What the hell are you talking about?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Just like Star Wars, so nice.
I love this actually, I always wanted for computing and electronics, the relevant kind and not “how to make a shortwave receiver from an antenna, two transistors and a potato”, to be just another work, not “that thing people do glamorously with coffee and snacks receiving lots of money and we don’t want to understand it, it’s just cool and future and such”.
Even if it involves “AI” and such business practices.
Cause when it stops being glamorous magic, it starts becoming optimized and normal, like painting fences. People start using common sense more, corporate advertising less, when thinking of it.
Or so I hope.
elbarto777@lemmy.world 1 week ago
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 week ago
All that’s happening now is that software engineers have less job security than McDonald’s staff. If you think that’s good for anyone but corporate shareholders, I’ve a bridge to sell you.
Ideally everyone’s jobs should be getting better, but all that’s happening is that for a bunch of people, things are rapidly getting worse. Worst part is, kids are still being told to go study computer science because “it’s the future”, knowing full well they’ll be working at a fast food chain with that degree because there’s going to be one job for every 50 students. Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will continue to make record profits though. Just with fewer pesky employees to pay.
I’d rather see the fence painter be paid more than the software engineer be laid off. I thought we were all part of the same working class. But maybe that’s just me.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
“Working class” is a construct.
I agree that solidarity works.
But also in every era there’s a new direction or profession paying enough for solidarity to look worse.
And every time someone can kick the ladder behind them, they do.
Like Komsomol leaders did. USSR had something resembling democracy and social lifts two times - between civil war and Stalin’s ascent and between Khruschev and Brezhnev (arguably during Stalin too, but with a lot of nuance). The problem with Brezhnev is not that he made something worse - it’s that he didn’t change anything, letting the social and power and economic structures crystallize.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
It is already just another work. Electronics and software development has never that accessible before.
Grandma can pick up an Arduino, a few components and create a fully automated garden if she so choose, without having prior experience.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No, it’s still overhyped compared to other work.
And I didn’t mean easiness, I meant social place.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I totally agree with you then.
Venator@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
Star wars?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yep, remember how in the EU tech workers are, well, normal workers. Even in kinda important places. Not perpetually massaged and coffee-stimulated superstars.
Venator@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
What?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
In the Star Wars EU, Expanded Universe.
I’m not in my best shape last few days, insomnia.
littleomid@feddit.org 1 week ago
Interesting way to think about it. Have not thought about it that way.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 week ago
The portrait kind of painter working like the fence kind is not a good thing. It’s not even a thing at all, it’s an illusion.
Also when it comes to accessibility for the aspiring hobbyist coding is very accessible. If you have nothing to start with, sure, more expensive than knitting, but probably not more expensive than acquiring a merino wool habit, and if you already have any kind of computer – any – it’s literally free.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No. The path is easy when you know it. Except you don’t unless you are lucky.
There are a lot of false targets, a person 30 years ago willing to learn would have Basic as something normie-directed, C as something serious, x86 assembly language, with things like Pascal floating around and maybe C++.
They’d read something about DOS and how an IBM PC with DOS works and understand it probably very quickly.
Then they’d practice.
Then there was Windows 95+, and still the complexity was about similar, except there also emerged Tcl/Tk, Visual Basic, those things.
Now … you are a kid, you want to learn something, you might read about how digital electronics work, how a processor works, what interrupts are, see some words like syscalls and virtual memory and DMA, yadda-yadda. From some other side that there are operating systems, and there are compiled and interpreted languages, and there are levels of abstraction …
How the hell do you cross the gap between these and actual understanding? Other than the blind way of going up level after level, starting with a bipolar transistor, which doesn’t seem easy at all.
The hardship of finding the learning path shouldn’t be ignored. And the cost of all that complexity.
About Arduino, too, - well, there at least you can write something in AVR assembly and almost transparently flash it to the board. Arduino and such things are good. I meant the things most people actually use and how.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 week ago
You don’t pretend that Haskell has anything to do with electrical engineering and then you’re golden. You do not need to understand the one to understand the other. You do not need to understand quantum mechanics to understand a transistor, either – I mean, sure, if you intend to develop process nodes then you better understand quantum mechanics, but if you plan on soldering transistors to make a radio? Who cares.
You choose some random interest and learn it and don’t look higher or deeper up the stack, you respect the abstraction boundaries, unless you actually have a good reason to cross them.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yes, then you have another problem - how do you choose what you want to do if you don’t yet understand the whole in any approximation.
Again, about people who don’t know anything yet. There’s a barrier a person has to grind through with their teeth before they understand that they want to learn Haskell and what that is.
trungulox@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I learned python and bash over about 6 months.
I’m not a phenomenal coder yet but it’s definitely doable. I didn’t take a class or read any books I just tried to code shit until eventually the anger and frustration lead to a moment where it kind of clicked and I was just like, writing line after line after line of code.
It was so weird. When I woke up that morning I felt like I’d never learn and then I could just kind of do it.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Have you already heard of our Lord and Saviour, the Wizard, and the scripture known as The Wizard Book?
(The software to use with the book is nowadays called racket, use
#lang sicpto enable the right dialect)trungulox@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I have not. I’m about to start learning rust so this could be useful. Thanks!
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
So, how’s your understanding of the whole system your python and bash scripts run on, after that?
trungulox@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. Seems a really relevant question for anyone looking to learn a low level programming language. I’d say it’s fairly in depth but I don’t know what I don’t know. I get, at a high level, how memory addresses work, understand what ram does, I get the concept of hyperthreading and have written a couple of python scripts that have used it for so applications…
I’ve fucked around with a lot of hex tables.
I took formal logic in uni and while I sucked st it I did learn a lot about the fundamental logic underlying it all