Just give me the answer, ChatGPT

Last week, I tinkered with developing a Shopify App. Shopify’s developer guides are… eh – a mixed bag. What I wanted to do just wouldn’t work. So, when I can’t find an answer in their guides and it’s also not easily googled, I turn to ChatGPT. I don’t often use ChatGPT for this kind of stuff – I still mostly use Google because it’s faster – but I’ve found that searching for Shopify’s subscription guides often leads to forum posts with no clear answers.

The issue with ChatGPT is that it can be so annoying. It’s like talking to that one coworker who never responds directly to your questions, trying to hide that they secretly have no idea what they’re doing. Just give me an answer, Chatty!

Scenario: a magical fairy—the “magical” is important, so you don’t confuse it with a boring non-magical fairy—appears and grants me one wish. What would I wish for?

That JavaScript switches to snake_case over night. We wake up and all the camelCase is gone, replaced by beautiful snake_case.

This isn’t a matter of personal taste. camelCase is simply more difficult to read. It requires more visual effort. There’s even a study on that.

We’re used to reading words that are visually separated, and the underscore provides that visual separation. You probably had no issues reading this sentence, even though it was mostly lowercase letters. But writingLikeThis madeItLikely aBitMoreDifficult toRead, didn’t it?

JavaScript is not a visually appealing language. Perhaps Java and Smalltalk were not the best influences. And with all the new question marks added to its syntax, it looks like a very insecure “mocking spongebob” meme.

And I won’t buy the argument that camelCase is more efficient because you don’t have to type the underscore all the time! It’s as if developers spend their whole day just typing, non-stop, without autocomplete, constantly having to find those keys to press! Aaaaah help, where’s my underscore key gone now, I can’t find it!!!

Nah. snake_case would have been the better choice.

A man can dream though… a man can dream.

Favorite Media 2024

An incomplete list of my favorite videos, shows, movies and music of 2024, in no particular order.

Werner by Herzog

wait a second i know the synthesizer why don’t i use the synthesizer

There are a few things I always wanted to do with AI. This is one of them.

Saw a cat, took some photos. Cat looked like it was having one of those days.

I’m using em dashes—but I’m not an AI

Please don’t make the em dash—the long hyphen I’m using here—an indicator of AI-written text. I recently saw a post on LinkedIn (it pains me to admit it) where someone wrote a script to hide all comments containing an em dash because they’re highly likely to be AI-generated. I think there’s truth to it. But I also hate the fact that I think there’s truth to it.

What’s that LaCroix flavor?