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> Users think with data. Imagine you are a cashier at a grocery store. You learn how to calculate the amount by watching the owner do it for a couple of custome

> Users think with data. Imagine you are a cashier at a grocery store. You learn how to calculate the amount by watching the owner do it for a couple of customers. No one does that. You go to school and learn numbers and basic arithmetic, which gives you all the formulas you need. And even illiterate people work out quickly the minimum they need to do transactions. > This ability to abstract logic is what separates developers from users Then everyone is a developer as everyone can write a serie of instructions which abstract action from context. It just that the computer is very limited and you need to be very precise. But what it can do, it can do it very fast. What is instant for us is an eternity in CPU time, and you can do a lot with simple operations if you can do a great number of them. > Just like a developer's brain can think about a problem and come up with a solution using code, o3 generates a program (i.e., metadata) on the fly to solve the problem Again that's not happening. You think about a problem and solves it by constraining yourself to the basic operations you have available (the APIs, languages, libraries, platforms). The code is just the written form of that solution. You can't invent operations that does not exist, you can only group them under a new name. Each set of names is another layer of abstraction that make it easier to write the code. But the constraints don't go away. The code is not how you create a solution. It's how you instruct the machine to replicate the solution you came up with.

austin-cheney 2y ago
I disagree with everything you commented. As a self-taught developer I absolutely promise you don't need to go to any school to learn the requisite skills to achieve a variety of complex things. You absolutely can learn from both trial and observation. Yes, everyone actually is potentially a developer, because there are no baselines to the contrary. I have met many developers that should never have been there professionally. Not everybody is capable of actual engineering though, as engineers follow processes and measure things. So many people writing code for a living absolutely cannot measure things. I think your fundamental problem is loss of empathy. Perhaps you understand your own limitations but do not seem to understand other people learn differently than you do or may have wildly different experiences than you have.
- skydhash 2y ago
  I interact daily with people who did not have the chance to go past primary school or to go to school at all. And they did have to learn skills through alternate means. I myself had to learn computing and programming with little to no electricity at home, and only a few people that owned computers (which I had to borrow). I do agree that you can learn with trial and observations, but it's way faster to have someone transmit the knowledge either in person or in books. And once learned, it is learned, unless you don't use that piece of knowledge for a long time and you forget about it. And it's exponential, learning things enable you to learn more things. You don't have to restart from scratch for similar situation. Like you don't have to learn letters again to learn a new Latin languages. > Not everybody is capable of actual engineering though, as engineers follow processes and measure things They are capable of it. It's just that most people don't care about that if there is another way to get what they need (including getting other people to do it)
  - gopalv 2y ago
    > I do agree that you can learn with trial and observations, but it's way faster to have someone transmit the knowledge either in person or in books. This entirely depends on the teacher or the book author. The "do not try anything new, but repeat after me" is a popular method of teaching things when we talk about skills, but often the next step is not just pursued but entirely discouraged. There is a particular point where a teacher says "some of you might fail, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make" & ask people to do something entirely new by themselves. That is cross-over point where being self-taught has some advantages, because you have external guidance but not instruction. If you're the kind of person who has failed a lot learning basics, then those new failures are less of a knock on your ego than if you had coasted through the early years without learning the parts which come after a failure. Maybe if we all had a clear memory of "learning to walk", it would help - six+ months of falling down and not giving up, which most of us have done once.
- catlover76 2y ago
  [dead]
- 2y ago

austin-cheney 2y ago

I disagree with everything you commented. As a self-taught developer I absolutely promise you don't need to go to any school to learn the requisite skills to achieve a variety of complex things. You absolutely can learn from both trial and observation. Yes, everyone actually is potentially a developer, because there are no baselines to the contrary. I have met many developers that should never have been there professionally. Not everybody is capable of actual engineering though, as engineers follow processes and measure things. So many people writing code for a living absolutely cannot measure things. I think your fundamental problem is loss of empathy. Perhaps you understand your own limitations but do not seem to understand other people learn differently than you do or may have wildly different experiences than you have.

skydhash 2y ago
I interact daily with people who did not have the chance to go past primary school or to go to school at all. And they did have to learn skills through alternate means. I myself had to learn computing and programming with little to no electricity at home, and only a few people that owned computers (which I had to borrow). I do agree that you can learn with trial and observations, but it's way faster to have someone transmit the knowledge either in person or in books. And once learned, it is learned, unless you don't use that piece of knowledge for a long time and you forget about it. And it's exponential, learning things enable you to learn more things. You don't have to restart from scratch for similar situation. Like you don't have to learn letters again to learn a new Latin languages. > Not everybody is capable of actual engineering though, as engineers follow processes and measure things They are capable of it. It's just that most people don't care about that if there is another way to get what they need (including getting other people to do it)
- gopalv 2y ago
  > I do agree that you can learn with trial and observations, but it's way faster to have someone transmit the knowledge either in person or in books. This entirely depends on the teacher or the book author. The "do not try anything new, but repeat after me" is a popular method of teaching things when we talk about skills, but often the next step is not just pursued but entirely discouraged. There is a particular point where a teacher says "some of you might fail, but it is a sacrifice I am willing to make" & ask people to do something entirely new by themselves. That is cross-over point where being self-taught has some advantages, because you have external guidance but not instruction. If you're the kind of person who has failed a lot learning basics, then those new failures are less of a knock on your ego than if you had coasted through the early years without learning the parts which come after a failure. Maybe if we all had a clear memory of "learning to walk", it would help - six+ months of falling down and not giving up, which most of us have done once.
catlover76 2y ago
[dead]
2y ago