And before stack overflow, we used books. Did we need it? No. But stack overflow was an improvement so we moved to that.
In many ways, ai is an improvement on stack overflow. I feel bad for people who refuse to see it, because they’re missing out on a useful and powerful tool.
Which is, of course, true for every source of information that can point you in a direction.
I’m a senior dev, and copilot as a productivity tool usually pays for the monthly license multiple times per week.
Whenever I hear someone say it’s useless, that tells me they are either some godlike dev who knows everything already (lol), they haven’t actually used it, they are not good at integrating new tools into their workflow, or they simply haven’t learned how to use it yet.
This is what people don’t seem to get. Human nature is when things are bad we band together, when things are good, we compete against each other. Capitalism leverages the latter while communism just tries to ignore that it exists.
Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but it’s a far better starting point.
This is one long strawmen: you’re generalizing my argument for this single situation to every situation.
You’re basically accusing me of doing what you’re doing: thinking in black and white. In my case if I think that ruining his life here with severe punishment is wrong, it must always be wrong.
Ask yourself this. Is there anyone who did something very stupid in HS that turned out to be a good adult without facing severe consequences for their actions? I can think of a few.
Common or not, they did not make the argument. You presumed a position and then used that made up position to launch an ad hominem.
A kid was arrested, but released pending further investigation, so I’m hard pressed to believe there is no punishment for this. But we’re talking about teenagers here, the fact that he could be punished is there, but was not given serious consideration if any at all…because he isn’t a fully mature adult. So what would a more serious punishment do?
This is something probably solved with education rather than more punishment.
The human mind doesn’t even really fully mature until your mid 20s. A 15 year old still has a good full decade until full maturity, and they are notorious for making impulsive decisions without realizing the consequences of their actions.
What he did was wrong and he deserves punishment, but ruining his life too for being a dumb teenager does nothing for the unimaginable harm caused to this girl, it just makes more victims.
I don’t know what the right answer is, but I can tell you the wrong answer is to ruin a teenagers life over a stupid act when that isn’t going to solve anything.
Ultimately I’m not sure where I fall on this issue, but the fact that you just mindlessly claimed that this person wants to see tits and clits, when they said nothing of the sort, just exposes how fully you realize you can’t defend an actual position.
One time when we were tripping on acid, one guy found a blade a grass that he claimed was changing colors. A bunch of the other guys gathered around and they were all laying there in a circle on their stomachs looking at it, trying to figure out if it was actually changing colors or if they were just tripping.
They were being ridiculous so I was just laying there staring at the clouds laughing while listening to them debating it.
The best part was that after about 10 minutes, they concluded that it must actually be changing colors.
I didn’t say they were the same thing; my whole point is that they are different. We’re talking about people thinking they’re talking to a human, compared to people attributing a single human attribute to a spoon. But probably not even really for the latter because if you ask someone if the spoon is actually sad, most everyone will say no.
You ask someone if the ugly spoon is human, they know it’s not.
We asked people if they were talking to a human, and it said yes.
These are not the same.
I see it as the opposite, and now that it’s getting uncomfortably close to seeming human, that makes people uncomfortable and so we are rejecting the turing test in favor of… what? It seems like nothing. It’s convenient that what makes us human is intangible.
society just fucking hates neurodivergent people.
Let’s keep in mind what I was initially responding to.
my son is gifted and can’t be neurodivergent because he is (proceeds to list a bunch of things that aren’t actually incompatible with neurodivergence).
Except I didn’t say this. The other poster made the claim that gifted means neurodivergent, and the neurodivergent are rejected by society. I pointed out that my kid is gifted and socially very accepted, challenging either of their claims.
You can be liked by your peers and still be mistreated by society
A fair disagreement, which certainly is also not true for my kid, but I think we might be wandering into pedantic territory, but either way I certainly did not say that my son can’t be neurodivergent because he does well socially.
The top level commenter was the one who made the comment that being gifted makes you neurodivergent and the comment that society doesn’t like neurodivergent people. I simply pointed out that my kid meets their requirement of neurodivergent and is very socially adept. I made no generalization about what neurodivergent people are or are not like, that was the other commenter.
I wonder why it’s me you challenged and not the other poster, when your criticism is similar to my criticism of them and doesn’t really apply to anything I said (although I can see why it was inferred).
At no point did I say my kid is or is not neurodivergent, until this last post. The poster I was responding to was wrong either because being gifted does not mean being neurodivergent, or because being neurodivergent is not hated by society.
None of this is rare for people on the spectrum.
As I said to the other poster, it’s not me who said this but them who implied it. They were the one who said society hates neurodivergent people. I’m pointing out that my supposed neurodivergent (why isn’t addressing their claim that only neurodivergent people can be gifted?) child is very socially competent and well accepted by society
That being said, this kid is not neurodivergent. My other one, definitely. Smart and sociable, but ADHD.
I don’t consider myself a never nester, but looking at my code now, I extract all the time and rarely go 4 tabs in. It just makes it more easily maintainable. I also like the idea of putting the failure conditions first. I haven’t looked at this yet but I’m sure there are some times I can use it.
Sure, sometimes you might not have a choice, but I do think there is a lot of value to what they are saying. I think it kind of goes in line with standard “functions should do one thing” paradigm.
WTF is this?
Everyone has lots of bugs in their code, especially beginners. This is why we have testing and qa and processes to minimize the risk of bugs. As the saying goes, “the good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad n was is that they do what you tell them to do.”
Programming is an iterative process where you do something, it doesn’t work, and then you give it another go. It’s not something that senior devs get right on the first try, while beginners have to try many times. It’s just that senior devs have seen a lot more so have a better understanding of why it probably went wrong, and maybe can avoid some more common pitfalls the first time around. But if you are writing bug free code in your first pass, well you’re a way better programmer than anyone I’ve met.
Ai is just another tool to make this happen. Sure, it’s not always the tool for the job, just like IoC is not always the right tool for the job. But it’s nice to have it and sometimes it makes things much easier.
Like just now I was debugging a large SQL query. I popped it into copilot, asked if to break it into parts so I could debug. It gave a series of smaller queries that I then used to find the point where it fell apart. This is something that would have taken me at least a half hour of tedious boring work, fixed in 5 minutes.
Also for writing scripts. I want some data formatted so it was easier to read? No problem, it will spit out a script that gets me 90% of the way there in seconds. Do I have to refine it? Absolutely. But if I wrote it myself, not being super prolific with python, it would have taken me a half hour to get the structure in place, and then I still would have had to refine it because I don’t produce perfect code the first time around. And it comments the scripts, which I rarely do.
What also amazes me is that sometimes it will spit out code and I’ll be like “woah I didn’t even know you could do that” and so I learned a new technique. It has a very deep “understanding” of the syntax and fundamentals of the language.
Again, I find it shocking that experienced devs don’t find it useful. Not living up to the hype I get. But not seeing it as a productivity boosting tool is a real head scratcher to me. Granted, I’m no rockstar dev, and maybe you are, but I’ve seen a lot of shit in my day and understand that I’m legitimately a senior dev.