Reinforcement Learning

Remember when we thought we'd train AI to help us write code? Top panel: cute little AI cub learning from the wise software engineer master. Bottom panel: six months later, that same AI has evolved into a towering beast while we're still sitting there with our legacy code knowledge from 2019. The career progression timeline has been dramatically compressed. Took me 15 years to become a tech lead. Took AI about 15 minutes to make half my StackOverflow contributions irrelevant. But hey, at least I still know how to exit Vim. For now.

The generational divide in tech has never been more savage! Old-timer dev with his magnificent beard is schooling these youngsters about the ancient art of coding without AI assistance. “ChatGPT? When I was your age I had to write my own code” hits different in 2024 when half of us are just prompt engineers now. It's like bragging about churning your own butter or hunting woolly mammoths. The irony? That senior probably copy-pasted from StackOverflow anyway. The tech cycle continues—today's juniors will someday lecture about the primitive days of having to type prompts instead of just thinking them.

Someone's offering you a brain but you're like "nah, I'm good" because you've got AI to do the thinking for you. The irony here is chef's kiss—rejecting actual cognitive function in favor of letting ChatGPT write your code. We've reached peak efficiency: why learn algorithms when you can just prompt engineer your way through life? Your rubber duck debugging sessions have been replaced by asking GPT to fix your bugs while you pretend to understand the solution it spits out. The brain is literally being rejected at the door while AI gets the VIP pass.

Want to see a data scientist have an aneurysm? Just swap all their import aliases like some chaotic evil code terrorist. TensorFlow as plt? Pandas as tf? Numpy as pd? Matplotlib as np? This is basically the programming equivalent of putting the milk in before the cereal. The person who wrote this code definitely wakes up and chooses violence every morning. No wonder it's titled about a goldfish with WiFi—the memory retention matches the import choices perfectly.

When you accidentally push to production instead of staging... 😬 Someone's first day on the job just became their last! Nothing says "I'm fired" quite like leaking government AI plans on GitHub because you confused your repositories. Pro tip: Maybe don't store national secrets with the same tool you use for your personal "learning-to-code" projects. That resume is about to have an interesting gap year.

The eternal struggle of math majors who chose programming instead of the "traditional" math paths. On the left, we see the bright, colorful world of physics, machine learning, electrical engineering, statistics, and numerical analysis – all respectable career choices that utilize advanced mathematics. On the right, the noir film-style programmer, stripped of color and joy, questioning their life choices while debugging someone else's spaghetti code at 3 AM. That moment when you realize you could be solving differential equations but instead you're arguing with the compiler about why a semicolon is missing. The math degree prepared you to understand complex algorithms but forgot to mention you'd spend 90% of your time fixing indentation errors.