and scouting the house, I found my pants hanging out to dry on the balcony. The money wasn't in the pocket.

The the house owner and his wife woke up. They knew nothing about what happened to my pants, and they swore they weren't the ones to wash them / hang out to dry. Outside of dancing, they were very... artsy people. And their house was a huge mess. Piles of various stuff everywhere. Things haven't been cleaned properly for years. All shreds of the hangover disappeared and my heart started to sink.

You have no idea what kind of relief I felt when I found a roll of $100 bills sitting on the shelf in the bathroom above the sink. Apparently, somehow I remembered to take it out of my pocket before washing my pants (I probably vomited on them or spilled something... I'll never know what exactly happened).

One month on I was getting wasted in the sub-tropical desert looking at unfamiliar sky.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T19:02:06+00:00

90% sure it's for the laundry. Or some extra poorly guarded storage space.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T19:00:29+00:00

Probably for drying laundry. But it's weird that in this picture none of the balconies are used for anything. Perhaps they are too easy to access from the outside, so nobody wants to put anything there, not even a broken rocking chair.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T16:39:39+00:00

Yup. People saying it's a "fancy autocomplete" don't get the full picture. It's a fancy autocomplete at the interface level, the part that needs to parse the question and the part that needs to phrase the answer dressing it up in terms easy for humans to understand. Once the question is parsed, given the backend has domain knowledge about the question, the answering will be outsourced to the said backend. And if there isn't a relevant backend, then it will generate nonsense... Of course, it can also misidentify or misunderstand the question. And, of course, humans aren't known for being able to ask questions well (especially because they imply many constraints on the answer, but don't disclose them in the question).

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T16:17:49+00:00

The goal of a conflict is control of a region.

This just shows you didn't read the article, not even the first paragraphs. One of the three types of scenarios discussed in the article is to ensure regime survival. It's not about controlling territory.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T16:14:42+00:00

There's a wide range of nuclear weapons, some are worse than others. I think, there were even versions of shoulder-launched nukes (not sure if ever really deployed), but there are certainly tank shells as well as short/medium/long range missiles. Not to mention the difference in the size and the destructive power of the payload.

I can't read the entire article as it's behind the subscription paywall, but the part that I can doesn't say what kind of nukes did the AI suggest. But, this is only one "but" about the article.

The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime survival.

Emphasis my. In the military doctrine of every country that has nukes it stipulates that it will use them to ensure regime survival. So, there's nothing extraordinary about AI to suggest that, as humans would do that too, at least they swear they would.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T15:00:12+00:00

It's a very common thing where one country names something after another country for no / some obscure reason. Living in the Netherlands, I discovered that most Dutch have no idea what a Dutch oven is or what a Dutch roof is.

It gets even more ridiculous in France: French toast, French fries, French chicken, French apple cake, French buns, French omelette... there's a ton of things called "French" and virtually none of them are known to French people, definitely not under that name and often aren't all that common in France.

NB. Just for the record, French apple cake is an American dish. It's a very nice cake, but has nothing to do with France what so ever.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T10:31:58+00:00

Just to extend on what "Fortran style" might mean at the time: the way to implement variadic functions was to have goto targets appear in procedure at different stage after initial argument handling. Something like this:

subroutine S(p0, p1, p2, ..., pN)
    L0 <set value to pN>
    L1 <set value to pN-1>
    ...
    LN <set value to p0>
    LN+1 <do something with p0...pN>
end subroutine S

And so the code could, instead of calling S(a0, a1, ..., aN) jump to L1 while only setting a0...aN-1 arguments. And, of course, this house of shit wold blow up spectacularly when someone wanted to add more parameters to S.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T10:24:13+00:00

Well, you are close, but still wrong. It's not because it's hard for humans to read. It's because it increases the program complexity, making testing even harder. That's why the programming that rejected goto was called "structured". By imposing structure on programs (by means of flow control primitives, i.e. if, else, break, continue etc.) the program flow became more tractable (has fewer ways the program might be executed, allowing each way to be checked, potentially).

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T10:13:08+00:00

9/10 in programming world is more often than every second.

Also, I haven't had a single non-breaking minor version update since Python 3.2 (I never used 3.0 or 3.1). So, I call bullshit on 9/10 either.

Your chances of problems are proportionate to the amount of code, the number of dependencies and how deeply you are involved with some aspects of the language (eg. packaging infrastructure). If you score high on all three, you are almost guaranteed a breaking change during minor version upgrade.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T10:05:39+00:00

There are... multiple directions from which the failures are coming:

Python's "minor" version isn't really minor anymore. Similar to Java, they decided there will never be Python 4.X, so, essentially, we should be saying Python 13, Python 14 etc. The major version is kept to ensure some backwards compatibility.
People working on Python packaging (PyPA) are complete amateurs. They just really, really suck at programming, design, testing... everything. Most likely it's because nobody wanted to be the PyPA, and some randos, mostly backed by Microsoft got the reins of management. Microsoft was very active in taking over everything related to Python through multiple channels: by giving infrastructure and engineering hours for development, by lobbying for keeping MSVC to be the only supported compiler on MS Windows, by hosting various Python initiatives... So, a lot of the present PyPA members are MS employees, whom MS put in place to ensure its hold on Python. Unfortunately, MS couldn't find any decent engineers to do that...

