I watch aviation accident reports all the time ... Mentour Pilot is a very good channel for that on YouTube - very professional. My excuse for that is that it gives me a "exterior" view as a sysadmin on how well you need to be prepared for any disasters ...

I think it's an accurate view. Yet it does not HAVE to be that way. First, there was "vi" We got Notepad on Windows. Then Visual C++. Then we got Visual Studio with Intellisense (Visual C++ did not have that). Now we have code-writing AI. You can still program in Notepad today. Would you do it? Probably not. But programming using Intellisense is a dependency, too. You can do without, but it's slower. The quality will suffer only because it takes too much time, not really because of a different procedure. It might be the same way with AI. The only thing I hope is that no-one ever will think that AI can actually replace creativity in humans. And that's a key in programming. But how could AI as a rule-built and rule-depending thing (may the rules be ever so obscure), compared to actual creativity of live beings? Of course it cannot, but the danger is that people might think it's "the same". People who think so must think that humans are just machines like a computer. I possibly digress but it might also be very pertinent.

I think you only have to look at how ChatGPT actually works - it tries to figure out the "best" next word in the sentence. That is NOT how to reason or think. Do you think that way? Certainly not - I would guess you have a CONCEPT first before you open the mouth. ChatGTP has no concept. It is just word babble. Thinking is not talking, no matter how many "scientists" may tell you that the way we think is through words. Einstein did not. And what about musicians? They don't think "now I need to put a F# semiquaver here in this position" (and if they do, their music is balderdash)

But that's my exact point - what kind of question do they ask if they can be answered by a mindless robot??? Not matter how "reputable" that exam is

Now, when ChatGPT can write essays better than school kids, and has answers to lots of questions, it seems to me that it could also answer the exam questions kid are getting in school or college. Of course, the AI proponents are going to praise this as proof of how "intelligent" ChatGPT is - it's so good, it could pass a college exam! But is it? Isn't it rather a poor comment of what nonsense we are doing in schools? Is schooling really meant to be repeating random facts, regurgitate what you have been told so you can spit it out again on an exam paper? Is this "learning"? If you think that's learning, THEN of course ChatGPT is "intelligent". Even Einstein apparently said "most of my work came from imagination, not logical thinking. And if you have problem with mathematics, I assure you mine are still greater." A school should prepare kids for life, give them some competence they can use, some knowledge they can apply, make them curious to create and use their imagination. Cramming data down their throat is, in my opinion, NOT what a school should do. It's just another example of how "automation" takes something away from humans. But is it really taking something away, or is it not rather pointing out that this was, after, not really human to do this stuff? Was it human to die as a slave while carrying stones to the pyramids in Egypt, or rowing the Roman boats? Certainly it wasn't - and now it's replaced by machines. It certainly created some unemployment, I guess - the real stupid people were then unemployed. But what business does anyone have to be stupid? That's where schools come in. But they, now, just make kids into parrots, easily replaced by chatbots. Maybe ChatGPT just points out that the "robotic" repetition really does not have a place in our schools. Something needs to change here, doesn't it?

I am tired of tutorials and senior programmers which "explain" that exceptions should never be handled in lower level code. Here is my example to end all examples why you do need to catch exceptions sometimes in low level code: We have a component for importing millions of records of data from a delimited text file, process it and store it in cleaned-up form in a database. Now, data in delimited text files is "quite" clean but very occasionally it is not, and we want the import to stop and indicate WHICH column. So we can fix the import data, or the thing which generates it. Let's say that's a date column and we have Convert.ToDateTime() and there are 10 date columns in that structure - it will throw an exception allright which bubbles up but will be the unhelpful

String '184' was not recognized as a valid DateTime

. So - catch the exception, add row and column info and then re-throw. Really, anyone who sees this as wrong must be working with mickey-mouse applications where you never have to sift through millions of records to find the one datum which is wrong. Isn't it? Out of this "purity" of exception handling we get abominations like the SQL Server error message "String or binary data would be truncated." (I know it's finally handled as of SQL Server 2019, but it's been around for decades.)

To simplify that - there are 12 keys in the chromatic scale, so just put an integer from 0...11. Then you don't have any regional differences. And if you want major / minor, then add a Boolean. Should suffice for the most common "Western" music.

PS

Here is the laziest code of all: The code which is written correctly FIRST TIME around, with no correction needed to it ever, no need to revisit it ever again. Does it have to take longer? No, because you'll never spend time on it again. Does it take a long time to write such code? Not if you actually are capable of perceiving all ramifications of it, and actually confront the entirety of the issue at hand. The writers who spend 7 years to write a 500 page book don't actually write better books ... did you know that most of the well known artists like Mozart etc, spent incredibly little time to create immortal master pieces? Sorry for not being funny ... :)

Have done both. My experience made my answer very clear - don't distribute. I would suggest you to read this - no one can say it better than him - the founder of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp: The Majestic Monolith