Formal education in programming is surprisingly useless. Some people with a formal education in 'Computer Science' (and let's be honest, it's more of an art than a science) can tell you about set theory, but can't pick an appropriate database for a project. They can tell you when to represent a number with hex, but …

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I am a morlock - a naturally technocratic creature, comfortable with the darkness. When the pandemic hit, I heard the shock waves across the internet, and noticed every day how little my life had changed. It was at times, almost a nice excuse to sit and tap on the keyboard, and make dinner slowly to the sound of Nine …

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Can we stop pretending it's the 80's? I like Unix-style programs. I like the expectation of a manual with every program, instead of every programmer coming up with their own way to telling people how something works. I like being able to ignore licences, and there's no better licence to ignore than the GPL - it will …

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Stepping Stones: rocks to step on, to avoid the surrounding mud or water. When crossing a river, the more stepping stones it has, the better. Walking across six stepping stones feels much better than hopping across three, and hopping across three is better than jumping to one stepping stone in the middle of a river, …

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A fascinating article wandered across my feed, arguing that LLMs like ChatGPT replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con. 'Fascinating' because it's devilishly clever, and quite seductive, but seems like complete bunkum for the most part. 'People get fooled into thinking LLMs are clever', Baldur Bjarnason says, very …

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Everyone's talking about "Open"AI and Google scraping their entire website every 10 minutes, just in case anything might have changed. But not mine. I checked the logs for the first time in a long time, and there's not much traffic. The last 20,000 requests show only 111 from http://www.google.com/bot.html and only 24 …

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When coders use the GNU Public Licence, they have no obligation to give anyone credit for anything.1 Despite this, coders almost always receive credit for everything they do, down to the exact line-changes.2 Meanwhile, the Creative Commons licences - far more popular with artists - have explicit stipulations, but don't …

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I switched to a left-handed mouse for the first time, at the ripe age of 38. It's unviable, so I've stopped. Finding a mouse was easy - my mouse is already symmetrical. Reversing the keys was just one command. But you can't use a computer with that mouse. All the GUI shortcuts - Ctrl + c, Ctrl + f - all focus on the …

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I used to think of programming as something natively binary. 0's and 1's, [ True, False ], just like the Propositional Logic in first year Philosophy. And filesystems do work that way on the disk - every picture is made of 0's and 1's. However, Philosophy, or Logic in general, has other systems. Some of them use 'True' …

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I asked an older family member about old Scottish legends. She told me about what she heard when she was younger, from someone older still, and I suppose that puts the legend at least a hundred years back. There are ghostly bagpipes that foretell death...there are banks of primroses, where, if you pick the wrong …

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