Introduction

This blog is inspired by a book “Writing to Learn: How to Write - and Think - Clearly About Any Subject at All” by William Zinsser. The claim on this book is that it’s more effective to learn something if you write about it. So that’s what I’m here to do.

In a connected world, of course, you can publish what you write. This doesn’t seem to be a necessary step for writing. The value of publishing seems limited as well. The world is unlikely to need another discussion of what variables are in programming languages and I’m unlikely to be the person that could fill that need anyway. On the other hand, maybe there is something I could contribute and with search engines, maybe people can find it. On the off-chance you read this, as long as we both limit our expectations, we should be ok.

This is likely to be annoying because I’m at the point after a long software engineering career where what I want to learn about is eclectic and not necessarily systematic.

I’m interested in AI, machine learning and data, even though up to now, that hasn’t been any particular focus of my career, so maybe that will show up here more than other stuff, but we’ll find out.

Generative AI is hot right now, but perhaps is better and more sarcastically described as imitative AI. That leads to the title of this blog.

Once in my career, I decided to write some data gathering scripts I needed in Python, a language I did not know. I watched a youtube video and decided to get to it. Previously, I learned languages by reading books, which results in a pretty good end-to-end view of the language, but this time, I decided to just use google. Because of this, I was asking a lot of dumb Python questions, which normally resulted in going to stackoverflow.com and getting both the answer and comments about reading the manual before you ask trivial questions.

Now, since search engines like to preempt you actually going to a website with the answer, it summarizes the answer for you. It does this without judgement, so you can ask as silly a question as you like and it’s unlikely to say that’s silly. It will also give you a code segment on the concept. This is great for putting together scripts, but perhaps something gets lost if you abstract key ideas out of the concept. You no longer have to put up with being shamed for asking dumb questions, but maybe the shame encouraged a deeper dive. I guess we’ll find out.