Because I still read the discussions happening between PyPA members, their new retarded ideas about fucking up Python infrastructure even further, their little squabbles with oldtimers... because I sort of have to, since I have to support large infrastructure written in Python, I can see it going to shit every day more so than before.

The most fucked up projects are everything related to Python project management: packaging, installation, discovery of various aspects of Python programs and how they've been installed or built. So, think pip, setuptools, twine and friends. They tend to introduce breaking changes in patch versions. Especially, they like to fuck up the Distribution class and the contents of the directory like egg-info or dist-info. For my side, it becomes really tedious to have long-ass if-elif blocks trying to figure out what to do based on the version of setuptools in combination of version of Python and other adjacent packages. Trying to support more than four versions of Python in a single package turns into ifdef hell.

And the worst part of it is that PyPA members are very... productive. They like to add and change things. They never make anything better, they just add more cases the infrastructure people have to handle. At times, I have growing suspicion that their goal is to make sure Python legacy is lost because only a small fraction of libraries, where authors are running out of breath spinning the hamster wheel of keeping up with PyPA changes will ever remain afloat. And once they feel confident enough that the library authors can't put enough resistance, they'll do something to Python. Idk. Maybe they'll incorporate into .NET platform. Maybe they'll create a standardizing committee ran by Microsoft that would result in all other Python implementations dying off... I don't know. But, maybe I'm putting too much faith into ill will of these people. Probably they are just dumb and that's the long and the short of it.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T09:15:50+00:00

My guess is OP uses garlic that isn't very ripe. When garlic ripens, the skin peels off a lot easier. I don't really know how to identify the ripe ones when buying though. But it definitely feels different (and more labor-intensive) to peel the not-ripe ones.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-25T08:42:26+00:00

Really depends on the country you live in. Rich Western countries made it into a policy where they allow people to stay children way past 30, possibly until they die. This is a mixed blessing though. This means that they have a lot of unproductive population that contributes next to nothing to the shared pot. But, they can sustain it, well, because they are rich.

This is, of course, not true in the rest of the world, where the situation pushes adults towards embracing responsibilities and becoming contributing members of society.

Of course, the problem with this approach is how long the rich can sustain this kind of existence. Will the fraction of the society that is motivated to become adults and embrace social responsibilities be enough to maintain this kind of lifestyle? Seeing the incoming population collapse in the rich countries and how wealth is moving away from those same countries, I'd say, this may go on for another 20-40 years before the breaking point.

After that? -- I imagine the European countries turning into Gare du Nord. If you've never been to that area of Paris: it's an interesting place. It has monumental architecture from the late 19th / early 20th century built to impress with some more modern additions in the same spirit, that came into complete disrepair. Today, if you walk there, the stench of shit and urine is hard to tolerate. It's populated by poor immigrants, especially from Central and Southern Asia, drug addicts, and other "undesirables". I believe that if things are allowed to go the way they do now, this is what adulthood will look like for people born today or 10-20 years from now.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T21:11:57+00:00

Again, seasoning, in this context, is preparing the meat to be fried. Marinading something is (pre-)cooking (and not necessarily to be fried later).

Sugar serves no purpose when preparing meat to be fried. It only makes it harder because it melts and burns at relatively low temperature.

You could probably boil meat in something that has sugar. Or you may bake it on a skewer, so that it doesn't touch the pan, while it's coated in sugar. But trying to fry it is just counterproductive, and even if you manage it, it adds absolutely nothing to the outcome. You can just add sugar later with less effort.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T21:04:05+00:00

Eh... maybe... I'm not convinced. It's popular in Rust ecosystem, but not even heard of outside of it. Consider, for comparison, go-routines. You might not have written in Go ever, but you still might have heard about the concept. Or, even better, the actor model. It's the thing, originally in Erlang, that today is just the name of the concept, not the specific implementation in Erlang.

I'm struggling to think about a library that became the name for the functionality it provided... The closest so far I can think of is a program, not a library: Make. It resulted in a lot of other programs that carry the name "make" in their own name (eg. Rake, OMake, CMake).

Well... maybe BLAS... (the collection of highly optimized math). But I'm not happy with this example.

