My College Professors Be Like...

The hierarchy of pain in CS specializations is too real. Cybersecurity and game design folks living the Buzz Lightyear dream - shiny, exciting, and mass-produced. Operating systems specialists get the Woody treatment - still relevant but definitely sweating. Then there's the compiler students... burning in literal hell, questioning every life choice that led them to parsing syntax trees and debugging segmentation faults for eternity. The compiler specialization isn't just hard mode - it's masochism with extra steps. And yet, those compiler wizards are the ones who make everything else possible. Suffering builds character, they say... mostly to justify the trauma.

The chart hilariously reveals that GPT-5 scores a whopping 74.9% accuracy on software engineering benchmarks, but the pink bars tell the real story – 52.8% of that is achieved "without thinking" while only a tiny sliver comes from actual "thinking." Meanwhile, OpenAI's o3 and GPT-4o trail behind with 69.1% and 30.8% respectively, with apparently zero thinking involved. It's basically saying these AI models are just regurgitating patterns rather than performing actual reasoning. The perfect metaphor for when your code works but you have absolutely no idea why.

Congratulations, humanity. We've spent decades perfecting calculators—devices with the singular purpose of doing math correctly—only to replace them with AI that guesses answers like a hungover liberal arts major. Language models see "2+2" and think "hmm, these symbols often appear near '4' in text, so that's probably right" instead of, you know, adding . It's like building a toaster that occasionally decides your bread would be better as soup. The irony is exquisite—we've created systems smart enough to write poetry but too "creative" to remember that math has actual rules.

Non-programmers imagine us locked in epic battles over algorithm efficiency like Godzilla vs Kong, debating the merits of our custom sorting implementations. Meanwhile, our actual bloodsport? Two people in ridiculous costumes having a street fight over whether a variable should be named dateUpdated or updatedDate . The truth hurts. I've seen teams spend 45 minutes in code review debating variable names while the actual bug goes unnoticed. Such is the glamorous life in tech.

You spent THREE DAYS refactoring that beautiful function to perfection. You were SO proud. Then that ONE ridiculous edge case comes along like a wrecking ball and DESTROYS EVERYTHING! Now your elegant 10-line masterpiece has morphed into a 200-line MONSTROSITY with seventeen nested if-statements and a comment that just says "I'm sorry." The function works, but at what cost? AT WHAT COST?! Your dignity lies in shambles, and somewhere, somehow, that edge case is laughing at you.

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.