conwy

Awesome, thanks so much for open-sourcing! Will use it to generate my C.V. in Word format.

Finally someone put my thought on this topic into words! (Hopefully the author used a suitably invisible tool to write this.)

Well I've had more mixed experiences with other kinds of professions. Real estate agents have fibbed to me about the condition of the property, recruitment agents have misrepresented the role, financial advisors have given me sub-optimal advice. There didn't seem to be much in the structure to prevent this. Doctors, nurses and surgeons on the other hand were very careful and thorough, and that included telling me things I didn't want to hear. This makes sense. Medicine is much more serious - people's long-term health and lives are at risk.

I don't deny there's privilege involved in my case. Again, this seems an institutional problem. The medical field as a whole needs more inclusive frameworks to deal with women's health, racial justice, LGBTIQ, ageism and much more. These are issues need to be addressed at an institution and even whole-of-society level. You can't expect each individual to independently solve for them all. At the very least, they need education.

But it's good that being virtuous is the "easy path" for them. That's how I want it to be. Why would I want to make it difficult or put impediments in the way of my doctors doing their job well?

My point is that, when the institution supports and encourages virtuous behaviour, the actors within the institution are more likely to practice virtue.

I think this is also largely the point of Plato's Republic.

Admittedly this is anecdotal, but I've visited many doctors over the years, as a patient, and pretty much all of them treated me well, practiced their jobs professionally and gave me good advice and treatments. I never had a doctor give me advice that turned out to be wrong or ill intentioned.

Again ... maybe it's just my experience. None of these were super life threatening conditions. However I did go under the operating knife at least once; in that case, the operation was successful, healed me of the condition, and never caused any negative side-effects to this day.

Maybe there's a difference in regulation. A lot of the "entrepreneurial" landscape seems unregulated and a kind of Wild West, and I suppose that allows for certain kinds of personalities to succeed by suspect means. The medical field, by contrast, is quite regulated and there are very real risks to malpractice. Thus, I think it attracts better people and allows them to succeed.

Maybe it's similar to how dictators often take over in poor or struggling countries, whereas they find it harder to get a foothold in developed, prosperous countries with strong institutions.

FWIW, I've been using AI, but instead of "max # of lines/commits", I'm optimising for "min # of pr comments/iterations/bugs". My goal is to end up with less/simpler code and more/bigger impact. The real goal is business value, and ultimately human value. Optimise for that, using AI where it fits.

Along those lines, some techniques I've been dabbling in: 1. Getting multiple agents to implement a requirement from scratch, them combining the best ideas from all of them with my own informed approach. 2. Gathering documentation (requirements, background info, glossaries, etc), targeting an Agent at it, and asking carefully selected questions for which the answers are likely useful. 3. Getting agents to review my code, abstracting review comments I agree with to a re-usable checklist of general guidelines, then using those guidelines to inform the agents in subsequent code reviews. Over time I hope this will make the code reviews increasingly well fitted to the code base and nature of the problems I work on.

Can you provide a link to this app? Or alternately, share a few of the prompts by which you built it? I only ask because, if it's really that easy/simple, I'd like to do the same thing!

No, it’s just getting started!

Using LibreOffice with embedded open-source fonts to create a nicely formatted and portable CV

TL;DR: To lose unwanted fat in a healthy, sustainable, frugal and environmentally-friendly way, follow a whole-food plant-based diet and maintain a calorie deficit over a long period of time by exercising vigorously on a daily basis and sticking to a healthy and enjoyable eating routine.

I think this skill could save time in a very rushed business environment.

A while back I wrote a prompt to build a script that runs git-reflog to get a the list of distinct authors. After a few small tweaks I got it roughly working. This took about 1 hour. Writing it myself would have definitely taken multiple hours, especially having to learn the details of git-reflog.

But that said I think it's mainly resume-building. ChatGPT isn't going to overall transform our productivity.

If you're looking to maximise employability / pay scale, maybe you can do some small side projects, just enough to showcase curiosity/open-mindedness.

Examples:

- Build a useful bash script using ChatGPT prompts and blog about it

- Build a text summariser component for your personal blog using Xenova / Transformers.js

- Build an email reply bot generator that uses ChatGPT prompt with sentiment analysis (doesn't have to actually send email, it could just do an API call to ChatGPT and print the message to the screen).

Just a few small examples and maybe a course or two (e.g. Prompt Engineering for Developers) should look great.

However I question how many companies really care about it right now. Most interviews I've done lately didn't bring it up even once.

But that said, maybe in a few months or year or so it will become more essential for most engineers.

Why to complain? Seems like heaven to me.

For most people—who won't solve complex math problems daily at work—the takeaway from learning math is not their mechanical ability at solving math problems. The takeaway is their understanding of math concepts and ideas, which will shape their thinking skills in general.

Agree, but for some others, there are real world consequences, e.g. whether they get accepted into a university or whether they can read and properly understand an academic paper.

I know what you mean, in fact I remember earlier on when I started the course, I had wanted to use these kinds of substitution techniques, etc. and thought I could finish the course in a few days. Boy was I wrong!

