AI challenge...anybody?
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Unfortunately too many posters on here are 1) looking for someone to do their homework or 2) being paid by some pointey haired boss to attempt work that is way beyond their abilities so they look online for someone to save their butt (pro-bono). I spend my time trying to figure out whether the post falls into either of those categories before commenting. Although to be honest I do have to frequently fight the urge to give them crap if I feel either of the above may be true.
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You forgot about category 3:
People, who have absolutely no clue what they are doing, but trying to win a marathon before they can even walk :) -
@Pl45m4 said in AI challenge...anybody?:
You forgot about category 3:
I thought about that after post but didn't want to edit...nothing like "I want to build an enterprise distributed cloud service. Someone tell me how."
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@Kent-Dorfman @Pl45m4 I think you're being a bit too harsh. When I was young I had a brilliant idea of writing my own game engine, completely oblivious to the scope of such undertaking. I failed miserably, tried again, then again and again, each time getting a little further. Over the years I did a lot of stupid mistakes, asked some extremely noobish questions and took more than I could chew more times than I can remember. After over two decades I'm writing a professional AAA game engine and teach others how to do that. You have to start somewhere and not be afraid to ask silly questions, otherwise how would you grow?
Sure, people sometimes stumble in the dark, seek any help they can and ask basic questions. That's fine. IMO "I want to build a rocket and fly it to Mars. How do I do that?" is a perfectly fine question and it's perfectly fine to answer with something like - "First of all it's gonna take you 30 years and you can't do that alone. You need a team and here's why".
People don't know how much they don't know and if you see someone clearly not knowing what they are doing try to guide them. It's even more important in that case not to just directly answer their question, because often they don't even know what they are doing and just try random stuff. Sure if it's a specific problem that seems valid, a straight answer is best and can be reused by others, but if the problem is "Here's 3 pages of code. What's wrong with it?" the person clearly is lost and you need to approach them as such - ask what they are trying to do, guide them, try to lead them to ask the right questions and then answer them.
Sure, it takes a lot more time and patience to do that than to just give straight answer or roast the person for how noobish they are, and you're not getting paid for that, but that's what this forum is about - giving something back to the community, be it time, patience or nerves. It's like donating blood - If you're not up to it, that's fine too. It's just something a lot of people here like to do and, from my experience, it helps you grow on your own, just in another way - communication is also a skill and, like with anything else, you improve by practicing.
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@Chris-Kawa said in AI challenge...anybody?:
Sure, it takes a lot more time and patience to do that
You are completely right, but I was thinking about these "special" cases, where the OP has no clue, but very unrealistic wishes and wants it to be finished preferably tomorrow :)
IIRC, a few month ago there was this guy, trying to create a complete new bootable Operating System (using a Qt GUI) from scratch...
It's not impossible but a very very tough job, if you have no idea and no specialists with more experience around you.
=> "Build a rocket and fly to mars" -
@Pl45m4 said:
a few month ago there was this guy, trying to create a complete new bootable Operating System (using a Qt GUI) from scratch...
To be perfectly honest when I was a kid and learned Pascal for the first time I tried to write my operating system too :) Of course I ended up with a window that draws buttons, but hey, I had no internet back then and there was no one around to tell me this is not what an operating system is, so I was very proud of myself while the sweet ignorance lasted :)
That being said - sure, there are entitled jerks out there. Not much can be done about that, but I say let's try to focus on the good. There's so much bad happening that it would be kinda nice to balance it out a little.
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Eh...Once upon a time hackers were respected, well paid, and seen in certain cirles as artists. Business interests have done a pretty good job of propagating the very unrealistic idea that it's all assembly line work and that you can teach anybody to program. So yeah, I'm a bit defensive about what my vocation has become.
Real Programmers Dont Use PASCAL -- Datamation, July 1983
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@Kent-Dorfman said:
Once upon a time hackers were respected, well paid, and seen in certain cirles as artists.
My impression was that it is still the case. It's maybe not as prominent in media, but still.
Business interests have done a pretty good job of propagating the very unrealistic idea that it's all assembly line work and that you can teach anybody to program. So yeah, I'm a bit defensive about what my vocation has become.
I feel you. I guess the industry grew so fast that it kinda became obvious that we can produce new computers a lot faster than new field experts, so yeah, the entry standard is getting lower and lower and that trend is gonna continue. Yet another reason to try and help people so the curve is not dropping as fast. Except for maybe the top guys we're all gonna be replaced with AI one day. Hopefully not before I retire though :)
Real Programmers Dont Use PASCAL -- Datamation, July 1983
Ah yes, the good old "real programmers" :) I never met a programmer who admitted they were one of the fake ones. It's somehow always those other people :P
Pascal was for me a pretty nice little language to learn on my own at home and its incarnation Delphi was similarly nice way to step up into visual ui programming. Sure, they are not up there with the big boys and their time has mostly passed, but it was simple, formal, to the point. Not very powerful or particularly fast but easy to start with and focus on data structures and algorithms when you are at the level that pointer is a complex concept :) -
I had college profs who called Modula-2 object oriented...LOL First post-college job was DOS/modula-2 coding. previous programmer had them heavily vested in that generation of MS-basic...so severe memory limitations on data structures and not really any data structure abstractions anyway.
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@Kent-Dorfman Was he teaching object oriented using modula, or was he confused about what modula was out of the box? I have talked to a few people who use languages without object oriented support, but program them in the object oriented style. open65241 is one such project that programs C in oop style.
