The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in?
I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up with any damn story and make it credible. Just the other day I found out about reddit engagement bots, and I've seen some in the wild myself.
I'm waiting for the internet bubble to burst already so we can all go back to our normal lives, where we've left it 20 years or so ago.
How can I tell? Yes, the code looks quite a bit more polished. I'm not expert enough in JS to, e.g., know the cleanest method to inspect and modify the DOM, but I can look at code that does and tell if the approach it's using is sensible or not. Surely you've had the experience of a domain where you can evaluate the quality of the end product, even if you can't create a high quality product on your own?
Concretely in this case, I'd implemented an approach that used jQuery listeners to listen for DOM updates. Antigravity rewrote it to an approach that avoided the jQuery dependency entirely, using native MutationObservers. The code is sensible. It's noticeably more performant than the approach I crafted by hand. Antigravity allowed me to easily add a number of new features to my extension that I would have found tricky to add by hand. The UI looks quite a bit nicer than before I used AI tools to update it. Would these enhancements have been hard for an expert in Chrome extensions to implement? Probably not. But I'm not that expert, and AI coding tools allowed me to do them.
That was not actually the main thrust of my post, it's just a nice side benefit I've experienced. In the main domain where I use coding tools, at work, I work in languages where I'm quite a bit more proficient (Golang/Python). There, the quality of code that the AI tools generate is not better than I write by hand. The initial revisions are generally worse. But they're quite a bit faster than I write by hand, and if I iterate with the coding tools I can get to implementations that are as good as I would write by hand, and a lot faster.
I understand the bias towards skepticism. I have no particular dog in this fight, it doesn't bother me if you don't use these tools. But OP asked for peoples' experiences so I thought I'd share.
JavaScript isn't the only programming language around. I'm not the strongest around with JS either but I can figure it out as necessary -- knowing C/C++/Java/whatever means you can still grok "this looks better than that" for most cases.
Yep. I have plenty of experience in languages that use C-style syntax, enough to easily understand code written in other languages that occur nearby in the syntactical family tree. I'm not steeped in JS enough to know the weird gotchas of the type system, or know the standard library well, etc. But I can read the code fine.
If I'd asked an AI coding tool to write something up for me in Haskell, I would have no idea if it had done a good job.
This doesn't sound right to me. If someone who were expert in JS looked at a relatively simple C++ program, I think they could reasonably well tell if the quality of code were good or not. They wouldn't be able to, e.g., detect bugs from default value initialization, memory leaks, etc. But so long as the code didn't do any crazy templating stuff they'd be able to analyze it at a rough "this algorithm seems sensible" level".
Analogously I'm quite proficient at C++, and I can easily look at a small JS program and tell if it's sensible. But if you give me even a simple React app I wouldn't be able to understand it without a lot of effort (I've had this experience...)
I agree with your broad point: C/C++/Java are certainly much more complex than JS and I would expect someone expert in them to have a much easier time picking up JS than the reverse. But given very high overlap in syntax between the four I think anyone who's proficient in one can grok the basics of the others.
Ah, so karma is a thing on HN as well. That would explain it.
Since 2001 I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Mint. I got rid of them at the first available opportunity. Elon Musk himself couldn't pay me enough to switch to Linux.
For some reason, there's a huge amount of Hacker News readers who are still full-time Windows users. With the forced migration to Windows 11, I guess a lot of them are now not only trying out Linux for the first time (as a desktop system), but also for some reason going for Arch derivatives, which is always fun to see a beginner mess with LOL
I got this wild idea a short while ago and your comment helped cement it: probably one of the reasons why languages like Lisp are not "successful" has something to do with the impressability factor? If the people with money (and the decision) do not understand the tech or are not able to even fake that understanding, will they bet their money on it?
> If the people with money (and the decision) do not understand the tech or are not able to even fake that understanding, will they bet their money on it?
I never understood the appeal of Feynman and these Lectures. It has been a constant topic for years around here.
For example, the Electricity and Magnetism book by Purcell is phenomenal but it is hardly ever mentioned. To quote wikipedia,
Electricity and Magnetism is a standard textbook in electromagnetism originally written by Nobel laureate Edward Mills Purcell in 1963. Along with David Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics, this book is one of the most widely adopted undergraduate textbooks in electromagnetism. A Sputnik-era project funded by the National Science Foundation grant, the book is influential for its use of relativity in the presentation of the subject at the undergraduate level. In 1999, it was noted by Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. that the book was widely adopted and has many foreign translations.
