New tech isn’t socially neutral. Should we be excited about the possibilities of new missiles and warplanes? If you understand how that new technology can be bad, you can understand how other new technologies can also not be “exciting”. Capitalism produces for the sake of production. We have plenty of useless shit that exists for the ouroboros of profit and marketing rather than to fulfil some natural use case. I think modern LLMs fall into the former, not to mention the energy cost of the current demand. I think LLMs can be cool as toys/for demos/as academic projects/etc but the current prevalence is purely due to marketing and AI companies trying to make something that is quite expensive, profitable.

I’ve never heard anyone of any native language pronounce it fack-aid? The English speakers I hear always say fuh-saad. Or are you saying that fack-aid is how you pronounce it and you struggle with fuh-saad?

That’s because you’re American. That’s how you say it with an American accent. Like think about how Brits say “sure” vs how Americans say “sure”. Americans pronounce the R far more.

I think I was just pronouncing everything wrong for the first several years I was speaking English because I learnt English from books and never heard most words out loud. But I don’t remember anything being physically difficult to pronounce in terms of emulating how it’s said when I first hear it pronounced “correctly”.

Having to replace perfectly functional Pixel phones because GOS stopped making updates for them. I don’t blame GOS as they’re a FOSS project and their end of support coincides with Google’s end of support, but it still feels bad replacing perfectly functional hardware. Wish release cycles were much slower so support for existing devices could be focused on, instead of having to spend time porting to every new phone dropped like every year or whatever.

Any serif font is fine by me. I’ve been going with whatever Zathura’s default epub font is.

I just did.

Follow artists you like who don’t use genAI? There are loads of them.

I wasn’t talking about any laws. I was talking about one specific cybersquatter.

We’re not talking about an individual, we’re talking about Lamborghini. I think cybersquatting Lamborghini is fine.

Mine used to be the same but the last OS reinstall I reset everything, moved my files onto an external drive, and only copied them over on a needs basis. I’d been keeping the same home dir since I was like 4 or however old I was when I started using a computer. So needless to say there was a lot there that made me cringe to see every time I tried to navigate my files.

~/{nextcloud,git,pictures/screenshots,music,docs,videos}

In terms of what I manually create. Dot directories normally get automatically created but I guess I’d create a ~/.config if it didn’t get created.

That’s a really interesting suggestion. I’ve not used either. I had the impression that those languages are kinda esoteric, but maybe I’ll have a look.

If you limit yourself to not using WSL, sure. WSL 2 runs an actual Linux kernel with the same Linux executables you would find on any other distro.

I mean yeah but I don’t want to sit through instructing people how to set up WSL. I’ve only done it once years ago so maybe it’s simpler now—I don’t remember it being hard for me but for the average person I can imagine them getting confused at some point.

That might be a good idea actually. I think Java’s a good balance of demonstrating a variety of programming concepts (I think Python obscures too much that would be good to learn about for a beginner), and telling them to install IntelliJ should be straightforward enough without needing to babysit too much the install/setup process.

Tbh I think one of the main difficulties of Rust is that it works in ways that are quite unusual if you’re used to other programming languages. So maybe that particular difficulty is eliminated for people who’ve never programmed before, but yeah, I imagine it probably is still not an ideal first language.

The problem with Scratch is that you don’t learn very much about computers with it. When I expressed I wanted to learn programming as a kid, I was directed to Scratch, and the whole time I was like “ok this is fun and cool, but when do I get to the real programming. I want to make an ‘actual program’.” You’d learn about how programming works on a very high level but you don’t learn much about how things work “under the hood” which imo is the fun thing about learning to program.

The best way I can articulate my goal is like how it feels to watch an edutainment video (think VSauce/Veritasium/Numberphile/etc)—you get a peek at some topic you didn’t know about before and feel you understand how the world works a bit better. It’s not the same thing as training someone up to be an expert, i.e. I’m not trying to turn these people into programmers (though if they’re interested enough they can of course go away and pursue that in their own time).

What’s your target audience ? An what’s the goal ?

Good questions. The goal is not to make new programmers but mostly to satisfy curiosity and help people learn about how the world works, specifically how computers work, and to feel more confident around tech. It’s for a non-technical crowd. Mostly just to give them a taster/peek “under the hood”.

It sounds like a hardware issue that may not be captured by a software screenshot.

I mean someone pointing out a vulnerability in a piece of software should be a falsifiable claim, e.g. “they store their passwords in plaintext”—if it’s foss then just look at the source. You don’t need to read the entire source because you have been given a specific part of the code to look at. You need to only look at the process between the software receiving a password and its query to the database.

And if it’s not foss I don’t use it, and the claim may be unfalsifiable for an outsider who isn’t bothered to try reverse engineering.