It depends on how hard you push the envelope. The closer you get to doing something no one has ever done before, the more likely you are to be in your own.
Of course, any time you're doing something no one has ever done before, it's prudent to consider whether you should.
Lol this applies to so many things. Maybe there's some prestige to doing something for the first time, but really there were probably a dozen people that contemplated it and decided against it for good reasons.
Of course, any time you’re doing something no one has ever done before, it’s prudent to consider whether you should.
As a pentester I approve this message
I still have to look up basic things even when I'm doing that, sadly.
Things like "how do I reverse an array?" Will always be in my Google history because I can't remember ".reverse" exists.
Could I reimplement ".reverse" or just read the docs for an array? Yes. Will I? Never.
I feel you, my problem is that I switch between languages too much. I'm learning rust right now as a hobby, but I'm technically a frontend dev with years of experience in angular and react, and a couple months ago I have been put on a legacy rails project, which we're rewriting for Angular x Java stack (thankfully my roommate is a Java backend dev, he's been a lot of help) and on top of this I maintain my Cyberpunk 2077 mods written in lua, c++ and redscript (swift-like).
Send help.
How do I do thing that I do every day, but in this language I'm using today
Modding is definitely a nightmare though. One day I'm writing the latest python. The next I'm looking at some C library that was published half a decade before I was born and is for some reason deep in the bowels of the game engine I'm modding
Doing something nobody has ever done before should be something we strive for.
Do we really need more websites that are really just front-ends on databases?
I'm old enough that when I was in school, teachers were telling us that we'd never have calculators in our pockets wherever we'd go.
I'm that old, too. Can you imagine a student back then saying, "I'll have a calculator, flashlight, camera, video recorder, music collection, and games to pass the times I have to wait on others."
"Oh yeah and it's also a computer that's more powerful than any computer you've ever laid eyes on that has access to an unimaginable wealth of human knowledge via a wireless connection to the Internet."
The Internet is a communications tool, used the world over, where people come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another!
I listened recently to somebody on a podcast saying that only psychos or close family would dial you in this day and age... And I kinda agree.
Wikipedia was started in 2001, and Google in 1998. Who was saying this to you when you were 2?
They said "no Google and no Wikipedia," not "Google and Wikipedia were not as widespread as they are today"
The subject became “stupid shit teachers say that is not applicable in the real world” and in that context the subject never changed. They were probably told “you won’t have a calculator in your pocket all the time” as well as “don’t using the internet(google and Wikipedia) as sources” which was very common to be told around the time when they would have been in school. I’m not attacking you I just think you misunderstood as everyone is possible of doing.
This wasn't all that long ago though. I'm only in my 30's and was told this in elementary school in the 90's and early 2000's. The iPhone was first released only 16 years ago.
I was told this, too, but when I got to Functions and Analytical Geometry, they started suggesting calculators. Now kids have laptops, gees.
Not really. The first ones were quite expensive, and it was uncommon to have one on your person at all times like we now do with smartphones.
Yes really, if your job requires lots of calculations you'd be stupid not to have one, even back when they were expensive.
Every machinist I know, even the crusty old ones, carry a calculator in their pocket. It's indispensable. Why wouldn't you carry one if you need it all the time?
Pretty sure the teacher wasn't assuming that every single child in class was going to be a machinist.
In fact, most people aren't machinists.
And yet my point stands: if you need to do a lot of calculations at your job, you'd be stupid not to have a calculator in your pocket. And if you don't, then the time it takes to find a calculator will be negligible.
Uh what, that's literally the point lol. The "you won't have a calculator" has been complete and utter bullshit for literally over half a century.
It's even more stupid when it's the same class that required the purchase of a TI-85 to complete the course.
There was a period of time when I wore only carpenter jeans so I could fit my TI-83 in my pocket and I'm still not ashamed
Googling does become a hell of a lot easier if you know what the concept you're looking for is called.
I find myself going to ChatGPT for this stuff now.
