This is a good question, and I don't think you should be downvoted.
It is important for several reasons:
- As other commenters pointed out, filtering, adapting and integrating ChatGPT output has a better ROI with experts.
- An expert will know the ROI of using ChatGPT, including on the long run, and can assess if it's worth it or not. A non expert will use it for as long as it works, and can hit a wall of technical debts accumulated from the GPT usage that will now sunk the cost of the entire operation.
- Expertise comes with a lot of implicit knowledge that ChatGPT doesn't access to.
- ChatGPT doesn't learn from mistakes in the way humans does. And humans don't share the mistakes they made as much. And experts have made all the mistakes.
- ChatGPT tries very hard not to not be opinionated, or to have an opinion that will offend the least amount of people. IRL though, you want opinionated takes.
There are, however, many situations where being an expert to benefit from ChatGPT is no required. I also find that sometimes being an expert prevents me from getting the most of ChatGPT, because I stick to what I know instead of embracing novel workflows. I have a friend coding things with repeated ChatGPT copy/paste loops over days, and they have done great things with it.
Should this be the take away? It looks to me that people are building pipelines without taking into account that they change roles every time they have to build a package, from a package consumer to a package packager. Even if the package developers set an upper bound on the build dependency it is the packagers responsibility to provide a deterministic build environment.
When I felt like writing again after years of closing my previous blog, it though about it for a while before committing to https://bitecode.dev.
But eventually, I realized that
- I also write for myself, not just for others.
- People like reading things without having to prompt for it. So they will read the blog because it's nice and topics come to them even if they don't think that they need to know.
- ChatGPT doesn't have opinion. It tries very hard to be balanced. Your blog will have an opinion.
- There is more to the experience you provide than just knowledge. You can add tools, exercises, videos, etc. Which GPT cannot, for now, replicate.
- GPT can replicate style, but will not by default. People will come for your style as well. And pics. And design. And jokes.
- People value the interaction they feel when they content seems like there is a person behind it. They get attached. They develop sympathy.
- A blog puts things in context. "If you want to know that, you probably need to know that". It also gives information about what happen right now.
- Humans curate. In a world where creating crappy content is very cheap, a good filter has tremendous value.
So yes, you will be scanned, and replicated. Doesn't mean you don't have value in writing what you do.
And making something of value is nice.
This may change in 10 years or so. Maybe the LLM will be able to do all that. But depriving yourself of a rewarding experience right now for the fear of what might happen is not worth it.
Plants, mushrooms and animals have contained active substances forever, it would be surprising that after millenniums of trials and errors, the people of this time didn't settle on a few things that worked.
Sure, but are there examples besides aspirin and opiates? Unsurprisingly those are pain medications, since it was immediately obvious that they work.
The other class of drug that would obviously be recognized as effective are psychoactives such as alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine.
By contrast I can't imagine how they could judge the efficacy of e.g. blood pressure medications back in those days, even though there are purely herbal treatments like aged garlic that certainly do have an effect.
Another notable category of ancient drugs is laxatives.
The first synthetic drugs did not begin to appear until around the mid-1800s. In 1832 chloral hydrate was produced, which was the first synthetic sleeping drug, but it wasn't used clinically until 1869.
Pretty much everything we now use as herbal tea, if highly concentrated, will have a notable effect.
E.G: Thyme has well known antimicrobial properties and thymol is (or at least was) a component of commercial mouthwash.
Even when we don't make drugs out of the plant itself, it could have been used for the properties we know about today.
E.G: common vervain is known to have diuretic properties, so it's not a long shot to think it has been used for this particular reason at some point. Today we use diuretic to treat heart failure, liver cirrhosis, or hypertension. While they may not have had any way to catalog all this, it seems unlikely nobody ever associated the consumption of a lot of diuretic with people getting better for one reason or another.
People were not dumb, and there were a lot of them, for a long time. They likely tried a lot of combinations of things, on purpose or by accident.
That people tend to think of our ancestors as being less intelligent is one of my pet peeves. There is no reason to even suspect that they weren't at least as smart as modern man.
What they lacked was the accumulation of knowledge that time gives. "If I see further, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants."
Also, many of them were too busy doing repetitive tasks and didn't have time to innovate. Technology freed us from many of the repetitive tasks that were required for survival, so we have more available brain time. Also, improved communication helps us avoid wasting time discovering the same thing over and over.
Medieval peasants had the same brain as we have, but without proper education, limited comfort and material means, days spent working the land, and slow and limited communication, no wonder much findings came of them. And because they didn't have the tools we have today, a lot of peasants were needed to keep the general population fed. Only the higher classes had the means to conduct proper research.
Today, at least in developed countries, it is like all of us, including farmers are "high class". We all have access to knowledge, instant worldwide communication, and some level of comfort. Repetitive, draining jobs are still a thing, but on a global population level, we need less of them for survival. Not everyone is a genius, but we have a much greater pool of available geniuses, and their abilities are better exploited.
