She’s now qualified to do 90% of my job. Unfortunately the other 10% is explaining why it works.
There’s an anecdote that goes like this:
An important machine in a factory stops working. No matter what they do they can’t get it to work again.
So they bring in a specialist to solve the problem, for an agreed fee of $1000
The guy checks the machine over and then goes and presses a specific button and the machine is back working again.
So the factory manager goes: “All you did was press a button! Why should I pay you $1000 for pressing a button?!”
To which the specialist answers: “Well, you see, you’re paying me just $1 to press the button. The other $999 are for knowing which button to press”.
It’s a real story!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-steinmetz-the-wizard-of-schenectady-51912022/
At the beginning of the 20th century Henry Ford’s electrical engineers had issues they could not solve with a gigantic generator. Henry Ford called Steimmetz, a genius mathematician working for GE to help them.
When he arrive at the factory he spent 2 days and night listening to the generator and scribbling on his notebook.
After that he asked for a ladder, climbed on it, put a chalk mark on a specific spot and explain to the engineers that they needed to remove the plate and replace sixteen windings behind the plate. After that the generator worked perfectly and Ford received a $10 000 bill.
Ford asked for an itemized bill and Steinmetz sent this
- Making chalk mark on generator $1.
- Knowing where to make mark $9,999.
Ford paid the bill.
It’s funny reading this, because the way I heard the story was as a railroad story.
The train engine wouldn’t run. The expert was called, he arrived, and after inspecting the train engine, knew exactly were to apply a little bit of oil to make it run again. His bill was challenged as being overly expensive, and he countered with them paying for the knowledge of where to apply to oil, not the oil itself.
There’s like all these different versions of the same philosophy of the story
I heard the same story when I was a kid, but it was about a boilermaker. The rest was for knowing where to tap his hammer to fix their problem.
It’s an obviously apocryphal story with two great messages. First, don’t undervalue your expertise just because the fix was easy (I still have a problem with that). Second, if you don’t know what you’re doing don’t question the expert just because it looked easy.
I know a version with a graphics designer. They designed something in 10 minutes and asked 1000 USD for it. When confronted on why it is so expensive for just 10 minutes of work, the answer is that it’s not just the 10 minutes of work, but also the 10 years of experience that lead to this 10 minutes of work.
That last 10%, my friend, is GPT’s job not mine
working her way through C++
part of Digital arts curriculum
Might be too high for this, but what??
Maybe part of a gaming curriculum?
Like, “learn some code so that when the devs are crying you can make small talk?”
Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.
I was Haskalling for that one. I need to Go and shake off the Rust, maybe work on my Lisp to make sure people React well.
Node what I’m saying?
Not Ruby sure what you’re saying, but I dream of getting strangled by a Python that can’t C#. 🤤
React well
That can only be some sort of evil Scheme, a rather Basic one. I can’t even Assembly the proper words to describe the Brainfuck
If the devs are really exhausted and sad you can’t go wrong with bringing them a Java while they’re dealing with their latest Brainf**k . Knowing various languages helps you to C#, as long as you take good care of your eyes!
There are lots of ways computers are used for making art. Not just video-games. For example, projection mapping, algorithmic music composition, live coding, etc.
You can look into openFrameworks for examples of C++ in arts.
Oh shit. That’s the secret weapon that will get me ahead of my colleagues! I can’t believe I’d never thought of it.
I’ve straight up ripped code from StackOverflow that worked… But I had no idea why or how it worked 😂 I taught myself Go and I’m decent at it, one of my coworkers was a former professional programmer who knew C and could fumble his way through Go. I later told him I had no idea what some of the code did because I did the old copy and paste and he just said “I knew you did” 😂
When someone copies from stack overflow, a reviewer’s first question should be “did you copy the question or the answer?”
