I did. I did think I enjoyed the craft.
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.
A good question.
2,397 karma · joined January 29, 2015
Maybe I enjoyed the compliments, the stars, the glory, the God status I always imagined will come my way but never did. Except burnout. That did come my way.
A good question.
Start to write. Or continue to write. Or consider writing as the place to explore and develop your ideas. They're just words. There is even more freedom there to create. Not restricted by a compiler. Not restricted by the shape of the final product. Words can be written anywhere. Sometimes on a paper, even. On my phone while strolling and ideas pop up.
Give it a go!
This is the only sane approach.
The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in?
I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up with any damn story and make it credible. Just the other day I found out about reddit engagement bots, and I've seen some in the wild myself.
I'm waiting for the internet bubble to burst already so we can all go back to our normal lives, where we've left it 20 years or so ago.
I bet 2027 will be the year when writing code by hand will be (re)discovered.
Hopefully.
If one would really be interested in classical music or philosophy one would sure not miss the (other) giants in the field instead of concentrating on just one or two.
There's the mistery.
For example, the Electricity and Magnetism book by Purcell is phenomenal but it is hardly ever mentioned. To quote wikipedia,
Electricity and Magnetism is a standard textbook in electromagnetism originally written by Nobel laureate Edward Mills Purcell in 1963. Along with David Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics, this book is one of the most widely adopted undergraduate textbooks in electromagnetism. A Sputnik-era project funded by the National Science Foundation grant, the book is influential for its use of relativity in the presentation of the subject at the undergraduate level. In 1999, it was noted by Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. that the book was widely adopted and has many foreign translations.
Something mysterious is going on here.
Full disclosure: I've made that!
Then comes PixVerse, a sponsored result for a google play app.
Then difuss.me.
Then comes midjourney.
"People who log workouts are 2x more likely to stick to their routine and make gains, No social feeds, no distractions, just results. $1.99/month vs $9.99 competitors."
For me it would be a no-go, just from the 2x (unfounded?!) affirmation and how this is cheaper that (all?!) of the competitors. Do people actually like this kind of motivationals, so to speak?
Concrats! :)
While oftentimes what happens is is "oh, this thing seems to be working. And it looks easy. Great! Moving on.."
I remember from the days when watching TV. There were these preposterous commercials saying "23% more efficient than other toothpastes" or "33% less dandruff than a regular shampoo" or shit like that. How do you know what products do I use? How do you measure that? What skin type? No. It is just better. Trust us.
I mean, the financial backing in this sector is staggering. We know that already. It's a fact. There are also numbers. Billions if not trillions of them. What does Joe The Developer think all this kind of money goes to? Some of them, and not a small part, goes into marketing. Unless Joe still believes in the "build it and they will come" fake motto. Whomever has a stake in this will back it up, marketing it like crazy. Assume victory even in defeat as the old guy says. I was laughing hard one day when I saw Ilya Sutskever, laptop in hand, strolling the parks for a green meadow to work, develop ground-breaking ideas to save humanity! That's just marketing.
Liked your post. I don't think it matters (that much) that your native language is not English. We don't want to sound all the same by using AI to fix our grammar (ok, maybe this one, yes) or the awkward twists of sentences. Sometimes AI fixes them too good, leaving little room for some poetry into it.
To elaborate: if a CEO or Happy Worker Joe uses AI to write his Excel Sheets and Typist Jane codes their yet another website in less than two hours without coding knowledge (I know! It's amazing!), does that mean we're loosing our sense of self, or whatever?
Well, if it does, equating human with business has already done that a long time ago. Why complaining now? Only because AI is accelerating it?
If it doesn't, there are plenty of other areas outside work when one can actually be human.
If a new, wonder drug or food or medicinal plant would appear on the radar with claims of "it increases your life expectancy by x years, your happiness and well-being by y amounts, etc, etc" would you say that those claims are based on fact or are just marketing?
I've seen no actual improvement in the development speed of our product. Same pace. Same endless discussions. Same meetings. It hasn't changed the pace nor it has lead to an explosion of ideas, implementations or discussions. It did lead to an increase in code and deployed microservices, though, but that is not really a good thing in itself.
It's like making a commitment to eat healthy, diversified food. And, as we did in the '90 in the post-communist country I'm living, we've let the doors wide open for all the food to enter. Junk or otherwise, without, from our part, any knowledge of what is healthy and what not. Tremendous amount of choices, little, close to zero knowledge about what is good and what is not.
Most interestingly, it's about who holds the microphone and is allowed to say whatever they want, unquestioned.
For one, so many publications here in Europe are financed by the local governments and we have no problem allowing them to function and act in the interest or said governments. Two, it flies in the face of an independent, free individual who can choose what to read and discern what the truth is. By blocking it, you are saying, "You, as an individual, are not able to take your own decisions, you are not able to separate truth from lies and fiction." If, supposing the later is actually the case, then all this "free" media is actually dangerous as it becomes a game of "don't trust them, trust us!" and whoever has the better image, the best marketing and exposure wins over the others.
But then what happens in a reasonably sized C project is that other tools are brought in to fill the gaps. Tools like code generators (see some other comments on this post), for example, which are necessarily written in a different language and, most importantly, come with their own terminology and way of doing things. Which, in the end, becomes an extra mental load, the kind that you've rightly mentioned. Only you've partitioned or spread that load horizontally in multiple little pieces as opposed to building abstractions on top of each other.
Or, each piece of code is understandable by itself, but one has to read dozens of such "little islands" to make sense of what the code is achieving since, by necessity, you need to have many such pieces to achieve something meaningful. The alternative being the abstraction pyramid which does more with less code. The downside being, there is an upfront investment in understanding those abstraction layers before one can juggle with them, so to speak. In your example, the upfront investment is less so, but every-time you must do something meaningful, including reading the code, you pay the penalty of not having powerful enough tools. As an example: engineers go to universities to study calculus, physics and material science so that, with these, they can better plan and build a highway (let's say). There is a huge upfront investment in that, let's say 16 years of study. Versus, use our shovels and buckets and start building right away. That is easy to learn. You learn it in a day. You start building right away. Everyone can supervise and, thus, understand the work because it is straightforward. 1 day upfront investment. But the later will advance at a horrible pace. There is no way to visualize what you're doing. There is no study beforehand. Maybe the hill will collapse and you need to start over. Maybe the two ends of the road will not meet where you'd expect to. Maybe the materials crack after a week. Maybe the road is not even, so you start over. Etc, etc.
"Liberal arts," nice :)