Honestly, I read that passage as Carol realizing as she spoke that she had been underwatering that spot semi-consciously the whole time. That’s one of the things about expertise gained by doing. We don’t always realize exactly what we’re doing well enough to communicate it until we reflect on it later.
Reading it, I get the feeling the author worked the story the way Tom Hartmann works those agricultural machines. The AI gave input, but the author was tweaking it with human knowledge and wisdom.
A bot, sure, but also an extra terrestrial intelligence. Unless we’re talking a Stargate or The Magicians type of scenario where humans exist on a lot of different worlds. After all, they tend to ask you to prove you’re a human.
If they ask you to prove you’re not a robot, then we get into discussing sentient robots from other worlds.
What we’d be really interested in proving if we found proof of other intelligent life is personhood.
Yeah, but I doubt many of the newer generation are going to read this. I manage a team of engineers, and one of the recent-ish graduates asked me in our 1-on-1 if it's still worth learning Python given that he can just write prompts. (Python is the language all our tools use).
If the next generation doesn't even want to learn a programming language, they're definitely not going to learn how to write _clean_ code.
Maybe I'm just overly pessimistic about junior engineers at the moment because of that conversation lol.
Here's my optimistic take: the fundamental things that spark joy about learning a novel algorithm, pattern, technique, etc. haven't gone anywhere, and there's no reason to think those things won't continue to be interesting. Furthermore, it seems like reading code isn't going anywhere too soon, and that definitely benefits from clean code. It follows that someone who can actually recognize clean from spaghetti, and tell the LLM to refactor it into XYZ style, is going to be relatively more valuable.
Random side note: my teen son has grown up with iPhone-level tech, yet likes and finds my old Casio F91 watch very interesting. I still have faith :)
Junior here. There are still a few of us who value books and documentation. It's a weird time though. Hard to feel confident that you're learning in the correct way.
Anyway, I've found that if you want to get a coworker into reading technical books, the best way is with a novel or three. I've had good success with The Martian. The Phoenix Project might work too. Slip them fun books until they've built a habit and then drop The Mythical Man Month on them. :)
In almost forty years of experience, the fraction of developers I've known who read in the field beyond what's strictly needed for their task is very small. I'm always delighted when I find one.
IMO it is a valid question. Our AI has not yet reached that level, our prompts have not yet reached that level of sophistication. But I do not code in assembly any more, I do not do pointer arithmetic any more, so maybe some day we get to a state where we do not write python also. It is not going to be soon despite the AI bandwagon saying so, there are too many legacy pieces that are not documented well and not easy decipherable due to context window limits. But in 10 years ...maybe prompts is all we need.
PS: Not that we do not have people working at all levels of stack today, just that each level of stack, like a discussion going on today about python's JIT compiler will be a few (dozen or hundred) specialists. Everyone else can work with prompts.
I obviously wasn't there, but it sounds like maybe they were asking for reassurance. There's a lot of people out there saying that LLMs are going to totally replace regular programming, and for a new grad who doesn't know much about the world, they value your expertise.
That's a positive interpretation. You might be right, either way that's what I pointed them to. I don't think the LLMs will really replace engineers in the foreseeable future, and so learning the languages and the fundamentals is still needed.
I have a laptop and a phone right here, right now. I have actual calculators around here somewhere. I’ve been out of schools for decades. I still can do arithmetic and basic algebra in my head or on paper and often do.
I’m hoping the situation with LLMs will be the same. Teach the basics and allow people to fall back on them for at least the simpler tasks for their lifetimes. I know people, by the way, who can still use an abacus and a slide rule. I can too, but with a refresher beforehand because I seldom use those.
Text editing is a basic, fundamental, and reusable skill across all of Information Technology.
Output:
Text editing isn't just a task—it's a mission-critical, foundational skill set that scales across the entire IT ecosystem. Whether you're coding or strategizing, mastering the art of the edit is the ultimate force multiplier for professional growth. #InformationTechnology #SkillBuilding #Efficiency #CareerGrowth #TechMindset
My uncle married a woman with the same first and middle name as one of his sisters. My new aunt chose to use her husband’s name as her married name, without hyphenation or anything. His sister, my aunt, never married. One was an RN and the other is an LPN.
They were born in different years. Their SSNs were not close. For one of them the name was her maiden name. For the other, a married name. They went to different colleges and had different credentials. They did live in the same town.
When my aunt died, all the credit companies and collections companies tried one of two recovery tactics. Some tried to make her brother pay the debts as her surviving spouse. The others tried to assert that the debts were incurred by his wife and that the mismatch of other data in their own databases was evidence of fraud.
Debian stable isn’t that much more version locked than CentOS or RHEL. Debian also has the Testing tier, which is semi-rolling. Or you could use Unstable. Or if you’re brave, you could use Nightly.
Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, and others with Debian as an upstream are not Debian. They build their own packages on their own schedules.
Fedora is not “consumer grade RedHat”. It’s the rolling release upstream of RHEL, much like Debian Testing is upstream of Debian Stable.
The main reason Linux got a bad reputation was the tribalism of people going off half-cocked talking about their personal preferences without actually working with the alternatives and starting this sort of holy war diatribe.
macOS or Windows can be similarly locked down. In the schools, the school locks it down. In many companies, there are management tools like JAMF, InTune, or NinjaOne that lock down laptops, desktops, tablets, and cell phones a little or completely.
With a Chromebook, there is one thing to lock down. On a Mac, there are a lot of things to do, because the whole point of it is that it's a normal computer.
Every decent Chromebook the past several years can run a full Debian. I’m guessing the one thing you’re mentioning is disabling that feature. There are still client-side firewalls and some other settings to change to lock it down further for a school.
On a Mac, you do need to set up multiple settings in your JAMF profile but it’s only one JAMF client run to apply all the rules.
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