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Beej's Guide to Git

beej.us

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Re: Beej's Guide to Git

#21

Post by yoyohello13 »

jonahx wrote: post #15
yoyohello13 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more efficient to have one reference book rather than generating entire new 20 chapter books for every person. I also think if you are at the “don’t know what you don’t know” point of learning a topic it’s very hard to direct an AI to generate comprehensive learning material.

> Seems more efficient to have one reference book rather than generating entire new 20 chapter books for every person. The main advantage of LLMs is that you can ask specific questions about things that confuse you, which makes iterating to a correct mental model much faster. It's like having your own personal tutor at your beck and call. Good guidebooks attempt to do this statically... anticipate questions and confu…

I think a mix is the right approach. I’ve used LLMs to learn a variety of topics. I like having a good book to provide structure and a foundation to anchor my learning. Then use LLMs to explore the topics I need more help with.

When it’s just a book. I find myself having questions like you mentioned. When it’s just LLMs I feel like I don’t have any structure for my mind to hold on to.

I also feel like there is an art to picking the right order to approach learning a topic, which authors are better at than LLMs.

Re: Beej's Guide to Git

#22

Post by lucasoshiro »

boneitis wrote: post #13

I'm really interested and really hoping this is something I can sink my teeth into. I've always had frustrating experiences with trying to wrap my head around git and have to regularly use it at my job. Branching, making commits, and creating pull requests come easy, but beyond that, I know utterly nothing about it.

One mistake that I see people making about Git is trying to learn more commands, more flags, more tricks, but not trying to really understand how it works. Perhaps it's your case. You know Git enough to use in your daily basis, so maybe it's time to dive into a lower level and then everything else will be natural.

I strongly suggest reading Pro Git, the official Git book by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub, available for free here: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2.

I find it very pleasant to read and it really changed my perspective not only about Git but about how to write code in general. You don't need to read it entirely, but suggest at least these sections:

- 1.3 Getting Started - What is Git?: explains a little about snapshots and the three states

- 10.1 ~ 10.3 Plumbing and Porcelain, Git Objects and Git References: this explains Git in its lowest level, which is surprisingly simple but powerful. Those sections were enough for me to write my own "Git" (you can see it here: https://github.com/lucasoshiro/oshit)

Re: Beej's Guide to Git

#23

Post by yoyohello13 »

rco8786 wrote: post #10
yoyohello13 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more efficient to have one reference book rather than generating entire new 20 chapter books for every person. I also think if you are at the “don’t know what you don’t know” point of learning a topic it’s very hard to direct an AI to generate comprehensive learning material.

Definitely more efficient in terms of power consumed, not so in terms of human effort to build such guides across nearly every topic one could think of. But you're right, we shouldn't ignore the power consumption. I have found that asking AI "You are an expert teacher in X. I'd like to learn about X, where should I start?" is actually wildly effective.

> not so in terms of human effort to build such guides across nearly every topic

How will LLMs be trained if no humans are making learning materials?

Re: Beej's Guide to Git

#24

Post by elevatedastalt »

I regularly conduct 2 hr long "Intro to the Git Data Model" courses at my workplace (1-2 times a year). I literally take them into the .git directory and unzip the files to show how everything is just plain text representation of basic data structures. It's honestly cool to see it click in their heads.

We have a basic Git cookbook we share with any new joinees so that they start committing code, but most of them just follow it religiously and don't understand what's going on (unsurprisingly).

However, literally everyone who attends the course comes out with a reasonable working understanding of Git so that they know what's actually happening.

That does NOT mean that they know all the commands well, but those can be trivially Googled. As long as your mental model is right, the commands are not a big deal. And yet, the vast majority of the discussion on HN on every single Git post is about the command line.

Funnily enough the class sounds a lot like the alt text of https://xkcd.com/1597/ (Just think of branches as...), the difference is that that is unironically the right way to teach Git to a technical audience, and they will come out with a fundamental understanding of it that they will never forget.

I honestly think it's such a high ROI time investment that it's silly to not do it.

Re: Beej's Guide to Git

#25

Post by lucasoshiro »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #24

I regularly conduct 2 hr long "Intro to the Git Data Model" courses at my workplace (1-2 times a year). I literally take them into the .git directory and unzip the files to show how everything is just plain text representation of basic data structures. It's honestly cool to see it click in their heads. We have a basic Git cookbook we share with any new joinees so that they start committing code, but most of them just…

I did it once, I was indeed really nice, and the discussion that we did after was very cool. I put in the last slide of the presentation some questions for my colleagues answer based on the Git data model, e.g.: "Can we move a commit to another branch?" or "What guarantees that we don't have cycles in the commit graph". I was really satisfying that people came out thinking Git, not only using it!

Re: Beej's Guide to Git

#27

Post by elevatedastalt »

lucasoshiro wrote: post #25
elevatedastalt wrote: post #24

I regularly conduct 2 hr long "Intro to the Git Data Model" courses at my workplace (1-2 times a year). I literally take them into the .git directory and unzip the files to show how everything is just plain text representation of basic data structures. It's honestly cool to see it click in their heads. We have a basic Git cookbook we share with any new joinees so that they start committing code, but most of them just…

I did it once, I was indeed really nice, and the discussion that we did after was very cool. I put in the last slide of the presentation some questions for my colleagues answer based on the Git data model, e.g.: "Can we move a commit to another branch?" or "What guarantees that we don't have cycles in the commit graph". I was really satisfying that people came out thinking Git, not only using it!

Exactly, and it's such a high success rate!

This is precisely why it enrages me when all HN discussion about Git devolves to the same stuff about how it's complex and this and that.

A technical person who has general sense about basic data structures (Leetcode nonsense not needed) can be taught Git in under 2 hours and they will retain this knowledge forever.

If you can't invest that little time to learning a tool you will use everyday and instead will spend hours Googling and blindly copy-pasting Git commands, that's on you, not on Git.

Re: Beej's Guide to Git

#28

Post by nealabq »

jonahx wrote: post #15
yoyohello13 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more efficient to have one reference book rather than generating entire new 20 chapter books for every person. I also think if you are at the “don’t know what you don’t know” point of learning a topic it’s very hard to direct an AI to generate comprehensive learning material.

> Seems more efficient to have one reference book rather than generating entire new 20 chapter books for every person. The main advantage of LLMs is that you can ask specific questions about things that confuse you, which makes iterating to a correct mental model much faster. It's like having your own personal tutor at your beck and call. Good guidebooks attempt to do this statically... anticipate questions and confu…

This is a bit of a stretch, but it's a little like distillation, where you are extracting from the vast knowledge of the LLM and inserting those patterns into your brain. Where you have an incomplete or uncertain mental model and you ask a tutor to fill in the blanks.

Altho maybe I'm stretching the analogy too far.

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