Mailing lists. Or the lack of self censoring shame

I'm subscribed to a few developer mailing lists, not that I post too much anymore but I scan them occasionally. I also 'hang out' on a couple of OpenCL forums, or at least keep an eye out for something interesting going on.

Lazy kids of today

I'm a bit shocked at how little shame people have in asking obviously idiotic, lazy, indolent, somnolent, and torpid questions. I presume they are mostly students trying to get the internet to do their homework, which is bad enough to start with. But when they clearly don't have the faintest idea about basic software development, let alone advanced concepts such as parallel programming, you'd think they'd have the personal shame to get off their lazy fucking arses and try to learn a bit more on their own before begging experts for help and showing to the world just what a waste of space they are.

Being a newbie is one thing, we were all one once (although when I was a hacking newbie, I had no modem and no internet, so nobody to annoy but myself). But being a noisy, lazy, selfish, idiot is another matter entirely.

Particularly today - with such an enormous amount of quality information at our fingertips INSTANTLY. Doesn't anybody try to learn on their own? It works much more effectively than getting someone else to do the work ...

It seems that the easier it gets, the lazier people are.

Maybe it's too many single child or two-parents-working families - kids these days don't seem to even know how to eat properly with knives and forks or chew with closed mouths. Probably because they never have a sit-down meal with the old's as they're either working or out or don't care themselves. Or too many molly-coddling parents too scared to tell young Bruce or young Doreen that they aren't acting in an acceptable manner or that they fucked something up, least they hurt his or her feelings.

The arsehole brigade

Then there's the other type - someone who asks a question in such a way to imply that they're a bit lost and after some help. Then any advice given is bluntly and rudely rejected because they 'know' the real problem and you have it all WRONG. Yeah, that's why they came asking questions in the first place ... obviously.

Show us the sauce?

And everyone seems to think their crappy fucked up and not working piece of shit routine is so precious they wont post any of the source code - and then expect someone to blindly determine why it isn't working/isn't running fast enough/wont solve world hunger. If you're lucky they post some small chunk of some unimportant routine and even then miss the actually important bits.

I'm getting a bit sick of it to be honest - and tending to be less involved in the various forums as a result. What's the point? There's no peer-to-peer communication going on with the sharing knowledge and building of 'community' (whatever that's supposed to be) - it's all just a one way street of me me me, take take take. Particularly on forums for multi-national bodies and companies - they can pay someone to do that shit. At least they should have someone with some authority to tell people to get a clue or to grow up. Regularly.

Unfortunately when such policing exists it seems far more worried about 'top posting' in replies than anything else, which just goes to lower the tone even further. It's about fucking time people got over that by now. They've probably forgotten the reason they're even still complaining about it.