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People complain that the magic of programming has been lost because all we do is stitch together APIs. They're oversimplying the work done, those people are cy
by piyh 4y ago
People complain that the magic of programming has been lost because all we do is stitch together APIs. They're oversimplying the work done, those people are cynical, this is amazing.
- coding123 4y agoI think part of the magic is still lost, as we used to be very open source and free centric. These days it's all based on paid API calls.
- ccn0p 4y agoagree with parent re: stitching together -- but also, someone's gotta program the API!
- johnathandos 4y agoSomeone is out there building and maintaining the APIs
- yencabulator 4y agoOne hopes. If they decide to stop providing/maintaining the API, you're out of luck. Just using APIs also misses out on the learning, community, and collaboration of open source software.
- fragmede 4y agoThe magic is still there! In this case, the model for OpenAI's Whisper, which is arguably doing the bulk of the work here, is Open Source (under the MIT licence), and freely available for download at https://github.com/openai/whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper. You can run it wherever you want, though something with a GPU will let you do 5x realtime (or better!) transcription.
- beecafe 4y agothose APIs would be worthless if nobody wanted to stitch them together
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- s3000 4y agoCompare it to cars. New cars are more complex but collectors pay the most for the old, simple cars with a bonus for beauty and speed.
- madaxe_again 4y agoOn your old car, you can just take it apart and see how it works. Don’t have the part? Improvise. It’s heavily skill-based, and a little knowledge will take you a long way. As long as you know your fundamental toolchains, you can make any part, do any job. On your new car, it’s a series of black boxes, cables, and tubes - you don’t know and don’t care what happens inside the boxes, just what goes in, and what comes out. It’s heavily knowledge based - you need to know an awful lot about the boxes and how to work with them - but nobody expects you to machine your own parts. If one isn’t made that suits your purposes, you have to go to an old car guy. The skillsets are similar but different. To be clear, I really am talking about cars and mechanics here - you won’t find many who can fix up both a 1960 and a 2021 motor. You’ll find plenty who can do one or the other, however. And yeah - the same applies to developers.
- DieAgainAli 4y agoBeing an ex-mechanic I second this. You HAVE to specialise otherwise you’ll be left with the simple competitive jobs like tyre replacement. I specialised in new vehicles and then you have specialise in brand to actually know whats going on and how to fix said black boxes and systems. My reason for training to become a software engineer was mainly because I felt like the knowledge and on-going training you need to retain/constantly learn was not worth the money earned. Instead now I earn my bread from what was my hobby, essentially the same work ethic as far as knowledge is concerned just less back breaking to put into practice.
- Abishek_Muthian 4y agoI like to read comments from non IT people on HN, It's awesome that you were able change careers across different domains and still transfer skills.