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.
communism
joined 2 years ago
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.
Follow artists you like who don't use genAI? There are loads of them.
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).
Lesbians exist.