this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Greentext

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This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

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If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

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[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 8 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

The bullshit is that anon wouldn't be fsked at all.

If anon actually used ChatGPT to generate some code, memorize it, understand it well enough to explain it to a professor, and get a 90%, congratulations, that's called "studying".

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 1 points 30 minutes ago

Yeah, if you memorized the code and it's functionality well enough to explain it in a way that successfully bullshit someone who can sight-read it... You know how that code works. You might need a linter, but you know how that code works and can probably at least fumble your way through a shitty 0.5v of it

[–] Ascend910@lemmy.ml 1 points 24 minutes ago

virtual machine

[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 62 points 5 hours ago (7 children)

Yeah fake. No way you can get 90%+ using chatGPT without understanding code. LLMs barf out so much nonsense when it comes to code. You have to correct it frequently to make it spit out working code.

[–] threeduck@aussie.zone 4 points 2 hours ago (5 children)

Are you guys just generating insanely difficult code? I feel like 90% of all my code generation with o1 works first time? And if it doesn't, I just let GPT know and it fixes it right then and there?

[–] nimbledaemon@lemmy.world 1 points 55 minutes ago

I just generated an entire angular component (table with filters, data services, using in house software patterns and components, based off of existing work) using copilot for work yesterday. It didn't work at first, but I'm a good enough software engineer that I iterated on the issues, discarding bad edits and referencing specific examples from the extant codebase and got copilot to fix it. 3-4 days of work (if you were already familiar with the existing way of doing things) done in about 3-4 hours. But if you didn't know what was going on and how to fix it you'd end up with an unmaintainable non functional mess, full of bugs we have specific fixes in place to avoid but copilot doesn't care about because it doesn't have an idea of how software actually works, just what it should look like. So for anything novel or complex you have to feed it an example, then verify it didn't skip steps or forget to include something it didn't understand/predict, or make up a library/function call. So you have to know enough about the software you're making to point that stuff out, because just feeding whatever error pops out of your compiler may get you to working code, but it won't ensure quality code, maintainability, or intelligibility.

[–] JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world 1 points 27 minutes ago

My first attempt at coding with chatGPT was asking about saving information to a file with python. I wanted to know what libraries were available and the syntax to use them.

It gave me a three page write up about how to write a library myself, in python. Only it had an error on damn near every line, so I still had to go Google the actual libraries and their syntax and slosh through documentation

[–] surph_ninja@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

A lot of people assume their not knowing how to prompt is a failure of the AI. Or they tried it years ago, and assume it’s still as bad as it was.

[–] Earflap@reddthat.com 4 points 2 hours ago

Can not confirm. LLMs generate garbage for me, i never use it.

[–] UnsavoryMollusk@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Garbage for me too except for basic beginners questions

[–] dilroopgill@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

deepseek rnows solid, autoapprove works sometimes lol

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[–] janus2@lemmy.zip 26 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (5 children)

isn't it kinda dumb to have coding exams that aren't open book? if you don't understand the material, on a well-designed test you'll run out of time even with access to the entire internet

when in the hell would you ever be coding IRL without access to language documentation and the internet? isn't the point of a class to prepare you for actual coding you'll be doing in the future?

disclaimer did not major in CS. but did have a lot of open book tests—failed when I should have failed because I didn't study enough, and passed when I should have passed because the familiarity with the material is what allows you to find your references fast enough to complete the test

[–] bitchkat@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago

Most of my CS exams in more advanced classes were take home. Well before the internet though. They were some of the best finals I ever took.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemm.ee 2 points 2 hours ago

Yes It is laziness on the teacher's part

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 8 points 4 hours ago

Assignments involved actual coding but exams were generally pen and paper when I got my degree. If a question involved coding, they were just looking for a general understanding and didn't nitpick syntax. The "language" used was more of a c++-like pseudocode than any real specific language.

ChatGPT could probably do well on such exams because making up functions is fair game, as long as it doesn't trivialize the question and demonstrates an overall understanding.