These techniques definitely won't work in a tough online multiple-choice test (of the kind I'm getting) where they deliberately sprinkle in subtle quirks to deceive you, which would require very disciplined algebra, fractions, powers, etc. to identify.

Ok well thanks for the Algebra book recommendations, will see about working through those first.

this is one big hurdle in learning math backwards. You discover new missing pieces at every corner. Each missing piece leading to another missing piece.

Yes this is exactly what happening to me.

E.g. I got up to Week 2 of the course and suddenly made the big (to me) discovery that sqrt(a/b) = sqrt(a)/sqrt(b).

It seems trivial I know when you see it written like that, but the problem is to recognise and apply that principle in the context of a broader problem such as factoring.

Just keep at it.

Thanks, this gives me confidence that I'm not wasting my time haha

I am beginning to get better at it, to the point that I can often work out why I got a question wrong on my own without referring to the answer.

My guess is that most people hit a wall of abstraction at certain point.

I don't think it's a limit to their abstraction, I think it's that they didn't work properly on the fundamentals, so they had a superficial understanding of the abstractions.

To give a fitness analogy it's like trying to do heavy barbell presses before you can even do 10 pushups in a row.

My experience with programming is that once you get really really good with fundamentals you suddenly leap ahead and pick up new languages, paradigms, etc. incredibly fast.

Maybe this partly explains the 10x phenomenon - it's because they worked very hard on the fundamentals.

It serves a need just not my need!

(As someone who's surprisingly bad at math and trying to undertake a Calculus pre-req to get into university!)

Yep, this is the number one reason people think they aren’t suited for math. Everything is built on everything else, and if you missed anything you’re screwed. It takes a while to realise you are screwed, you can get by on rote for a surprising distance.

That's exactly what happened to me!

This is why I'm learning about differentiation yet struggling to factor simple fractions with a surd.

It's similar to the "expert beginner" problem described by Erick Dietrich (https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...).

Never use the stuff :)

So many people tell me this that it's become cliche at this point.

I find it demotivating, but unfortunately I have to press through, as there is literally no other way I'm going to gain entry to my university's bachelors program.

A part of me wonders if this kind of fundamental knowledge could be actually useful, similar to being able to cook your own food instead of takeaway.

Kind of like how "first principles" thinking can apparently lead to new discoveries because you're not just mimicking / re-using the same structures that were already built.

Yes, it's algebra.

Math isn't like programming. In programming you can often solve a problem using a library, framework, language facility, etc. without entirely understanding why it works all the way down to the binary level.

In math you can't often solve a more advanced problem such as Calculus problem without understanding the more foundational math such as algebra, fractions, etc.

If "information hiding" / layers of abstraction was possible in math, I would have completed my university entrance course months ago, but here I am still struggling.

Sure, we could have Algebra made easy and also Trigonometry made easy, Fractions made easy, Functions made easy, etc. etc.

I just find it personally irritating that all this foundational knowledge is brushed aside when it's really core to someone's actual competence dealing with actual math problems.

Maybe it's just assumed that people went to a good high school or had a private math tutor and already learned the foundations very well, but I think at least that assumption would be coming from a place of privilege.

It's similar to telling someone to take a Bootcamp in React and that will be enough for them to succeed as a software engineer. But to solve the kind of problems they are going to face in reality they will eventually have to learn at least some foundational Javascript and maybe a little about algorithms and data structures.

As someone who's taking a university entrance course in Calculus I find these kind of "calculus made easy" pamphlets irritatingly trite.

The hard part isn't the highest level concepts, which are actually fairly easy to grasp and somewhat intuitive.

The hard part is all the foundational knowledge required to solve actual math problems with Calculus.

The most difficult parts of Calculus (for me at least) are:

1. Having a very thorough grasp of the groundwork / assumed knowledge. Good enough that you can correctly solve an unexpected problem, from completing the square to long division of polynomials to an equation involving differentials.

2. Understanding and correctly applying the notation and graphing techniques, from Leibniz notation to sketching curves.

This is why large books and courses exist covering only introductory Calculus, not even beginning to scrape the surface of more advanced math.

Having a good code review process can make code reviews easier, more enjoyable and higher quality.

I'm getting "Error establishing a database connection" after following this link.

Maybe the developer who wrote the blog post can set a personal KPI of "99% uptime for blog site".

Documentation can substitute for refactoring difficult code-bases.

For me, it's about the process as much as the outcome.

I don't write code only because I want to achieve some distant future goal. I write code because that's part of who I am in the moment. I enjoy typing, I enjoy problem-solving, I enjoy building things, etc. Like a spider weaving a web, it has become part of my nature.

The beauty of humans is that we are general purpose machines, which can do a wide variety of things, because of how our bodies are, especially our hands.

The future of course is also important. Greater financial independence, learning new skills, improving one's character, meeting interesting personalities. All these of course are things we can hope for and strive for, but should also try to have reasonable expectations about, and avoid excessive entitlement.

Inflation linked bonds.

The 4% rule may not be entirely reliable. See: Ben Felix’s YouTube video on the topic. I’d be aiming for a 2% rule and holding some extra cash (call me paranoid).

It seems good for performance, and probably only that. I don't see anything in the pitch about readability, maintainability, extendability, security, usability/accessibility or portability.