this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
253 points (98.1% liked)

Mildly Infuriating

43089 readers
694 users here now

Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that. Please post actually infuriating posts to !actually_infuriating@lemmy.world

I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!

It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.


Rules:

1. Be Respectful


Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.

Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.

...


2. No Illegal Content


Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.

That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals

-No CSA content or Revenge Porn

-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)

...


3. No Spam


Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.

-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.

-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.

-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers

-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.

...


4. No Porn/ExplicitContent


-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.

-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.

...


5. No Enciting Harassment,Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts


-Do not Brigade other Communities

-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.

-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.

-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.

...


6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.


-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.

-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.

...


7. Content should match the theme of this community.


-Content should be Mildly infuriating. If your post better fits !Actually_Infuriating put it there.

-The Community !actuallyinfuriating has been born so that's where you should post the big stuff.

...


8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.


-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.

...

...


Also check out:

Partnered Communities:

1.Lemmy Review

2.Lemmy Be Wholesome

3.Lemmy Shitpost

4.No Stupid Questions

5.You Should Know

6.Credible Defense


Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.

All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
all 49 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] foggy@lemmy.world 172 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Linus from LTT asks Linus if he'd ever heard of software developers being terminated based on how many lines of code they'd written .

Linus Torvalds responds "Anyone who thinks that's a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company..."

It's clear Torvalds doesn't know who this is about when questioned.

Linus hints to him it's about Musk.

"Apparently I was spot on [about Elon Musk being such and individual who is too stupid to work at a tech company]."

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 76 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I'm not even a computer guy, but even I can see how just using the number of lines of code as a metric would be an extremely stupid method for determining effectiveness. Quality should ALWAYS rule over Quantity, but billionaires are obsessively into quantity, to an extremely unhealthy degree (it's a mental illness, OCD, hoarding, etc.), that's how they become billionaires.

[–] teft@piefed.social 44 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'm going to set my terminal width to 1 character. That way my "lines" of code count goes way up.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 35 points 1 day ago

That's the kind of thinking that a Sociopathic Oligarch could get behind, which is entirely the problem. Gaming and/or hacking the system is preferable to doing things properly. They want to be "disruptive," even when it's ill-advised.

[–] SolSerkonos@piefed.social 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Imagine trying to read that tho. Suddenly English is formatted vertically.

[–] Goretantath@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Isn't some of Japanese writing vertical? Might help me learn.

[–] SolSerkonos@piefed.social 6 points 1 day ago

Yeah, Japanese is written right to left, top to bottom. Traditionally, at least.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Imagine trying to read that

Kernel code is very often a series of short words, and very often formatted to take a lot of vertical space (i.e lines of code). It can be hard to read, especially when it's a short code that corresponds to a longer function or location; but with practice we can cope.

tho

See? You're expecting people to do it already. And kernel code conforms to the grammar a lot more than American 'english.

[–] SolSerkonos@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

I wasn't trying to suggest that it would be impossible- it's obviously not. Just that it would be a difficult adjustment.

An Ask Lemmy topic recently was "what are some video games that don't exist." I gave three answers, but held one back because it does technically exist.

SQIJ! for the ZX Spectrum was designed to be terrible by a programmer that, as I understand it, was contractually obligated to program a game, but had grown to hate the company. He wrote a game that turned the caps lock on so none of the movement keys worked, and if you edit the code with a memory poke to turn caps lock off, you'll find there's no game. It was written in BASIC, and the first line is the most passive aggressive thing I've ever read:

1 goto 2

[–] foggy@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Here's a very simple example.

What's 3^3?

Or,

Well it's 3x3x3

Which is 3+3+3, 3 times.

Which is 3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3, which is 27.

Which solution do we prefer?

3^3 = 27?

Or

3+3+3

+3+3+3

+3+3+3

=27?

Which one uses more lines?

[–] ohlaph@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

var three1 = 3

var three2 = three1

...

Repeat until 27.

[–] ChaosMonkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I prefer 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1.

[–] cley_faye@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

Code formatter will see this and be like:

const a = 1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1
  +1;

I smell a promotion in your near future!

[–] 01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] ChaosMonkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

You're right, 1*1 line.

[–] wabafee@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

Today you just ask AI to write you an essay 100 pages long to get that answer.

[–] TomMasz@lemmy.world 63 points 1 day ago (3 children)

LOC is a terrible metric. The worst programmer I ever had work for me had the highest LOC of anyone on the team, and his code was crap that barely worked.

[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 40 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Is this why so many of these fuckheads are keen on LLMs? They're great at vomiting out reams of code.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

With emojis in it for extra flair!

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

My biggest objection is unit tests. LLMs can actually be a useful tool for populating out unit tests. But of you let them run amuck, you get vast quantities of tests that add no value but now you have to maintain in perpetuity

This one junior developer didn’t notice the ai brought in a whole new mocking tool for a few tests and didn’t understand my objection.

[–] Flamekebab@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago

I had a dev add a load of unit tests that mocked values and then tested for the mocked values. I mean... They passed...

[–] CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 3 points 12 hours ago

LLMs can actually be a useful tool for populating out unit tests.

My experience with this is the LLM commenting out the existing logic and just returning true, or putting in a skeleton unit test with a comment that says "we'll populate the code for this unit test later".

[–] black0ut@pawb.social 2 points 11 hours ago

Relying on a chance machine to thoroughly test your code sounds like a recipe for disaster

[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

In my project there has been this guy who produced more lines of code than most other. All of his code is a terribly convoluted mess no one can work with. Also buggy and slow as hell. It’s been many years since he left the company, and the negative effects are still seen today.