[–] MeaanBeaan@lemmy.world 5 points 5 hours ago

I mean, I don't know how to code but I imagine it's the same as with other subjects. like not being able to use a calculator during some math tests. The point of the examination is for you to demonstrate you know and understand the concepts. It's not for you to be tested in the same way you would be in the real world.

[–] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

I know people that used to work in programming with zero internet connection... this was ~10 years ago... never underestimate the idiocy of companies. P.s. it wasnt even a high security job, the owners were just paranoid boomers.

With that said, with a decent IDE with autocomplete, you can get by a lot without documentation. Its ussually the niche stuff that you need to look up on how to do it.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

You'd have a wall full of documentation before internet was a common source of data.

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 18 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

pay for school

do anything to avoid actually learning

Why tho?

[–] Blueteamsecguy@infosec.pub 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Bronzebeard@lemm.ee 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Losing the job after a month of demonstrating you don't know what you claimed to is not a great return on that investment...

[–] L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It is, because you now have the title on your resume and can just lie about getting fired. You just need one company to not call a previous employer or do a half hearted background check. Someone will eventually fail and hire you by accident, so this strategy can be repeated ad infinitum.

[–] Bronzebeard@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Sorry, you're not making it past the interview stage in CS with that level of knowledge. Even on the off chance that name on the resume helps, you're still getting fired again. You're never building up enough to actually last long enough searching to get to the next grift.

[–] L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 minutes ago

I am sorry that you believe that all corporations have these magical systems in place to infallibly hire skilled candidates. Unfortunately, the idealism of academia does not always transfer to the reality of industry.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 43 points 8 hours ago (7 children)

This person is LARPing as a CS major on 4chan

It's not possible to write functional code without understanding it, even with ChatGPT's help.

[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] nthavoc@lemmy.today 9 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Giving me flashbacks to a college instructor that marked my entire functioning code block, written on paper, as wrong because I did not clearly make a ; on one line of about 100 lines. I argued that a compiler would mark that in the real world, but he countered with "It still won't run without that ; " That made me rethink my career path in CS. Fuck that guy.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 hours ago

That was/is one of my biggest complaints about CS courses: the horrendous, uncontrolled, inconsistent-across-course/instructor/TA mixture of concept and implementation skills expected of the students.

Ultimately you need to develop both to be successful in a CS/Software Dev/Programming career, but I've watched so fucking many people fail to progress in courses and learning because they're trying to learn both the concept and how it needs to be formatted in the class specific language's syntax at the same time. They hit a roadblock in one and the whole thing comes tumbling down because if your code doesn't work you can't just work around it to get the other parts done and then come back later. Being able to stub something out to do that requires skills that they're taking the class to learn in the first place!


Minor mistakes with syntax creates a situation where they can't get a working example of the concept to play around with. So then they don't have something hands on to use to cement their conceptual understanding.

Minor mistakes with the conceptual understanding lead to a complete inability to understand why the syntax works (if it even does) to create an example of the concept, leaving them high and dry when the class asks them to think outside the box and make something new or modified based off what came before.


I've worked as a Lab Assistant (TA who doesn't grade) for intro to programming courses. Due to transfer credit shaningans, combined with a "soon to retire" professor getting saddled with the bueracratic duties for their whole department, I ended up running lectures for an intermediate course I effectively had to take twice. I regularly led study sessions in college for my friends in programming classes. Even now, I'm the most experienced programmer on my team of sysadmins/engineers at work and regularly assist co-workers with scripts when I'm not coding custom automations and system integrations.

So I have experience teaching and using this shit.

In my opinion, courses should be split into two repeatedly alternating parts: concept and implementation/syntax. They are separate skill sets.

You need a certain set of skills to be able to communicate. You need a different set of skills to do so in a specific language.


Plus, classwork needs to better mimic real world situations. Even crazy motherfuckers using sed or nano to code should be using linters in this day and age, and no one should be working in an environment where they only have one chance to get it 100% right with no means of testing.

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