With misinformation about and how shit Google search is lately, it’s definitely a skill worth learning.
“I used to be able to Google like you, but then they changed what Google was and now what I can do doesn’t work, and what you have to do seems weird and scary to me.”
I used to google onions, because it was the style at the time
I used to be able to Google like you
…but then I got enshittification in the knee
And it’ll happen to you!
For reals. I never bookmarked anything as I’d just regoogle what I was looking for but as of six months ago I can’t find shit. It’s like it never existed and all I get is spam websites that’s are skinned to looks genuine. I’m honestly going back to Askjeeves.com…
If it is any consolation, a good chunk of those bookmarks would lead to deadlinks or domains bought by someone else.
wayback machine and bookmark, name a more iconic duo…
Until you stumble upon “we don’t have that page archived”, then the pain is real
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It’s Bing without tracking. And the things like quotation marks still work. However, baseline search using it has still gone to shit.
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It did, but Bing hiked their prices so it got shitty.
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DDG uses Bing on the backend, and they have to pay for each query, so Bing affects DDG
No, I’ve been using it for about 4 years or more, I think, and the search is stably kind of okay. Some time ago Google used to work when ddg failed, but…
Yeah. It shows me first result article that copypasta from other place which is straight out wrong. Went to ddg and it start to show result that makes sense. It’s no wonder people look up reddit thread for info. It also doesn’t show too much oldschool forum, or at least it’s buried down 20page later. It’s unusable.
“I’ve got 10 years of googling experience”.
“Sorry, we only accept candidates with 12 years of googling experience”.
To be fair you could call this “search optimisation” and the people on Linkedin would eat this up
I might actually put this under my skills. I’m fairly good at googlefu.
Or prompt engineering.
Not only is “Googling” one of my most important job skills, now that I’m doing professional services, my entire job basically consist of “Learn product ${FOO} faster than the customer’s employees can.” Which of course primarily consists of knowing what to search for, how to find it, and how to interpret and use what I find.
So you’re that contractor that always shits out code that looks like the guy who wrote it was just learning the language?
Yeah pretty much. I mean I do the best I can (and I do have resources to look to for help).
Did it work tho
Works as expected.
A few years ago… Okay over a decade ago 🤕 Google offered a free course on “googling” with a certificate for completion. You’re damn straight I put that on my resume. Of course they’ve disabled half the tricks they taught us but now.
“Prompt Engineering”: AKA explaining to Chat GPT why it’s wrong a dozen times before it spits out a useable (but still not completely correct) answer.
That’s actually a valid skill to know when to tell the AI that it’s wrong.
A few months ago, I had to talk to my juniors to think critically about the shitty code that AI was generating. I was getting sick of clearly copy-pasted code from chatGPT and the junior not knowing what the fuck they were submitting to code review.
Should start asking them like, why did you do this? Why did you chose this method? To make them sweat :p
That used to make sense when LLMs were not the thing, when evaluating assessments from students, half of which asked someone else and didn’t bother to even read the code
If no one can make sense of the change, then you reject it. Makes no difference if it was generated with an LLM or copy-pasted from Stackoverflow.
I just ask ChatGPT to review pull requests.
I’m trying to convince a senior developer from the team I’m a member of, to stop using copilot. They have committed code that they didn’t understand (only tested to verify it does what it’s expected to do). I doubt it’d succeed…
Co-pilot is amazing and terrible at the same time.
When it’s suggesting the exact line of code I expect to write, amazing. When it can build the permissions I need for a service account for a TF module I’ve written, amazing
However, it will suggest poorly formed, un-optimized code all too often.
That said, knowing when to use/not use/modify the suggested code has greatly improved my productivity and consistency.
I wish all this AI stuff was limited to just creating a new coding language. That I can get behind, sharing programming information is not the same as copying others art.
If there exists an answer, as gpt will tell you the answer exists till the very end, even when it’s not so
Ask them if they know what udm=14 means.
