my boss came in today asking for something I think is crazy.

He is an old guy trying to run a technology company without using any modern tools. it took 3 months to force him to use slack instead fo moving post-it notes around the office, he is scared of anything with the word cloud or network on it. now he is insisting that when I am finished with this piece of code to print it out, (all the files in the project) put it on a binder so he can store it properly?

should I be looking for a new job or am I overreacting?

I was quite sure it would say 0. What is the most likely answer? Symbolic calculation? Did it recognize some kind of pattern?

It's the Google calculator app btw.

For those who are genuinely good at coding now, was there a specific realization, habit, or shift in thinking that made things click for you? Not talking about grinding endlessly, but that moment where code started making sense and patterns became obvious. Was it how you practiced, how you learned fundamentals, how you debugged, or how you thought about problems? I’m curious what separated I’m struggling from I get this now

Mine was to first solve the problem then code it

By actually used I mean that algorithms that aren't used in practice, because there's better alternatives or because the problem they solve doesn't appear in practical applications, don't count.

If ‘1’ is a positive charge and ‘0’ is a neutral/no charge, why don’t we add ‘-1’ as negative charge and use trinary instead of binary?

The wall hits 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038. After this the time calculation will roll back over to either December 13, 1901 or January 1, 1970 depending on the implementation. Does anyone think 32-bit architecture computers will still be in service by 2038?

I'm finishing a computer engineering degree but took many computer science courses.

Right now I am staring at my final year project with my hands in my hair. All this time we've been learning for-loops, conditional branches, arrays, sorting, passing by reference, passing by value, stacks, heaps, treaps, linked lists, neural networks, genetic algorithms, big O, compression, encryption, decryption....

...C, C++, Java, Python, Assembler....

...and still I have no idea how you go about getting different programs written in different languages to work together as one project. How do you make a dll? How do you make an installer? How do you make the program work on different operating systems?

What's an API? What's a framework? What's a wrapper? What's a daemon? What's a socket? What's an interface when not referring to UI's? What do you mean "just" rebuild the kernel so that this ARM processor can even compile QT code? What is a "kernel"?

I google what these things mean and the definitions seem really abstract and generalized to me because I can't relate how I would use any of it in any code I know how to write.

Meanwhile some teenager is in the news for hacking some poor senator's email...and I don't even know how to open an email with anything other than my left mouse button. And that is exclusive to my email.

Yet it seems everywhere I look online, everybody just knows things like they read a book or took a class that I missed out on.

How is it that some people can play a video game, decide to change it, and without any modding tools they manage to add a gazillion new features to it?

How do you learn to make plugins for a web-browser?

Whenever I need to work on a new technology I have never used before, I have to look up tutorials on youtube that spell out the steps to me. This can't possibly be the correct way to do research, could it? How did that youtuber figure it out? What was their approach? Where do you first start looking?

tldr: Basically, is this massive gap of knowledge normal? Would a better degree have covered this? Or do people naturally figure out some approach for finding stuff out that doesn't involve googling tutorials?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the early generations of programmers—especially from the 1980s and 1990s—built so many foundational systems that we still depend on today. Operating systems, protocols, programming languages, databases—much of it originated or matured during that era.

What's crazy is that these developers had limited computing power, no Stack Overflow, no VSCode, no GitHub Copilot... and yet, they built Unix, TCP/IP, C, early Linux, compilers, text editors, early web browsers, and more. Even now, we study their work to understand how things actually function under the hood.

So my questions are:

What did they actually learn back then that made them capable of such deep work?

Was it just "computer science basics" or something more?

Did having fewer abstractions make them better engineers because they had to understand everything from the metal up?

Is today's developer culture too reliant on tools and frameworks, while they built things from scratch?

I'm genuinely curious—did the limitations of the time force them to think differently, or are we missing something in how we approach learning today?

Would love to hear from people who were around back then or who study that era. What was the mindset like? How did you learn OS design, networking, or programming when the internet wasn’t full of tutorials?

Let’s talk about it.

So I was just working on a writing assignment today and for shits and giggles I decided to pop it into some GPT content detectors to see what they said. I do use ChatGPT all the time, but didn't for this particular assignment.

I was somewhat surprised to see that 4 out of 5 detectors that I popped my paragraph into were extremely confident that it was written by a GPT model, including one (ZeroGPT) which was 100% confident. So I started popping in previous assignments which I had written, and was surprised to see that many of them were detected as AI generated content too.

The idea that these content detectors will soon be employed by teachers around the world who don't understand how they work to levy accusations of cheating against students frankly scares the shit out of me, and its very clear that the LLCs which are publishing these tools intend for them to be used this way. I'm not even convinced that the use of AI language models should even be considered cheating in many cases.

So that brings me to the second part of what scares me, which is the irresponsible way that these tools are marketed. The first time I was introduced to many of these tools they typically called themselves "AI content detectors", which seems pretty accurate. Lately I am noticing an increase in the use of aggressive wording on some sites, and a lot more labeling the use of generative NLP tools "AI plagiarism" (this wording is used by Writeful, ZeroGPT, GPTZero). But plagiarism is stealing another person's work and passing it off as your own. How can you steal from an inanimate tool who's whole purpose is to do exactly what you have done with it? Fortunately most sites still don't use this accusatory nomenclature.

But thats a bit of a pedantic question of when the tools are appropriate to use and I would rather let people form their own opinions and draw their own lines on what constitutes plagiarism. Whats much more concerning to me is the downright misleading claims of accuracy that some of these GPT content detectors are claiming.

ZeroGPT seems to be one of the worst offenders. They are clear about positioning their tool to be used in academic circles to evaluate student's work, and state clearly that they want universities to use their tool at large scale to detect what they call "AI Plagiarism". Their website claims "we developed ZeroGPT's algorithm with an accuracy rate of text detection higher than 98%". And yet their algorithm was 100% sure that my handwritten paragraph was generated by a language model as well as misidentifying several other things I've written over the years. They call themselves "The most advanced and reliable ChatGPT detector tool".

Guys, this scares the shit out of me. Way more than AI generated content does. These kinds of misleading and downright false claims are not acceptable. Students are going to get kicked out of school because of crap like this.

Often I'll see posts about videogames or softwares having thier source code leaked, but wouldnt the code already be on any computer that downloaded it? How does a game or program work without the source code?

My guess is that doing so would require knowing information that can't be directly inferred from the code, for example, the specific type that a variable will handle

Hey I was just wondering after graduating 2 years ago what it’s like now basically now that AI is probably relied on in every aspect with college students. In computer science, I can only imagine how bad it potentially could be. I used to stress out late at night when it came to doing coding projects and now it’s just easy mode. I wonder how bad the cheating is nowadays.

I’m a software engineer working across JavaScript, C++, and python. Over time, I’ve noticed that many foundational techniques are less emphasized today, but still valuable in real-world systems like:

• Manual memory management (C-style allocation/debugging)

• Preprocessor macros for conditional logic

• Bit manipulation and data packing

• Writing performance-critical code in pure C/C++

• Thinking in registers and cache

These aren’t things we rely on daily, but when performance matters or systems break, they’re often what saves the day. It feels like many devs jump straight into frameworks or ORMs without ever touching the metal underneath.

What are some lesser-used concepts or techniques that modern devs (especially juniors) should understand or revisit in 2025? I’d love to learn from others who’ve been through it.

Title

Edit: Wow! Thank you for all the suggestions!