Last week I created a Tinder account, and woke up the next day to 15ish likes give or take a few bots. Not bad a for an old guy I would reckon, so I started judiciously swiping until I matched with a few that I thought were 1. real, and 2. pretty cute. Tried to send a message and got rebuked by Tinder for bot like behavior? And I have to send a selfie to verify my identity? Like a fool I complied, since my face is already all over my profile that shouldn't matter much. No, not good enough, I need a picture of my ID. To this I said "fuck off" and deleted my account.
A few days later I bought Doom Eternal on Steam. When I try to open up the game, the main menu is locked by a Bethesda.net modal compelling me to link my account with seemingly no way to close it that I could easily see, hitting Escape just closed the game. I said "fine" and tried to link my Bethesda account I created for my old Steam Account many years ago that I dumped in a fit of minimization and got rebuked because "this account is already linked". Why it wouldn't just relink automatically is a mystery to me, but figured I could just unlink it on Bethesda's website. No dog, that is not possible to do. A support ticket needs to be submitted to get that done. I immediately said "fuck it" and asked for a refund, and thankfully Steam said "sure".
I tried subscribing to a software developer digest letter recently since that is my vocation and I'm notoriously obstinate about 'furthering my education' and EVERY FUCKING LINK was about AI, with a few of them about how to fucking vibe code.
I don't recall software being this shit as a function of existing...ever, really. But my exploratory phase of games and apps sorta fizzled out after the Doom fuck-up since two was enough for me to retreat back to my low-tech partition of life. But for sure all modern tech can't be like this now, right? I just need to hunt for tech that isn't vibe coded jeetware, right? I'm trying to do my part to not jeetcode my small thimble of the digital ocean but there's strange resistance to that from the upper managers of my company too. Surely an alternative culture has sprung up that isn't shrouded with Discord mod tranny pus, but I suppose one of those needs a secret handshake of which I am not aware.
Mainstream tech is. They are trying to push it to everything. I'm not going on Tinder, but most crypto sites have that same ID checking. Weren't they adding it to Discord? I've not understood the appeal of that shit since it came out. It's always sucked.
I haven't bought Doom Eternal because I played it a bit before and hated it, but I haven't considered a handful of other games including the newer Doom because they won't release it clean. Put the single player stuff on GOG for me so there's none of that and I'll buy it. Otherwise I'm raising sails. I'll buy some Steam only stuff, but not AAA titles linked to all that online only BS.
If you're in software development I don't see how you can't have seen AI stuff already though. I don't see any path other than AI destroying that industry. It's way better than Indians at making web slop. It does an okay job at a decent amount of other algorithms. No one has understood or cared about being resource-efficient for 20 years now, so while I suspect AI isn't the best at that, neither is anyone else. Programming died when it became all about linking existing frameworks and APIs. Unless you're in specific fields, no one cares about how it's actually having the CPU manipulate the bits in memory anymore.
The "Know Your Customer" was forced on the crypto world at gunpoint. The other industries don't have that excuse.
My previous project was pretty close to the metal and C++ based while my current project is a basic web app calling a microservice, but the microservice lives on a container that is allocated half a gig of memory for some fucking reason so every method we write has to fragment our transactions so we don't OOM. It's surprisingly performance heavy, and the extent to which we use AI is to dive deep into the gears of Java and SQL Server documentation to optimize as much as possible there.
Beyond that? All of the new developers we get that are under 30 can barely write a for loop. I had to have one dev scrap an MR entirely because he copy and pasted another method that was sort of related to the work he was doing in name only and changed some variable names. So I get what you mean by saying that AI alone might be good enough given the current crop of devs, especially as more and more of the old guard leave either due to retirement or just getting sick of all of the shit
I find this funny, just because 95% of my skillset comes from playing around as a kid, most of that being TurboPascal because I had gotten my hands on a copy of it, or I used to play around with assembly for the NES and Game Boy when emulators starting coming around. That's what I actually really enjoy doing with code. Extremely metal. Moving things around in memory. Hearing a 500MB memory limit as a problem just makes me chuckle. Not saying it isn't legit if you're working with giant data sets. It's just funny.
