feels like this should be normalized in someway
>unsourced information about an inflammatory topic shared in a humor community
I trust this graph with every fiber of my being (/s)
Unpopular opinion: I don’t mind the use of AI by devs if it makes their work easier. As long as the devs are pros who understand whats going on and uses it to optimize their workflow, fine go ahead.
Where I don’t whant AI is, first, in anything creative. I want art to be abother humans sharing their emotions and perception of the world, ever if it’s sometimes poorly done, boring, or plainly bad. I have zero interest in art created by a machine, no matter how perfectly executed it is. The promise of AI was to make our life easier by optimising the boring and repetitive stuff so we can make fun and interesting things, not the other way around.
What do you think is not art or creative? I’m a software engineer. Its highly artistic in api design, considering consumers and how data flows, managing responsibility etc.
I have no doubt it is highly creative.
That’s why I trust that good devs will keep making the important choices and only use AI for optimization and technical parts of the work. My position is nuance, I still want pro devs behind every projects, I just think most of them are smart enough to decide when and why the use of AI is appropriate.
keep living a pipe dream. Thats not at all how it’s used in the real world in software.
In this case it is doing the work instead of them. We are increasingly going to have code running critical systems that no person has even bothered to look at.
I hate to tell you this, but the code running most critical systems out there is already completely fucked.
Most people assume that just because software developer has been a degree for the last few decades that everything has been rewritten by professionals, but there are a crazy number of systems still running 3-5 decades from when they were first created. A vast majority of this shit was written before “programmer” was a profession or a degree. So, everything was written by some person who had a job doing something that had nothing to do with computers, but either dicked with computers as a hobby, or was forced into it because no one else wanted to do it.
People point at Y2K as the point when everything had to be rewritten and replaced, but most Y2k solutions just involved patching the software and nothing else. All that shit is still out there and running.
And let’s be frank, every profession has people that are just aren’t capable but seem to stay in it no matter what. For every bad waiter you have ever dealt with, there is a developer who is just as shit at their job.
And that is on top of companies who just don’t give a fuck and who knowingly put shit software out because it is more profitable to cheat people than provide what they promised.So, don’t worry about AI causing some great collapse. We were already well on our way there without AI.
True, but we have to know AI is making it wayy worse. The same people who were barely getting by, are now using AI to write softwares that’ll be used for years to come. And other people that don’t have developer experience and aren’t good themselves don’t have any idea and really trust those developers because “they make things happen” like “magic”. Previously they’d take a lot more time to make something work, it’d be shitty, but it’d be obvious for any developers that come after them. Now detection is hard, and the volume has increased.
That’s why I mentioned that I want real devs looking at the code.
Remember my words: The em dash will be skynets fall!
1000 day intervals… Nice. MM/DD/YY… Not nice.
Why even bother with days at this scale?
8601 4 LYF
Programmers don’t have gang signs we just recite rfc.
4 EVA
The em dash thing annoys me because I actually used em dashes a lot in my own writing. Now I’ve had to change how I write to keep people from assuming I’m using generative tools for writing.
In the plus side, our mayor loves my writing style because he thinks staff should be using AI for everything.
I don’t advise changing the way you write. It’s a skill you need to flex, and unless you’re using em dashes incorrectly then you should be able to find ways of differentiating yourself from AI without fundamentally changing how you communicate.
Idk, just food for thought. Fuck anyone that tries to say I use AI to write — they can eat a bag of dicks.
I never even heard of an em dash until I started reading about AI. I was just using hyphens everywhere I was apparently supposed to be using em dashes. I am a stickler for grammar and correct punctuation (except for punctuation inside quotes which my internal programmer won’t allow me to do the American way) so I’ve started using em dashes – and now people think I’m an AI.
That’s no —, it’s two hyphens playing pretend!
Some Markdown renderers interpret two dashes as an en dash and three as an em dash, so on some Lemmy clients, that might show up as a real en dash.
inb4 AI resurrects the tab v. spaces debates but between how many dashes equals an em dash.
