setsubyou

I’m not sure about this… the build systems I work with are either so complex that something like cmake gets used because that way we can support multiple build systems on different platforms without maintaining five different projects, or they are so simple that it frankly doesn’t matter whether it’s make or something else.

And in the former case, i.e. the only case where I even care what tool we use, what I care about the most is speed, so I would want something like ninja instead of make (which cmake conveniently supports). I don’t want to micro-optimize by doing everything myself with redo.

It doesn’t seem to be based on petroleum, since they’re explicitly comparing it to petroleum-based plastics…

There also are other non-petroleum based plastics that dissolve in water. This part is not new. E.g. polyvinyl alcohol is used widely.

What’s new about this one is that it specifically needs salt to dissolve and they claim it’s otherwise relatively sturdy. So maybe it could be used instead of pet bottles for drinks? Or maybe they’re not quite there yet but it’s a new step in that direction…

Hmm, it shows archived on Jun 2 for me, but this person’s screenshot says May 31:

https://x.com/OnlyXuanwo/status/1929504028863369416

So did they unarchive it, make two commits, and then archive it again?

In UTF8, all bytes that are not an ASCII character have the high bit set.

IMHO, LISP is ok for theoretical fundamentals but it won’t necessarily get you a practical understanding of how computers work. Functional languages are more like how mathematicians wish computers worked. All programming languages are abstractions, but functional languages abstract away how the underlying hardware works in ways that procedural languages don’t.

And Java is pretty useful if you want to get a job but if you don’t want that, then there are less painful options. The difference to Python is mostly that Java often feels like it was intentionally made annoying to use. But it’s a pretty high level language, I wouldn’t call it more fundamental or basic than Python. Java wins on performance but that has nothing to do with how high level it is.

For practical fundamentals, if you actually want those, I’d recommend starting with microcontrollers and their assembly. Modern CPUs are so complex that learning fundamentals from scratch with assembly is quite difficult. But with smaller/older microcontrollers (like PIC or something) it’s both more approachable and more useful. It’s almost a shame that hobbyist microcontroller platforms are pretty advanced now too. But you can move on to C first, you can ignore MicroPython for a while if you want.

If you want a game way to learn absolute basics, there is a game called Turing Complete. It basically teaches you how to build your own CPU architecture from logic gates. You start with the basics about logic circuits and eventually build a simple CPU, and then another more complex one. I think this actually goes a bit too far in terms of fundamentals, it will take you forever to learn how to even make something write Hello World on a screen. But I guess this is the closest to how I started out. Of course for me the logic part was theory only. And the CPU I eventually learned programming first was a 6502 and not something I designed myself.

Tbh, I’m in my 40ies and I don’t think my education was so much better than what younger generations are getting. I’m a software engineer and most of the skills I need now are not skills I learned in school or even university.

I started learning programming when I was 9 because my father gave me his old Apple II computer to see what I would do. At the time, this was a privilege. Most children did not get that kind of early exposure. It also made me learn some English early.

In high school, we eventually had some basic programming classes. I was the guy the teacher asked when something didn’t work. Or when he forgot where the semicolons go in Pascal. During one year, instead of programming, there was a pilot project where we’d learn about computer aided math using Waterloo Maple that just barely ran on our old 486es. That course was great but after two months the teacher ran out of things to teach us because the math became “too advanced for us”.

And yes the internet existed at the time; I had access to it at home starting 1994. We learned nothing about it in school.

When I first went to university I had an Apple PowerBook that I bought from money I earned myself. Even though I worked for it, this was privilege too; most kids couldn’t afford what was a very expensive laptop then, or any laptop. But the reason I’m bringing it up is that my university’s web site at the time did not work on it. They had managed to implement even simple buttons that could have been links as Java applets that only worked on Windows. Those were the people I was supposed to learn computer science from. Which, by the way, at the time still meant “math with a side of computer science”. My generation literally could not study in an IT related field if we couldn’t understand university major level math (this changed quickly in the following years in my country, but still).

