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Telling a Computer to Do Things

21 pointsby 3h agowill-keleher.com
5 comments
1h agoHN ↗

Nice article about actually learning stuff and putting this knowledge to use together. Not with AI but with one’s own brain.

22m agoHN ↗

Good advice. I've gotten a ton of utility out of my shell without learning very many tools particularly well.

If you take nothing else away from this, memorize the syntax of one-liner for loops, it has saved me so many times.

8m agoHN ↗

Why are we assuming using the terminal is the only way of "telling a computer to do things"? Every way you interact with a machine, you are telling it to do things in theory.

For example

At a fundamental level, I wasn’t able to tell my computer to accomplish anything that involved logic or stitching together multiple programs

How can that be true if you are telling it to boot on into a os? It doesn't involve logic? Or stiching together multiple programs?

Using a shell =\= telling a machine what to do on a broad level. You are just using the abstractions provided by the os. If you mean get better at shell so you can use it more efficiently than okay cool but that doesn't someone who uses a GUI doesn't "tell" the machine what to do as much as you.

2m agoHN ↗

I was sure this article would be about how we tell computers to do things now (writing prompts to an AI in plain English). I was wrong. Interesting nonetheless.