Wait, what’s the rule for punctuation inside quotes? I don’t think I’ve ever noticed a regional difference.
In the US, the punctuation is supposed to be inside of the quotes, even if that punctuation wasn’t actually part of what’s being quoted. So if somebody says “your mother sews socks that smell,” the quoted partial bit would be typed as “your mother sews socks.” In Britain it would be “your mother sews socks”. The difference might not be really obvious visually; it’s whether that period (which is required to end the sentence) is before the end quote or after it. Apparently programmers in the US (like I used to be) have gravitated towards the British style because with string variables (which are generally delimited by quotes) you can’t be farting around with adding phantom punctuation inside the quotes, even if it is grammatically correct here.
I’m I’m not mistaken, the reasoning for this goes back to the printing press era. The comma or period would be on the same type block as the quotation mark; dealing with individual blocks for , or " was too fragile or fiddly. So they had blocks for ," and ." that were used regardless of sentence structure
Oh. That’s pretty neat. My favourite bit of typesetting lore :- this combination is known as the dog’s bollocks in some circles.
I used to like the punch of “It’s not just ___, it’s ___” but I’ve pretty much removed that from my vocabulary.
I’m trying to stop using “for bonus points, ____”. I don’t have any bonus points left to give out.
Same, except “fucks sake”.
I’m entirely out of fucks.
Oh god yeah this and bullet points
I’m going to start using “for bullet points, ____” and see if anybody notices.
Same, I would use that construction pretty frequently. Or “it’s X not Y”.
But now, it’s not just trite, it is triggering.
They’re useful—especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons; I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
I use them when connecting a thought in between another thought—for example, what I just did right now—and then returning back to the original thought. I use a semicolon when connecting two related thoughts together*; LLMs tend to only use one em-dash, so I’m hoping that by using two of them instead—and a semicolon instead whenever an LLM would use an em-dash—there will be no confusion as to whether or not I’m human.
You’re absolutely right! I have never seen an LLM use em-dashes in the way you do — if they use them, it’s always to add a pause to the sentence.
I use them with a space on each side – which is apparently wrong. Sigh.
I like to alternate between sets of em dashes and sets of parentheses to obscure the fact that I’m using too many “asides” in my writing.
I do that too on top of everything else I said. It’s an ADHD thing. I write how I think, with lots of tangents.
They’re useful. Especially to avoid over-using other punctuation such as semicolons. I also use them to avoid back-to-back sentences with exclamation marks!
There you go. It’s easier, clearer, and less pretentious.
Okay, but you’ve just created a sentence fragment, which is fine unless you were trying to use complete sentences.
Fragments are wrong in elementary school grammar, yes. In the real world, they’re used by Charles Dickens and other sophisticated writers intentionally.
Did I not say “which is fine”?
Fuck, dashes, embrace, Hegel.
I’ve just been using en dashes this entire time, was once accused of being a bot because I used them, and as a result I found out that I was using dashes improperly — and should instead use em dashes.
I think putting spaces before and after the em dash is incorrect, but I’m not sure. I do it because I think it just looks better visually.
I also think it’s incorrect—I don’t do it.
Why do you care about the opinions of people who can’t even fathom that someone might use Alt-hyphen to get an en dash (or shift-Alt-hyphen for an em dash)
And that’s on Mac. Obviously on Linux there are even more options. (Compose key and so on)
I care when people think I’m lazy and outsource my writing.
I am lazy, but my terrible writing is my own, dammit.
Can we have this divided by the total number of commits?
Total number of commits has climbed too though
The problem with being more right is that it’s often less funny.
So, when long arguments became a thing?
As someone that uses AI at work because 1. this is a run-out-the-clock situation, and 2. I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible, it feels weird and hypocritical to expect no AI in all of the software around me as well.
