#learning/5 entries

I was excited to see that this is the first module in a new Coursera course I'm doing. I've long thought that ethics are missing from software development, and I think it's more important than ever to care about the consequences of what we're doing and building in this age of AI. This course on building agents literally opens with this statement:

This module is for professionals and data scientists aiming to build responsible AI.

I'm really heartened to see that building responsibly is becoming a legitimate concern, at least in some corners of the industry.

By bridging theory and practice, the program empowers you to lead initiatives that prioritize accountability, ensuring your AI systems deliver immense value without compromising integrity or public trust.

I'm looking forward to this.

I've been hearing more and more things about jujutsu and want to try it out. It is so hard to learn new things that replace something I've been using almost every day for over 10 years though. The muscle memory is so ingrained and my mental model of what version control even is is so rigid, it's hard to wrap my head around the idea that it could be anything other than git's. My main motivation is that I've "heard" it's better for a) working with stacked branches and b) working on multiple worktrees (called workspaces) at once. These are both things I do way more now because of all the agent-driven-development stuff I'm learning than I ever did before and I feel like I am spending a ridiculous amount of time fighting git. But learning new things is so hard. Wish me luck.

The thing I hate most about AI is that it has made it very difficult to actually learn something new anymore. I have become convinced that if you already know what you are doing, AI can be quite cool. It definitely allows me to develop more and better software than ever before (which I'm not convinced yet is necessarily a good thing, but it is cool). The problem is, though, if you don't know what you're doing, AI has made it more or less impossible to tell what is true or not anymore. This is actually a huge problem for learning. If you don't know what you don't know, how can you possibly sift through the sheer volume of slop that has flooded the internet on whatever topic you're trying to learn about? This is actually a frustrating problem.