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Reddit sucks for many reasons and I refuse to use it, but as a software engineer, this hardly looks nefarious. That looks like a pretty typical event gateway in networked applications, which is used for all kinds of things to make a platform run. We have one in our application, and it's not used for any kind of privacy-invasive tracking. We use it for things like bulk data processing for things like userbase-level analytics (like, how many users are using this feature?), or for billing purposes for our customers (since we bill based on usage).

And calls to /api/* routes are absolutely completely normal for any SPA (single page app), and are required for them to function. There's certainly a technical argument to be made against SPAs in favor of more traditional server-side rendering (augmented by tools like https://htmx.org/ for dynamic content), which could be used to avoid these kinds of API calls (and, in fact, it's a model I'm very much in favor of), but that kind of architecture is far from the norm these days. The SPA model is the current (IMO bad, from a technical perspective) standard.

We have many reasons to shit on reddit and their behavior, but this honestly isn't one of them.

Liar.

We didn't circumcise our son. It's a barbaric practice and you shouldn't do it. There's absolutely no good reason to mutilate a child's genitals, and it's abhorrent that it's so commonly practiced.

Yeah, sounds like a badass bluesman.

None of what you described requires a video. Articles can be written for different audiences, and, in fact, are much more capable of mixed-media content. Text can be selected/copied/consumed by screen readers etc, graphics can be embedded with accessibility information (unlike videos, which can easily contain inaccessible content), images can contain controls that allow one to pan, zoom, etc. and can be separately downloaded, other file types can be embedded with their own controls (including animations, as needed). Relevant related content (like, say, documentation) can be linked inline where it's referenced, rather than dropping a huge bag of links in a video description. Articles can be indexed, searched, translated, and more. Articles also allow each person to consume the content at their own pace, rather than whatever pace is determined by the person in the video. I personally find videos agonizingly slow compared to how fast I can read.

Videos are an ineffective mechanism for communication of information, particularly for information that is more complex or technical in nature. They are popular due to the ever-shrinking attention span of people, but that doesn't mean we should optimize for that.

Cute. I'm a senior software engineer that has trained many different models (NLP, image classification, computer vision, LIDAR analysis) before this stupid fucking LLM craze. I know precisely how they work (or rather, I know how much people don't know how they work, because of the black box approach to training). From the outset, I knew people believed it was much more capable than it actually is, because it was incredibly obvious as someone who's actually built the damn things before (albeit with much less data/power).

Every developer that loves LLMs I see is pretty fucking clueless about them and think of them as some magical device that has actual intelligence (just like everybody does, I guess, but I expect better of developers). It has no semantic understanding whatsoever. It's stochastic generation of sequences of tokens to loosely resemble natural language. It's old technology recently revitalized because large corporations plundered humanity in order to brute force their way into models with astronomically-high numbers of parameters, so they now are now "pretty good" at resembling natural language, compared to before. But that's all it fucking is. Imitation. No understanding, no knowledge, no insight. So calling it "inspiration" is a fucking joke, and treating it as anything other than a destructive amusement (due to the mass ecological and sociological catastrophe it is) is sheer stupidity.

I'm pissed off about it for many reasons, but especially because my peers at work are consistently wasting my fucking time with LLM slop and it's fucking exhausting to deal with. I have to guard against way more garbage now to make sure our codebase doesn't turn into utter shit. The other day, an engineer submitted an MR for me to review that contained dozens of completely useless/redundant LLM-generated tests that would have increased our CI time a shitload and bloated our codebase for no fucking reason. And all of it is for trivial, dumb shit that's not hard to figure out or do at all. I'm so fucking sick of all of it. No one cares about their craft anymore. No one cares about being a good fucking engineer and reading the goddamn documentation and just figuring shit out on their own, with their own fucking brain.

By the way, no actual evidence exists of this supposed productivity boost people claim, whereas we have a number of studies demonstrating the problems with LLMs, like MIT's study on its effects on human cognition, or this study from the ACM showing how LLMs are a force multiplier for misinformation and deception. In fact, not only do we not have any real evidence that it boosts productivity, we have evidence of the opposite: this recent METR study found that AI usage increased completion time by 19% for experienced engineers working on large, mature, open-source codebases.

Ah yes, "just use it correctly". All these programmers convinced that they are one of the chosen few that "get it" and can somehow magically make it not a damaging, colossal waste of time.

"Inspiration", yeah, in the same way we can draw "inspiration" from a monkey throwing shit at a wall.

Similar story at my workplace, masturbatory AI bullshit coming from the top.

Unfortunately, my boss is in favor of it. Sucks because he's a great engineer (turned manager) in his own right who by all accounts had a really good head on his shoulders when it came to stupid, unnecessary bullshit and I really respect him, but for some reason that I cannot begin to fathom he thinks LLMs are actually useful for software development.

I can't really figure out what led him to such an obviously wrong conclusion. I guess it's really true that no one is immune to the bullshit psychological feedback loop induced by LLMs.

Also, you know, he's the son of the most powerful force wielder in the universe. Tends to help with piloting a bit.

All hype, no substance.

Yeah most developers haven't the slightest clue what it means. Most people use it to mean a shitty version of a RPC API with a bad query language.

If you're going to do that, you may as well use something that's actually meant for that, like the numerous RPC protocols available. Or hell, even GraphQL (which is basically what you're saying).

REST can take different forms, but all of them necessarily require you to be talking hypermedia-enabled APIs. If your resources (read: not endpoints, which are not a concept in REST) do not contain links to other resources, you aren't doing REST and you should stop pretending that you are.

I mean, there's no real reason laptops shouldn't like any desktop computer with parts that can be swapped out. Maybe when laptops were first coming on the market with a difficult form factor to work with, but it's been long enough that modularity should be easy and the default.

If you can swap out tiny little SIM cards in a phone, you should be able to slot in standardized, smaller form-factor components like RAM, SSDs, etc.

And by the way, people can and do swap out motherboards all the time for desktops. There is no good reason to need to buy all new components all the time.