With that said, if I still had any semblance of passion for writing code, which I do not, anything I worked on for the OSS community would be fully devoid of AI usage. But I’m mentally at a point where I’d rather move to a cabin and use computers less and less with each passing day.
There’s also a huge difference between someone like Linus Torvalds, who understands code better than most people on earth, using AI supervised to increase productivity, and Timmy off the street having chatGPT build something he has no clue how it works or what code even does.
Vibe coding isn’t just using AI. It’s using AI to do things you don’t understand in the first place.
there’s a lot of wilful ignorance around that last point
100%. There’s a difference between asking AI to do things that you yourself don’t understand, and using it as a quicker route to something you already know as an engineer. The difference is that the engineer knows when to halt the agent or push back to do something properly. I don’t make AI dabble in languages I don’t already know myself.
There’s also a huge difference between someone like Linus Torvalds, who understands code better than most people on earth, using AI supervised to increase productivity, and Timmy off the street having chatGPT build something he has no clue how it works or what code even does.
disagree. there’s no difference between the car mechanic or the politician pouring oil into the river. They’re both horrendous. sure, one of them might have a reason for doing so, but that reason isn’t a good reason.
Both things are going on at the same time, as Torvalds and Timmy are both paying Sam Altman to pour oil into the river as a byproduct of the service he’s providing. For something as important as the Linux kernel, it wasting fewer CPU cycles as a result of LLM-aided optimisation work might even be net beneficial for the environment once you take into account that it’ll affect billions of computers for years to come. If the end product is shitty, though, there’s no question that it wasn’t worth the environmental damage.
It would have to use trillions of fewer cpu cycles to do that. Currently scientists estimate it at 8 cups of water consumed for every 100 word prompt. What developer do you know that consumes 8 cups of water a day much less every thirty seconds. A developer can sit there and think with their own mind, computer doing nothing, while an LLM consumes thousands of gallons of water and kilowatts of electricity to do the same thing.
It only needs to save a few hundreds of seconds on one computer, or one second on a few hundreds of computers, or a tiny fraction of a second on the number of computers that actually run Linux to save trillions of cycles. A trillion cycles isn’t very many at all. A hundred-word prompt on a frontier model running on GPUs in a datacentre burns much more power than a trillion cycles on a CPU, so for a large Linux kernel patch, trillions is the wrong number by many orders of magnitude. There are also a lot of computers spending a lot of time running Linux, so it kind of balances out. There’s only one Linus Torvalds, and he’s very busy, so it’s likely that if he’d not used an LLM to get this work done, it simply wouldn’t have happened, even if someone had been willing to fund a different human to do it.
Either way, the original point of the post was that LLM-generated code is always shitty (even when it’s not immediately obvious to whoever’s responsible for it that it’s shitty) and so having any amount of it already makes things worse, even ignoring the huge environmental cost. With that context, it is the case that there’s a huge difference between Timmy and Torvalds as Torvalds is famous for having very high standards, so if he’s using it, he might be able to make something that isn’t shitty.
I didn’t realize you were talking about performance in the kernel, which I think will be incredibly hard to measure. That that’s usually the main focus of enterprise investment into Linux, so I very much doubt that an LLM is coming in and making improvements there, but maybe it’s happening. As far as I can tell all the latest things are security scans, which usually will result in worse performance since the goal isn’t speed but safety.
This comment chain is specifically referencing a single LLM-assisted patch that Linus Torvalds posted to the mailing list for review a few days ago that solves a longstanding performance problem that interacts with enough things parts of the kernel that there are only a handful of people in the world qualified to deal with it, and that none of them have had the time to investigate and fix properly until just now. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-posts-his-first-llm-assisted-patch-to-the-linux-kernel-after-issuing-clear-pro-ai-directives-the-bossman-makes-use-of-ai-tooling-himself
I felt a lot like that too. I still do, but this helped me a lot:
Bookmarking this one for later. Thanks! It’s hard not to feel like my entire field has been cheapened. We spent so long perfecting our craft, only for it to to be completely devalued with speed as the main focus.
