3 ms·
>You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days. Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a helicopter and fly over the damn th
by darepublic 8mo ago
>You can still jump on a camel and cross the desert in 3 days. Have at it, you risk dying, but enjoy. Or you can just rent a helicopter and fly over the damn thing in a few hours. Your choice. Don't let people tell you it isn't travelling.
its obviously not wrong to fly over the desert in a helicopter. its a means to an end and can be completely preferable. I mean myself I'd prefer to be in a passenger jet even higher above it, at a further remove personally. But I wouldn't think that doing so makes me someone who knows the desert the same way as someone who has crossed it on foot. It is okay to prefer and utilize the power of "the next abstraction", but I think its rather pig headed to deny that nothing of value is lost to people who are mourning the passing of what they gained from intimate contact with the territory. and no it's not just about the literal typing. the advent of LLMs is not the 'end of typing', that is more reductionist failure to see the point.
- noslenwerdna 8mo agoI felt the same way about python when I was switching from C++ to python for data analysis
- ericmcer 8mo agoHow? Other then calling utility functions that C++ doesn't have you can't just like skip understanding what you are coding by using Python. If you are importing libraries that do stuff for you that wouldn't be any different than if someone wrote those libs in C++.
- noslenwerdna 8mo agoAre you saying I was incorrect for feeling that way? The reason is that you no longer really know what's going on. (And yes, that feeling would be the same if C++ had as rich a library of packages as python for numerical analysis.) If you are doing something that requires precision you need to know everything that is happening in that library. Also IIRC, I think not knowing what type something is bothered me at the time.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>Are you saying I was incorrect for feeling that way? I think they just wanted clarification. If a program is just "make lines of code do thing" then it wouldn't be different. But if you are used to ummanged code and considering the hardware architecture and memory management when you make a high performance program, working on python can feel like a black box. Things will slow down because there's a lot of "magic" weighing down the program. But not everyone works in that space. Unlike LLMs, at least thos box can be peered inside of you really want to.
- ericmcer 8mo agoReminds me of all the parables about kings who "pretend to be a common man" for a day and walk among their subjects and leave with some new enlightenment. The idea that you lose a ton of knowledge when you experience things through intermediaries is an old one.