I feel so validated by this article. I took two semesters of machine learning electives for my CS masters and feel nearly as ignorant and mystified as when I started. I worked so hard to create something useful and at the end of the day, my work felt like it was 96% example code with modifications hacked in to make it work. And in the end it was still terrible! At least now I know what people are talking about when discussing neural nets and their inner mechanics.
For now, ML research and development is too complicated and frustrating for me to dedicate the time and energy to become skilled in it.
It goes without saying that I could easily Google this myself, but I’ll ask anyway for those who are also wondering: what is the significance of HTML5 for this implementation? I’m not a web guy have gotten by with simple html css js and occasional templating when needed. Is HTML5 supporting some native programming?
Are howto articles considered spam? I found it useful and wanted to share it as well as save the link so I could find it later. If this post violates some code of etiquette I’ll not do it again.
Yeah it’s just a tutorial. I don’t really have any kind of platform for saving links I find useful so figured I’d post it here to save it for myself and maybe someone else would like it. I expected it to be completely ignored.
Perhaps this holds true more to fields that stem from hedonic experiences themselves like the arts, sports, games etc. I felt this way about music after graduating from music school. I became bored and jaded to music and had to spend several years not consuming music at all. Eventually I regained my love of it.
Conversely I don’t think this applies as much to sciences. After I pivoted away from music to become a software engineer, I discovered a world that never ceases to captivate me and elicit curiosity no matter how much I grow. In fact the more expertise I’ve developed, the more intense my interest becomes.
This post says everything I’ve been feeling. Ive been doing a lot of work with the Dronecan/UAVCAN protocol and nearly all their documentation is relegated to a Discord channel with no discussions about problems I’ve been trying to solve. A LOT of people have asked the same questions I’ve been asking and not one person has responded. Probably because their questions are ignore for a short time by busy people and then the questions are buried in a deluge of other questions from users. No doubt people have solved the same problems I’ve been coping with but have neglected to post what they’ve learned because discord does not allow you to make focused threads on a very specific topic without the content being buried. I’m getting more frustrated that projects are ditching the tried and true old school forums of yore where conversation can be focused and easily found.
The first time I took a rather complex library, learned it inside and out. I read documentation, did examples, wrote my own examples, implemented quick and dirty working versions, refactored, sometimes started again from scratch and eventually clicked with the material. It started slow, but once I really began to understand things, the code started to write itself quicker and quicker until I had stable production code that I’ve been maintaining for several years now. The beginning stages was like solving a big puzzle and built a lot of confidence.
Also in school we had to do some big projects like make a virtual machine from scratch and implement things likes call stacks, threading and memory management with our machine op codes. Doing a big long project that really pushes you out of your comfort zone is a BIG help and also can be an opportunity to do something really fun.
Edit: I left out the important role of asking questions, talking with others and even taking the time to compose a forum post or issue on github when it seems that I’ve truly exhausted all my options. Bottom line is, when I took my time and really tried my best to learn something new/difficult there was always an eventual breakthrough and consequential boost in confidence
I was big into Tintin as a kid as well in 2000. I checked out library books and eventually began to purchase my own volumes every time we went on a family road trip. My nephews recently found them at my parents and I’m happy to see they are enjoying them as much as I did.
Glad I stopped to read this. Thank you for sharing this wisdom. I’m always so eager to get to making stuff that I could very well see myself making the same mistake.
If that’s your preferred MO, then I can’t argue with that. But based off your response, it seems like you haven’t tried it yet. I would recommend at least giving it a try.
I think one of the great strengths of AI (smol developer in mind) is to greatly speed up the development process by reducing busy work. How many times do you need to write a CRUD app from scratch? Sure templates exist but having a buddy that can do a lot of the tedious work up front while also implementing the basic structure with your design in mind can save you hours of work. Far more powerful than some template that can leave you with a bunch of extra crap and irrelevant libraries.
More broadly speaking, AI applications like chatGPT can save you a ton of time looking up a bunch of tools just to accomplish an incredibly boring task. This can help to keep you focused on the far more interesting and challenging aspects of work. Often, the solutions yielded from these interactions end up revealing to me a built in bash tool or python lib that I had no idea even existed. To me it’s like stackoverflow on steroids if you know how to use it
Also, AI chat bots can be extremely effective learning resources. A few weeks ago, I wanted to implement a digital low pass audio filter and didn’t know more than a few basic concepts. I asked chatGPT to explain the concepts with code examples. What followed was several late nights of just asking it follow up questions and very detailed discussions on the various aspects of filters. I got a primer on digital signal processing, bilinear transforms and filter design. I fed it snippets from free text university textbooks asking it to walk me through concepts and explain the things that would have been completely over my head. This was extremely useful since many books will assume you have a strong background in topics that can takes weeks to get a grip of assuming you even have a teacher.
All in all, I see AI as a tool as disruptive and empowering as the Gutenberg printing press, radio or internet was for humans. I highly recommend trying some of this stuff out and seeing how you can use it to enhance your workflow and learning process.
There are a lot of great responses in this thread. One thought I had is to maybe set a goal to “release” like a week or even weekend from the time you start. Bang out the minimal viable product with a buddy and get your project into an alpha phase. You don’t need to openly share it but that milestone might help you to set a cadence of success that will keep you working on the project and meeting more future releases.
Wow such a cool game. I thought I would play a few levels at work when it was time to take a break. I ended up taking an early lunch. This game is so addicting.
Valid question. My statement is a bit vague. I see AI as a disruptive technology similar to the printing press or radio. It enables regular people to accomplish task that were previously difficult. I can see it becoming a tool that makes some major companies obsolete in the way it opens up new paths. But fair point, a lot of these AI advancements are being pushed forward by large corporations like Microsoft and Google. It’s obvious that AI as a tool will be used for good and evil. Tech companies who wish to survive see the necessity to get in on the bottom floor of this technological leap forward.
Either way, my observation is simply that I could see a lot of parties finding the advancement of human potential through AI to be harmful to the status quo that they comfortably exist in.
Yes. I do want to be clear that we should be mindful of the mistakes made during other technological revolutions that negatively impact the environment.
Quick dumb question: does it seem like saying AI development is a threat to the climate a convenient excuse to put a stop to a technology that is disruptive to existing corporations and systems of power?
I switch from being a musician by profession to software development because I got burned out and music stopped feeling like art. Ever since I left, I feel like engineering has become my new preferred means of artistic expression. This project is so cool in how it shows the process and craft of software and how it is carved, smoothed and honed into a “final product”. And much like in conventional art, it’s hard for the artist to call the job done and stop improving on it.
For now, ML research and development is too complicated and frustrating for me to dedicate the time and energy to become skilled in it.