The bright side is that AI will never be as good as me when it comes to CSS. I’m still the go-to CSS person at work, despite folks having AI tools at their disposal.
only for it to to be completely devalued with speed as the main focus.
Welcome to the rest of the world. All middle managers and C suite dickheads know is “hurry up and get it done,” they’ve entirely lost the concept of “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”
The middle manager above my direct supervisor regularly clocks in late every day (and that’s after a 3h time difference no less, and it doesn’t seem he understands timezones either), and then with about 1.5h left in my day suddenly “hey stop what you’re doing and get this 3h of work done by the end of the day, but also no you can’t work OT.” Like “hey dickhead, it’s physically impossible to do that,” but of course instead of telling him, my direct supervisor just pulls that guy’s penis out of his mouth for long enough to say “yes sir” and tell me to break the laws of physics.
I’ve managed to land at a wildly uncommon yet positive company where engineers get to steer a lot of the timelines. We don’t always get what we want, but I feel like we have a better spot at the table than I have at previous jobs where it felt like MBAs and product people set the deadlines in stone before conversations with engineering even started. The only way I’ll leave this job is if they fire me.
The process has been backward before LLM.
When we try to get a new customer, they already have a price point for their PCB and a release date that cannot be moved.
Without knowing what the requests they have will entail.
Thank you for linking that talk. I wasn’t expecting something that deep and also funny. I concur with your recommendation wholeheartedly.
No, coding should be done to garner clout, so eventually when I start my shitcoin, I can rugpull more people! /j
It’s valid to feel that way working in software, but try to hold space also for the fact that computing is ‘the means of production’ in the information age, and how it is made and who controls it is inherently political.
I don’t give a fuck and would like to be at my desk as little as possible
I always had this stance and found it weird when people resisted. Your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss is telling you to work half as much? Whether you think that the output is half as good quality or not why the fuck aren’t you JUMPING at the chance to do that.
It’s coming after your job. Why would I want to feed my output into the machine breathing down the back of all our necks? I like what I do. A carpenter isn’t going to be happy working in a factory where chairs are made by robot arms. I’m not gonna be happy working in a slop factory
Standing in the Mississippi won’t dam it
Your comment was that people should be jumping at the opportunity to use it. I’m telling you why people aren’t. Efficicecy is a different thing. Maybe it might be ore apparent to you if you were to say the same thing about outsourcing to oversees rather than outsourcing to AI.
If enough people do it will.
Every person on earth could jump in the mississippi and it would flow anyways.
it most definitely would not. you ever switched the direction of a lazy river? doesn’t take that many people. Your ignorance is showing.
You comparing the mississippi to a lazy river is showing your ignorance lmao
Whether you think that the output is half as good quality or not why the fuck aren’t you JUMPING at the chance to do that.
Two reasons actually.
-
Most people want to be productive in some way. Even if you don’t like your job very much, its a much bigger mental burden to sit around and do nothing than it is to actually work.
-
You employer isn’t going to pay you the same rate for half as much work done. It is that way now cause they have no idea what the actual productivity will end up being, but once the numbers are stable they will save as much money as possible. You will either be lucky and will work just as much as before with more but worse output, or you will be fired.
-
I can’t use AI in my job, because I manufacture.
But the HR lady can use it to make policies that are fucking stupid and my direct boss can use it to create an app to more effectively micromanage us without having to actually do the micromanaging himself so he has free time to blow his boss and cook breakfast for 30min on the clock every day.
So yeah I’m not a fan.
maybe people have now see the em dash in use enough that they’re observing it’s greatness in real usage!!!
/s
-f pour one out for the em-dash, it’s reputation has been tarnished
I wondered the same, really.
I used to underuse it, but now, using it anywhere is enough to draw ire, so I’ve essentially gone to zero. :)
You can get a lot done when you’ve got 29 months in a year
Yeah sorry about that, was the default format in my spreadsheet software and I didn’t think to change it
?
