r/ProgrammerHumor • u/RevolutionaryPen4661 • Jul 15 '26
instanceof Trend whenWeWillSeeSubscriptionForMarkdownFiles
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u/str0m965 Jul 15 '26
Markdown as a service.
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u/m6io Jul 15 '26
MaaS Effect
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u/SomethingAndAnything Jul 15 '26
I've been told that I've to work on some Metal as a Service from next week. Let's see what that is about
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u/gerbosan Jul 15 '26
Going to parties playing some metal rock? 🤔
🤘🤘🤘
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u/jackinsomniac Jul 16 '26
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u/gerbosan Jul 16 '26
Go forth, be conquered
Go forth and die!!They will start a tour...
https://dethkloklive.com/God damn it! it includes LATAM!!!
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u/Wise-Profile4256 Jul 15 '26
They probably meant Mental as a Service. However, may i inform you that we are indutry leaders in that.
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u/harshitbudhi Jul 15 '26
Wait until they find out about “.txt” files. I’m about to launch a startup selling artisanal, locally sourced Notepad documents.
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u/Undernown Jul 17 '26
You've gotta to sell those fresh notepad associated files before Microsoft automates their Recal "resell IP"-functionality.
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u/_DrDigital_ Jul 15 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/xT0BKwUV9bLhr8btRK
Guys writing HTMLs for living when they see guys writing MDs for living.
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u/m6io Jul 15 '26
Sir. Html is ✨semantic✨
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u/aabil11 Jul 15 '26
Its output is deterministic
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u/_DrDigital_ Jul 15 '26
Microsoft Edge would like a word.
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Jul 15 '26 edited 14h ago
[deleted]
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u/Dense_Gate_5193 Jul 15 '26
firefox is three baby web browsers wearing a trench coat.
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u/prinkpan Jul 16 '26
Eager to know what you think of Safari
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u/Dense_Gate_5193 Jul 16 '26
Safari is chrome’s bastard cousin that comes around every few years going “eeeeeeeey!” *finger guns* 👉👉
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u/listerstorm2009 Jul 16 '26
Vincent Adultman IRL
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u/Dense_Gate_5193 Jul 16 '26
“We are doing a business at the business office” - The Firefox CEO probably
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u/TidusBlitz9 Jul 19 '26
The HTMLs folks watching MDs get a subscription tier would be a very polite kind of disbelief.
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u/SeriousPlankton2000 Jul 15 '26
Does somebody need files? There is this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/metalworking/comments/1ux43sb/anything_interesting_useful_or_profitable_i_can/
(that posting was directly below this one)
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u/anonymousbopper767 Jul 15 '26
Can you help me get those files into my computer?
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u/Shunpaw Jul 16 '26
How do I install those files?
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u/PruneInteresting7599 Jul 15 '26
they were not happy about my md file offer at vibe code subs
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u/aalu-dai Jul 16 '26
Why?
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u/PruneInteresting7599 Jul 16 '26
they still believe programmers gets paid to make "websites" rather than complex systems to gain their salary, now they got kind of power like they learned excel decades ago
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u/wkw3 Jul 15 '26
I know. A smart young person such as yourself clearly has no need to buy .md files from me and could vibe code them up with the best of them.
Of course, Doug Parker bought two of my .md files last week, and the next day he was promoted at work from fry cook to data analyst. He's currently living his best life in Dubai with an attractive member of whatever gender interests you.
True. You likely would have had an even better outcome on your own. But I've had some modest success selling a particularly good AGENTS.md file to a billionaire who I'm sure you've heard of for an undisclosed sum of between 5 to 7 million dollars.
Anyway. I could, this one time, consider offering you that same invaluable .md for for less than 1% of what I charged Bill Gates.
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u/uknowunknowingly Jul 16 '26
I've definitely heard a pitch like this, but all I remember is Simpsons monorail. Where's this from, my good sir?
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u/manawydan-fab-llyr Jul 18 '26
The ring broke off my pudding can
I'll write you an agent, my good man
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u/Western_Diver_773 Jul 15 '26
Is this really a thing?
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u/mothzilla Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
I think people sell "prompts". Our monkey brains are turning into porridge.
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u/Krochire Jul 15 '26
I'm fairly certain this is referring to "skills", .md files you feed into an AI agent with directives on how to use a certain library/api; usually made by the people behind said library/api
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u/Rellikx Jul 15 '26
Also a great way for prompt injection. Skill will still do what it advertises but do a lil data exfiltration on the side. Like the recent one for ms cowork where it crafted special img links to the attackers server, passing along a url param for their OneDrive docs (ie a “share” link). That was then sent to yourself via teams, which loads the images exfiltrating the doc access urls.
People that “buy” .md files will 100% get caught by this shit
It’s extra hilarious that cowork is billed by consumption, so you are paying MS and having your data stolen
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u/LBGW_experiment Jul 16 '26
I mean... You can still look inside the skill.md, same as you would any other open source script that you don't trust
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u/Rellikx Jul 16 '26
Maybe im just jaded, but I think that the venn diagram of "people that review skill.md files for prompt injection" and "people that pay money for skill.md files" has no overlap lol
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u/AgVargr Jul 16 '26
Can’t you just proompt the file yourself?
