this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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Programmer Humor

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[–] LucidNightmare@anarchist.nexus 12 points 28 minutes ago

Reminds me on how they had a single person (I think?) doing Batman’s cape for the Arkham games. That was their position, the person who makes the cape seem like a real piece of cloth.

I still think about how good the cape looked when flowing or in movement. They did an amazing job either way!

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 85 points 3 hours ago (4 children)

I had a client who thought I was a miracle worker for changing the color of every link on the site in under an hour.

Then he got mad because it took me three days to add one field to a form.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 42 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Most people cannot begin to comprehend that just having the field on the form doesn’t magically make it do anything. Like, yeah, I can add a field to the form in five minutes, but if you want it to actually work, it’ll take time.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 hour ago

Dotcom days, my company charged a venue $30k for an "emergency change" to disable a form and all links to it.

The dev already had a system switch for it. $30k, 10-second change.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 47 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 29 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

And then you realize that the previous programmer abused the anchors to build all of the buttons.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 12 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

And 50% of the styles are marked as !important

[–] SleeplessCityLights@programming.dev 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Hey it's not my fault, this project was started in 2018 and they choose to use bootstrap.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 3 points 59 minutes ago (1 children)

Oh god I didn’t expect that to give me the level of PTSD flashback that it did.

Fuck bootstrap with a rusty pitchfork.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 3 points 55 minutes ago* (last edited 54 minutes ago) (1 children)

It’s not as bad as it used to be. Some things require you to use a few more selectors that you’d normally write, but that’s really only tables.

Most stuff is exposed via CSS variables nowadays.

[–] criss_cross@lemmy.world 1 points 1 minute ago

Good to know.

I have not touched it in several years so I just remember the 2013-2019 onslaught of bootstrap.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 31 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

To be fair to the client, I, as a programmer, often struggle to estimate tasks with accuracy, and am very often at a loss at even explaining to co-workers why some things are easy and others impossible.

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 26 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

I once just asked how long if would take them to swap the chair and the table, and how long it would take to swap the window and that pillar. After all, it's just moving stuff around. They understood after that.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 16 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Careful, that table is critical for getting airflow over that server in the corner. If you move the table it will overheat and cause a cascade of failures and bankrupt the entire company.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 hour ago

And that’s a load bearing chair.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 8 points 1 hour ago

I like that metaphor. I'm gonna use it next time I have to talk to a non-technical.

[–] Klear@quokk.au 68 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I've never felt more called out.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 13 points 2 hours ago

He was okay when I explained that the custom Magento plugin was written in Bulgarian and I had to translate it before attempting to understand the convoluted mess I’d been given.

[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago

Should take you an hour of just testing.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 51 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

I'm sad that the relevant xkcd is kinda obsolete now (because it's been long enough for that research team to finish doing its thing).

[–] GraniteM@lemmy.world 11 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Google photos is alarmingly good at object and individual recognition. It'll probably be used by the droid war killbots to distinguish "robot" from "human with bucket on head."

[–] whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 minutes ago

Not a hot dog

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

What would be a "nearly impossible" task in this post-AI world? Short of the provably impossible tasks like the busy beaver problem (and even then, you would be able to make an algorithm that covers a subset of the problem space), I really can't think of anything.

[–] hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 hour ago (3 children)

Deterministic answers from AI

[–] Vigge93@lemmy.world 1 points 17 minutes ago

Most AI are deterministic, it's only a small subset of AI that are non-deterministic, and in those cases it's often by design. Also, in many cases, the AI itself is deterministic, but we choose to use the output in a non-deterministic way, e.g. the AI gives a probability output, and will always give the same probabiliies for the same input, and instead of always choosing the one with highest probability, we choose based on the probability weight, leading to a non-deterministic output.

Tl;Dr. Non-determinism in AI is often not an inherit property of the model, but a choice in how we use the model.

[–] pebbles@sh.itjust.works 2 points 53 minutes ago

Wouldn't you just set the temperature to 0?

[–] gothic_lemons@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Do you have a link explaining what deterministic means in the context of AI? Preferably for noobs

[–] nogooduser@lemmy.world 6 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Deterministic means for the same input you always get the same output.

For AI it would be if you ask it a question multiple times using exactly the same words you would get the same answer.

[–] gothic_lemons@lemmy.world 1 points 7 minutes ago
[–] usualsuspect191@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 hour ago

Don't forget the magnificent scarf in Shinobi (PS2)

[–] Tahl_eN@lemmy.world 25 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

I appreciate the joke, but the rules are exactly why they go "oof". The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.

You could make them go "oof" on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.

Let me translate. Adding a completely new object with new rules is easy compared to modifying exist assets and it's new a clothing peice. Cosmetics are hard to implement, especially a fucking scarf which is on top of all the major animation areas. Do the animations still look good? Do I need to adjust the cutscenes to account for which scarf is being warn? How does this affect lighting?

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

The scarf has higher requirements for precision and a more constant overhead than a one-off giant summon.

I mean, there's a scarf.

And then there's a scarf

You could make them go “oof” on the summon if you added a requirement that the lava properly flow along the ground and interact with all characters near the event.

I think the better question is "How many polygons do you want and what do you want them to do?"

[–] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 14 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Real time simulation of fabrics is a ongoing field of study. It has years of research behind it.

[–] snooggums@piefed.world 7 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Generally simulated fabrics look good as long as it is flapping in the wind like a flag and has no chance of interacting with any other objects, such as the person wearing a scarf.

[–] sundray@lemmus.org 1 points 45 minutes ago

"You can choose to play as a mighty warrior, or a free-floating sentient scarf. One or the other."

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 4 points 1 hour ago

The last two-minute-papers video on the subject makes it look like a solved problem, until you notice the stats in the corner are measuring "minutes per frame"

[–] DivineDev@piefed.social 9 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

Exactly, the first request is so vague that you can just implement it in a way that doesn't require any complicated programming magic, but a scarf has the implicit expectation to swing around and not intersect with the player or itself. Or worse, expect the player to summon a demon wearing a scarf!

(Still a good joke though)

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 hour ago

Scarf on the demon is probably fine :) They can bake it into the new movement frames. Player has all kinds of focus and real time physics :)

[–] ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 18 points 2 hours ago

Or you could go the JRPG way and make the scarf clip through everything including on cut scenes where the devs had 100% of control over the position of everything.

[–] RampantParanoia2365@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

No shit. One is moving an existing model upwards. The other is changing an existing model, adding new cloth physics animation to it, and fixing any animation that involves the scarf. One is a one-time thing, the other is the entire game.

[–] judgyweevil@feddit.it 1 points 2 hours ago

Now try a classy giant demon with a scarf