Luckily we’ve been able to detach ourselves from the worst parts.

[–] aesthelete@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

It reminds me of the quote, "if I had more time I would have written you a shorter letter". Terse code is often better, because it is often developed using a process that only adds necessary things or was created by trial and error during the development process that isn't included in the final output.

Lengthy code is often written because a person coded their misunderstandings, their ambiguities about the problem space, and their early failures at solving the problem into the code.

[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

True. However, in this case I believe this guy just had a weird admiration for complexity.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Complexity or “complexity”? A couple months ago I had to accept a merge from a junior developer that is now flagged as the code with the highest complexity in my code base. It was in Groovy and he must have just discovered closures. Instead of breaking up the code in nice modular testable blocks, it was massive methods hundreds of lines long, and the most egregious use of closures

[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago

Not necessarily closures, but it involved many dynamically generated lists of lambdas passed around through many layers of abstraction.

A few posts up was a meme about Arch linux updates having a net negative file size :)

[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 37 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I’ve never had to code professionally, but even on my personal projects, I don’t want a single extra line in the program that doesn’t need to be there and I should be able to understand the purpose of every line years later.

My eyes glaze over whenever I look at corporate code because there are so many moving parts at that scale all from different qualities of programming.

I don’t know if this is a practical thought, but I really wish we could get away from every project being monstrously sized. I prefer small packaged ideas similar to terminal commands. Just because it has a GUI doesn’t mean you need to design every piece of software as if I’m going to spend a day in it. Just give me small, purpose-built tools I can understand and then stop eternally developing and adding features.

To add to this, it seems that every company now either makes one piece of software or 36 different softwares. If they make one piece of software, they endlessly pack it with features people don’t want and if they’re the latter, every piece of software is a hastily-cobbled-together half idea and they just move onto another piece of software. Is there really not a middle ground here?

[–] ohlaph@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

That's the result of product managers, project leads etc constantly thinking users need stuff, maybe trying to beat their competition, etc. I have watched a few products get bloated with the aim of beating their competition not providing user value.

[–] orclev@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

The really disgusting part is that actually works (if you're primarily selling to other corporations). Most of the most popular pieces of corporate software have the common trait that they do tons of stuff really poorly and nothing well. They get picked by the bean counters because the bean counters don't care that it's a fucking trash fire of a UI, they're just looking at the list of other software they can remove because this new software does the same job significantly worse. That or they're just mesmerized by the giant fucking bullet point list of "features".

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

softwares

This is still not a word, my dude.

[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Hopefully this isn’t falling on deaf ears, but language is intimately more beautiful when you bend the rules: https://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com -5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I kinda agree with your first point, but AI assistance is so incredibly powerful that it's foolish not to use it, unless you're working on some really important logic. And even then, having an AI skim for common mistakes, inaccuracies or inefficiencies is still very valuable.

And what you're describing is really "Unix philosophy" and I strongly agree with that. Make a piece of software that does its one thing really well, and have it communicate with a simple API (POSIX).

In Unix/Linux you generally just "pipe" one program's output into another program's input, and can chain them virtually infinitely.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

When I was stuck with that, my rebellion was to widely announce all my merges with negative line of code. Let them try to challenge that publicly.

Of course my current gig is new features generating positive lines of code but the new stupid metric is how much did the ai add. So far I’m losing that battle. Making me more efficient? No, so far ai is doubling the amount of time I’m stuck code reviewing junior developers

[–] _stranger_@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago

My favorite part of Junior devs is that if you tell them in a code review comment to never do that again, they usually won't.

My least favorite part of AI is that it is convincing the jr devs to ignore me, leading to a lot of pain for them when they get sent to the doghouse for writing production destroying garbage.

And my least favorite side effect of AI is that thanks to all the garbage ai-driven devs churning like a boiling sea, companies aren't building bases of competent jr devs that will eventually be senior devs anymore, because the good ones are getting lost in the noise.

[–] Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AI generated commenting? Idk I've never coded anything beyond modifying powershell scripts

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It could probably do a decent job generating those scripts, given adequate prompting and a few cycles of feedback from you. But it’s almost never a final result. It’s still on you to know what it’s doing and whether it meets requirements, whether it’s sufficiently performant and scalable, whether it’s resilient and flexible. Most importantly it’s up to you to ensure good quality that future you can read and maintain.

[–] NickeeCoco@piefed.social 25 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I look forward to X, Tesla, and SpaceX switching to Windows (and permanently fucking off)

[–] DandomRude@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

Yep, Grok is probably already working on it, or at least getting people excited about it...

[–] CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

What? Did I miss something?

[–] thomasloven@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day ago
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 15 hours ago

Want to make tons of lines of code from pretty normal code?

Just unroll your fixed size for loops (i.e. convert them into multiple copies of their contents, one after the other as many times as that loop would loop).

You can actually automate it and in fact some compilers will do that when generating assembly for some microprocessor architectures (if the loops aren't crazy big) because it increases performance in those (because the JMP instruction at the end of the loop is quite expensive).

[–] qevlarr@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Lines of code should be on the balance sheet as liabilities, not assets

[–] Randelung@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago

So, code golf?

[–] ksh@aussie.zone 3 points 7 hours ago

Almost as good as a sabotage. Lines of code metric is no different to someone talking a lot and doing little work, very likely counter productive and a big problem. Leave the good quality stuff to open source while big tech take it and do their best to “embrace, extend and extinguish”.