The European Commission sees open-source software as more than an IT tool. Policy makers are encouraging open-source ecosystems to drive innovation, autonomy and collaboration in a world where global trade is being redrawn.
This trade dispute highlights something most open-source advocates have known for years: open source is freedom. It’s freedom from monopolies, freedom from arbitrary pricing, and freedom from foreign influence.
It’s pretty useful replacing stack overflow that could also generate code specific to your project. It’s also useful for testing. Like any tool, it has its use cases.
I sometimes float the idea in my brain to learn how to code. If I ever come to it, I want to debate and discuss my work with another human. Not a machine.
Personal preference.
That’s a great way to do it, but human attention on your code is a scarce and valuable resource. LLMs are great for the sort of lazy stupid questions where you benefit from a quick answer, but also don’t want to waste someone else’s time on. When you are learning nearly all the questions you’ll have will be like this, your progress is gated on finding the answers, and even if you are taking a class and it’s someone’s job to look at your code and help you understand what’s wrong with it, you have to wait your turn for that and only get so much help.
and there are so many cases in programming where you can save hours asking a really simple question that should be easy to figure out on your own but actually isn’t.
@fubbernuckin Well yes, but those hours are called “learning”. Learning must hurt, it’s a change in the brain, that pain will change you, you want to be changed. You will not learn to figure things out if you just always reach for the robot at the sign of first trouble.
No, learning is there part where you have to think. That’s not when you use the robot. You use the robot when the documentation is trash and unusable and every answer you find is out of date. You use the robot when you know exactly what you want to do and how to do it and you don’t have time to trawl through the docs for the next 2 hours. You use the robot when the only gimp 2.10 tutorial on earth for how to write plugins tells you to use this funny program called gimptool but you’re new to gimp dev so you look online to see what that is only to find that there’s no mention of it literally anywhere besides your current tutorial and a disjointed man page where you can’t find the source anywhere, and the devs are all on irc and you don’t want to bother them and you’re worried that they’re just going to tell you to read the tutorial you already came from and you’ll leave empty handed. That’s when you ask the robot. It has a use, you don’t have to substitute your thinking to use it.
@fubbernuckin Right, so you only substitute “how to read documentation” and “how to talk to people on IRC”, great…
Know what, that’s stupid and reductive and not even accurate to what I said, but fuck it, yes. Yes actually. Because i value my time and sanity and other people’s time and sanity. Just because i eat out every now and then doesn’t mean I can’t cook.
@fubbernuckin Because you did spend that time to learn cooking somewhere in the past. Look, I teach IT students, and there is a very clear difference between those who use ChatGPT for everything, and those who try to figure things out. Even asking the right questions from people on IRC is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. You don’t see it, because you haven’t grown up in a world with ChatGPT since the start, so you did already learn that. But can you ever stop learning?