Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's doing a pretty good job of imitating those "experts" then too
Which experts? People who are actually experts in their field?
These, and the fakers and impostors too.
Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
261–270 of 334 posts
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's doing a pretty good job of imitating those "experts" then too
Not a pretty good job, a better job, because, from (it's algerbraic based) imitation, differently from these "experts", it doesn't exclude expressing the same concepts in a different level of abstraction and authoring a coherent story with reasonable accurate analogies. Precisely all the things they omit.
The experts that I work with (PhDs conducting research in their fields) are easy to tell apart from impostors. Impostors can't accurately cite sources and almost never tell me that they don't know something. Essentially all of the actual experts that I personally work with both cite sources and tell me when they don't know something and sometimes even help me figure out how to find out.
ChatGPT regularly makes up citations out of thin air including DOIs
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#263The problem is most people do not try to put any effort into understanding what they are doing by the computer. When you ask your wife to fetch you from work at 5 you don't have to explain: * That she needs to take a car, * That there must be enough fuel in it, * That she has to plan some time for the drive and add extra if traffic is expected on the way, * That she needs to let you know if there are unforeseen circu…
Non-specialists passively build detailed mental models through experience and associations, and when there's no consistency between implementations, there's no way for that to happen. The reason specialists understand computer usage is because they understand how computers function at a low level, and are trained to expect certain necessary features whether or not there are any indications of those features in the interface. It's not because we're more thorough or have a better attention to detail.
The physical existence of a car gives a lot of indications of the function of a car. People deal with computers through arbitrary idiosyncratic curated interfaces that for business purposes often plot against their users.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#264I used to think that I find tech stuff easy because I'm used to it (and there's certainly some truth to it), but if that was all of it than I would expect myself to behave like tech illiterate people in domains that are foreign to me.
And yet this isn't so.
The reality is that peoples problem solving skills are absolutely atrocious. They don't even try to figure shit out. The maximum number of inferential steps the average person is willing (or able?) to make before throwing their hands up and exclaiming "this is impossible" seems to be somewhere between 0.5 and 2.
There seems to be just enough stuff you can do without having to ever really think for yourself that people are content with not understanding.
This is so far away from my own experience that I really struggle with understanding it. Obvious knowledge gaps and noticeable confusion are two of my biggest motivators. I cannot stand not understanding. It feels like giving up agency.
Wow. I got quite angry there for a second. I guess I need to examine that frustration a little more.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish CLIs had better discoverability. That's one of the first principles of UX. There should be a library that makes it easy for developers to include a basic GUI with a CLI
> There should be a library that makes it easy for developers to include a basic GUI with a CLI There are. For example, in Python, Gooey provides that. [0] [0]: https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey
Good to know!
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I really don't understand the aversion to examples. The sorta-standard format for man pages is... extremely confusing, even after a decade of using them.
“you should be smart enough to figure this out from here” bravado probably for some cases.
You do realize that writing good docs takes time, skill, and effort, right? Not to mention the docs you're blanketly scorning at were most likely written on someone's spare time who has no obligation to do so.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#267The problem is most people do not try to put any effort into understanding what they are doing by the computer. When you ask your wife to fetch you from work at 5 you don't have to explain: * That she needs to take a car, * That there must be enough fuel in it, * That she has to plan some time for the drive and add extra if traffic is expected on the way, * That she needs to let you know if there are unforeseen circu…
Your examples aren't equivalent. "Would your print out my boarding pass?" is equivalent to "would you pick me up from work?" Whereas "the car won't start" is equivalent to "the printer isn't working." Many people know how to diagnose and resolve simple car issues, like a dead battery, just as many people know how to fix a printer that isn't working.
The example the GP mentioned is checking if the printer is on. That should be no more harder than checking if the light is on in your room.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#268I wrote an essay once that was nominally about using Pysimplegui to get folks to use your software, but is really about understanding ways to make your software accessible to people without your level of coding ability: https://cushychicken.github.io/python-guis-for-heretics/ Might find it interesting.
Hey thanks, this is great.
I have a simple py script I am trying to deploy to small team that does some web scraping and slicing/dicing of data from internal repositories. I had been starting to learn PyQT but it was really overkill for what I needed to do, which was a simple menu of options and input/output file selection.
A lot of HN devs don't realize this truth about working in industries that have not historically been software-focused:
It’s a brutal reality, but if you’re the sole person in your group who’s figured out enough to:
Install Python, and use it to run command line scripts,
Run Cygwin or the Linux Subsystem for Windows on your work Windows machine,
Get your hands on a Linux machine/VM for writing scripts,
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#269most devs I've worked with in my career are absolutely terrified of CLI, and if their IDE doesn't hold their hand they are completely worthless.
Re: Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
One additional point: since Excel packages the code with the data, when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did and learn on the job. This is also why Jupyter notebooks are so powerful. If instead of Excel they run a bunch of scripts and just send me the output, I am left much less empowered.
> when somebody sends me a spreadsheet with functionality I've never seen before it's extremely easy to figure out what they did a You must have encountered only very simple spreadsheets. I've had to reverse engineer a number of technical spreadsheets that took days of full time sweated effort to merely understand the principles and more days again to extract the methods accurately enough so that they could be reimpl…
Think about how much harder it would be if you couldn't see the inputs, code, and outputs all together at once. The difficulty you found has little to do with Excel; you were trying to learn a whole new domain by reverse-engineering a model created by an SME. Of course it took multiple days of effort to merely(!?) "understand the principles" of a brand new technical domain. Ideally the SME should be explaining those things to you as well.