"I'm trying to do something like [concept]. What is that called and can you give me an example"
Usually I get my results faster and easier than Google.
be careful using it as your only source of truth, even more so when you don't know what you're searching for exactly
While I never had it happen, it could give you wrong command line switches that do damage. For example, when I asked how I could list volumes attached to an AWS instance, it gave me a "modify-volume" command instead of "describe-volume" command. Thankfully, I caught that before I cut and paste it.
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It's bad enough at programming that you can often see the problems without the help of the compiler
Last thing I asked it for, after the fourth draft still had undeclared variables and called imaginary libraries (which if they existed would be great)
It was good for coming up with a nice structure for a small program
You can ask it for source now with browser integration. Previously the browser extension was a separate model with gpt3.5 which was pretty bad, now it's just integrated into gp4. It works a million times better and it's great that it doesn't break the flow of the conversation.
I had an emailed a question that I didn't really know where to go with, so I asked Copilot to answer the email factually. Sent that email with a note of ai origin, but it was close enough and got us into right track
I've made it two decades in IT and related fields by searching for answers using Google. I accidentally took my laziness, love of automation, and ability to Google and became an SRE. Then I accidentally became a senior software engineer because the director on that side of the house liked my initiative and was sure my skills would translate. I protested but got a substantial bump to do it.
I'm failing upwards by abusing stack overflow and search engines.
Yep. I've got company access to GitHub Copilot, a personal subscription to ChatGPT, and I use Bing Copilot.
Bing and ChatGPT have a lot of utility overlap. Those things don't do my job for me but they do generate initial ideas and double check my code. I also use GPT as my rubber duck that kind of talks back. I literally tell it to be a rubber duck and pretend to know nothing, then chat with it. It's pretty great for that. Better than the bear that sits on my desk, but not as fun to look at.
Those are the newest tools in my arsenal of "Make computers do my job and rake in the paycheck".
I ask ChatGPT to roleplay as my 90s sitcom programming teachers Chip Bytefield, makes me giggle a lot more when I use it for 'poor mans' peer programming :-). Gonna try your idea too, sound fun!
"There is no point in reinventing the wheel" is my favorite saying when it comes to things like this.
If something has been done over and over again, there is no point in doing it yourself from scratch. It wastes time, money, and effort that could be spent on creating something new.
Humanity's greatest strength is being able to add to the previous generation's knowledge base, too!
If we had to relearn how to do the same things in the same way, in every generation, we would still be in the stone age...
When I manage folks, I expect them to steal if its already been done and especially if it's been done to death.
If I relied on my college CS textbooks as reference for anything I code now, not only would it have been outdated 2 years after purchase, but it's been ten damn years now. Only actual reference books I have are for theory. And even then it's probably not the best source anymore.
there is no point in doing it yourself from scratch.
Learning. The point is to learn.
You don't have to learn everything that way, but you understand things a lot better when you've built them from scratch, and that underlying foundation enhances the entire knowledge stack.
I like both of your guys' points. Keeping all old knowledge while deconstructing and rebuilding it to make it understandable to newer generations is pretty great in my opinion
I literally made money on a contract this year doing something I’d never even done. Thank you google. Love it
I'd : contraction I + had, past participle active. Indicative of something having been done by the subject (in first person) in the past.
"I did something I had never done (before / in the past).
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Looks like everyone but you understood it correctly - maybe you should brush up on your language comprehension skills?
Take an English class, I'm sure YouTube has a good video explaining it (basically there are different "degrees" of past tense, did / had done etc.)
Well the word "before" doesn't need to implicit. The "had" in I'd is more than enough past for the sentence to make sense
In the English language, an action I "had done" is before an action I "did." It's a grammatical case, not an inference.
I did do this for web dev for a government contract. I got brought on for mobile optimizations but ended up doing full UI/UX design and marketing copy with no experience. All through their shitty in house WYSIWYG. $60/hr for a full year lol.
