I get this, but

Why not say “I get this, and …” ?

I don’t think the idea of a learn-as-you-go editor goes against the idea of watching skilled devs with their favorite tool

Input speed is not “just” input speed.

Note: I’m not about to argue for or against modal editors, I just want to answer: why is input speed really really really important, when (we agree) its not a big percent of total time.

5min at 80mph over a bumpy dirt path is very very different than 5min of flat smooth straight driving. And not just because of effort.

A senior and junior dev could spend the same amount of time to rename a var across 15 files, move a function to a new file, comment out two blocks, comment one back in, etc. But. When I try to have a conversation while they do that, or when I change my mind and tell the junior to undo all that, its a massive emotional drain on the junior.

But effort isn’t the whole picture either: speed is a big deal because pausing a conversation/mental thought for 5 seconds while you wait to finish some typing, is incredibly disruptive/jarring to the thought-process itself. That’s how edge cases get forgotten, and business logic gets missed.

Slower input is not merely input time loss, it also creates time loss in the debugging/conceptualizing stages, and increases overall energy consumption.

If the input is already fast enough that there’s no “pauses in the conversation” then I’d agree, there’s not much benefit in increasing input speed further. BUT there’s almost always some task, like converting all local vars (but not imported methods) in a project to camel case, that are big enough to choke the conversation, even for a senior dev. So there’s not necessarily a “good enough” point because it’s more like decreasing how often the conversation gets interrupted.

Don’t Speculate

Go to Twitch/YouTube. Watch a senior Vim/Jetbrains/Emacs/VS Code/Helix dev churn out code for a hackathon/advent-of-code, and see what you are (or are not!) missing out on.

If you have “how the hell did they just do that” moments, figure out what that feature is, and STEAL IT. If its too hard to steal, then maybe you are being limited by your editor. Base your “fear of missing out” on what you see rather than random people tossing their opinions around. Only you can answer “how much is that feature worth to me and my workflows?”

• If you’re going to try modal editors, sooner is exponentially better. Probably start with Vim bindings for VS Code.
• If you’re not going to go modal, then make absolutely sure you don’t bottom out. To be frank, Ctrl+D is the tip of the iceberg. Half the benefit of modal editors is, mastery is mandatory; they chase you around with a 10k volt taser until you’ve got 100 instinctual shortcuts. Hardly anyone mentions this but Go beyond/outside your editor: At the OS level, use spacebar as a modifier key, where holding spacebar converts your WASD into arrow keys. Then disable your normal arrow keys. Something like that will get you vim-like benefits, but in every app, and with a learning bump instead of a learning mountain. For VS Code, get cursor jumper extensions like Mario (block jumper), get cursor-alignment extensions, write boatloads of custom code snippets, get a macro record+replay extension, make a jump-to-next quote, jump to next bracket, install sequential number generator extension, a case change (camel case, snake case, etc) extension, sort lines, case-preserving rename. If you can avoid bottoming out, and keep learning, you’ll likely never feel that you are missing out on whatever modal editor people are swearing by.

Usually you can just google tiktok downloader, paste in the url and download it. Its possible those services have died since I last checked though.

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Why not both?

Its a tough problem. You have to find something that you want to exist; like an app or a website or a game. For example, try making a GUI for managing SSH keys. You know, like the ones github makes you create in order to clone and push to a repo. Make a visual representation of those keys (stored in the .ssh folder), and tools to add/delete them.

Along the way you’ll find tons of missing things, tools that should exist but don’t. Those are the “real” projects that will really expand your capabilities as a developer.

For example, I was coding in python and wanted to make a function that caches the output because the code was inherently slow.

• but to cache an output we need to know the inputs are the same
• hashes are good for this but lists can’t be hashed with the built-in python hash function
• we can make our own hash, but hashing a list that contains itself is hard
• there is a solution for lists, but then hashing a set that contains itself is a serious problem (MUCH harder than hashing a list)
• turns out hashing a set is the same problem as the graph-coloring problem (graph isomorphism)
• suddenly I have a really deep understanding of recursive data structures all because I wanted to a function that caches its output.

Ignore the name (neural networks might as well be a footnote). A more appropriate title would be “generic problems and algorithms”.

(Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach by Russell and Norvig)

https://github.com/Youquan1/Artificial-intelligence-books/blob/master/Artificial Intelligence A Modern Approach - Stuart J. Russell %2C Peter Norvig.pdf

I agree, and here’s a few different avenues of examples:

1. If trying to get past interviews, Leet code and hacker rank can be great. They’re not so great for real world problems, but not bad.

