4 ms·

I’m using it as a technical editor for a book I’m writing on bash for beginner programmers. Compiling this book from scratch is a one-man operation; I don’t ha

I’m using it as a technical editor for a book I’m writing on bash for beginner programmers. Compiling this book from scratch is a one-man operation; I don’t have the budget or time to hire a technically-competent bash programmer who is also willing to act as a proofreader and editor. Instead, I plug in certain paragraphs and ask “Does the following paragraph about file descriptors / environment vs. shell variables / fork vs. exec contain any technical errors? If so, please tell me what errors there are, and also provide a more correct alternative statement.” I take what I learn from the output and verify it on a site like StackOverflow. This has proven to be an effective alternative to starting directly with StackOverflow. Oftentimes I find that “I don’t know what I don’t know”, and am therefore unable to phrase a certain question in a way which is suitable for StackOverflow’s (very specific) expectations. Usually that’s because the question I want to ask is predicated on a series of assumptions, any one of which could be incorrect (and would therefore result in my question being downvoted and/or closed, since it makes the question itself less-broadly applicable to the average user). But I can ask ChatGPT that same question, and get a correction in my understanding without the loss of those sweet, sweet internet points. At the very least, what I learn from ChatGPT can help me phrase a question which is more suitable for a public forum like SO.

phaedrix 4y ago
That sounds really cool. I'm always trying to get juniors more into the CLI. Link?
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  www.impostorsguides.com. Any feedback is appreciated. Note that it is currently very much a work-in-progress, and you’ll have to wade through the unedited word salad of my stream-of-consciousness as I narrate the entire codebase of a certain Ruby version manager called RBENV. Which is why I currently have a “noindex nofollow” meta tag on it. But if that doesn’t dissuade you, help yourself! Rest assured that my arrogant rants about the current state of technical documentation in our industry, as well as the frequent dead-ends in my thought process, will be edited out before I release the beta version. I also plan on adding an entire section on using Github to learn about a repo’s history and the design decisions / trade-offs that were made. I’m basically writing this in the 1-2 spare hours per day that I have before work starts, so it’s slow going as you can probably imagine.
boredtofears 4y ago
> But I can ask ChatGPT that same question, and get a correction in my understanding without the loss of those sweet, sweet internet points. How do you ever know when the correction it makes is wrong?
- toomanyrichies 4y ago
  Mostly I just Google the information it tells me, and see if I can find confirmation from sources known to be written by humans, such as official docs or other equally-trustworthy sources. For example, just today I asked ChatGPT "In UNIX, what is the difference between redirecting with symbols like > and <, versus redirecting with the | symbol?" I had trouble Googling this same question because the characters <, >, and | confused Google, and the first-page search results were all irrelevant. However, ChatGPT told me that the difference was that < and > were used for "redirection" of input and output into or out of a file, where as the character | was used for piping output into a command. Based on this, I was able to Google "piping vs redirection" and find confirmation from Stack Overflow.

phaedrix 4y ago

That sounds really cool. I'm always trying to get juniors more into the CLI. Link?

toomanyrichies 4y ago
www.impostorsguides.com. Any feedback is appreciated. Note that it is currently very much a work-in-progress, and you’ll have to wade through the unedited word salad of my stream-of-consciousness as I narrate the entire codebase of a certain Ruby version manager called RBENV. Which is why I currently have a “noindex nofollow” meta tag on it. But if that doesn’t dissuade you, help yourself! Rest assured that my arrogant rants about the current state of technical documentation in our industry, as well as the frequent dead-ends in my thought process, will be edited out before I release the beta version. I also plan on adding an entire section on using Github to learn about a repo’s history and the design decisions / trade-offs that were made. I’m basically writing this in the 1-2 spare hours per day that I have before work starts, so it’s slow going as you can probably imagine.

boredtofears 4y ago

> But I can ask ChatGPT that same question, and get a correction in my understanding without the loss of those sweet, sweet internet points. How do you ever know when the correction it makes is wrong?

toomanyrichies 4y ago
Mostly I just Google the information it tells me, and see if I can find confirmation from sources known to be written by humans, such as official docs or other equally-trustworthy sources. For example, just today I asked ChatGPT "In UNIX, what is the difference between redirecting with symbols like > and <, versus redirecting with the | symbol?" I had trouble Googling this same question because the characters <, >, and | confused Google, and the first-page search results were all irrelevant. However, ChatGPT told me that the difference was that < and > were used for "redirection" of input and output into or out of a file, where as the character | was used for piping output into a command. Based on this, I was able to Google "piping vs redirection" and find confirmation from Stack Overflow.