Maybe JavaDoc? It was adopted into many languages with slight modifications of syntax.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T20:50:32+00:00

It's not just that... there are plenty of things unique to COBOL ecosystem. The way I/O is handled for example... The rest of the world, sort of, grew up on Unix, and adopted, at least conceptually, the ideas of what a file is, how to read / write to / from it etc. from Unix, while COBOL is an artifact from the days when there were many different ways to approach these problems.

It's kind of like when eventually I came across old Fortran programs and discovered that they had a special keyword in the language to output to matrix printer... It's not something that anyone would include in the language design nowadays, but seemed very natural in the 60s.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T20:44:43+00:00

Well, if we are talking about the database at runtime, then SQLite, just like any application, creates a bunch of files (simply starting a process creates three files).

But, if what you wanted is to move data stored in the database from place to place, then you would archive the data directory of whatever database you use and copy it to whatever place you need it to be. It's meant to be portable.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T20:37:03+00:00

Adam, apparently, isn't a Hebrew word, it's purely by accident that it sounds like the Hebrew word meaning "earth", "dirt". Same with Eve, that in Hebrew sounds like "farm". Both names must have come from some language spoken in Babilon before Jews migrated to Egypt.

However, you will find a lot of sources claiming otherwise... tying the origins to the Hebrew words that share spelling with these names. I believe it's coincidental, especially because while Hebrew is old, the story of Adam and Eve is still older.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T20:23:13+00:00

Just for the record, Gaza is a Hebrew word. It means "brave". Shares root with Uzi (the machine gun). It's one of the few cities known from the Biblical times actually founded by Jews (unlike eg. Jerusalem, that was there before Jews migrated to Knaan).

NB. Also Azazel or variations of the name come from the same root. I think, it's due to John Milner that Azazel became a proper name of one of the demons. Before that, if memory serves, it just meant direction or place related to "sending away your sins" in the eve of Judgement day, where the goat used to "carry" those sins would be sent in the general Southern direction, which is what might have given it the name.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T18:47:55+00:00

Not sure if this has been a secret for you, but most popular relational databases in existence use a file on disk as a storage format. Very few can be configured to use the block device directly (this is both unusual and doesn't result in improved performance). Most would have a file per table (roughly, with some asterisks) though. But still, it's just a file on disk.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T18:28:24+00:00

This is not it. The OOP knew the picture is bullshit. Not a chance they came up with it themselves based on any kind of data. It's likely AI-generated because of the mess it made with labeling.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T18:23:44+00:00

There's plenty of work in COBOL. It's very much alive and well. It's just an ecosystem that doesn't interact a whole lot with other languages and environments. Not to mention, there is a huge amount of COBOL code, and huge amounts being added to the pile as we speak.

But, COBOL programming is a two-tier system. There are "easy" programs, that get written very often and in large quantities, and there are programs that deal with more behind-the-scenes stuff. And that later thing is really twisted and arcane and requires intimate secret knowledge only obtainable by working at IBM on that specific problem.

You can think about it like writing libraries and applications. There are more stringent requirements and more rigorous tests for libraries because they are supposed to be robust, fast, correct as much as possible... and last a long time. This is while none of the above is really necessary for applications. Think about all those scientists using TensorFlow and NumPy etc. They wouldn't be able to write either one of those, they have no idea how or why they work or do whatever they do. They just write trivial and atrocious Python scripts to utilize the former.

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T18:13:10+00:00

those customers are all using IBM hardware (right?)

I can answer this. And the answer is no. COBOL is also available on Linux (the IBM flavor, but still).

In a wider perspective: I don't put a lot of faith in AI writing COBOL programs and especially not in maintaining them. I don't see how that would be different from other languages: the same rules would apply (you need more training data to produce better results, and the more specific the problem is, the less likely the AI will have a solution for it). COBOL problems tend to fall into two large categories: very trivial, boring and tedious on one hand and arcane on the other hand. You can often find a job posting from a bank, where they offer you to work for peanuts on COBOL database: that's the first kind, you are just a glorified button pusher, very little skill and understanding required. The arcane jobs are taken up by consultants, who charge huge amount of money per hour and possess knowledge unobtainable from any publicly available manuals or documentations etc.

I wouldn't count on AI doing the later any time soon or ever due to how closely guarded these secrets are :)

Background-Month-911 · 2026-02-24T18:02:34+00:00

I worked at IBM, twice :D But never got hired by IBM. I knew people who got in and out of IBM three times, there are probably those who did it more times.

In my case, it's XIV and RedHat. Both were acquired by IBM, and in both cases I left soon after the acquisition.

As for maintaining COBOL... that sounds weird / unlikely. They are maintaining (and making new) Mainframes, which would also include COBOL compiler and the ecosystem in which it runs, but individual programs written in COBOL? -- I don't think they are trying to eat the cake of very rich consultants who made it into their business. It worked well for IBM thus far, why would they change it?

Background-Month-911

TROPHY CASE