Then-vs-now Memes

Posts tagged with Then-vs-now

Programmers Then Vs Now
AI Programming Python
8 days ago 476.7K views 0 shares
Programmers Then Vs Now
Back in the day, programmers had to understand the intricate details of LSTMs (Long Short-Term Memory networks), BERT embeddings, and optimize for browser latency like absolute beasts. You needed a PhD-level understanding of neural network architectures just to classify some sentences. Now? Just slap import openai at the top of your Python file and you're suddenly an AI expert. The entire machine learning ecosystem has been abstracted into a single API call. We went from manually implementing backpropagation to literally just asking ChatGPT to write our code for us. The buffed doge represents those ML engineers who could recite transformer architecture in their sleep, while the crying doge is us modern devs who just copy-paste OpenAI API keys and call it innovation. The barrier to entry dropped from "understand advanced calculus and linear algebra" to "have a credit card."

Programming Tutorials Then And Now
Programming Gamedev
1 month ago 211.8K views 0 shares
Programming Tutorials Then And Now
The golden age of programming tutorials had people casually dropping "let's build a game engine from scratch" like it was a weekend project. Now? We're celebrating the monumental achievement of... configuring VS Code with the right color theme and extensions. The devolution is real. Back then, tutorials assumed you had a PhD in computer science and three lifetimes of free time. "Part 1 of 47: Implementing our custom memory allocator" was considered beginner-friendly. Today's tutorials are like "Step 1: Install Node. Step 2: Cry because of dependency conflicts. Step 3: There is no Step 3, you're still on Step 2." The shift reflects how the barrier to entry has lowered (good!) but also how we've become more focused on tooling than fundamentals (questionable!). Though to be fair, getting your IDE setup properly in 2024 with all the linters, formatters, and extensions IS basically rocket science.