There Is Hope For Us Yet

The glorious fall of programmer dignity, visualized in perfect clarity. Once upon a time, developers were digital demigods who wrote code without AI crutches, built entire games in Assembly (because apparently suffering builds character), crafted code that literally sent humans to the moon, and performed memory management wizardry by hand. Fast forward to today's pathetic reality: developers frantically Googling how to center a div (still an unsolved mystery of computer science), begging ChatGPT to fix basic syntax errors, getting permanently trapped in Vim like it's some kind of developer Hotel California, and introducing three new bugs while fixing one—a net negative contribution to humanity. The evolution from muscle-bound coding titans to helpless brain-worms perfectly captures how we've traded actual knowledge for dependency on tools. Progress!

Five of these panels show the typical innovation S-curve where technology evolves from primitive (MS-DOS, Internet Explorer) to peak performance (Windows 95, Chrome). Then there's music... where we apparently peaked at Napster and it's been downhill ever since. The real innovation was clearly the ability to download entire discographies without paying a cent. Progress isn't always what corporate overlords want you to believe it is.

The tech industry in a single image. Massive crowds fighting to post LinkedIn updates about how they're "leveraging agentic AI solutions" while VCs throw money at anyone who mentions the buzzword. Meanwhile, a handful of folks actually discuss job displacement risks, and even fewer build anything useful. And that lonely stick figure trying to generate actual value? That's the junior dev who just wanted to automate their unit tests but got pulled into an "AI transformation initiative." The hype-to-value ratio remains gloriously consistent across every tech wave I've survived since the dot-com bubble.

Oh. My. GOD! In this parallel universe, a robot is painting Totoro (the beloved Studio Ghibli character) instead of creating yet another AI-generated monstrosity! THE ABSOLUTE IRONY! While we're over here having existential crises about AI taking over our jobs, somewhere in the multiverse, AI is just chilling, making cute little anime portraits and living its best artsy life! Meanwhile, our GPT is busy writing passive-aggressive emails and generating 50 ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile! HONESTLY, I'D SWITCH UNIVERSES IN A HEARTBEAT! 💅

Einstein said insanity is repeating the same thing expecting different results. Meanwhile, machine learning algorithms are literally just tweaking parameters and rerunning the same model 500 times until the accuracy improves by 0.02%. And we call that "intelligence." The real insanity is the GPU bill at the end of the month.

Ever opened a PR from an AI and seen comments like // This is a for loop that iterates through the array ? Welcome to the world of AI-generated documentation—where stating the painfully obvious is considered helpful. It's like having that one intern who explains what a keyboard is every time you sit down to code. Next up: ChatGPT will helpfully inform you that your function returns a value and that variables store data. Revolutionary stuff.