points by jmull 15 hours ago | 0 comments
To me the voting is pretty much on target.
They are both good answers, depending on what you're looking for. The first is clear, concise, and correct -- pretty much exactly what you want to read and write code with the $ prefix.
The other one is more interesting in a behind-the-scenes way, and goes through the thinking process behind it.
I can see why the first answer gets the most votes -- that's usually all people want. The other gets votes for the people looking for a somewhat deeper answer and are willing to spend more time reading to get it.
It shouldn't necessarily be about winning the voting... different perspectives are useful.
But now we have llms and we are even farther from any sort of community. And llms for all their faults are very pleasant to work with, and completely obviate the need to interact with anyone. And all those posts on stackoverflow and all those blog posts that everyone wrote free of charge all got slurped up, so when I ask it to port a big mess of jquery to react, somewhere in the matrix multiplications going on at scale in a data center somewhere is benefiting from some compressed knowledge that $ at the beginning of a variable means its likely a reference to an object that is a jquery wrapped set. And the connection to stratoscope thinking this up gets lost in a sea of diffuse indirection.