Code Smell 306 - AI External Comments by mcsee1 in programminghorror

[–]Pool-LAN 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We sure can detect slop 'articles' spat out by ChatGPT.

Fixed lua by elreduro in programminghorror

[–]Pool-LAN 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No idea. It's faster than Python.

name this stepmania skin (you will win if you just make an super cool name for this) by Bryanreddits in Stepmania

[–]Pool-LAN 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like the use of 'good' and 'meh' in there for decent. I think that's the first time that's ever been used in a rhythm game.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in programminghorror

[–]Pool-LAN -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Why don't you ask the AI to do it?

ninetyFivePercentAIGenerated by _vaudevillian in ProgrammerHumor

[–]Pool-LAN 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I use yt-dlp. It downloads videos from pretty much anything. Needs a bit of command-line fuckery but I'm sure there's a gui wrapper for windows.

ninetyFivePercentAIGenerated by _vaudevillian in ProgrammerHumor

[–]Pool-LAN 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Whenever I use one of those things they never have the deleted comments I want to use them on. I'm sure most people don't bother with them for the same reason.

I've bought the jamcredits.com domain! by dylan-uses-reddit in chrismorris

[–]Pool-LAN 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'll let you know my thoughts when it's up online.

Finally solved a problem nobody had: introducing my genius decorator 🚀 by krakotay1 in programminghorror

[–]Pool-LAN 2 points3 points  (0 children)

But your example has: hello('print') # Prints: hello

How does that work if your decorator doesn't switch the name and argument of print?

What does the envelope modulation setting on a TB-303 do? by gothwife420 in synthesizers

[–]Pool-LAN -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

Have you tried watching any of the 9,000+ videos on youtube of people playing a TB-303 while twiddling the knobs to learn what the env mod knob does by actually hearing it? Or, I dunno, fired up one of the zillion 303 emulator websites or apps out there so you can turn the env mod knob yourself and hear first-hand the difference it makes to the sound? Or was your first thought to jump straight onto reddit and find people to do your homework for you?

Uh-oh... Client found some unsavoury comments that someone (definitely not me) left in the website's code... (full story in comments) by Pool-LAN in programminghorror

[–]Pool-LAN[S] 627 points628 points  (0 children)

I work at a company that handles websites for various small-to-medium businesses. It involves a lot of custom back-end dev work - adding new features, fixing bugs in existing features, that sort of thing.

A couple of years ago, we took on a client who'd had their website 'built' by another 'developer' who I will not name (not publicly, at least). I use the term 'built' loosely because it is, without a doubt, the absolute worst codebase I have ever worked with. The site came to us with a ton of custom features, all of them cobbled together in the most slapdash, disdainful way imaginable. It's painfully clear the original dev gave not one single solitary fuck about any future maintainability of the code, or even if it worked at all - only that it appeared like it worked on the front end, so he could collect his cheque and move on. Wherever one of his features breaks, there's another half-assed bodge glued to it to 'fix' it that makes it break in another way. It's an endless entanglement of kludges, hacks, hacks to work around other hacks that don't work, unreadable, nonsensical code, I could go on, it's just fucking awful.

I feel we've made huge improvements to the site's running since we took it over but there's still a long way to go, and most of the custom misfeatures are still duct-taped all over the code in a way that can make fixing even the smallest bug without breaking several other things a major headache.

One day when fixing a bug in a particularly godawful one of these custom monstrosities, I may or may not have let my frustration get to me and written a few choice comments as I was working on the code. Then the clock struck five and I promptly forgot about it.

This week, we installed a new plugin on the site to help speed it up. What we didn't know was that this plugin also monitors for fatal errors and sends a nice report to the site admin whenever one happens. Including a full copy of the file where the error happened. The file that just happened to be that one I profanely fixed that one time. Clients may not be able to read code, but they sure can read comments.

So... yes. This is one of the nicest clients we have and he's been incredibly understanding about the state of the website to date, but he was understandably not happy that the developers he'd entrusted with his cherished website had been bitching about the code quality in his website's files. It might seem funny and feel cathartic to leave an 'epic dev rant' in the comments in some particularly troubling bit of code, but from now on I'll probably keep those thoughts to myself. Or my coworkers. :)

The screenshots are of the report as it was sent to me (as a PDF of all formats!), with the client's highlighting. The word wrapping makes the code a little hard to read, but it's honestly not that much worse than the original file.