eksemplar

I don’t think the insect apocalypse is getting its attention stolen by climate change.

I just don’t think enough people care. I mean, look at France. They are having violent riots because the gas prices were increased to fight climate change.

I know that it’s easy for me, a relatively wealthy Scandinavian, to not worry about gas prices, but even if these people are struggling to make ends meet, they are right now, actively fighting to kill the future of their children.

How the hell we going to change anything when the status of the world is like this?

Maybe if you're comparing piracy to stealing of personal goods, but if you steel a few gallons of milk from your local supermarket then you're not depriving them of selling that particular brand of milk either.

Digital products are easy to replicate, so they're obviously different, but that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with them. Well you can, because it's extremely hard to regulate, but that frankly doesn't make it any better from a moral point of view.

So do you and the content creator.

I mean, we've all laughed at the "you wouldn't steal a car" commercials, and the truth is, if you could download and 3D print a car, risk free, you probably would steal it.

The underlying social part of that statement is both true and interesting though. Because the reason you wouldn't steal a car is because of the social contract you have with other members of society. We don't steal from each other, and if we do, society punishes us.

That's basically what the EU is doing with this legislation, and sure, its annoying, but I have a hard time seeing how it's wrong.

Github is a platform that allows anyone to share my things openly. It also lets them contribute or perhaps even take ownership of the work if we agree it's better off in their hands.

I'm perfectly fine with that.

I'm not advocating for anyone to shut down information, I just wouldn't be sad to see a world without companies like Reddit.

I think freedom of information will actually do better without them, though.

When I call them morally bankrupt, its because of the social manipulation, meddling with democracy and selling of user data, not so much the fact that they allow people to share images of Yoda. But I guess I could have made that a little bit clearer.

I don't personally think the laws are wrong though. I'm a content creator myself, and while much of the code I write is open source, and I'm happy to see people use it to build cool things, I also don't want anyone to steal it and pretend it's their own, and I certainly wouldn't want a social media company to make money from it being shared.

So I like the law, and I think it should apply equally to you as it should to a social media company. Reddit shouldn't be above the law, and it makes me proud to be a European citizen when our politicians stand up and tell these companies that they aren't.

If I'm a photographer and you see my images and like them, then you can't download them and then upload them as your own on reddit, and reddit certainly can't make money from the clicks generated by my photos that you uploaded to their site. Unless you have my permission.

Thats the clear case, it gets difficult with stuff like Star Wars memes. Disney probably doesn't mind someone using Darth Vader to tell a joke, they probably don't care if you stole the image and uploaded it as your own either, and they probably don't care if your joke is distributed on reddit either or whether they make money from it. Because at the end of the day, thet's sort of a free commercial.

Under the law though, you have to ask permission.

It's annoying to be honest. I give a lot of presentations, and not having every image on the internet available to me, is just annoying. But I work for a municipality, and it can potentially be held accountable if I use proprietary images without having permission to do so.

It's been like that for a long while by the way, but internet companies like Reddit have somehow gotten away with doing what the rest of us cannot. In fact they've build a big part of their business model around it, and now the EU is telling them they aren't above the law, so of course they're unhappy.

It's perfectly fine to share links, the EU directive specifically states so. What you can't do, is take content, and host it as your own without getting authorization to do so by the content creator.

You can probably imagine why that would be a problem from Reddit.

I don't personally care if companies like reddit get to face the harshest possible fines from the EU, they are morally bankrupt after all. I mean, almost every image posed on reddit is a form of piracy, and very rarely does the original content creators actually benefit from having their works shared or altered on reddit, and that's not even touching their shady political and commercial manipulation. On the other hand, I really doubt that EU legislation will ever be successful in stopping people from sharing dank memes.

Also, I'm guessing this only applies to the desktop version of reddit, because would be impossible to see anything on the mobile version anyway since everything is blocked by all those "USE OUR APP" banners.

The west won’t go free. Heatwaves have been killing thousands for the past decades in Europe, and extreme weather is really fucking with America.

Being near the cost isn’t necessarily worse than being inland as the sea can help regulate the extreme temperatures. I live in a costal city which basically sits around 100meters above sea level, on a good foundation, so the higher amount of rainfall and increasing sea levels aren’t really a worry. I work in another city 40km in land. In the winter my work place can be absolutely frozen while my hometown sits around 0 degrees, and vice versa in the summer. We had a really bad heatwave this summer, but it was 5 degrees worse at my work place than my home.

But basically you’re only going to be fine if you live as far north as Canada or northern Germany.

You’re spot on about climate refugees though. Syria was/is a war about water control, and now Yemen is in the same boat.

The real worry isn’t that though. It’s all the methane gas locked in the permafrost. It might make the air unbreatheable to humans, and then the rest really won’t matter.

It’s really silly to ruin your life with a criminal record like this, but at least the guy did something useful with his fandom. A lot of kids on YouTube are just watching, wasting away.

Good idea, but they are not tech companies, so they likely lack the ability to do so.

I guess they could upscale in tech, but how would they pay for it when they can barely earn enough money to fulfill their primary function?

