this article is incredibly long and rambly, but please enjoy as this asshole struggles to select random items from an array in presumably Javascript for what sounds like a basic crossword app:
At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.
Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway.
ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this), selecting a random item between 0 and the areay’s length minus 1, and maybe storing that index in a second array if you want to guarantee uniqueness. there’s definitely not literally thousands of libraries for this if you seriously can’t figure it out yourself, hackerman
I returned to the crossword project. Our puzzle generator printed its output in an ugly text format, with lines like
"s""c""a""r""*""k""u""n""i""s""*" "a""r""e""a". I wanted to turn output like that into a pretty Web page that allowed me to explore the words in the grid, showing scoring information at a glance. But I knew the task would be tricky: each letter had to be tagged with the words it belonged to, both the across and the down. This was a detailed problem, one that could easily consume the better part of an evening.
fuck it’s convenient that every example this chucklefuck gives of ChatGPT helping is for incredibly well-treaded toy and example code. wonder why that is? (check out the author’s other articles for a hint)
I thought that my brother was a hacker. Like many programmers, I dreamed of breaking into and controlling remote systems. The point wasn’t to cause mayhem—it was to find hidden places and learn hidden things. “My crime is that of curiosity,” goes “The Hacker’s Manifesto,” written in 1986 by Loyd Blankenship. My favorite scene from the 1995 movie “Hackers” is
most of this article is this type of fluffy cringe, almost like it’s written by a shitty advertiser trying and failing to pass themselves off as a relatable techy
It's worse than that, because there's been incredibly simple, efficient ways to k-sample a stream with all sorts of guarantees about its distribution with no buffering required for centuries. And it took me all of 1 minute to use a traditional search engine to find all kinds of articles detailing this.
If you can't bother learning a thing, it isn't surprising when you end up worshiping the magic of the thing.
reading back, I wonder if they were looking for a bash command or something that’d do it? which both isn’t programming, and makes their inability to find an answer in seconds much worse
So I haven't programmed in a long time but like isn't a simple approach for this sort of thing (if want low numbers like 100) just something like:
from distribution I like(0, len(file)) get 100 samples read line at sample forall samples
or if file big
sort samples, stream file, if line = current sample add line to array, remove sample from other array.
Like that is literally off the top of my head. I'm sure there are real approachs but if googling is too hard isn't shit like that obvious?
edit: wait you'd have to dedupe this. also the real approach is called: (unspellable French word for pit of holdy water etc) sampling