this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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[–] SeeMinusMinus 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Limit how much you use chatgpt. How I learned python was get a python book and read it carefully and follow the examples. There isn't a fast way to learn programming. You are just going to have to take your time. If you run into a issue just make sure to add more details to your posts so we know how to help you and programming stuff should go in other communities most of the time lol. For asking people for help you can also take a look at matrix. There is lots of programming chat rooms on matrix and are community has matrix chat rooms full of programmers at all sorts of levels. I believe you will one day be quite good at python.

[–] BlueWorld2007 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

books aren't my thing sadly

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Programming books are different, trust me. You're not intended to just read them cover to cover, like with a novel. You're supposed to read it with your computer next to you, type in each example code and see what it does, and how it changes if you change the code. It's a lot less like reading a storybook and more like programming from a tutorial, or reading an instruction manual for how to build (and make mods for) your own IKEA videogame. Al Sweigart's book of arcade clones (which you can read for free on his website) is particularly fun for this.

[–] SeeMinusMinus 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use to think the same thing to. Reading has always been very hard for me and still is so I often liked videos more and I still watch lots of videos lol. Books will help give you a deeper understanding of a topic and has a level of detail that videos barely ever have. One thing that might help you is always avoiding noise when reading. The best thing you can do is find a quiet place to read. Good earplugs or something can help when there is no other opinion. A lot of us including me have a really hard time shutting out sound and I believe that anyone that has a hard time reading should try spending more time reading in quiet places. Even with my issues reading now I can read and understand stuff that is often only for people with good reading skills because I am aware of how the world around me effects how I read.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't rely on ChatGPT, it's a language model, not an encyclopedia. Start with tutorials. If you want to "make your own ChatGPT" and don't have any background info, drop that idea for now and revisit it once you've gotten started. It's complicated stuff.

[–] BlueWorld2007 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I first learned Python from a book called Python for Kids by Jason R. Briggs. Quite a good reference for beginners, children or not. It walks you through everything from installing the Python interpreter and your first "Hello, world!" , through data types, functions, classes and Python's object-oriented programming (OOP) features, through to making a simple graphical platformer game. I received a copy of that book for my 12th birthday and read it cover to cover, following every example. Once I had a solid grasp on how Python itself worked, I started reading the standard library documentation at docs.python.org/3/ to find out how much the programming language I had just learned could really do (and how I could make it do it). By the time I was 13 I was programming my own multiplayer, multi-computer games from scratch. (Mind you, they were text based -- the book showed how to make a graphical game, and I had done it once, but I didn't have the patience to do it again :P)

I've also heard good things about Al Sweigart's books, which have the advantage of being available free of charge on the author's website; however I find they largely ignore Python's OOP features and do many things most Pythonistas consider to be anti-patterns (fancy word for ways of doing something that work but are suboptimal in some way, usually because there's an easier and/or less error-prone way of doing them). If you want to get straight into practical applications of Python, I can think of worse ways to start, but if you do I would definitely recommend reading up on how classes work on your own time. Python's OOP features are one of the primary reasons to choose that language over others, and Sweigart misses out on a lot by not even mentioning they exist.

One other note: It's okay to ask ChatGPT how to do something or what to do in a situation you're not sure about, but I would strongly discourage you from asking it to write the code for you and simply copy pasting what you're given. You'll never learn to program if you don't take the time to understand why things work the way they do and how to write a program without the computer's help. That's not to say you have to memorize everything, mind you, or that IDEs like PyCharm that have linters (a component that provides a red squiggly underline when you call a function you forgot to define, or spelled a variable name two different ways in two different places) are for babies -- it's been close to a decade since I got that book, I'm a programmer full time now, and I still look up documentation every day, even for built-in functions I've used dozens of times before, and I can scarcely write a program without my linter checking I've spelled all the function names correctly -- but I don't go to ChatGPT or StackOverflow, take code someone else has written, and treat it like magic. I read what the functions do and what arguments they take and write the program myself.