I'm really glad I sprinted away from that as a job 20 years ago. I spent a few years half as a field tech and the other half developing a handful of custom web apps for businesses in compiled-C or PHP with SQL. Almost no one remembers CGI in C, that goes way back. I left by luck and following other opportunities, but it's worked out better.
Always was curious what the new guys can do anymore. I didn't care for the tiny amount of programming I took in college. It was required. I wasn't in computer science or anything. It was more about commenting than producing code that worked.
I've been beating AI up to do some web apps for my own use, but I haven't gone thru and really tried to optimize them. Business stuff. I just know they work a lot better in a day of questioning Claude than anything I used to get out of one of those agile scrum nonsense groups. I was a customer of that world when I was a corporate guy, and it was just me being drug into meetings for three hours to explain a simple bug I can reproduce 100% of the time that is probably a five minute fix. AI is also exceptional at one off data processing. I'll have it make a python script to parse some spreadsheets and spit out what I want. Something that would have taken me a day manually I can have functioning in 30mins. Since that use case is often a one-off optimization doesn't matter I toss it in the trash after.
In hindsight the C++ project has been my all-time favorite. My first task involved manually deserializing a binary stream of data in order to write a simulated version of a piece of software with which the only interface into it was a 20-page user manual written in broken English. Took me a month and I had to open the stream in a hex editor to try to detect parity bits. It's crazy what the human mind can do when it stares at something long enough, as long as some form of a pattern is present. I'm no maven either, but I don't think any of the junior devs with whom I work even know what a binary stream is.
It's the new SaaS model: Software as a Shit.
Jeets spread it everywhere they go.
AAA slop has been like that for a long time. If you want to game look into indie stuff or older titles. As for dating apps their business model is selling betas "premium" subscriptions to increase their visibility to women who will swipe left regardless while providing a rent-a-thot service to Chad. If you're not the guy who's getting a new thot to bang every night they're a waste of time.
Sweetie, every single "like" was fake. They glaze new accounts with fake attention to try and hook you.
Sadly, this is becoming the norm.
It's gotten so bad, I'm starting to wonder if I still want to find a job in tech. It's been hopeless for more than a year, for me, and every new I read kills my motivation.
Yes.
Soon you'll start seeing ads on fiverr for "account creators" who use their ID to create accounts and then send you the credentials.
Edit. Now you can use cheap masks to fool selfies for ID. I bought a cheap 12 dollar fabric one off ebay and it worked after a few tries. I recommend using darker skin tones as they've had issues with facial recognition of blacks in the past so I was betting that they would have loosened the criteria for darker skin tones.
Lol
I'm not sure what happened there, but Tinder premium is required. The free version of Tinder is worthless.
I hate hate hate account linking. Not as much as other people since I love playing Doom Eternal, but I probably have over a hundred accounts now, and most of them are for trivial nonsense like calorie counting apps. When I complained to an app dev about this, he actually didn't understand my problem, maybe because getting your a/s/l info is the best way for these people to make money? What a trash industry.
They all want account linking for even more data, yes. Even ignoring government spying, getting data from a bunch of apps (each with a bunch of different permissions to access certain things) essentially makes a perfect representation of you, your interests, your social circle, location, all sorts of stuff to better generate ads for you (which you won’t end up buying lol).
The off shoring of software development has shittified everything. It cost Boeing billions because they farmed off the software for their new 737 to an Indian company, and 2 planes crashed with total loss of life as a direct result of it.
What I want to know is why white software devs are not tribing up, founding their own start ups, and coming in behind the shit pajeet coding to dominate the market. You cannot tell me that good code that works is more expensive than shit code that constantly breaks on the long term.
It's the inevitable consequences of technological progress without restraint. If there's nothing to stop people developing dystopian surveillance/AI technologies then someone will do that and since the governments and business oligarchs can benefit from that sort of thing they will use it to its full extent and prevent laws that may limit their use of it. To fix the problem you either need to prevent development of these technologies or have governments that genuinely try to protect the rights of their people, such as the right to privacy.