• 4 Posts
  • 248 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 16th, 2024

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  • On the other hand, I’m sure people are going to come up with excuses even for this by blaming the user, his mental illness, his mother or even society at large.

    I mean, I am going to say it but not as an excuse. Should companies that supply these products be held accountable as the criminals they are? Yes. Is this all downstream from the fact our society hasn’t treated mental health as a serious matter, therapy access is garbage, all the while being a young person in 2025 is a hopeless string of horrors and anxiety? Also yes.

    Torment Chatbot That Kills You is a bad thing to create, but also no one would be chatting with the Torment Chatbot That Kills You if society hadn’t utterly failed them beforehand.






  • I don’t think you’ll be broken by learning Python, but in my opinion to be a good programmer you need to understand at least one layer of abstraction lower than what you’re implementing. So, as an example, once you learn how to code in Python using idk numpy, you absolutely must learn how numpy works under the hood. And that means C, because you cannot escape C.

    I teach people Rust and I always say that you kind need to know the nightmare that is C/C++ to be able to fully appreciate what Rust does for you and how it builds a much more sensible programming model on top of the same set of basic concepts we use and have always used to talk to silicone. And then you can write web apps with Rust and never even touch a raw pointer in your life, but it will make you an infinitely better Rust developer if you understand what’s going on below you.

    This works surprisingly well across the entire SE stack IMO, e.g. if you’re using React you should be fully aware of the layer below you - raw JS and HTML. If you’re coding in C you should be aware of assembly and memory models. If you’re using SQL to query a database you should be aware of logical plans. If you’re a project manager you should be aware of what software engineering entails and what people in your team actually do day-to-day.


  • I’m glad this exists even though I vehemently disagree.

    I would bounce right off a course like this. I fucking hated the webdev course we had. I don’t care about websites. Writing a program in C that finds a shortest path in a graph and dumps it to the terminal? Fuck yeah, that’s where the dopamine lies.

    I agree that teaching people Java or Python as the first language is a bad idea, but for me it’s not because they need something simpler that has tangible results - that’s the opposite of what my experience tells me! I want them to write code in C that doesn’t produce any GUI at all. They need to know how to test code that has no visible buttons to click. How to debug code just using a debugger. Having a tangible result other than just a dump on the terminal is a blight, it makes people lazy. It’s very easy to determine that the program works because when I click through buttons in the GUI it does what I expect. When you have a library that doesn’t have a GUI but just does things to objects in memory you can’t take a shortcut, you need robust testing to convince yourself it does what you want. If you are GUI-centric, they will think that the only code that matters is the one that they can see from the front-end. This is precisely the way people get taught coding now with Python - it doesn’t actually matter what is the code, it matters that you get a plot that looks right at the end.

    The way to enlightenment lies in having 200 lines of C code that segfaults but only sometimes and having to figure out where the bug is using nothing but a debugger and your brain to analyse the code you wrote. That’s how you learn how a computer actually works underneath, and once you get through that then stuff like Java or Python is small potatoes. You’ll get the high-level language because you’ve seen the nightmare underneath the surface.

    If the problem is that people don’t feel motivated to do that and need a pretty website to feel like coding is fun then idk maybe they should train in something different? If having to debug broken code feels bad then you might want to do something else that’s more rewarding. It’s fine if there’s like 50% fewer programmers but they’re more conscious of all the layers between the user and silicon on average and fixing arcane problems scratches their itch.







  • I, for one, am excited, because this could be the ultimate bubble. Like think about it, crypto was shit, but at least it was vaguely a thing, like you could buy Bitcoin and order drugs through SilkRoad and you’d have drugs, that’s a material use case. LLMs suck ass but ChatGPT exists, you can go to that website and type shit and it will respond, it’s garbage but it’s garbage you can touch and smell.

    Quantum has none of this. It’s ultimate vaporware, a technology that literally does not exist, you can’t have a PoC, you can’t have an early version that you’ll lie about being a “big step towards General Quantum Computing” or whatever. This is SV’s wet dream, can we make money from basically nothing at all?




  • So I was thinking about this recently with a colleague and there are two things that I think would be useful:

    • I would actually like a HUD? Like a minimap when walking through the city. Or the ability to popup a small YT video in the corner of my eye. I have no idea if it would actually work with how human vision works, but that’s a cool idea for me.
    • Universally good idea: smart glasses that detect advertising billboards and other shit like that and automatically replace them with something. Could be just with white space, or with pleasant landscapes, or giant dicks if you’re into that. The possibilities are quite endless. Would be universally beloved by everyone.


  • This is a bundle which originated out of anti-Calvinist polemics written by Catholic and royalist Anglican writers during the early modern period, was picked up by 19th century romantic reactionaries to build the foundation of the emerging Counter-Enlightenment, got carried into the 20th century by various counter-modern literary movements seeking a third way against both capitalism and socialism which could justify the continuing relevance of the traditional humanistic disciplines against the new challenge of the social and psychological sciences, transitioned from being primarily of the political right to the political left because of the ideological aftermaths of WW2 and 1968, and took on its modern form in environmental and anti-globalization activism in the 90s

    Parkour! So nazis weren’t left-wing but they switched after the war, brilliant.

    It is the actual source of the post-60s ideological transformation against the ideas of rationality, science, objectivity, and progress on the left

    Pfffffff, lol, what? xD Ye, the left, famously anti-science, unlike the rational thinkers that reside in the White House right now