2. Advent of code is a good middle ground between theory and practice in my opinion.

3. To really learn real world problem solving, I’d recommend implement a specification, without looking at existing implementations. For example, make a basic regex engine (formal Regular Expressions not PCRE expressions), or try to implement the C Preprocessor, or the JS event loop.

“Algorithms to live by” https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-Live-Computer-Science-Decisions/dp/1627790365

Less technical than you probably want, but it is useful for mapping real world problems to known algorithms.

No

No

I didnt upvote the other python-beginer friendly meme cause it wasn’t accurate. But this one is on point.

(I know I’m two months late)

To back up what you’re saying, I work with ML, and the guy next to me does ML for traffic signal controllers. He basically established the benchmark for traffic signal simulators for reinforcement learning.

Nothing works. All of the cutting edge reinforment algorithms, all the existing publications, some of which train for months, all perform worse than “fixed policy” controllers. The issue isn’t the brains of the system, its the fact that stoplights are fricken blind to what is happing.

If you paid a true professional to sit down 1-on-1 with you everyday for 6 months, and you are good at learning I think yes, for most but not all software positions. But unless you’re forking over $200k I don’t think any professional dev is going to do that for you.

This could actually be a pretty big deal

1. The Eclipse foundation has been making alternatives to VS Code’s “killer apps” (Docker, Python, Go, C++, SSH, Live share, etc). AKA the closed source ones exclusive to VS Code offical that make all forks of VS Code a huge downgrade. The Eclipse foundation is also running the extension store that powers VS Codium.
2. “why not just use VS Codium?” (With the killer extensions made by Eclipse)
   • VS Codium is great, but because of manpower limits, they always have to be “downstream” of VS Code. They can’t rewrite any of the core systems.
   • As someone who contributes to VS Code, and loves VS Codium, many issues I have with VS Code have been open on github for +7 years, with hundreds of comments and thumbs-ups. We can’t even sort the file explorer view by last-edited and folders-first (but we can do folders-first alphabetical). Thats been open since 2017.
   • Theia looks like it could finally be the hard fork I’ve been waiting for. A hackable editor, trying to be open source, where all my extensions work, and the community can actually make a PR, get it merged, and extensions are not excessively sandboxed.
   • Will it be that? Only time will tell, but the Eclipse foundation has a pretty good record. They’re definitely prepared for long term support.

Wow that’s super interesting to know. So its still got some resistance, but a lot less than I thought. Thanks again for sharing!

Thank you for such a long and detailed post! I indeed did not know about things beyond the SIM, and I didn’t know about the extra details about the country codes either. That is extremely interesting to me.

With the phone spoofing though, does that mean two factor with a phone number is basically useless? If I had authentication based on a MAC address, it would take seconds to break it. But I think, and sure hope, that auth based on phone numbers is more secure.

I think your domain name answer – that for the most part computers didnt need them – is a very satisfying answer.

If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying that right now the network doesn’t have an exhaustive table of IP addresses to physical locations. It has a cache, and a hierarchy, and the path to a location of the IP is fluid.

But a system where every device could be directly contacted/identified like a Sim card, would effectively require a complete table of “what network is device ABC at”. A table that is updated every time the device changes network connections. It would be like trying to change domain name to point to a different IP address.

The problem is, updating a domain to point to a new IP takes hours or days not seconds, so doing that every time a phone changes WiFi is not practical.

Is that a good summary?

Finally :D thank you so much!

So basically VOIP is “cheating” because its not actually handled by the network directly, the phone company pays for always-online servers, and phone(s) reach out to those server every time they change networks, in order for servers to be able to route calls to them.

Which also means! it is possible to do the same thing for computers, but it requires having

1. A static IP
2. An always online server
3. The device needs a daemon that tries to connect to an always online server, and authenticates itself
4. That server needs to manually reroute traffic (through a VPN or some other means) from the static IP address to the device, wherever it might be

Which also explains why general network providers wouldn’t want to create the infrastructure. Even if universal addresses were given to each device, which simplifies DHCP and address-leasing, and shortens time it takes to handshake with the network, all of that is less of a cost than the infrastructure needed track of devices as they change networks. (And that’s on top of ISP’s being slow to change from the legacy approach of local networks and desktops).

^ which is more the conversation I wanted to have but didnt really get with this post.

Thats a sizable edit!

Yeah 😅 I didnt want it to be this complicated of a question, but I didnt see how else to explain that current addressing systems don’t meet the same need as a phone number.