Oh my fucking god. Thank you!
I have multiple people in my IT department who henpeck when they type. If you don’t want him, please send the CV my way.
I knew a compsci grad who used a physical magnifying glass to read screens
You didn’t have to do us henpeckers like that
I will be honest as a late GenX it’s going to be interesting as my cohort retires because we were the last generation to remember before The Internet and grew up to understand the technology not just use it.
If you’re my age or older please make sure you’re teaching your young coworkers how to break things and put them back together without the aid of all the tools and resources they have at their fingertips now. Creativity thrives in adversity. Creativity is at risk when tools like ChatGPT are at their fingertips now.
/rant
Get off your high horse old man. Millennials were born into technology, molded by it. We live and breathe it, and also grew up in a world where things most definitely did not just work.
I think you significantly underestimate the ingenuity and problem solving abilities of the younger generations. My Gen Z coworkers are extremely smart and hard working and understand how things work just as well, if not better than older generations.
I said nothing about the ingenuity and problem solving. That’s not the concern. I also didn’t take any exception on work ethic or intelligence. You’re putting words in my mouth.
I never said that you said those things. You said you were the last generation to understand technology and not just use it, which is quite frankly ridiculous and untrue - especially for anyone with work ethic and intelligence.
I think they mean that they were the last generation who was alive and learning about how things were built and innovated on, while newer generations won’t have that benefit.
They will be exposed to high level tools instead that automate a lot of the work which will make things easier for them but reduce understanding.
Thus, the newer generations on average will need to purposefully dig back into the past to learn what the older generations learned by just being around while it was happening.
These are just general trends though, its not going to be very practical to try to apply it to any individuals, or the group of people you work with.
Yeah, the tools are still there to figure out the low level shit, information on it has never been this easy to come by and bright people who are interested will still get there.
However growing up during a time you were forced to figure the low level details of tech out merely to get stuff to work, does mean that if you were into tech back then you definitely became bit of a hacker (in the traditional sense of the word) whilst often what people consider as being into tech now is mainly spending money on shinny toys were everything is already done for you.
Most people who consider themselves as being “into Tech” don’t really understand it to significant depth because they never had to and only the few who actually do want to understand it at that level enough to invest time into learning it do.
I’m pretty sure the same effect happened in the early days vs later days of other tech, such as cars.
The comparison to cars is interesting, although cars maybe have peaked already and I doubt technology has.
I dont think proprietary information is helping much either. Makes young folk think they need to get a job at Google to work on something real and important.
On the nose. Thank you for explaining it far more eloquently than I was able to.
edit: replied to wrong user
Counterpoint, image gen ai has afforded me far greater time and ability to access my creativity than I’ve ever had before it. Different people can be creative in different ways, and have different Muse’s for their creativity
Counter counterpoint. Without the fundamentals you will struggle in understanding your capabilities.
You could be a virtuoso in playing the piano but without understanding how to read and write sheet music you will be hampering your ability to learn other instruments. Note I am not saying you can’t. I’m saying it’s harder.
Creativity isnt necessarily about skill level though, and while in the past you’ve NEEDED skill in order to fully access your creativity, as technology progresses that becomes less and less true. Different people get different things out of art and creativity, and for me, the final product is a huge part of the payoff for me, and before, for the type of art I like looking at, that would have required a multi year - lifetime investment in order to be able to achieve. Now, my skills in Photoshop alongside Stable Diffusion allow me to collage myself my costume designs in hours, which wasnt even possible for me to achieve previously. Similarly, this tech is likely to snag future people into an art path because they experience the joy of creativity enough that they then decide to learn the skills to bypass the limitations of Generative AI
There is of course a difference in that you’re talking about artistic creativity whereas I’m talking about programming creativity.
Your example works great for artistic creativity. On my side, not so much. I am fearful of people coding in python who do not know what they’re coding as an example.
Yeah thats fair, I guess my example isnt very comparable to what you’re talking about
Maybe.
