4 ms·
I think you're right. I've sometimes been in the situation of having to maintain a script that depends on APIs or data formats that change from time to time wit
by bloak 3y ago
I think you're right. I've sometimes been in the situation of having to maintain a script that depends on APIs or data formats that change from time to time without warning. A fair amount of skill and effort is required. (There is skill involved in writing the script so that it is maintainable and not too fragile but still detects when something has gone wrong.) If the script is doing a task that has to be completed on a particular day every month, rather than whenever the script hacker is next available, then you'd have to choose between paying the hacker a reasonable retainer or having someone around who you know can still do the task manually, which means you might have to get them to do the task manually from time to time to stay in practice.
A dilemma I keep facing in practice is converting a text that someone else has produced in their own special way, like the ghastly cluttered HTML from a word processor. For example, do I attempt to use a Perl script to automatically convert some of the mark-up, or do I throw away all the mark-up and put back the italics by hand, with the risk of making a mistake? (If anyone knows of a good configurable or modifiable tool for converting cluttered HTML into sane HTML/XML I'd be interested to hear about it. My Perl scripts for doing it are not great.)
- danielbln 3y agoSounds like a good usecase for an LLM.
- ben_w 3y agoPerhaps, but LLMs while may be slightly better (or slightly worse) than average humans, if you have 20 instances of the same LLM will have correlated errors whereas 20 humans will be… well, not entirely[0] uncorrelated, but less correlated, in their errors. [0] We'll still sometimes get an entire office of telephone help-desk people who are all convinced that $1/megabyte is the same as $0.01/megabyte, or whatever that story was a few decades back (I can't Google it any more to find it, there was a recording of the phone call).
- genewitch 3y agoit was 0.01¢ and the rep / software was billing it as $0.01 - saying 0.01 of a penny is $0.01. I may be off by a factor of 10.
- ethbr1 3y agoOver the years, I've internalized a few rules to soften what you point out. * Understand both the cost of making a mistake and of the process not running. Be aggressive on things that are 'nice to have' or have downstream manual re-validation. Be conservative on things that are 'must have' and immediately effect an outcome. * First, do not harm -- program defensively and break execution on any violated expectations * Understandable error messages at the user level are gold. The user has no idea what "schema mismatch" means. They can understanding "Column 3 had unexpected value. Was expecting 'X'. Saw: 'Y'" -- On ugly HTML, that's a bad one, because of how ugly it can get. I've only done toy work with it, but I hear good things about Beautiful Soup (Python). https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/