So while I don’t disagree about education having a lot of room for optimization, when it comes to more recent technologies like AI, it also makes me a bit salty when all of the blame is assigned to education. The generations currently in education, at least in developed countries, have access to so much that my generation only had when our parents were rich or at least nerds like my father (he was a teacher, so we were not rich). And yet, sometimes it feels like they just aren’t interested in doing anything with this access. At least compared to what I would have done with it.

At the same time, also keep in mind that when you say things like education doesn’t prepare us for AI or whatever other new thing (it used to be just the internet, or “new media”, before), those who you are expecting the education from are the people of my generation, who did not grow up with any of this, and who were not taught about any of it when we were young. We don’t have those answers either… this stuff is new for everyone. And for the people you expect to teach, it’s way more alien than it is for you. This was true when I went to school too, and I think it’s inevitable in a world moving this fast.

To be fair, connecting some of the hardware I used in the 80ies is not straight-forward. But not impossible.

Just enough money to buy some physical goods, but not enough to buy so many that storage becomes a problem…

I’m not sure how much sense it makes to complain that an AI chat bot collects so many categories of data and then highlight “user input”, which it obviously needs to function? Like how is something like DeepSeek the “middle ground” if that’s what the author thinks is the biggest problem with it? When I look at DeepSeek on the app store, it does list at least “coarse location”, so why not highlight that? DeepSeek can’t answer my questions about e.g. “restaurants nearby”, unlike e.g. ChatGPT, which comes up with a map. So that’s what I would be interested in, what DeepSeek uses my location for.

Although just in principle this kind of analysis rarely finds surprises.

If you can enter text or click on things in an online app, obviously it collects user input.

If it can refer back to previous answers, obviously it retains chat history.

If it can process pictures, obviously it collects photos if you upload any.

If it can be interacted with using voice, obviously it collects audio.

If it can answer questions about things near you, obviously it will use location data.

If there are IAPs, it better not forget that you bought those, too.

And so on.

Samsung had a smart watch with a curved screen and a 3g modem in 2014 (the original Gear S). I guess it didn’t work out.

It’s not related to Windows or Linux, but as the article notes, Apple devices that use UEFI are not vulnerable (and current ones don’t use it anymore and therefore aren’t vulnerable either), so I guess that’s where the “Windows or Linux” comes from.

Pretty much everybody in this thread who is laughing at Amazon’s drones is thinking of drones as they are right now. But Amazon is not using drones because it’s a good idea now. They’re using drones now so they already have the experience and the setup when inevitable technical progress happens.

The drones might never work out or they might eventually work out, but this is exactly how Amazon got so big in the first place. They started selling books online when a lot of people still weren’t sure whether that could work and they started selling cloud computing almost ten years before anyone else thought to do that.

Amazon is not quite as dominant in Japan. Rakuten is still alive.

Comparing to macOS is actually impossible because fde can’t be turned off on Macs at all. Macs (and iPhones etc.) handle encryption of internal storage transparently in hardware at pretty much no overhead and without the CPU even having access to the key. You can only choose whether a login is required for the Secure Enclave hardware to be able to access the key.

On other platforms it’s pretty much a hardware question too. PC vendors and hard disk vendors could do the same thing Apple is doing regardless of whether the OS is Windows or Linux or whatever. How fast the OS based encryption is only matters on hardware that doesn’t have this functionality.

The T2 chip is only in Intel Macs. ARM Macs have the Secure Enclave too but it’s part of the main SoC, not a dedicated chip.

If you need python 3 there’s also graalvm but its python support is still “experimental”.

In 2004 I was still running a Usenet server. Online games were run by the community too. I spent so much time on MUDs.

It seems like now we are in this cycle where someone builds something shinier and fancier, it briefly becomes the next best thing, and then they find out it can’t make money (or just survive) unless it becomes significantly worse, and then the next best thing appears. But because of all the steps back there is little real progress. Lemmy too is, functionally, not that different from Usenet. It has pictures and votes and is generally more modern. But what I see highlighted in contrast to reddit is that it’s distributed. Like Usenet. It’s not supposed to be a breakthrough but after reddit it feels like one.