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In IT contracting (at least the fields I'm around) it's quite common that "being able to acquire new skills quickly" is one of the skills you get paid for, and the time needed for you to do that is accounted for in the project planning.
A meme programming language would be cool.
I can't find one in this list:
https://esolangs.org/wiki/Joke_language_list
As someone who worked in tech support and a sys admin role, yes, and thank you. I would say 90% of all issues and problems I had were either solved or pointed in the right direction since 2006, the year I started.
I'll do you one better. I've learned that in the absence of online information for a bug or fault, that I'm most likely attempting something that is better solved another way. Like, nobody does it like the harebrained thing I just invented, so it's just me and everyone else with a (different) working solution.
My teacher dead ass said that to me when I was 9 and had a Casio wrist watch with a calculator on it.
Watches with calculator functionality have existed since 1970 so... Nothing millennial or zoomer about it. It's firmly in boomer territory.
Do teachers actually say this these days? Or are you making it up just for the sake of the meme.
for us oldbies, who went to school before the internet was popular, it used to be "You won't have a calculator with you everywhere you go!"
You won't always have access to books from a printing press, youngster, so you must derive all knowledge from first principles!
And ftr, there's always been a good reason to learn things from first principles, and for teachers to encourage students to practice learning from first principles. You end up with a deeper understanding about it, can answer more questions on your own, and can ask better questions and get faster answers, if you understand the layers beneath your question.
That's still no excuse for teachers being dishonest about the reason though. I don't believe that teachers in the 70's and 80's thought calculators were just gonna go away.
As a teacher, no. Now we say don't trust the Google summary, click a link for more information!
Funny. In my day Wikipedia just came out and they used to give the same advice. In comparison, I would wager any random wiki article has a better chance of being more reliable and a better answer to your question than a Google summary.
Eh, there are entire categories of questions that can't and shouldn't be answered by searching wikipedia. A technical howto, for example, doesn't belong on wikipedia because wikipedia articles are listings of facts, not narratives about following a process. They just aren't meant for, or structured for, that type of question.
Stackoverflow also leaves a lot to be desired in that area, though, so you still need a search engine to find them.
Also might be good to recommend them to use multiple links / sources, and look for opposite views to broaden their perspectives on topics.
Googling problems certainly helps but you still need enough knowledge to define the problem, Google it, and implement the solution.
I get the impression that a lot of posted solutions are from people who actually spoke to high level tech support for various hardware/software because how else would they know things like what obscure registry key with a very arbitrary name to add?
That’s a big part people don’t understand is you need to know enough about your problem to google the correct terms and find what you need. Googling itself is a learned skill.
This is so true. That's why there's no shame in using Google or Duckduckgo or even Chatgpt. You have to know enough to phrase the right question, know how to filter the right answer, and then use it.
I can Google a Chinese dictionary, but that won't make me fluent in Chinese.
Google search results have become so bad i barely use it today. Its even better to use chatgpt. You have to take every answer with a grain of salt but usually it can give you a few options and give you resources to work with. Google search sucks ass. The amount of times i do NOT find what im searching for is way too high
Well, you need the basics of software development to start with. But sure, I'm not going to make my own implementation for every problem I come across. That would be insanity and a colossal waste of time.
However, people googling or using ChatGPT to create code they do not understand themselves, are just cargo cult programming, and it will bite them in the arse/ass (delete as applicable).
Im full time IT, a huge chunk of my job was learned through google. My current position looked incredibly different before we had phones and could research everything on the fly. I feel bad for tech's who didn't have access to research tools like we do now.
I work in controls and I couldn't imagine how life was working with allen bradley stuff pre internet. there's a manual for everything
Well, for once it was far smaller code base and significantly simpler. Better optimized though since hardware was very limited. Middleware nightmare we are currently living in is no joke. Soon we'll have to have search engine locally indexing stuff because code grew so big. People just include everything without thinking. Yea sure pull entire web browser for your note taking app because they were too lazy to learn few calls to UI library.
Searching does help, but hey, you have to know what to search for and then how to apply the findings.