That's not to say all copying of code is evil. I think it's fine in moderation. The important thing is to understand what exactly the bit you've pasted does and how you would change it, if you wanted to, to make it do something else. Say I'm learning HTML and I find online that adding background: #FF0000 to my CSS makes the background of my page red. This tells me nothing about what I'd need to know if I wanted to make it blue. I could look that up separately, of course, but I'd much rather understand what that mysterious code does and be able to make my own without help from the internet. If I do a bit more googling, I find out that that six-digit number is split up into three parts; the first two digits are how much red is in the color, the second two are green, and the third two are blue, each ranging from 00 (black) to FF (full saturation). Then I can reason out that #FFFF00 would give me full red, full green, and no blue, which would mix to make yellow. If that's all I need to know, and I'm satisfied, I can stop there. If I'm still curious, I can keep researching and learn how hexadecimal works to represent a number between 0 and 255 in two digits using base 16. That thirst for knowledge, always wanting to know a little more than I strictly have to to get my job done, has gotten me very far in life, and I suspect it will do the same for you.

Sorry for the wall of text. It's late and I'm on mobile so I tend to ramble. Hope this all made sense :)

[–] lwuy9v5 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You are picking a really hard problem to start with - AI is a thing that people get incredibly advance degrees to know about. Frameworks have made things much easier to get started without all that learning, but I'd still recommend starting MUCH smaller.

Make a Python program that takes input and randomly gives output from a list. Then make a Flask WebApp that returns the same if you give it a web request.

I'd say after you can do both of those challenges - maybe then you'd be in a better place to start thinking about implementing something with an AI library. There's layers and layers and layers of knowledge to build up.

[–] BlueWorld2007 0 points 1 year ago

confused as hell sorry

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Don't use chatgpt for this kind of thing. It absolutely sucks for programming stuff if you can't already spot goofs in the code, because it will make them regularly, and if you can't spot them yourself, they will torpedo your entire project. Debugging tools will be of limited help.

Start with a project you feel would make your life easier, then work out how you want to get from A to B. Maybe you want something that can fetch you something from the web every day? For that you can look into the 'requests' library to make web calls.

If you need help, I've been doing Python code for the best part of 10 years. Holler at me if you want help!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you already know other programming languages, or is Python your first one?

[–] BlueWorld2007 1 points 1 year ago

Html, Python was my first, but I suck at both :(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What problems are you having specifically? Which tutorials or resources have you tried so far?

[–] BlueWorld2007 -1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Can't program a generator or Ai in it, like ChatGPT and Claude

[–] jerrimu 8 points 1 year ago

Dude that’s crazy hard, try training a model that’s there already first

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

“I just learned to swim, why don’t I qualify for the Olympics?”

[–] TropicalDingdong 2 points 1 year ago

generators are difficult. is this your first ai model you are training?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Do you mean scripting interaction with an existing one or writing your own or something?
Like Stack Overflow question, the only way someone could help is if you detail what you tried already, and what didn't work.

[–] BackOnMyBS 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not a programmer, so I can't really contribute anything to answer your question. However, I can recommend a resource!

Our chat has a room for technology. While it's not strictly a programming room, this community seems to have a ton of programmers, so there is bound to be someone there that could help. There may be others that have had experiences similar to yours, so they could share what has and hasn't helped them. While it may not be the best and most reliable support for learning to program, meaning it might not be a good idea to depend on it entirely, it could be part of your toolkit to get support since the users will likely be more considerate of autistic traits and thinking styles.

[–] BlueWorld2007 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] BackOnMyBS 3 points 1 year ago

Can you elaborate on the part you don't get? Are you having trouble accessing the chat room?

[–] nyoooom 2 points 1 year ago

Programming is hard and requires you to think in a different way than how we think most of the time.

This is the hardest part, learning to think in algorithm. You can learn that with most languages, once you know it it's much easier to learn another programming language.

Start with some simple tutorials, only use ChatGPT to help you understand some concepts or pieces of code, not to write the code. You can't really learn shit if you're not forcing your brain to think that way.

It takes time, like weeks to start to become kinda comfortable with basic programming. Start with conditional structures (if, else), loops (while, for) variables and functions. That should already allow you to create some fairly complex programs.

If I may, I would heavily suggest you to try to learn C, as it's a much lower level programming language that has almost no hidden logic, where python comes with a whole lot of integrated features that make it hard to really learn and understand what's really happening.

Good luck! 👍

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Python is a big, complex language with tons of libraries and obscure features. IMO you should focus on learning the fundamentals of the language and computer programming in general, and then how to use the primary libraries you'll need. Take it slow.

Since you mentioned elsewhere that you're not into book learning, try this 8 hour video. Eventually, you'll have to sit down in front of a computer and write out some code. This video does give you some projects to start with. If it's your first programming language, then yeah, it might take 8 hours of studying to grasp.

[–] jerrimu -3 points 1 year ago

Try c++ or JavaScript I can’t do Python I hate it despite being ok at most languages.