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30
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825
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • Programming is one of those skills and industries that is accessible enough that basically anyone can do it, but you will run into trouble later if you're doing anything serious without learning how to do it well. There are hundreds or thousands of ways to make something work, but if it's an unmaintainable mess or you don't even understand how it works, then we end up with our financial institutions running COBOL in 2025. Good luck when regulations change. Have fun when your operating system becomes unsupported and you have to replace the underlying dependencies. Hope your boss doesn't sue when they have to hire people to rewrite your hackjob.

    And these were all already problems before AI code came onto the scene. We had the programming equivalent of script kiddies, people who would blindly copy and paste code from web searches without even reading the date or the comments saying "this is bad and this is why". But this probably makes it even easier to do, and possibly harder to spot. Combine this with how many universities don't even focus on lower-level languages so you get plenty of people who can't understand how to fix any of the trickier errors in their code. And that's not to say everyone has to be able to, but it's a problem when so few are able to. So these programmers are unlikely to know if the code has problems so long as it passes their tests, and unlikely to know how to fix those problems when they become clear.

    Automation tools are good ideas for assisting and detecting possible mistakes. They're not good at generating that much code. In fact, that amount of code in that amount of time is suspicious, hinting that it's unlikely to be well-designed, maintainable or efficient.

  • If any of you have a spare laptop, maybe you can run a live OS for people to play around with?

  • Sabotage a city with this one weird trick!

  • That's alright, and I'm also a little bit sorry for nitpicking! I just saw it as an opportunity to illustrate how complex this whole software mess is.

    I'm not sure if you've come across it yet, but there's a well-known copypasta posted to satirize the way many Linux users will nitpick terms.

  • Seems like the average user on here is smart enough not to get caught up in that bullshit thankfully.

    I wonder if it's still early enough to give people taps on the shoulder - "don't feed the trolls, friend".

  • I’ve never understood the mindset that this social site is made up of a different mix of personalities than any other. It’s not.

    On the other hand, this is often the case in small communities. Most Lemmy instances are general-purpose or large enough to have a typical mix, but I have been to a few sites which will moderate away any hostility whatsoever, and that does make the site unusable for some personalities. These kind of sites have rules like "No politics. No insults. No drama." Toxicity isn't inevitable, there's nothing forcing community staff to tolerate mean people or mean outbursts, but it does take a mixture of design decisions and careful micromanagement which most communities, and especially most large sites, don't bother with.

    edit: and on the flipside, there are also communities where toxicity is expected and it's amazing to see someone acting nice there, it might even be done as a trolling method.

  • But I will say that I’ve basically stopped checking my notifications because all of a sudden it seems like almost every time I go in there, I’ve got at least one insufferable, hostile, negative, etc response or message in there. It didn’t used to be that way.

    I still check mine, but occasionally I'll know I've said something that will have a hostile reply. Usually when I've asked someone to stop being hostile and inflammatory :)))

  • That's one of the benefits of having a forum small enough to have a community. Troublemakers stick out like a sore thumb.

  • It's not only about many people here being technical, of course you're right that it plays a big part, and it's also that the Fediverse is a rejection of for-profit, closed social media, so there's a HUGE crossover between its users and the FOSS community (including Linux users) who really take strong issue to many things about Windows (and Mac) that Windows users consider to be normal. And with Lemmy especially, the initial userbase was largely anti-capitalists, since Reddit was banning many of their subreddits and was exploiting their users for profit with ads, blocking third-party apps, and bending to the demands of media companies and their owners. So plenty of people here are political about software.

  • Furthermore, Linux (as a whole) is not a for-profit project, or a singular organization.

    Desktop Linux is far from it's only purpose, and many of the devs are far more interested in their own use-cases: servers, embedded systems, supercomputers, phones, special purpose OSs. Wikipedia even has a page for the wide range of use beyond desktops and servers. So we can't simply treat devs as a unified group with a common goal like we can generally do with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Steam, etc. unless you pick a particular distro!

  • Enough folks drank the coolaid,

    You say that like the UK all sat down in a room and most of the country said "please censor me".

  • with the only way to fully dismantle them would be to shutoff all access to the Internet

    I don't think this is true. It's a bit complicated because there are ways to obfuscate the traffic, but generally speaking, I'd assume governments could track and block nodes just as easily as you can find them.

    Tor is slow

    It might trip you up for real-time things like gaming and you might take a while to download HUGE files, but it's much faster than its historical reputation

    and has a reputation of being used by pedophiles and drug traffickers

    This is true for any privacy software. Encrypted chats, cryptographic currency, darknets. Even the internet itself has that reputation. Anyone trying to hide what they're doing is likely to seek privacy tools. Reputation means nothing.

  • Lynx

    I know of two other uses for it:

    • Conveniently setting up a software with a web interface while on a headless server
    • Looking busy at bullshit jobs - see the Looking Busy anecdote near the bottom

  • dreamingspanish

    Thanks for the recc. I was half expecting it to force a pay gate to simply watch any of the videos (the internet can make me cynical like that!) and better yet, they have a superbeginner video on an exact topic I was interested in learning about after some South American immigrant friends had brought it up. Immersion almost seems 'too good to be true' because one can learn interesting content more enthusiastically than studying it formally, I've found the same with history and political theory.

  • I've had people outright claim caffeine and coffee aren't addicting. It basically ticks all the boxes, from habit-forming chemical dependency to social reinforcement. Out of addictions to have, it's one of the less harmful ones, but it absolutely can form addiction and people who can't function without it are dependent, even if they can overcome it easily.

  • The modlog is excellent. In fact, I've seen it used not just to keep mods accountable (or at least prove to the community that they're abusive), but also to refute troublemakers who claim they were banned from an instance for no reason or for ideological reasons, when the modlog shows them making clearly bigoted and inflammatory posts.

  • Most of all: it's run non-for-profit. There are no ads, donations are optional (I have the means to chip in a bit each year) and its not VC funded and therefore has no intrinsic pressure to enshittify like reddit repeatedly did. Lemmy does not exploit me.

    I've been able to make (very minor) improvements to the codebase.

    I could download and host an instance if I thought there was one my hobbies needed.

    I can move around pretty easily without missing much if admins are moderating in a way I disagree with, or kowtow to corporate interests or garbage national laws. And some of the reddit admins (not merely subreddit mods) were abusive.

  • Lots of the usual stuff, but speaking of class, when I get unexpectedly positive reactions for outreach. When handing out fliers at a train station, I'd often see someone instinctually ignore us for handing out stuff, but when I announce the reason (e.g. protesting a local weapons factory supplying the ongoing genocide, or for my union organizing to fight issues affecting our workers) some people double back and grab one, or even thank us for volunteering. It's heartwarming and validating. Far more people showing interest or support than the one or two grumpy reactionaries.

  • Most celebrities. I know its usually manufactured hype, but I still don't understand people falling for it.

    Collectible toys. On top of not getting it, I hate it from an environmental perspective and a wasted resources (incl labor) perspective.