It could also cause immense frustration when people realize that all the time they spent creating AI art is essentially wasted when it comes to learning a new skill.
It could give people false expectations about the effort needed to make art. It could flood the internet with AI art to the point where it hides individual artists even more, driving down demand due to over supply.
Also, you dont need to create stunning works to motivate people to create more art, the problem is people not accepting the learning process which involves a hell of a lot of mediocrity and failure along the way. AI tools are not going to improve the average persons perspective, who likely thinks you need to be born with a gift to be an artist.
Once again, art means different things to different people. The process is important to some, but not to everyone. Being able to access creativity has never had fewer barriers to entry which means more people will find enjoyment in it instead of being put off by the previously inescapable barriers. Further, if your creating art for yourself, it shouldn’t matter if the market gets flooded and visibility gets harder. Those things are only important if you are looking to sell, and, well, welcome to capitalism.
Creating art for yourself is a fiction. Doing nearly anything for yourself is a fiction. As much as some feel they prefer to be alone, noone lives in a bubble.
When you talk about barriers to entry for art, you really mean high quality art. Sure, perfectionists will be able to outdo their outsized expectations of themselves, briefly. The barriers to making art have been incredibly low for all of human history if you really are talking purely about the cost to begin making art. You and I can start cresting art with our hands right now. How much lower can the barriers be?
It seems to me you would find it easier to work on your perspective that prevents you from enduring the failure required to learn high quality art than to advise we steal all art globally and historically, combine it into a program using the energy of a large nation, and present it to you at your home over the internet.
But like you said, we all have our perspectives on what is important.
Dude Socrates was convinced that reading and writing would ruin everyone’s memory who grew up with it. Whining about <innovation> somehow handicapping the next generation by making them “too dependent on technology” or whatever and couching it in reasonable-sounding terms is as old as language, and time always makes fools of those who indulge in that sort of masturbatory delusion. You’re just jealous we had cooler toys, own it.
When I interviewed junior devs for my team, I had zero theoretical questions, and only two coding questions which were basically code that had to be debugged, and once it was running, for them to implement some minor things that I asked them to implement. I said I don’t mind if they googled, I only wanted them to share their screens while they worked, so that I can see how they worked and how they googled/adapted the answers to their code. I interviewed over a dozen people ranging from freshers to 4 yoe, and you should see how terrible they were at googling. Out of all them, only one fresher came close to being good in the interview. Even ‘4 yoe’ devs who ‘spearheaded’ various projects sucked at basic python and googling.
I would 1000% become dumb as a rock with someone watching me not to mention in a high risk setting such as an interview
Yeah. We do a ton of screen sharing guided mentorship in my role, and everyone can’t think straight while sharing their screen.
We get through it, and feedback says it’s worth it. But it still sucks in the moment.
I tend to do the most embarrassing sitcom shit possible when someone is watching me do something I’m an expert in.
Knowing when to cut your losses swallow your pride and ask for help is legitimately an incredibly important dev skill. I’ve met otherwise decent developers that could disappear in a hole for a month on a simple problem that anyone else on the team could help them work through in a few hours because they didn’t want to look dumb.
I’m torn about this because I have good mentors but I genuinely want to try to learn how to code and not just have the answers given to me right away. At least I’m only working on volunteer project so being slow isn’t really holding anyone else up.
Don’t be torn - solve it yourself until you can’t! It’s not helpful to be someone who constantly runs to other folks to fix their stuff and neither is it good to be someone who will just frustrate themselves struggling without progress.
If you’re a junior developer you will probably get time boxed tickets, just try and catch yourself if you’re spinning your wheels (and that isn’t easy, it takes practice).
As with most things in life balance is important, you don’t want to be at either extreme.
Actually finding something on Google often requires some knowledge and the application of the right strategies and tricks.
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Lucky guy. Tolerance for calling a spade a spade is a big green flag.
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