Comment by darknoon

25 days ago

I think you'd find that it's far from "any human" who can do this without looking anything up. I have 15y of dev exp and couldn't do this from memory on the cli. Maybe in c, but less helpful to getting stuff done!

  # curl -s https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Sun.png | file -
  /dev/stdin: PNG image data, 256 x 256, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

That's it, two utilities almost everybody has installed.

  • ChatGPT has 800 million monthly users. The fraction of those who are comfortable opening a terminal and running those commands is pretty tiny.

    • If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?

      4 replies →

  • Yes but now do the same for every bit of programming tooling, sysadmin configuration / debugging problem and concept out there. With just a few seconds to answer each reply.

    • It's called learning, and it used to be the hacker mindset to continuously improve. But I guess that died with slop generators.