Devil isn’t as good with a fiddle as he thinks he is tho’. I dunno where I’m going with this.

When people say a country was/is “communist,” they mean it’s being ruled by Marxist-Leninists, not that it’s achieved the hypothetical level of society that usually only Marxists are familiar with.

This is a great line

Everyone always dunkin’ on Perl, but I can’t even tell you how often it’s been the best tool for the job. Like, at least 3

If you can, just use Perl. Probably installed on your systems, even the ones without python.

Mate, first of all: chill. Second of all: me, mincing words? You’re the one who’s decided the phrase ‘natural philosophy’ only applies to ancient Greeks. It’s literally just what science used to be called. Being very very hung up on a specific definition of a word or phrase and excluding other common usages is not a good basis for an argument. There need have been no argument at all. ‘We call it science now’ seems to be what you meant, but it’s not coming across well

Oh. And you can still do science without a theory. It’s called data collection and it is absolutely vital.

Edit: a good example would be Rosalind Franklin’s work on the structure of DNA. She did some incredible science with x-ray diffraction which was vital to Crick and Watson’s theory of the structure.

Edit X2: also ‘doing it implicitly’ is totally fucking fine if the result of being invalidated is you create a more refined model of reality. Which is, like, pretty much what the whole thing about astronomy is…

That sounds plausible but is, in fact, kinda a made up distinction you just came up with. People up to and including Isaac Newton used the phrase ‘natural philosophy’ to describe what they were doing. ‘Testing’ in any meaningful sense of the word was a part of that more often than not. Even Pythagorean astronomy was implicitly testing things by making predictions of the movement of celestial bodies. So, no, but thanks.

Edit: also worthwhile, I feel, mentioning that a lot of good science is purely observational and involves no direct testing, even of theorems. E.g early paleontology would, I feel, fit into that theme

Tbh anything that can give you a curated set of options, and some resources that can help you make the final decision is pretty incredible. But that’s the thing about most AI - it needs some human vetting for good results, regardless of how powerful it is

Previously known as natural philosophy

Software is really hard. Replacing something that needs to continuously have new features added to it because it’s not been replaced yet… You’re running to stand still

Many years ago, my aunt bought an old, terribly specced laptop and couldn’t get Windows to run on it. I installed Ubuntu and everything was fine - she could check her email and browse toxic conspiracy theories on Facebook and all was good with the world.

Two years later when visiting I got my first support request - would I mind showing her how to print something? No problem, but would you mind showing me what you were trying? She was selecting menu items to send to a virtual printer, not the one on the network. I show her the correct printer to send to and the thing prints. Easy. Out of curiosity, I check the outbox queue for the virtual printer. Over a hundred documents, going back two years.

For two years she’d been unable to print, and every single time she’d ever attempted to print something she’d followed the exact same steps that didn’t work, and just accepted that this was the way things were.

SMH.

Well yeah because booting into Linux is so much faster

This is not a natural landscape. You don’t get fields of grass like this without human intervention. This started in the bronze age, so just because your local human-made landscape is green, make no mistakes.

Bit by-the-by, though, because obviously computers are completely awesome, but real nature is not this placid homogeneous scene

There are two difficult problems in computer science. Naming things, and pairing with Bluetooth speakers.

Preach

I think the actual problem is that they won’t know when they’ve got something that compiles but is wrong… I dunno though. I’ve never seen someone doing this and I can only speculate tbh. I only ever asked ChatGPT a couple of times, as a joke to myself when I got stuck, and it spouted completely useless nonsense both times… Although on one occasion the wrong code it produced looked like it had the pattern of a good idiom behind it and I stole that.

No arguments from me that it’s better if people are just better at their job, and I like to think I’m good at mine too, but let’s be real - a lot of people are out of their depth and I can imagine it can help there. OTOH is it worth the investment in time (from people who could themselves presumably be doing astonishing things) and carbon energy? Probably not. I appreciate that the tech exists and it needs to, but shoehorning it in everywhere is clearly bollocks. I just don’t know yet how people will find it useful and I guess not everyone gets that spending an hour learning to do something that takes 10s when you know how is often better than spending 5 mins making someone or something else do it for you… And TBF to them, they might be right if they only ever do the thing twice.

I have no idea why the engagement with this was down votes. So your friend thinks having an LLM to answer questions will help to learn Linux? I imagine he’s probably right.

Don’t knock being perpetually high. Some of my best code I wrote in my mid-20s

Yeah but the idea of AI in that kind of workflow is so that the product guy can actually do it themselves without asking you and in less than 30 mins

I feel like there are actually multiple counter-examples to this, but they’re all much better realised worlds than Harry Potter