AnarchistArtificer

I’m a mediocre hobby programmer, and for me, the hardest part is coming up with the concrete specifics of what to implement.

I’m actually half decent now (for a hobbyist), but I remember that when I first moved from coding along with worked exercises in textbooks, to actually trying to solve real life problems, it got exponentially more difficult. The textbooks say “use this tool to achieve this goal”, and even if you’re bad at using that particular tool, you can put all your effort into doing it well. However when you’re having to make the bigger decisions for yourself, you have to choose what tool to use, and I found that super hard — especially when having to choose between an approach that I felt confident with that wasn’t quite the right tool for the job, and a new tool that was completely new to me (and if I am unfamiliar with a new approach, am I sure that it’s the right tool?).

At one point, when I was deep in a personal project, I had a period of a few weeks where I had no reliable access to internet, and so I did most of my coding using paper and pen. It forced me to think more deeply about the implementation I was using, rather than just diving straight into the code

Yeah, I feel like the author of this blog post read the referenced piece in a quite adversarial manner. Even if a programmer does no talking to stakeholders at all, the planning and design part of the process is still huge, and largely invisible if all you’re looking at is the end result. That invisible skill and labour is the difference between a mediocre personal project of mine, and the output of a seasoned professional.

I’m not AI, just struggling to articulate myself in matters like this. Though I can see why you thought it was AI — reading it back, I can see that there are a few phrases that are common AI-isms. I’m pretty opposed to AI use at the best of times, but I agree with you that it would be fucked up to use it for this.

Even just the video (before the reaction to criticism) left a super bad taste in my mouth. I remember an aggrieved knitted described their own feelings around it as being that it was easy to enjoy the edutainment material he produces when it was in a topic they were confident he knew more than them on. However, when they saw how shoddy the knitting video was, that made them feel uneasy about even the non-knitting related content, because what if that was as plagued with errors and bias as the knitting video, except they didn’t notice it.

What I was especially salty about with the video is that there was a non-problematic way to say “look at the cool research that involves throwing modern science at ancient textiles crafts” — highlighting research by people like Elisabetta Matsumoto, a physicist and a knitter. I was so hyped when someone reviewing the video mentioned Matsumoto’s research, as I was aware of her research already from being a ridiculous nerd.

I’m sorry that things got bad enough to require inpatient care, but I’m glad you were able to get some help — I hope it did actually help. I know from firsthand experience that one never fully recovers from PTSD, in the sense that you can’t go back to how things were before. However, I also know that it’s possible to continue living life with the psychological equivalent of a massive scar, even if it is still red and angry and often painful — but not really possible to when instead of a scar, you have an open, gaping wound.

I hope you were able to make some progress towards healing, even if it’ll take much longer to fully heal.

I also appreciate your attempt to leverage your own experience to promote compassion for Green. I’ve not read the rest of the comments here yet, but I can imagine there are a lot of people with uncharitable stances towards the situation. I am pretty steadfastly anti-AI, but I think it’s important that we consider the person at the centre of any problematic AI use