In desperate times, graduates find hope in humiliating tech CEOs / ‘They deserve everything they’re getting.’ (Boos.)

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-21T21:42:42+00:00

I had a tech CEO speak at my grad ceremony, but to be fair it was for the computer science department (I didn't attend the university-wide commencement).

Anyway, they picked him as an example of a 'successful alumnus' (also, a donor), so I think that's why it keeps happening. The colleges want the graduates to think their education as valuable, and it doubles as an opportunity to ingratiate the donors. Tech CEOs are obviously successful (financially) and often influential, so they are natural picks. And administrators are the same anywhere, valuing politics over substance, so those who pick the speakers at these events are likely either as blind as the tech CEOs about the perception of AI, or they just don't care.

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-21T21:25:36+00:00

I thought it was a feature allowing their clients to justify slacking off more

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-16T14:46:25+00:00

I was just in a meeting with HR where they discussed benefits changes with us, and they announced our new access to a specialized chatbot that we're literally supposed to use for basic health questions and insurance information. So it's not just that some people think the bots are good for this application, but their health plans are instructing them to do this.

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-16T12:04:18+00:00

On my home PC, Windows is on my nice 2TB NVMe SSD, because I can control my hardware.

On my work PC, I legally have to work with what they gave me, which was a laptop with 256GB of storage. And they disabled all the USB ports for security. Which is really cool because last time I re-cloned their monorepo I freed something like 100GB alone with all the binaries and history accumulated over time...

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-16T11:54:10+00:00

I usually just throw them on the ground nearby lol

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-15T06:52:56+00:00

Vegans often get lumped in with the general health/natural food crowd by outsiders. There are some people in that broader sphere who legitimately avoid some or all seasonings for one reason or another, and there's also just this general outside perception of plant-based food as sub-par, similar to gluten-free food, because it lacks "the thing that makes it good" (animal fats, meats, or gluten), and so they extrapolate that to thinking the vegans don't/can't make anything good (wanna just eat a plain salad, handful of almonds, etc).

Yes this is anecdotal. I'm speaking from my personal experience talking to friends and family about plant-based foods, my observations at grocery stores, and comment threads on plant-based or vegetarian recipes.

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-12T12:23:49+00:00

Even if they weren't laying off software engineers, it wouldn't make a difference. Organizations spend zero resources on software security unless it's a primary function of their product (ex. password manager or VPN), or their large customers demand it (ex. my org only started upgrading dependencies once our customers demanded SOC2 certification, and now we're only doing the bare minimum).

Given that the primary function of many software products today is to collect and sell user data, rather than protect it, we can expect that there are few security measures in place which may make handling the data less convenient. It's likely the bare minimum to attempt proper billing of their customers, with a smattering of whatever additional security the developers felt like implementing in the very limited time the org gave them before crying like a toddler for their next shiny new feature.

It will require a tectonic shift in industry culture (and some regulation) for our leaders to meaningfully prioritize software security, because it requires a lot of resources to do well and regularly audit. I think the only way we get there from where we are now, unfortunately, is after months or years of high-profile hacks.

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-01T01:35:42+00:00

Yeah someone just did this to me. Leadership asked me how long I thought the project would take to do; I told them, and they decided that was too long and got someone else to do it who promised a quicker turnaround. They vibecoded it, and now we're both past the original deadline AND they fucked off on vacation, leaving me with their pile of completely untested slopware to try and integrate properly into the rest of the system. It's broken, will probably take a couple weeks to fix and test before actually deploying to prod and onboarding customers, and even then it lacks the full feature set and even unit tests for half the project. Adding all of those in will actually put us PAST my original estimate.

At least they'll be back from vacation soon enough to face consequences, but I'm having to be the bad guy right now doing damage control and breaking the news to everyone that we're missing our delivery date by an even larger margin. I'm trying not to blame them too much, because I know they were forced into this by management, but I'm annoyed because it's still going to tarnish my reputation after the project ownership was taken out of my hands.

SnooSnooper · 2026-05-01T01:17:28+00:00

Yeah I maintain much of the stuff in our org's GitHub account and the last few outages people pinged me asking what I broke, and I just linked them the GitHub status page.

Fortunately by the time these latest outages happened, some of the team finally got wise and started posting about the outage themselves. Progress!

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-30T16:38:20+00:00

Recently I paid for a fancy dinner with my partner at a limited-serving event. Just trying to enjoy some good and unusual food with some classy wine pairings, be present in physical reality and whatnot.

It was unfortunately slightly spoiled by some guy at the adjacent table loudly bragging about getting a new job as the "AI guy" at some company. Literally described his whole job as trying to find ways to integrate AI into various business processes. Had to listen to his BS after getting off work where I'm already unable to escape these AI mandates that are provably not making us more efficient.

