eah
@eah@programming.dev
- Comment on Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead 1 day ago:
I think the trouble young people have with using desktop computers is overstated. It’s a bit of a satanic panic situation. You can learn it pretty quickly. A common complaint is that “they don’t know hierarchical file systems” because the mobile devices have only flat file systems presented to the user or something. A tree structure is not a challenging concept and the basic things you can do in a file system you can count on 2 hands. Open a file, save a file, rename a file, delete a file, move a file, copy a file, create a directory, enter a directory, move up a directory. The physical interface is the mouse with 2 buttons, a primary and a secondary for opening context menus; and the keyboard which has the characters printed on them. There’s a bit more to it, but it can be explained in, like, a page of text. And the rest you can learn through experimentation. Touch typing is another thing entirely, though. That takes dedicated time to learn.
I wonder if ineptitude with tech shared between the young and old are different kinds. Maybe the old are just completely inept, but, for the young, it’s just temporary. It’s a shock when we find out they don’t know something, but, after explaining it, they’re productive within minutes. A 20-year-old still has plenty of mental plasticity. Having to teach somebody the desktop metaphors isn’t a huge bottleneck.
I’ll end by contending that I don’t think schools should not be teaching computers. Rather, they should be teaching computers in more depth. Teach students basic programming and they will have to learn the desktop metaphors along that journey anyway. Computers are way too important to leave the future stewards of the Earth in the dark about how they work. I had to learn how the energy of a photon relates to its wavelength and I had to read and analyze the Canterbury Tales. Not entirely useful. But it’s at least a little interesting. Kids are very capable. They won’t all be programmers. They should learn it all, anyway. Don’t let Silicon Valley have it all to themselves.
- Comment on Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead 1 day ago:
Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it. You don’t even need to read a manual. I wonder if this is all a holdover from the 70s when the computer interface was likely to be a paper teletype which is naturally difficult to use without instruction. We’re living in the future. Teach the difficult stuff. The teachers need a wetware update.
- Comment on ESL homework 3 days ago:
I reject your reality and substitute my own!
- Comment on Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users 1 week ago:
Also, other sites on the Net can collate links posted to reddit and the users and times that they were posted with users accessing pages on their own site. If you’ve posted a sufficient number of youtube links, youtube can possibly link your reddit account and youtube account, say, as belonging to the same person. Just about any popular site can link your reddit account with your IP address. And your facebook account with your IP address. Etc. And thereby link reddit accounts with facebook accounts in cases with long-lived IP addresses. If X is a scrapable site on which users with fixed pseudonyms can submit links and Y is a site popular enough and has enough content, then Y can collate user accounts on X with IP addresses. This is not to say anyone is doing this. There are not many sites that meet the criteria to be a Y. I would say it includes mainstream news sites. The authorities could compromise some of the Ys or create their own through astroturf and thereby link users on the Xs with IP addresses and then with location.
These days, this might be a bit harder because reddit closed up when the AI companies started scraping. I don’t know the situation with Facebook with regard to scraping. If it’s scrapable, they’ve got your name linked to your reddit account.
What I’ve said about reddit equally applies to lemmy.
- Comment on An oopsie occured 1 week ago:
Oopsie woopsie. It wooks wike your uwu dwiwu was in a wiwwy bad caw cwash. Would you wike to caw and abuwance?
- Comment on 'No One Should Have a Copyright on Vance Being Booed': Video From Olympics Blocked on X 1 week ago:
You can’t find anything on youtube these days. Uploads from ordinary people don’t appear in search results. They’re crowded out by the mainstream.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 1 month ago:
- Comment on LG Update Installs Unremovable Microsoft Copilot on Smart TVs, Ignites Backlash 2 months ago:
Build your home as a Faraday cage. They can’t bypass physics.
P.S. Holy crap. The guy on the radio is on lemmy?
- Comment on AI Slop Is Ruining Reddit for Everyone 2 months ago:
They’re not competing with you or me in the conspicuous consumption game. They’re competing with all the other rich people.
- Comment on Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead 2 months ago:
I swear bro, just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear, we’re gonna get to AGI. Just add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear. I swear. I swear. I swear, we’re gonna get to AGI. Just one more gigabyte and just make it bigger. Just make it bigger. We’re gonna get to AGI. We’ll get there. We’ll get there. We’ll get there. Just make the model bigger. I swear.
- Comment on Plex’s crackdown on free remote streaming access starts this week - Ars Technica 2 months ago:
Pure rent seeking. It’s not the only example. So many products have artificial defects deliberately added by the manufacturer so that they can then charge you to disable the defect.
- Comment on Getting in on the library craze with the Reading Rainbow guy 2 months ago:
Borrow the book of it’s available and then pirate a digital copy. The physical book is available for someone else to use when you’re done with it, but you can still refer back to the book whenever you want or just sit around staring at it in adoration.
- Submitted 2 months ago to [deleted] | 29 comments
- Comment on Scientific Exposure 2 months ago:
If you’re ever caught downloading knowledge, just say you’re training a neural network and point at your head.
- Comment on Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash — "the fact that people are unimpressed ... is mindblowing to me" 2 months ago:
They turned Windows into an IoT device. It’s your refrigerator with a TCP/IP stack and a touch screen bolted on the front. How many watts does the fridge use? Oh, I don’t know, but look, it has a digital calendar! How long does it take to cool items down? Who cares! You can use it to set reminders! When will I need to replace the gasket? What? I don’t know. But it can scan barcodes and send it all to the cloud. Isn’t that neat?! Cool, cool, but why does my fridge need to do that?
- Comment on FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Infamous Archive.is Site 3 months ago:
The administration didn’t threaten to take down the IA or investigate it or anything like that, so it’s not similar at all.
It’s conspiratorial to think the FBI is doing this to censor or hide something. archive.is is primarily used to get around paywalls. The most likely explanation is news sites complained to the FBI that their copyrights are being violated (which is true), so the FBI is investigating. They’ve had a problem with falling revenue for a decade or more at this point as everything went online and people expected to get instance access for free in contrast to print media.
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 3 months ago:
I think they might be anticipating LLMs possibly being able to do a decent job at deobfuscation in the near future. This is an opportunity for Mojang to earn friend points. They might as well take credit for something that is going to happen anyway.
- Comment on Huge internet outage live blog: Amazon, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max and more experiencing issues 3 months ago:
It really highlights just how centralized so much of the internet is on like three companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google)
Cloudflare: What am I? Chopped liver?
- Comment on Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit after Kimmel suspension 4 months ago:
I’m similarly skeptical it’s a genuine outage given how so much stuff nowadays is done with cloud computing which enables dynamic on-demand procurement of server resources. Or whatever the correct terminology is to describe that.
- Comment on ISO 26300 5 months ago:
- is an all-around cool, intelligent person and unquestionably punk
- Comment on ISO 26300 5 months ago:
Schools could have used that time they were “teaching” the Office suite to give an introduction to unix, programming, and the basics of how the internet functions. I had to read and analyze Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Homer and memorize the names and formulas of 33 polyatomic ions. Computing education to the same depth should have been and should be required as it was required for the other subjects.
- Comment on ISO 26300 5 months ago:
.tex
Ha, lamers. A true wizard writes their assignments in roff.
