> "Writing, like all creative forms, is a human endeavour. At its best it is pulled up from the soul and put down on the page, or the screen. We all use ‘tools’ of some kind to do this, like the keyboard I am now writing on. But AI is different. It does not help you to do your job; it does your job for you. It sucks up from the worldwide web the usings and doings and scrapings of the already-created and it rearranges them, pretending all the while that it has ‘created’ them itself. It imitates reality but can never replace it. It is, at root, a shabby, boring and actually evil thing. It is the end of art."
This is really interesting, but I don't agree with this conclusion: "These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal maths." (My own opinion is that educational curricula are generally not very important at all; that people are learning machines that learn what they need to in the contexts they find themselves; and that people -- as shown by this study -- struggle to effectively apply what they've learnt in one context into a different context.)
> My own opinion is that educational curricula are generally not very important at all
We spend an incredible amount of time and effort on educational curricula, so it's worth thinking about.
My opinion is everything you learn before you start actually using knowledge is "just" familiarization. In my opinion, pedagogical instruction should do a much better job of explaining this and incorporating this realization. I do think individual teachers understand this.
Project management is "create, maintain and drive the ticking off of a to-do list being done by multiple people inside/outside company to achieve a goal" - e.g. "move from Dynamics CRM to Oracle CRM", and it cares a lot about setting exact timelines and ticking off when tasks are done. Most quality control or creative input is done elsewhere.
Product management is "understand a market and customers to create or improve a product, prioritising features to feed to teams to deliver based on some metric (e.g. "creates most new sales" or "slowly improves the lives of existing customers without breaking anything"), and is often highly involved in quality (and perceived quality matters such as UX) and is fairly creative, as it decides what features go into the product.
Product companies tend to have more product managers and less project managers (they’re usually called something else, like simply software engineering managers or tech leads who have take on the project management duties).
Traditional enterprises and software consultancies tend to be organized around projects rather than user-centric products and their features, so they will more often have project managers instead. The product responsibility in turn tends to become more ad hoc, sometimes with someone assigned as a “product owner” outside their regular title.
(My personal view: if a company has project managers and product owners, that’s a sign that it’s probably not the place for me.)
Great link! I don't think I would count Scala as he says, "Scala (I’ve always wanted to play around with this one too, but the sheer number of language features is scary and I always put it aside)"
PHP and Go are the ones he uses for work, Elixir is the one he uses at home.