Feynman was a uniquely gifted teacher that made things intuitive and simple. Those other books are course textbooks for physics majors, and they require an order of magnitude more effort and time to understand.
When I was a physics student the best students seemed to use both types of materials simultaneously. A work like Feynmans would give a bigger picture and more intuitive understanding of what is going on and help you not miss the forest for the trees so to speak, the regular textbooks will teach you all of the little details and math tricks you need to actually solve difficult problems with these concepts.
>>Feynman was a uniquely gifted teacher that made things intuitive and simple.
I think explainers like Neil deGrasse Tyson have a job harder than people imagine. Historically the problem with science education has been, that, as the conceptual universe gets bigger and complicated there's a tendency to assume the common person is too stupid and beneath the subject to understand it.
To simplify and demystify science to a point to get people interested in it as a intuitive iterative process helps a lot in increasing participation of the general crowd.
Bang on.. Several thought experiments and constructs he would present in the lectures will elucidate/challenge a foundational concept in such a manner as to lead an inquisitive reader or student on a quest to absorb the extant knowledge just to be able to answer the conundrum satisfactorily. Many of these have since become classics.
Yes, another thing Feynman is doing is teaching people how to think about and model problems in a simple but reliable way in their mind, something he was very good at. In a sense his specific subject matter is just an example to demonstrate the process.
A textbook that just plainly presents the facts about a specific phenomenon isn't necessarily training you to think like a theorist, in the way Feynman is.
Angela Collier has a 3-hour video on the topic (The Sham Legacy of Richard Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc) with funny takes and criticism. It has been a while, so I cannot remember if she was criticizing Feynman himself to some extent or how his legacy is being portrayed by the media. In the latter case, I am also a bit annoyed how he is constantly portrayed as some kind of a super star by American media, where the rest of the world does not really care that much.
Her primary thesis, if I understood correctly, is to clarify that none of the books with Feynman listed as the author were written by him, and that they were transcribed from interviews, lectures etc with editorializing. For example, by Ralph Leighton. Her secondary point was that she hates the "autobiographical" ones, and finds parts sexist, and thinks most of the stories are mostly false/lies/storytelling.
With that in mind, I think we'll agree it's not relevant here, as these seem to be handwritten notes by Feynman himself.
> and thinks most of the stories are mostly false/lies/storytelling.
It's been a while since I read "Surely, you must be joking" but I seem to recall Feynman himself makes the same point. He basically says something to the effect that some of his stories and bon mots are things he wished he said or did rather than stuff that actually happened.
especially reading Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! leaves a bad taste in my mouth after all these years. i can only take the title literally "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
Surely you're joking Mr Feynman begins in the 30s and takes us to the 60s IIRC, so one has to take into account, what the mainstream was in those times. But he is against hazing, explaining how traumatized European Jews were hazed and reliving their fears in Europe. But, of course, some things cannot be understood nowadays with the mindset we have now.
Her criticism is purely about the man, not Feynman as a physicist, a thinker, or a teacher. Feynman was probably on the spectrum and he had a lot of problematic behaviors. That doesn't meaningfully alter the core of his legacy.
It's also not terribly insightful to point out that a great figure from history was deeply flawed. If anything, that's so common as to be nearly guaranteed.
I don't think you actually watched the video? Nearly all of the criticism is about the myth creation around him with a short bit at the end mostly praising him as a person
Normal students learn the material from normal textbooks. The Feynman Lectures on Physics are a fantastic supplement and a great reference for people who already have a solid background. They’re not a practical introduction. Feynman acknowledged in his preface that, as an intro physics course, the Lectures were a failed experiment.
Especially as a beginner it’s possible to read along with the Feynman Lectures and think you’re getting it, without really getting very much.
Another way you may hear this same point: “only Feynman could get away with doing things in this crazy unrigorous way. You better do things normal and check obsessively, and understand the normal approach very clearly before you do anything weird.” That’s mostly fair but it’s incomplete. Feynman also checked the living shit out of everything he wrote. He just doesn’t show all the checking, so he appears to be fast and loose.