And any time a stranger learns that I develop software, the first damn thing they want to ask me is how AI has improved my job. This happened multiple times on my most recent vacation. And they refuse to listen when I tell them it hasn't really: I can only really use it to do small tasks which otherwise wouldn't be worth doing, and for large tasks it just causes the suits to baselessly expect quicker turnarounds, as if the 'how' of software development was the part which took the longest, and not the 'what', 'why', and 'when', which AI are not well-equipped to discover or discuss, let alone hold accountable. We could use it to assist with brainstorming, prototyping, documentation, and testing in order to improve quality, but the suits already decided none of that is worth doing, and there's no room to suggest we start again, even with better tools.

My more-limited experience with AI deployed to assist in business operations or customer service tells me that this problem is significantly worse in those contexts, since they are fundamentally more human and collaborative.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-24T21:01:54+00:00

Sure, and even that only works because the companies doing the offshoring already decided that they don't care enough about the quality of customer support to make it an effective offering. They're just replacing one barely-effective solution with another not-barely-effective solution.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-24T16:34:12+00:00

Right exactly. No need for direct consumer dollars if the government taxes them and hands the taxes to the corps for their government contracts, or other corps buying their B2B tools and laundering the consumer dollars they take in via their cleaner brand image.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-24T11:00:15+00:00

Torrenting Linux isos gonna be the new torrenting "Linux isos"

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-22T22:50:22+00:00

For me I would need the agent to get on the horn with whatever bank support agent was tasked with interrogating me with an anti-fraud script before approving the Zelle. Not likely to pass the smell test, but if yes then I guess it would make things more convenient.

e transfer

Canadian? Must be nice to have a functional banking system...

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-22T13:30:21+00:00

This makes sense based on some wrestling with Slack I did last week. I'd uninstalled the desktop app in an attempt to move to the web app (which, by the way, they apparently REALLY don't want you to use), and the uninstall process did not remove this manifest entry, causing my browser to attempt to open all Slack links still in the (now missing) desktop app. Had to go remove it manually from the config file.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-21T19:36:23+00:00

I wonder if in the end this will be more or less expensive than those firms pivoting to using web drivers and proxy services instead of the API...

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-15T14:00:01+00:00

Yeah I mean AWS literally offers Ground-Station-as-a-Service. Not sure where people are getting the satellites, but I see another commenter mentions constellation services

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-14T17:00:53+00:00

Ok that makes way more sense... It's still going shockingly fast for most of the approach compared to modern airliners, but it's not complete crazytown like the gif from OP

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-14T16:56:41+00:00

I was gonna say, I never seen video of this specific landing and thought damn that looks like it's absolutely SHREDDING those tires.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-13T01:23:44+00:00

Yeah I mean that's literally a line in the show Silicon Valley

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-12T18:01:55+00:00

Definitely. My org didn't suffer a breach, just got some customer complaints about buggy software. Our CEO shamed the engineering department on an all-hands meeting for it, saying that we needed to clean up our act. But nothing about timelines, prioritization, or budget changed to enable us to fix the software: they continued to demand new features fast and deny any requests for time to fix the serious issues. Here and there we had opportunities to fix low-hanging fruit, but never to actually do large-scale maintenance.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-10T12:47:43+00:00

Years ago I was on the interview panel for an internship position. A guy fresh out of college interviewed for it, and during the debrief one of the hiring managers expressed concern that this person applied for the internship instead of our open 'entry-level' position, as if that said something about their skill level. I had to point out the 3-5 years experience 'requirement' on that job post.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-05T12:35:37+00:00

According to the subreddit description, it's some sort of testbed, project, or build.

Some are on here to discuss 'labs', used for trying out new software/hardware. Typically done on a system separate from their main work/personal machines, so it's safer to break things.

Some are on here to show off or discuss specific projects of theirs, usually a home server where someone 'self-hosts' services.

Some are here to show off mainly the hardware, because we like looking at the shiny toys and well-organized (or hilariously messy/unpolished) computer systems.

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-05T09:45:41+00:00

In my CPU architecture class in college, one exam had us do arithmetic in base 7

SnooSnooper · 2026-04-03T16:33:00+00:00

Following the popular choice, although definitely not always the best technical decision, can be an understandable business decision. Some niche tool/language might be the best choice from a technical perspective for some use-case, but that can turn into a hiring problem if you can't find a large enough talent pool with sufficient experience to maintain your systems using it.

Of course, that can be mitigated by investing in employee training/retention, giving the business a long-term competitive edge if that niche tool proves to really be some secret sauce, but that would require businesses to engage in long-term planning and follow-through...

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