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How exactly had it improved your thinking? By your description it did it for you, you just sat back. Doing nothing does not drive self improvement, I can't get

by Guthur 3y ago

How exactly had it improved your thinking? By your description it did it for you, you just sat back. Doing nothing does not drive self improvement, I can't get stronger sitting on the couch watching videos on YouTube about weight lifting, even if I did type in the search term.

huytersd 3y ago
Who cares about developing skills machines can do better. I don’t spend hours with a handsaw so I can cut perfect perpendicular cuts in wood, I just use a miter saw that does it perfectly 99% of the time. That lets me concentrate on the next thing on the value chain that machines can’t do yet. There’s plenty of woodworkers that work exclusively with hand tools for the joy of it and that where a lot of programming will be a decade in the future.
- Guthur 3y ago
  That's fair, so it isn't self development just like i said? glad you agree.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    I think being able to get better at things higher in the value chain does count as self development.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  Because well, for me we are designing tools not doing manual labor. The tool is designed once and well. Then the computer executes it 50 million times. Automated tool design is cool but the ROI for us is not developer hours minimized but number of users.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    The ROI for any business is number of users. What tools? Do you mean physical tools or are you referring to a program as a tool?
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      The software I make is the tool. The user uses my tool millions of times. The cost of adding a user is close to zero. So the power for me isn't in reducing developer costs
      - huytersd 3y ago
        Yeah that’s all development/programming.
konschubert 3y ago
It challenges and improves your thinking just like a coding buddy improves and challenges you. It's not like watching others lift, it's like having a sparring partner. ( A very fast, slightly stupid sparring partner...) Coding a button isn't the part of software development that's intellectually stimulating, so I am glad we have robots to help us speed it up. I feel like you're coming from a place of disliking chatbots and then working backwards.
- munk-a 3y ago
  My father was a wiz with a slide rule and understood the relations between logarithms and powers as a matter of necessity - he could look at a number and have a rough idea of what the natural log of that value was at a glance. I had a calculator - I am an expert at pushing the buttons but outside of a few select important numbers if you throw a value at me I'm not going to guess correctly - log10(7000) is clearly between 3 and 4 (it's in the thousands) - is it closer to 3.7, 3.5 or 3.9? Tools don't improve skills they replace but, at the same time, are those skills that are being replaced important to practice? If you've worked even briefly with vector math or game programming you know sqrt(2) is 1.41 being able to summon that value at will is essential if you're regularly doing vector addition - but sqrt(23)? Probably never going to come up. At the end of the day we need to decide whether these tools are helpful or not - in the very limited scope of UI building I think the answer is yes... a lot of front-end surface-level development has one right answer. For other things I am skeptical - and even for front-end work a developer that is considerate with their CSS classes and tag nesting will be a darling of the UI team compared to a developer that gets it to look right but does so with code that's difficult to understand or modify.
mashlol 3y ago
Because they learned for next time? Are you suggesting that you wouldn't want anyone (or anything) to suggest improvements for you because then you would not learn yourself how to improve?
- Guthur 3y ago
  Learning is hard, what was described didn't sound hard to me? You can call productive if you want, but sounds pretty far from self development to me.
  - sideshowb 3y ago
    Agree, that's why I only program with 1s and 0s, programming languages rob me of self development opportunities ;-)
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    Learning isn't hard wtf. I aced all my computer science shit and write trading code now. None of the learning was hard. It just was. Learning is easy. It's just learning.
etse 3y ago
By "It challenged my thinking and improved it." OP probably meant 'improved upon it', or 'improved on it' where "it" was the originally desired output.
chrismcb 3y ago
You can't get stronger from watching videos. But you can learn things that you can apply next time you workout.

by Guthur 3y ago

huytersd 3y ago

Who cares about developing skills machines can do better. I don’t spend hours with a handsaw so I can cut perfect perpendicular cuts in wood, I just use a miter saw that does it perfectly 99% of the time. That lets me concentrate on the next thing on the value chain that machines can’t do yet. There’s plenty of woodworkers that work exclusively with hand tools for the joy of it and that where a lot of programming will be a decade in the future.

Guthur 3y ago
That's fair, so it isn't self development just like i said? glad you agree.
- huytersd 3y ago
  I think being able to get better at things higher in the value chain does count as self development.
calvinmorrison 3y ago
Because well, for me we are designing tools not doing manual labor. The tool is designed once and well. Then the computer executes it 50 million times. Automated tool design is cool but the ROI for us is not developer hours minimized but number of users.
- huytersd 3y ago
  The ROI for any business is number of users. What tools? Do you mean physical tools or are you referring to a program as a tool?
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    The software I make is the tool. The user uses my tool millions of times. The cost of adding a user is close to zero. So the power for me isn't in reducing developer costs
    - huytersd 3y ago
      Yeah that’s all development/programming.

konschubert 3y ago

It challenges and improves your thinking just like a coding buddy improves and challenges you. It's not like watching others lift, it's like having a sparring partner. ( A very fast, slightly stupid sparring partner...) Coding a button isn't the part of software development that's intellectually stimulating, so I am glad we have robots to help us speed it up. I feel like you're coming from a place of disliking chatbots and then working backwards.

munk-a 3y ago
My father was a wiz with a slide rule and understood the relations between logarithms and powers as a matter of necessity - he could look at a number and have a rough idea of what the natural log of that value was at a glance. I had a calculator - I am an expert at pushing the buttons but outside of a few select important numbers if you throw a value at me I'm not going to guess correctly - log10(7000) is clearly between 3 and 4 (it's in the thousands) - is it closer to 3.7, 3.5 or 3.9? Tools don't improve skills they replace but, at the same time, are those skills that are being replaced important to practice? If you've worked even briefly with vector math or game programming you know sqrt(2) is 1.41 being able to summon that value at will is essential if you're regularly doing vector addition - but sqrt(23)? Probably never going to come up. At the end of the day we need to decide whether these tools are helpful or not - in the very limited scope of UI building I think the answer is yes... a lot of front-end surface-level development has one right answer. For other things I am skeptical - and even for front-end work a developer that is considerate with their CSS classes and tag nesting will be a darling of the UI team compared to a developer that gets it to look right but does so with code that's difficult to understand or modify.

mashlol 3y ago

Because they learned for next time? Are you suggesting that you wouldn't want anyone (or anything) to suggest improvements for you because then you would not learn yourself how to improve?

Guthur 3y ago
Learning is hard, what was described didn't sound hard to me? You can call productive if you want, but sounds pretty far from self development to me.
- sideshowb 3y ago
  Agree, that's why I only program with 1s and 0s, programming languages rob me of self development opportunities ;-)
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Learning isn't hard wtf. I aced all my computer science shit and write trading code now. None of the learning was hard. It just was. Learning is easy. It's just learning.

etse 3y ago

By "It challenged my thinking and improved it." OP probably meant 'improved upon it', or 'improved on it' where "it" was the originally desired output.

chrismcb 3y ago

You can't get stronger from watching videos. But you can learn things that you can apply next time you workout.