I don’t think publishers have a problem. I think users do. I hate online news as much as everyone, but I still want deep, intelligent and critical journalism, so I subscribed to a paper which sells it.

It’s one of the most successful news papers of my country, financially, and up until April this year they didn’t have a website. They do now, but it’s basically just a digital version (also available in audio from apps) that you can still only access if you subscribe.

I couldn’t be happier, and they earn money. So maybe the whole free content thing isn’t really a good way to go for either the user or the publisher?

Is that really practical though? I mean, it makes sense financially and in terms of how we usually do transition, but we’re frankly running out of time, and maybe we need to be radical rather than practical.

I’m old, I’ve seen how we’ve ignored the warnings for the past 30 years. Worse yet, if you ask people on when sollutuons can be ready, they say 10-20 years, and we only have one decade left to stop our own destruction.

I think it’s easiest to explain like this.

You don’t get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.

That’s a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven’t taken that well.

It’s almost always better to achieve for yourself instead of others. A PhD. is infinitely more valuable than a couple of years working for any company, especially if your subject is interesting enough to on-spot hire you before you finish.

And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.

I think you misunderstood me. It’s not the abstraction that’s important. It’s the problem solving that comes with knowing how the understanding.

How can you really be tasked with solving problems if your first response is to look for a node package that does it for you? And that’s what JavaScript teaches you.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use node packages. But learning to do that as your first steps into programming is robbing you of learning how to use code to solve problems.

C/assembly are great starters because they teach you how computers actually work.

Even a simple function in JS taking one variable abstracts a good deal of that away from you because it handles things like memory allocation for you.

A lot of modern hopeful programmers that make it into our interviews can barely explain what the new keyword of a OOP language actually does, and way too many have no idea what a stack is.

This isn’t useful when you write CRUD web-applications for a few thousands users, which is arguably a lot of modern programming is, but it’s extremely useful if you ever want to build something original.

Which is actually the key issue. You seem to think building a water pump isn’t a beginner project, but why isn’t it? It’s one of the most basic programs you could write. In fact it’s so basic that you could solve it mechanically, without the use of programming, if you have running water to power the timed open close mechanism of the pump and pull the water.

By contrast, a web site is infinitely more complex. Only you think it isn’t, because other programmers have build most of your tools for you. Which is great, you should stand on the shoulder if giants every time you can. What isn’t going to be great is when you’re tasked with solving a problem no one has solved for you first.

Do they have internet? Because if they do, then cloud9 IDE is an excellent way to teach, any language too.

One of the best examples of this is CS50x from Harvard, which uses it (and other cloud services) to give students an IDE, automatic helpers, debuggers and code checkers.

Node is easy to set up and get going with, but if you’re teaching people how to hack, maybe it’s better to teach them something much more low level so they can actually build real things? I mean, if you want to build a solar powered aquafarm, or water pump, then C or Python and a raspberry gets you a lot further than JavaScript, and with C you actually learn how computers work.

But I guess it depends on the circumstances, and not knowing yours, then perhaps JS is a good choice.

The article talks about it, but it seems too fantastical to me. I mean, what’s the business model really? Facebook earns around $2.5 a year per user, is enough people really going to bother selling their data for almost nothing?

I’m not sure it would be true, but government sure spends a lot of money on Microsoft licenses.

How is JavaScript accessible? Because of websites like the linked article, which covers the basics, that lets you build things? Because Udemy, codeacademy and all the others will teach you how to google program using it?

Maybe you’re right, but this page doesn’t actually teach you databases, and most of those courses don’t actually teach you programming.

At least not efficiently.

I have worked with JS for a long time, and I don’t hate it, but it’s such a terrible language and environment that the most popular part of it is literally a strict syntactical superset of of it.

I don’t particularly like Typescript by the way, and I don’t think it’s really that useful, but you can’t deny that most people do.

I think 95% of all projects would be better of using something that wasn’t JavaScript for the whole stack, and I think that’s the reason so few things are build on node. I like graphql as much as you do, I also think Prisma is okish, but I’d rather use Django, Flask, Java Spring it .Net Core because they are so much more efficient in the long term.

Of course on the client side, all the innovations and all the talent lies with JS, and there is some advantages for using JS for your whole stack. Those advantages end at the DB though, at least in my opinion.

This isn’t a problem, you can use Prisma for Postgres, and there are decent drivers for mssql, but I’d never advise people to use nosql unless they had a very specific reason for doing so, and I can’t think of one.

I work in the public sector. We operate more than 500 systems at the muniplacity where I work. Some are major, some are not. Some have support completely handled by the providers, some do not. Some are build in house, some are bought by local software companies and developed specifically for us others again are standard software.

What’s common among them is that they run on different technology.

So we have 500 different ways to do front-ends, middle-ware, back-ends and databases. So literally thousands of combinations.

We have 5 IT-operations staff to run and maintain it. They’re very good, but they are very good at specific things. Like one guy knows networking, another knows server infrastructure and user management, but only for Microsoft products because that’s our backbone.

