social.noyu.me

if touchHLE and my MIDI adventures have anything in common it's that i've been reading so much official documentation that i start to know it like the back of my hand

i think they gave me literacy in school so i could read high literature. instead i spend it all reading 15-year-old apple documentation and 30-year-old roland and yamaha documentation

you see… when you tread new ground, there is no tutorial out there for how to do what you want to do, and the llm will not understand you. your only weapons are your brain and your hands

@hikari@social.noyu.me Is that not high literature, classics even? ​​

@hikari@social.noyu.me You are blessed with official documentation.

You don't need to read random blog posts, code comments, or reverse-engineer code or hardware. ​​

@usagi yeah, we're very lucky to be reimplementing something with a public SDK and very clean ABI. we do have to reverse-engineer stuff sometimes but not that often

@hikari yeah, this is the norm for anyone doing anything novel or obscure

@hikari i don’t use LLMs as a rule, with the only exception being the weird single-line local model in IntelliJ that i mostly keep enabled for entertainment

i’d say that my recent work, not including internal stuff, has probably been like 40% documentation, 50% looking at source code, <10% stack overflow/blog posts

@hikari [replying to the quoted "post"] so uh... when has "stack overflow / blog posts" started being derogatory, and anyways why isn't it called "looking stuff up" in this situation? And when has shaming for looking stuff up been a good thing? (Never.)

And uh, looking stuff up is becoming less of less of a thing that works. shrug. And previously, when it worked, the answer was "it depends"... Some things aren't in "official documentation" when you, for example, smush two projects together to do a thing. TBF, I'm confused by the existence of that train of thought as a whole.

@hikari oh, I think I got it.

Their train of thought is the bizarro version of: "Hey friends, here's a tip: learn to read documentation, and think through the implications in across the parts involved, instead of only relying on asking in the void(s) hoping for the best".