Oh, the second part I strongly disagree. Bad tests are worse than no tests!

Very interesting article, thank you.

From my experiences with paid models at work, tests were especially insidious: I had cases where a seemingly sensible test showed up to not work at all. I was planning to push it but I got curious, and decided to “break” the feature it said it was pretending to verify. Lo and behold, test stays green. I find it especially bad because nobody loves to write tests, even less to review them, it’s not easy to make them good, LLM oh so loves to churn them out, and I’m already tired reviewing the main part of the code.

As for docs, my personal take is that they may not be as good as you think. IMO it’s more that we are not taught to write good docs or even to properly care about them. So I claim it’s the same JS case here, just you have even less skill to evaluate it than you had with JS. Note, it’s not directed at you personally more than anyone else, and I may certainly be wrong, that’s just how I feel about the majority of the industry in the area of docs (even pre-AI to a big degree).

Your article spelled out some things in a nice new way for me, with an interesting new takeaway for me in context of what I want to learn (here I must especially be wary of “AI” as it can help somewhat but can also actively degrade/hinder/derail/anchor), vs. where I don’t - but then if I don’t do I have skills to evaluate its result and to what degree (e.g. on your example, IMO, c++ high, js medium, docs low). Thank you again!

Yep, that’s exactly the sentiment I saw in people’s writing, that email has become almost centralized in practice, even though in theory it’s not. I saw this also generalized, that even successfuly promoted distributed/federated protocols still face the constant risk and challenge of becoming centralized in practice, when a major player manages to capture the majority of the field.

AFAIU, even Mastodon community needs to (and does) purposefully work on promoting alternative instances, so that not everybody ends up on mastodon.social…

FWIW, from what I read, the difficulty in selfhosting email is mainly in how to not get your outgoing mail insta-plonked by increasingly fussy and moody spam filters. Shows up that a huge percentage of receivers are now on gmail, trailed by a few other major players like M$, and you’re on their whimsy, with no way to appeal plonk decisions (and challenging to even find out if they plonked or not). This was reported so even before the era of “AI”, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were even harder now.

What I’d say, is don’t worry and don’t get discouraged. I’m sure there must be photographic memory artists, but a question is what you want to achieve. You can still be a great artist without photographic memory, there were, are, and will be many. For sure not every artist has photographic memory. Also, with training you will start unblocking skills and talents in your brain that you didn’t expect before you might have. I couldn’t sing well, I was unable to match a tone, but I loved singing (uh) and started learning and gradually got to a level where I could lead a voice or sing it alone in a church choir and heard compliments from various singers. Now I’m learning to paint watercolors since 2 years, and unexpectedly to me my line drawing also starts improving. Often I am frustrated by my drawings or paintings but sometimes I am surprised how this or that one somehow looks so good! Sometimes feeling not under my control if ends up good or bad 🤷‍♂️ I went into it with the same attitude as you: let’s just keep practicing, with time it must start slowly improving. Well, it does! Annoyingly glacially slowly (at least in my perception), but definitely does. There will be always “better” artists; but you start discovering that you have a different voice, a different eye, and there are people who honestly resonate with your artworks, even if you feel yours are “worse”. Not everyone, but some do. And not every piece, but some. (I literally had a friend single out one drawing as something she really liked, completely unprompted, when before a “learned artist” grilled me over it so much that I lost desire to draw for half a year.) This also gives some validation, and helps persevere through those who complain or say nothing, or who say nice but only to be nice.

nice! out of curiosity, do you have a link to the original maybe?

The top one is a koh-i-noor pencil, a short one, with the original lead so probably HB. I also sometimes use a 0.9mm 2B instead.

The bottom one is a UniPin brush pen (black).

I enjoy both quite mich - the pencil mainly for being so cute 😅 and the brush pen feels super cool to use. I also like to just write with it, for example page titles in my notes.

Thanks! And good luck, I support this idea! 🙂

Not too shabby at the moment, thanks; how’s it for you?

thanks! :)

wow, amazing! 🤩 is this watercolor maybe? or digital art?

I just came to say hello! like you welcomed in the newcommunities post ☺️