Not a hot take at all. Probably the best take in this thread.

You think VSCode’s ui is more complicated than eg Microsoft Excel? Or am I misunderstanding?

This comment on the article sums it up for me, at least in part:

“Nobody knows how the whole system works, but at least everybody should know the part of the system they are contributing to.

Being an engineer I am used to be expert of the very layer of the stack I work on, knowing something of the adjacent layers, mostly ignoring how the rest work.

Now that LLMs write my very code, what is the part that I’m supposed to master? I think the table is still shifting and everybody is failing to grasp where it will stabilize. Analogies with past shifts aren’t helping either.‘

> no, I'm not looking for a hoax, or a deliberate comment on the situation. I'm looking for something that drives home the point that a lot of academic papers that look legit are actually meaningless but, as far as we can tell, are sincere

The Sokal paper was a hoax so it doesn’t meet the criteria.

The fact that it got published means there is at least one whole journal full of that

Exactly this. At work, I’ve seen front-end people generating probably 80% of their code because when you set aside framework churn, a lot of it is boilerplatey and borderline trivial (sorry). Meanwhile, the programmers working on the EV battery controller that uses proprietary everything and where a bug could cause an actual explosion are using LLMs as advanced linters and that’s it.

At the beginning of my career, sometime around 1999 or 2000, I was at Microsoft with our team because we were trying to integrate our product with this absolute piece of junk called Microsoft Biztalk.

It simply didn’t work. I complained about it and was eventually hauled into a room with some MS PMs who told me in no uncertain terms that indeed, Biztalk didn’t work and it was essentially garbage that no one, including us, should ever use. Just pretend you’re doing something and when the week is up, go home. Tell everyone you’ve integrated with Biztalk. It won’t matter.

Light-duty pickups still exist, eg the Nissan Frontier with the 6’ bed is probably the most reliable, sturdy and cost-effective pickup out there. Europeans may know this truck as the Navarro.

Yes, the lack of context or history has annoyed me in the past too.

Also, Liam Neeson just catching strays over here

I think the OP is referring to the company Palantir.

Ah fair enough. I just couldn't see it. Thanks for explaining.

Conan the Barbarian: co-written by Oliver Stone, directed by John Milius, music composed by Basil Poledouris. Oh, and co-starring James Earl Jones and Max von Sydow. An astounding lineup.