The weird US American Date scheme is not used in most of the world.
I wish. Am European. I know one person that voluntarily uses their date and time formats. For reasons I will never comprehend.
He or she must enjoy the endless confusion and friction in the interaction with others. That said, some idiotic IT systems use the US format to. Causes a lot of problems.
I’m in the US and have had problems with C-level douches misreading dd-mm-yyyy dates in some system we had that logged in that format and freaking out (and also missing that the log time stamps were in UTC-0, causing further confusion/freakout)
Anyway, this is part of why I always use yyyy-mm-dd, because nobody will confuse that date string for any other date, and everyone who can understand dates at all will be able to read it.
D/M/Y > M/D/Y
There is only YYYYMMDD
sadly for everyone that’s factually incorrect, but the phrase DD/MM/YYYY > MM/DD/YYYY does not preclude YYYYMMDD > DD/MM/YYYY > MM/DD/YYYY
your pedantery is apreciated.
Because one lives the other should not long live Y-M-D
NO. You need a character per digit and you always want the leading 0 shown.
YYYY-MM-DD
At least it makes my folders really easy to sort through…
Only if you leave the leading zeros!
…or your file manager is smart enough to do numeric sorting
ISO 8601 is the only correct way.
It’s close, sure, but actually no. That standard currently requires the letter T (and no white-space) between date and time when both are present, and, frankly, that’s ugly and a space should be allowed.
An old version of the standard allowed the space, and GNU’s coreutils seem to have carried on the tradition, so I’m not alone in thinking this.
OP’s graph uses slashes.
Dashes would remove all the confusion.
No because it’s the global format that typically uses periods.
D.M.Y (normal)
Y-M-D (superior)
M/D/Y (mental illness)Mixing up the formats and denominators makes this mess even worse.
you should also always specify YYYY-MM-DD because often M and D ignores leading zeros, YY means the 2 digit suffix, and Y… well, i don’t even know what that is but i’m sure it’s something less specific than YYYY
if we’re going to be picky about being clear about things, let’s be truly clear about things
YYYYY would be something like “The Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand and Twenty-Six” (or probably just “Twenty Twenty-Six”, but the other is more ridiculous so I’ll go with that)
Y would just be “6” but I can’t think of any context where that would ever be used
Yep, I do it in every format. Just kept it short for readability.
The dates below the graph
deleted by creator
Pretty much only in the US.
Some BS AI “visionaries” keep blurting.
What is the accelerating rise of m-dashes from approximately 2014-2019 about? That trend apparently continued until very recently, even slowed down a bit, before exploding at some point in 2025 or 2026 for obvious reasons.
Does anyone have a theory?
People slowly learned to use their keyboards for proper typography?
That was a good one.
If the graph is not just using made up data, then it also measures absolute em-dashes, not em-dash density, so possibly could be an increase in interest in contributing to the kernel?
By a factor of roughly 10-fold? Maybe. It could indeed be a measure of overal absolute contribution. But post 2025 that could be influenced by m-dash density especially.
No, the comment I responded to was about the ~2014 uptick, not the recent one.
The recent one is obviously AI one way or another. Absolute contribution rate is higher due to AI as well.
Yeah sure, no I am not surprised about post 2025. My question was indeed about the post 2014 uptick.
I assume it’s due to phone keyboards.
I don’t think a lot of kernel devs are programming on their phone
That’s why the number was low before.
The OP graph is just absolute count on the y axis, so I also assumed it was basically measuring LoC, but looking at this chart, the em-dashes do appear to be definitely more of a modern phenomenon compared to raw LoC:
Maybe some policy/tooling change around 2014? A guess is perhaps something to do with allowing UTF-8 in source files, but that’s a pretty long shot.
Looking at that, the lines of code cannot really be the full story. M-dash count really just appears to rise from 2014 onwards.