Counterpoint, look around all all of the dumb people currently alive. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, true, but that giant is standing on a brobdingnagian mountain of stupid people.
Lots of examples. 'Thorsons Introductory Guide to Medical Herbalism' is, for example, both required reading for many modern medical degrees and a collection of hundreds (of documented; more realistically, thousands) of years of the medical practice of herbalism.
And if you want some anecdata, I've used plenty of preparations from that text for nausea, fever, menstrual cramps (not mine, clearly), poor clotting, sinus congestion, and likely some things that are slipping my mind.
Plants are where we get a lot of medicines from, and while modern pharmaceutical companies may prefer that information not get spread around (it's basically the whole reason we don't have a widespread practice of western medical herbalism in the US), but the fact remains that if you know how to get the medicine out of the plant, it's still totally possible to do so.
> No, its because the west rejects the "wooo" and makes a pill out of the part that works.
No, the west makes a pill out of the part that's commercially profitable, which is a very different set of criteria than "works". Things like shelf life/stability, cost and availability, dose:response curves that are very predictable for the entire human population, etc.
What goes into pills has far more to do with what works for business than what works for people.
It's overly reductionist to assume that all herbal remedies are the result of 1, maybe 2 active ingredients. The incentive for making a pill is less about efficacy and more about patentability. I can't patent camphor, but I can patent a 3% menthol & 3% camphor ointment suspended in a gel base (Fast Freeze).
I don't think it's fair to say the west as a supposed monolith rejects "woo", especially given the popularity of pseudoscience re: vaccines, homeopathy, Reiki, acupuncture, cleanses, etc.
It sounds like you’re implying there is Western medicine and “pseudoscience”.
In other parts of the world they call this crap “white people medicine” and stick with the natural remedies. It just lacks a shiny seal of approval from the FDA/EU regulatory body, which makes it “pseudoscience”. We all know that science is totally incorruptible and always true though!
Why take a thing that’s been known for thousands of years to be perfectly safe, when you can take this thing invented in a lab and tested on mice for 10?
> George Washington woke up at 2 a.m. on Dec. 14, 1799, with a sore throat. After a series of medical procedures, including the draining of nearly 40 percent of his blood, he died that evening.
Old medicine and medical treatments were absolutely lethal compared to what we have in modern times.
We certainly improved, but in 1799 I think it was already the age of pseudoscientific medicine, where people thought they were superior to traditional herbalist, simply because they read some books. In other words, I don't think any traditional medicine man would have done that treatment.
(Apart from that, I surely go to a hospital if I am really sick, but for everything light, I rather find something else, than some drug, where I don't know if it is helping me, or the doctors pension fund)
Iatrogenic deaths are still incredibly high today. Modern medicine is the evolution of the doctors regarded highly enough to treat the president, not the people who filled their prescriptions in the woods.
Earth has been known to be flat, women and POC have been known to be inferior and homosexuality has been known to be a sin.
But thankfully, humanity moves on, and among other innovations, came up with such things as statistical methods and drug testing. But if you so desire, you're absolutely free to distrust modern western medicine — after all, a lot of prominent people do, for example, late Steve Jobs.
America doesn't prescribe some remedies, herbal or otherwise, because they aren't FDA approved due to an unnecessarily burdensome approval process that costs tens of millions of dollars to navigate, alongside a culture of civil lawsuits that causes doctors to act with excessive caution.
When it’s not blisteringly hot out we actually will take a 30-45 minute walk around midday. Helps a ton and has a side effect of allowing my subconscious to solve the problems I’ve been stuck on.
Oh man the struggle in the real. I quit zoom at exactly 5pm and run downstairs and out the door for daycare. I’m at daycare around 5:20 and to pick up the little one to come home, cook, eat, bath and bed time.
The lack of time to decompress after the day (like commutes used to help with before I went fully remote) can be gruelling at times
I'm inclined to believe proper agile is a myth. I have never seen it done correctly, and it's always spoken about ideally. All forms of agile I have seen or heard about always breaks down in real businesses environments.
The Agile Industrial Complex is a horror show, but that doesn't mean it's not possible to do agile well.
There absolutely is a way of doing agile well, I've been involved in a number of teams that did. And it worked extremely well. In fact, we did agile way before the agile manifesto came out, and before I was aware of there being a name for the things we were doing. We were just doing them because they make sense, they make us go fast and they let us have fun while doing it. Which is basically what the XP people said when they started writing things down. They never claimed to have invented a brand new way of creating software. No, they were observing that certain teams were very productive, and looked at what those teams were doing. If there was a pattern. Spoiler: there was.
Anyway, I also introduced agile "practices" in a large company. Well, in a small team in a large company. We didn't do a single one of the practices the Agile Industrial Complex proposes and often mandates. The much more important team next to us did. They did all the AIC practices. We did the technical. And interacted closely. Did TDD, worked on trunk, paired when necessary, did stuff alone when not. Did the simplest thing that could possible work. ("Where's your database?" "We'll put it in when we need it". <later> "Oh we're done. I guess we didn't need the database ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" ).