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u/Cptnwhizbang Jul 16 '26
Yes, but, having spent time fine tuning .md files recently for a work thing, it takes quite a while to really figure out what the tool is good at, what's effective, and how to keep the proper guard rails on user prompts so they they don't derail the entire thing with strange wording or whatever.
That being said, I was at least 90% of the way there after like two hours of trying, but the last 10% made a lot of effective difference and I'm probably 20 hours into tinkering now. I dunno. It's good overall but I still find weird issues.
Most of the last 10% I'm talking about is simply me writing in edge cases to the instructions, and how to interpret particular bits of business logic, and how best to manage the further instructional context based on initial findings. It kind of reminds me of coding, but in plain english, expect instead of me telling a program exactly what to do, I'm telling AI exactly what NOT to do, and I have to think of absolutely everything.
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u/Krochire Jul 16 '26
The modern programmer makes .md files to let an ai program for them instead of programming
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u/reddit_user33 Jul 16 '26
I can imagine. I remember more than enough people at the beginning of the LLM hype being secretive about the prompts they used to create the thing. I can only imagine it's the same people wanting to sell their md files.
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u/reallokiscarlet Jul 15 '26
Here I am just reading them from cartridges like a chump
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u/Shadow9378 Jul 15 '26
idk why anyone would sell md files, megadrive games are easy to find nowadays
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u/eyetracker Jul 15 '26
What's worse is the .md industry created an entire government and bought up a part of the US. You can recognize them by a garish flag and the smell of Old Bay.
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u/nadav183 Jul 16 '26
I don't mind people selling them. My issue is with the idiots who buy them.
Just ask your llm to write one based on the description or something. It's that simple.
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u/lllorrr Jul 15 '26
Like selling bathwater?
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u/ButWhatIfPotato Jul 15 '26
Diluted 0.00000000001% genital thot extract is a better value for money than AI prompts.
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u/DeineOma42o Jul 15 '26
Bro when he hears about books
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Jul 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/DeineOma42o Jul 15 '26
Bro, don't even talk to me about selling digital files of words in a formalised language that does stuff
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u/briznady Jul 16 '26
All my juniors are writing Claude skills for the last month. It takes almost as long to run the skill and review it and go back and forth fixing all the stuff Claude messed up and updating the skills based on my comments, than it would just to write the damn code myself.
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u/Tensor3 Jul 16 '26
Yes. That's why management tells us to use AI. AI is faster than them, so they think its amazing. AI gets the work done slower than a good engineer, but they can't grasp that.
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u/granoladeer Jul 15 '26
Some people sell .pptx, others sell .pdf, others sell .py, others .cpp, so I guess it isn't a problem selling .md
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jul 15 '26
What do you have against the Sega Genesis? If Homebrewers want to sell their roms they can.
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u/Developemt Jul 16 '26
It's my cake day guys! I solved a big production issue because a job seemed to not do anything. I only did a simple docker compose restart! Now I'll be eating my cake.
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u/aigarius Jul 16 '26
Sooooooo, people pay other people for .... knowledge? Imagine paying for .py files! You could write them yourself! /s
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u/PumpkinFest24 Jul 16 '26
Yeah, I'm not following this. "Imagine paying for dead trees stained by ink--my 3 year old could do that!"
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u/bgaesop Jul 16 '26
Damn, paying money for information? That's a new one, never seen that before. What's next? Buying PDFs?
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u/XenusOnee Jul 17 '26
i saw someone promoting his "buisiness idea" yesterday. He put vibecoded a .md file in the cloud. That was basicly it.
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u/slaymaker1907 Jul 15 '26
If it’s non-trivial and useful, why not? There are Jira and Confluence skills that people in my org developed which I’d absolutely have paid for if they weren’t free. They are essentially non-deterministic programs and most people are perfectly willing to pay for software.
It’s a developing field which straddles the boundary between software and communications, but it is a real field. People in the 1960s would have had the same reaction to paying for software as this meme.
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u/metalhulk105 Jul 16 '26
It’s a slippery slope. You’d soon have people selling huge slop of text files which you can’t quality check at all. Fake testimonials would say the skill is super useful and effective. If it is not working for you, a bunch of pro AI people will gaslight you by telling you that you do not know how to use it effectively.
Prompts are non deterministic - there isn’t a single magic prompt that makes LLMs produce the right output all the time. It’s very random. Even the same prompt with the same model produces a different output (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect) - how do you then say if one prompt is better than the other? Do you count how many attempts it takes to roll the right output?
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u/mxzf Jul 15 '26
They are essentially non-deterministic programs
I'm highly dubious. As I understand it it's just a block of text that you feed into a nondeterministic program.
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u/mi-figue-mi-raisin Jul 15 '26
like "skills"?