But we’d like to run a JBOSS server on redhat, and we’d like to run some Django and Flask servers, and we’d like to have a PostgreSQL and a MongoDB for GIS, a MySQL for some of the cheap open source stuff and a MSSQL for most things. And so on.

Guess what makes that easy, docker for Windows. Our IT staff can’t support all those techs, but they can deploy and maintain containers and keep surveillance on them. Sure the content of the containers is up to the developers, but it’s infinitely easier to operate than having to support the infrastructure to do it without docker.

The same thing is less true in Azure or AWS where your cloud provider can act similarly to containers, with web-apps and serverless, but it’s still nice to keep things in containers in case you need to vacate the cloud for whatever reason.

It worried me a little that you compared yourself to Udemy. Because Udemy is at best a decent look into a little bit of a certain technology, and at worst an amateurish stride through a topic. Maybe it’ll allow you to google program, but it won’t teach you computer science.

So I looked over your courses at, https://www.makeschool.com/course-catalog and I have to ask, but do you really teach computer science? You seem to lack a lot of the fundamentals on how computers, compilers and programming languages actually work, and instead offer a range of introductory courses on specific technologies.

Don’t get me wrong. I like applied computer science, we have it in my country as well, as an alternative to the universities and real CS. Such a degree takes 2.5 years, and it makes people very hireable, but it’s not comparable to a real bachelors of computer science.

I think you should aim instead, and instead compare yourself to EDX and their free course of CS50x from Harvard. I’d feel a lot more comfortable hiring someone who had completed those courses than someone who had learned React on Udemy.

Good luck though, the CS field has room for, and needs more craftsmen, but maybe don’t call it a bachelor of science if you don’t actually teach the science.

I disagree. Some days you’ll be beat, sure, and you won’t be able to be creative on those days. But that’s fine, if you accept it.

Other days you’ll get a lot of creativity done in your spare hours, and if your hobby is computer science, then you can certainly get a side project done. Because if you have a few hours to watch Netflix or browse hackernews, then you have a few hours to do other things, and once you get into the habit of having fun with your hobby, it will feel nothing like work.

Granted, that last bit isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it’s probably impossible if you don’t like your side project. Like if your side project is to build x because y will be good for you, then x may not be what you want, and it’s almost impossible to do that then.

Disclaimer, I’m Scandinavian. Our work week is 37 hours. My work week isn’t though, and I still had time to build a password cracker for DES encrypted passwords in c the other day, because it was fun.

Of course, if your goal is to start a business, then it’s perfectly possible that this won’t be fun, and I do agree that it’s often a good idea to give it a shot instead of trying to do it on your spare time. But creative side projects? That’s like going for a run or watching a movie.

No, I meant to say that open source libraries are especially dangerous.

I get why you may object, but open source libraries have failed us a lot and by contract the .net framework library hasn't.

There are a lot of great open source libraries, that are both well documented and maintained, but there are a lot more that aren't.

Could they have build the iPhone XS with a jack? Because if they couldn’t, I’d argue that everyone who owns one benefits from it not having a jack.

The real annoyance for me isn’t the lack of the jack, it’s that they haven’t also replaced the jack on the MacBook line yet.

I agree that lines of code is a terrible measurement of productivity.

I don’t agree that short is always better. Sometimes it’s better to write the code so that it’s easier to understand than to use smart tricks to make it short, because the next person looking at the code might not be on to your tricks. You can argue both ways on this of course, but I prefer clean and easily understandable because I’ve seen what happens when you don’t do that and a junior programmer has to fix something 15 years later.

I also disagree that libraries are better. You seem wary of JS, and that’s good, but no libraries are magical and none of them can be trusted to do something for you, unless you look under the hood.

Especially not open source libraries. If you don’t know what is going on inside the libraries you use, then you’re heading for a world of pain. Of course some libraries are better than others, but using them blindly is wrong. And if you have to read up on them, then they aren’t really quick fixes.

We had a developer who used a library to handle decimals. We have our own library for this, that we’ve build because almost none of the open source libraries for decimals are very good at handling memory allocation and floats and computers aren’t 0.00000000000 they are 0.00000001436 etc. But our developer didn’t know we had our own library for this, so he used a public one. One that uses around 10 other libraries, one of which didn’t handle memory allocation the way you’d want.

So suddenly our decimals were wrong, but the computer didn’t know they were wrong, because technically the library worked it just wasn’t specific enough. And it cost us a lot of money to clean things up afterwards.

This is the extreme example, but it’s never been more relevant than it is today. Especially not in a world where less and less programmers seem to actually know how computers or even compilers work.

It’s a bit of a cheap statement though. If keeping the headphone jack would have prevented Apple from making the iPhone X, then the argument wouldn’t hold any value.

I would have hated if the XS was thicker, or if it still had bezels.

Why don’t you just plug your old headphones into the adapter and continue to use them?

Weird, I noticed no difference between using the headphone jack headphones or the usb-c headphones

I guess I can’t charge my phone and use headphones at the same time, but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable.

But I guess you must always be charging your phone since the usbport is occupied?