> go f**g cry about github you f**g piece of s*t n**r, I hope your throat gets cut open and every single family member of you is burnt to death

Are github users gamers? Really puts the "git" into "github" there.

No, but I assume a lot of AI bros are

ffs, can we just not make this a thing?

Too late, a demographic or people who could just barely scrape together a script making REST requests are now selling themselves as “AI specialists” or “prompt engineers” to the corporate class. These are this cycles cryptobros, who were mostly not engineers but people riding a hype wave.

The age of the AI bro is here, and as I’ve been in the space as someone genuinely interested in the models, working with them from time to time, for a while. I’m giving a lot of eye rolls in meetings when these people start talking about the underlying tech.

“Prompt engineers”… sigh.

Some complex shell prompts I've seen people use definitely must have required a fair bit of engineering!

Booming industries always attracts its fair share of snake oil peddlers I suppose. From "Webmasters" who could barely program a VCR during the dot-com era to "SEO specialists" to "Crypto bros" and now "AI bros".

Too late, the AI bros already did.

It's a thing lol

The other day I saw some gym bro in the IG comment section trying to flex on people with "do you even know what backpropagation is?"

Some more here:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

Friendly people.

I've received emails like that too over the years. What hugely controversial thing do I do? I have a website where I sometimes write about $stuff and I post on HN. Keeping the basic info private is probably a good thing especially if they're based in the US, because "SWATting" etc, but beyond that it doesn't seem "credible" in the sense that it's very likely someone will show up at their door with a gun.

Since the first two are redacted, I wonder if they sent them with their real names.

It can be explained by the normal curve. The bigger your audience is the weirder the outliers will be.

Pretty much, yeah. There's about 26.8 million developers in the world. Assuming 5 million read this story (not everyone speaks English) and 0.01% of people is a bit unhinged then you've got 50,000 unhinged people, and only about 0.006% of those 50,000 (or 0.00006% of total) need to be unhinged enough to actually shoot off an email.

Considering how large GitHub is (in the industry) it’s like asking is “are Facebook users gamers”?

That's what struck me about it too. Isn't it the case in a large enough population you can always find representation of something you dislike or hate? I've seen lists of "Republicans" (meaning anyone in, near, or related to a Republican politician) showing those people being caught or convicted of various moral, economic, and social "crimes". Ok. But if I sat down and looked using the same criteria, couldn't I just as easily create a long list for the Democrat party? Having made that statement on Reddit, the response I got was, "well, there are MORE republicans". That struck me as odd too. Are you trying to say of the two horrible things, one is worse, and so I have a moral imperative to chose the less horrible one? I'm fairly sure I get to abandon both in search of a better option. lol

> I've seen lists of "Republicans" (meaning anyone in, near, or related to a Republican politician) showing those people being caught or convicted of various moral, economic, and social "crimes". Ok.

I’m intrigued. I’d like to see the subset of the list that are people who were in Republican politicians.

An impressive number of 4chan's /g/ users are on github. Some even actively contribute to Linux (though usually to Arch, Gentoo, and now more and more Nix).

I wrote a paper during college that I should release some time about when /g/ threw an absolute shitfit over Linus going "so, I've been a kinda shit human being to people and I'm going to step back and get some help", going as far as to blame his daughter/"the woke mob"/multiple named core kernel contributors for killing their god.

At one point, I attended a GitHub event that wasn't directly sponsored by github but encouraged a lot of github users to show up. While there I met several people who, outside the venue, were talking animatedly about Terry Davis. Listening in on the conversation revealed that they more or less just approved of his extensive use of racist language and epithets.

I haven't checked, but I would suspect that Linus' recent "trans rights" by proxy post has caused at least one or two aneurisms in the /g/ user group.

/g/ is pretty mainstream among the zoomers they browse it publicly. Also 4chan is among one of the most popular websites on the internet so it doesn't come off as a surprise.

A large number of people you meet, from all walks of life, will admit that 4chan is a guilty pleasure. At least I’ve met a ton and none of them were right leaning to say the least.

That would be my general theory as well, you're far more likely to meet someone who is left leaning who admits to having posted on 4chan (or still does) than you are otherwise. Maybe it has to do with perceived biases, in that a right leaning person/group is probably then going to feel they are aligned with the seediest aspects of 4chan, whether they actually do or not and their perceived social impact/failings for using 4chan.

Yeah moderate to right wingers would probably not admit accept to people close to them due to that perception. But using the site you can tell there are a lot of very intellectual liberals and fiscal conservatives. The racist and sexist stuff is just their equivalent of the dumb Reddit memes that encompass 80% of its content.

I would love to read that paper if you do decide to publicise it! 4chan mob dynamics never fail to make interesting (albeit often nasty) stories.

> An impressive number of 4chan's /g/ users are on github. Some even actively contribute to Linux (though usually to Arch, Gentoo, and now more and more Nix).

An aside about this from a moderately longtime Nix user and very occasional contributor:

I used to occasionally post about Nix on /g/ before virtually anyone there knew what it was just to gauge reactions, and boy were people shitty and dismissive about it. It was all hot takes, broad strokes, and very little curiosity about the technical details. And even though Nix is 'cool' on /g/ now, all of those things are still true about the way /g/ treats NixOS and other distros.

The interest that 90% of /g/ users have in Linux distros like NixOS is as a bullshit status symbol, a token in some consumerist identity game. The presence of that shallow, status-obsessed, needlessly edgy type of person in the Nix community is definitely more visible in the Nix(OS) community now than it was a few years ago, but it still sticks out like a sore thumb against the backdrop of longtime Nix users and the culture they've evolved together.

For that reason, I strongly recommend engaging with the Nix community in community-owned channels, like discourse.nixos.org or the community Matrix channels, rather than message boards like 4chan or mainstream social media platforms like Reddit. If you do that, you'll find kinder, more knowledgeable people (and perhaps in some cases, kinder more knowledgeable personas for the same people).

If you're reading this and you've unfortunately encountered Nix 'evangelists' with those shitty attitudes online, please understand that those influences are external to the community, and as far as most participants in the community are concerned, quite unwelcome.