I wonder how many em dashes are real vs interpreted.
I love an em-dash, but I have never typed one on purpose; they are all just two minus in a row and I use them wrong – with a space around (*inspect source to see that lemmy translates for me). I abuse them like I abuse semicolons. They are a typographical tick that indicates a pause or pivot when I translate my thoughts to text.
I can imagine a human manuscript editor turning punctuation like a comma into an em-dash when it makes sense, but I can’t imagine a developer ever specifically typing out one – with the need to either know or look up the unicode for it. The only relevant place would be a comment, but even then IDE’s are not generally known for their tendency to replace typed characters with something else.
Maybe some tool in the pretty-print/code-formatter ecosystem added that as a feature? But
var--is so common that I can’t imagine that’d be a good idea, even in a comment.For pedantry’s sake:
Two dashes –
--– in Markdown is usually rendered as an en-dash – more common in British-adjacent styles and usually surrounded by spaces.Three dashes—
—in Markdown is rendered as an em-dash—more commonly associated with American styles and usually (though not always) without spaces.Hah. Neat!
For pedantry…
My understanding was that en-dash was a range, and em-dash was a change in topic or a parenthetical, so I’ve been using the wrong one but for the right reason. This may be an American style distinction, though. Time to jump into a new rabbit hole.
They probably write code in Microsoft Word
I used to write websites in Notepad. It was kind of like digital Amishness.
At least notepad won’t fuck with your formatting for you
Absolutely insane ide choice. Wonder if visual studio tries to add those too.
It, thankfully, does not
I really love the emdash. I’m very—very—upset ai ruined it for me—cunts.
Cold dead god-damned hands
Rebel. Start using triple em dashes⸻see?
(╯°□°）╯︵┻⸻━⸻┻
Fu———ck yeah.
This reads like Haiku
Haiku’s are easy
But sometimes they don’t make sense
RefrigeratorIt could be a haiku. They don’t need to be 5-75 syllables. It’s more about an observation or a moment of clarity/realisation. The first two lines set up a concept or image, and the third line closes out the thought, usually with contrast. Just have to structure it properly.
I really love the emdash,
I’m very—very—upset ai ruined it for me.
Cunts.
I once tried to write a haiku,
Whose syllables were out of skew.
The words started flowing;
I just kept on going,
A Limerick will just have to do.5-75
You have been reading much longer haikus than I have 😜
That’s how you know that comment isn’t ai. No dash.
timetoproveourhumanitybyrejectingallpunctuation
c/unexpected_agglutinative_language
Oh, that reminds me: is Haiku still a slop-free OS?
Yeah, they’re based
Slop and driver free
Turns out AI learned from humans, who learn from the writings they’re exposed to
It’s an endless cycle, and we’re only in the first revolution
And one solution would be to just turn off all grammar and spell check and let people’s fat fingers and inability to spell let them stand out as the human. Oh boy.
LLMs are really good at language, it’s their whole thing. If you tell them to make spelling errors, they’ll do it just as easily as they can copy the tone and cadence of MLK or Trump speeches
Also, please no, I’m so bad at spelling
Ya except the internet called everyone grammar nazis for caring.
I did that over a year ago. It was always misinterpreting what I was trying to say and fucking it up, so this is honestly way better.
On the plus side, drunk people would have a MUCH harder time starting arguments…
So, I’m guessing you don’t meet too many drunk people…
Quite the opposite, but I know they can’t type for shit. If they can’t type a coherent message, it’s easy to ignore.
Ypu think I cant spell drunk amd anget huh bitcj!?
Emdashes on this chart are the Jaws theme of vibeshittification.
—
—
—
———
————
——
——
———— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— —— ——
Personally the only part I have seen is documentation is now vibe coded, where in the past, it was autism coded.
As long as it’s short, sweet and to the point and not prose.
“This function doesn’t return an
int*, it returns achar *.”deleted by creator