I agree. It's like a fairy tales book for Physic students. You learn from the main book and just before bed you read one of the lessons, just the relevant one. It's not a book to marathon, unless you have a (almost) complete degree in Physics, or something equivalent.
Feynman was the epitome of "think outside the box" for physics, revisiting most topics with a personnal, "back to first principles" angle. Therefore his lecture notes are engaging and entertaining like no others, and a perfect complementary text to normal text books. When I was in college we used to pair the Feynman lecture notes with the much more dry Landau textbooks. A perfect mix, although probably already outdated at the time.
I'm not sure I'm seeing the mystery - do you mean you think that book is not mentioned enough?
Digestible lectures from a charismatic man (who made the television circuit pretty often) have a different audience than comprehensive textbooks I would think.
If one would really be interested in these kind of things, I'm pretty sure one would be interested in other great resources, like the one mentioned.
If one would really be interested in classical music or philosophy one would sure not miss the (other) giants in the field instead of concentrating on just one or two.
Interested enough to listen to a lecture for an hour is not the same level of interest as focusing on a book for many hours, basically. The two things aren't comparable in terms of depth, and many people are interested only enough for surface level understanding or intuition?
One collection that I always loved due to the clear exposition is the one from Walter Greiner[0].
It goes from zero to quite advanced theoretical physics topics in a very nice way. I think that sadly some volumes were never translated, so there is a gap if you read them in English.
I never found anybody taking about Greiner, and at this point, I'm way too afraid to ask why.
1) He had a HUGE amount of personal charisma. Some lecturers are watched because they know a lot or are famous, despite a lack of public speaking skills. Feynman could have gone into acting or politics the guy is genuinely entertaining and a VERY skilled presenter. Feynman's on camera personality is the professor from Gilligan's island but funnier and friendlier.
2) He got his Nobel price in peak boomer years 1965 and then didn't die until the end of the 80s. For boomers he is "their" generation's physicist just like the WWII gen had Einstein as "their" physicist. Who is "the" popular science fad physicist for the X-ers and younger? Hawking, maybe Susskind, possibly even Sabine, I guess?
3) IMHO he was an autodidact who wrote for fellow autodidacts. That is my learning style. His style REALLY STRONGLY resonates with me and my learning style. If you're capable of self-teaching you get a feel for who's your type of author and who is not. Feynman definitely writes books for people like me. His books and notes are all old, of course, which is sad. As for "moderns" who emit similar intense autodidact vibes, I'd suggest Schroeder and his famous "Introduction to Thermal Physics" from the turn of the century. I subjectively like that book. I don't care if there's a better way to learn bachelors thermodynamics by taking a course in a classroom or watching video lecture, I just like the book's style. Not the superficial style like typography but the organization and connectivity of the topics is very autodidactical, just like Feynman's books. To some extent, he's post-education in that once you are done officially learning, the rest of your life you're an autodidact, like it or not, and Feynman's style leans into that. I still remember as a kid in high school, where I took two years of public high school physics, paging thru a copy of Feynman's lectures in the library and it was so clear and so fascinating compared to my experience in "official classes with new textbooks".
Yes, I can. I get deevid as a first result occupying the whole screen (on mobile) as it lists the sub-links, too (one of them being a sub-link to the "AI kissing generator")
Then comes PixVerse, a sponsored result for a google play app.
"People who log workouts are 2x more likely to stick to their routine and make gains, No social feeds, no distractions, just results. $1.99/month vs $9.99 competitors."
For me it would be a no-go, just from the 2x (unfounded?!) affirmation and how this is cheaper that (all?!) of the competitors. Do people actually like this kind of motivationals, so to speak?
The OP is "quite weak at JavaScript" but their AI "vastly improved the quality of the extension." Like, my dude, how can you tell? Does the code look polished, it looks smart, the tests pass, or what?! How can you come forward and be the judge of something you're not an expert in?
I mean, at this point, I'm beginning to be skeptical about half the content posted online. Anybody can come up with any damn story and make it credible. Just the other day I found out about reddit engagement bots, and I've seen some in the wild myself.
I'm waiting for the internet bubble to burst already so we can all go back to our normal lives, where we've left it 20 years or so ago.