Leave your screen unlocked, meet developers paypal.com | Hacker News Reader

Leave your screen unlocked, meet developers paypal.com

anthony.dev.profullstack.com

At the place where I was taught this lesson, it was "getting Hasselhoffed" - in short, you find photos of David Hasselhoff in Baywatch (wearing as little as possible, you see? Speedos were very much in in the 80s), and you set it as the desktop. Perfectly harmless, like actual porn would be too far, but it was far enough to be genuinely embarrassing - not least because every Dev gets the same warning on day one (you leave you computer unlocked, you get Hasselhoffed) so everyone knew what it meant anyway. Everyone would, of course, play along - "Didn't realise you liked Hasselhoff that much - bit of an unprofessional image though don't you think?" And so on. If I remember rightly, I literally came in from a cigarette and the first person I saw just went "Do you admire David Hasselhoff's body?" and I already knew what I had done.

I'd just set my wallpaper to Hasselhoff as soon as I found out about the tradition and be done with it.

More seriously, the wallpaper stuff is OK, but I never found some of the more disruptive office pranks on the list to be particularly endearing (e.g., switching keycaps, taking the ball out of a mouse). It's work, and you sometimes need to do something urgently, and it's annoying to troubleshoot or clean up after someone wrapped your entire cubicle in shrink wrap, tied your shoelaces together, or something like that. If it's more fun to you than to the recipient, don't do it?

I did some office pranks, but tried to keep them nice. A tall stack of TPS reports on a manager's desk, sure.

A real hacker doesn't hack the software system...

I worked at a place almost exactly like this article. No surprise, it was one of the many startups that came out of the “PayPal mafia” in the 2010s

When the culture demands you spend every evening in the office, the actual work output is often secondary to the theatrics. Look at how crazy we are. Can you believe we have a kegerator?

All the shenanigans also means nobody is productive or even present until well after noon the next day. But nobody bothers asking what the point of all that was in the context of getting shit done because ultimately you just have to be one of the bros.

It’s frat culture with someone else’s money.

i didn't experience anything like that from 2004-2007at PP

one th ing you can do to your manager is screenshot their desktop, hide all their icons and menus andset the screensot as their background. they will be very confsused.

Don't forget to flip the photo and them flip the monitor.

You sound fun!

lol that's hilarious. you couldn't get away with that shit now. i remember around 2005 at paypal the team of interns had this email thread going on developer@paypal email list and they were talking eubonics. i said to someone "oh they're gonna be fired" they were all canned the next day.

In Brazil we had a soccer player who was the cover of a gay magazine back in the 90s. That was the wallpaper of choice.

This was generated by AI. Why are you being rude by pasting LLM output at us? If we wanted LLM output we can ask our own agents.

> How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes, then edited by me.

Chill, dude. The AI datacenters generate enough heat.

i still tell it what to say.

There's probably some Dunning-Kruger when you don't notice crap writing. Compare the output of an LLM to Martin Amis, who chooses his words deliberately and with care:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/jun/02/politicsphi...

Of course I don't expect human writing like his, but the typical LLMesque phrases are overused and just frustrates my brain when I see them yet again. In contrast, Amis' writing is delightful because it surprises.

what is this link for? i'm not understanding.

Sigh.

An example of "tasty" writing...

You wrote, in all lowercase, "i still tell it what to say." You can ask LLM to write something, and hypothetically, if he were still alive and you could persuade him enough (with a huge amount of money, maybe), you could ask Martin Amis to write you something. LLM will write something full of LLMesque phrasing, which many loathe (your post is flagged to death for a reason). Martin Amis will write you something which readers will find engaging and beautifully written. That's the difference.

And if you can't tell the difference, Dunning and Kruger wrote a paper about that.

No you don't.

Did you tell it this?

> The part worth keeping

Shame on you.

Can you ask your agent to write about someone else's experience?

> How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes, then edited by me.

Genuinely confused by this. All the AI tics and patterns that you left in there - did you genuinely think they improved the piece somehow? There were bits that I found unreadable or nonsensical.

It feels like the AI has taken what could have been a short funny story with a small message and made it over written, overblown and over long, where the message is entirely lost in the AI gargling.

I remember being very productive in a team of developers and locking the screen wasn't necessary because everyone had full trust in each other and we shared a common goal. No time for nonsense. Obviously this changed when the corporate developers arrived, teaching the ways of the professional. We also learned to save hours of programming with weeks-long projects.

I remember doing the desktop screenshot trick in my high school's computer lab. Alas I wasn't around to see how many people got suckered and who eventually figured it out (very likely the IT teacher), but it was fixed the next time I visited and not a word was said anywhere I could hear :D.

I the companies I've worked, it was ice cream. Someone would post an ice-cream emoji on the general_random slack channel under the name of the person that left the computer unlocked and that person then have to bring ice-cream for his team. We used to say that guy got ice-creamed.

Hey we did that at engineering school in the early 90s. Pranks were a little less ... subtle shall we say.

Still, to this day I still can't walk off my desk with locking my screen. So the lesson was well taught, and I'm happy about that (and have find memories of the various pranks).

Locking is not enough today. I take laptop, phone and all personal stuff for lunch and meetings. Over years I had too much stuff broken, stolen, chowed... Once someone spilled coffee over my laptop! Another time coworker peed on my laptop bag!

I learnt this lesson already during the university, worse you could even lock your screen, but there were xhost and VT access that could also be used for some fun, if the default security settings were left on their original state.

had this in the 00 at a company i worked at, happended to me one time, pizza for the all dev teams. i took the lesson (never happend again), but refused to buy the pizza. i am there for earning money, not to spend it.

You should at least reread your text. I found the story interesting, but it's practically unreadable. The text is completely AI-generated, and poorly generated.

Hard read as the AI tells are everywhere. Too bad; as a tale of a different time it could be interesting.

left alt + left shift + print screen toggles high contrast mode in Window 9x. That was always fun to do on an unlocked screen.

So so many emdashes and LLM phrasing....

I don't understand how you can say it was drafted by Claude and then edited by yourself when the entire thing reads fully LLM-generated.

Is so frustrating to me because it's simple to avoid, just one extra line in your prompt: "don't use emdashes or any other LLM phrasing"

How does an LLM comply with "don't use LLM phrasing"?

These things have become invisible to me. Literally didn't notice any of it while reading.

I like the story, I really can’t stand the way you used AI to write this. The story is great! But I genuinely cannot tell what you actually think. Too much over-wording and cheesy phrasing.

The internet is going to increasingly suck for you if you don't get over it.

TL;DR (or Too Slop; Didn't Read), if you left your computer unlocked at PayPal other employees would send emails from you to the whole company, like offering to buy everyone donuts.

I've used "AI;DR"

Right at the goddamned top for everyone to see:

> How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes, then edited by me.

For the record, I enjoyed the post, and it's much more than your summary suggests.

ai slop is not worse than human slop for most things...anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com