The more important team next to us that was doing Scrum with the standups and whathaveyounot failed. We delivered. Hmm.
And if you can point to the practices being promoted by the AIC as being in direct and obvious conflict with, for example, what's written the Agile Manifesto, and can in fact point to ways of doing it right that are in harmony with the AM and in conflict with the AIC, then it ain't a No True Scotsman fallacy. It's a simple case of the AIC doing it wrong.
I too have seen great agile. However, it required the team to be in control of its own destiny. Namely, we didn’t have deadlines and the goals we reported against were impact. That meant we could run no-weekly sprints while safely fitting delivery into the goal reporting timetable.
In most companies, it seems management is incapable of measuring progress other than “will X be done before Y date”.
maybe the idea of "proper agile" is too vague to even be useful?
"That's not agile"
Has become one of the most annoying arguments I've ever heard. As someone who experienced a corporate takeover of agile "consultants", I can tell you, it is one of the hardest things to try and deal with people who have their own idea about agile.
"Proper agile" is too "team specific" that maybe it shouldn't have been a "manifesto", just call it good "team practices" and maybe it wouldn't have become such a cult
I’m adding that to my list of corporate tech paradoxes
It joins:
- Innovation departments being built the least innovative departments you’ll ever meet
- HR departments being the worst at dealing with people
I always enjoyed the irony of rigid adherence to agile processes. My philosophy has always been to ask "what are our goals" and then figure out how to make our process be in service of those goals. Scrum does provide some useful frameworks for estimation and planning and continual reflection & improvement.
Agile as a noun is a myth. Agile as an adjective is a journey. When I've seen a company being agile and responding to change it's not because they are using some system they learned at a seminar, it's because they trust their engineers to do the technical work, trust their product people to have solid relationships with customers, and empower both groups both in their individual roles and when communicating with each other.
All of this is to say that I agree with you. 'Agile Methodologies' are a crutch for companies that cannot tolerate agility
I'm not sure you have brought that reason. A sample size of 3 where only one did better than "fairly well" would not be my reason to advocate for "Agile" to be the "industry standard."
Across my sample size of about 7, half were maybe better than terrible, but only two were good enough where I would say it helped more than it hurt.
The tech industry I think would do well to more rigorously study "Agile" and do some A/B testing. Unfortunately this problem space feels like trying to A/B test forms of government. The downsides are generally known after the fact, are context specific, and there are few good ways to run a control
same for the legendary "maintainable/evolvable/perfectly encapsulated code". yes, until the team is very skilled, everyone is disciplined and there are tight processes around learning the architecture. 3 bad hires later because "investors want growth!!1" and you're done :D
cool links, thanks for sharing. I also share your feelings, but reality (or burnout) is starting to take its toll on me and I see too much uninterested people working as SWEs nowadays. I mean, tooling is probably part of the problem, but quality is going downhill real fast, with people with 2/3 years on the job not understanding simple things like HexArch or basic patterns (not advocating for anything, just mentioning something that should be common knowledge in 2023).
I'm starting to think that if we want to maintain this "race to the bottom" pace, we need a more industrialized/blue collar approach and be more less about the person and more about the tool. Most jobs in my area are web crud controlling a transaction script. there is no problem to solve.
I mean, tooling is probably part of the problem, but quality is going downhill real fast, with people with 2/3 years on the job not understanding simple things
I agree but I also wonder why we would expect them to.
Many coming into the industry have had little formal education in CS or SE. Employers providing substantial training is mostly a thing of the past because retention and professional development for employees has mostly been deprecated in favour of the rapid job-hopping culture. And for a while now it's been such an employee's market that developers haven't needed to invest their own time and money into professional development in order to progress their careers.
So even for relatively senior devs it's easily possible that they could have little academic education, little professional training provided by any of their employers, and little incentive to spend their own time studying. Their understanding might come from nothing but a few years of experience working on only 2 or 3 different products and - if they're lucky - some ideas they've been exposed to through more experienced mentors, team leads and code reviewers.
I personally believe our industry would be infinitely better if we could get back to the idea that professional development is important and employers should both look for people who've been learning and then support their people's ongoing learning themselves. Maybe we can even do that now that the gold rush is over and job-hopping every five minutes for a pay and title bump is no longer the most reliable way to climb the career ladder.
The key differences from the most common implementation of agile are bigger delivered chunks, multiple sets of smaller self driven teams, no highly prescriptive ways of working, and avoiding constant 'sprinting' with at least two weeks dedicated to bug fixing, maintenance, and retros/self improvement between 'sprints'.
After many years of using all systems in place, I use a mixed of several stats:
- every week, I print my calendar for the week
- I used a chat thread to myself for notes
- long term stuff goes into productivity apps (todos, cals, etc)
This means I most of my organization on the paper sheet, and only a few minutes on apps, to basically sort things out and put what's important back on paper.
It's more satisfying, it's faster, more flexible, and for some reason, manipulating something on paper commits me more than on screen.
It also don't run out of battery, can be read in the sun, and has no start up time, no clicks.
