Programming starter-pack rule
AnarchistArtificer @ AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net Posts 3Comments 1,191Joined 2 yr. ago
But is it a good game?
I think there's a negative cycle also, where a male-dominated hobby where many people are not super socially skilled makes them more oblivious to some of the nuances that turn "explaining" into "mansplaining" (I.e. they are less likely to understand how their behaviour is making their hobby less welcoming for certain people), which makes the hobby more male dominated, both in appearance and actuality
I would really love to have a beard. I have joked that I am clearly wishing I were a dwarven woman, because besides this, I am very happy with my assigned gender at birth
I also have a friend who, due to hormonal stuff, naturally grows an extremely thick and impressive beard and wishes that they didn't have to shave it (if they don't, they get hate crimed :( )
I like that comments are disabled on that video. Talk about setting an example
(n.b. I am neither a rust, nor C developer so I am writing outside my own direct experience)
One of the arguments brought up on the kernel.org thread was that if there were changes to the C side of the API, how would this avoid breaking all the rust bindings? The reply to this was that like with any big change in the Linux kernel that affects multiple systems with multiple different teams involved, that it would require a coordinated and collaborative approach — i.e. it's not like the rust side of things would only start working on responding to a breaking change once that change has broken the rust bindings. This response (and many of the responses to it) seemed reasonable to me.
However, in order for that collaboration to work, there are going to have to be C developers speaking to rust developers, because the rust developers who need to repair the bindings will need to understand some of what's being proposed, and thus they'll need to understand some level of C, and vice versa. So in practice, it seems nigh on impossible for the long term, ongoing maintenance of this code to be entirely a task for the rust devs (but I think this is taking an abnormally flexible reading of "maintenance" — communicating with other people is just part and parcel of working on such a huge project, imo)
Some people have an ideological opposition to there being two different programming languages in the Linux kernel full stop. This is part of why the main thing that rust has been used for so far are drivers, which are fairly self enclosed. Christoph Hellwig even used the word "cancer" to describe a slow creep towards a codebase of two languages. I get the sense that in his view, this change that's being proposed could be the beginning of the end if it leads to continued prevalence of rust in Linux.
I haven't written enough production code to have much of an opinion, but my impression is that people who are concerned are valid (because I do have more than enough experience with messy, fragmented codebases), but that their opposition is too strong. A framework that comes to mind is how risk assessments (like are done for scientific research) outline risks that often cannot be fully eliminated but can be reduced and mitigated via discussing them in the context of a risk assessment. Using rust in Linux at all hasn't been a decision taken lightly, and further use of it would need ongoing participation from multiple relevant parties, but that's just the price of progress sometimes.
I am unsurprised to see that this loser was on kiwifarms (a site that does organised harassment of their victims (often trans people))
Permanently Deleted
I've been meaning to check out Addy.io for a while now, because you're not the first person I've seen mentioning it in threads like this. Your comment was the straw that broke the camel's back and I've finally gone and checked it out. Thanks for including a link in your comment; it helped reduce the activation energy of setting it up
To be fair, the ones that I often come across in my home are literally called "house spiders" (Eratigena atrica)
People in this thread have made good suggestions about how you can be a tad more honest while also keeping things brief and polite. I found this surprisingly effective in making me feel less hollow, but something that really helped me was having friends who I could be completely honest with when they asked how I was doing.
You might not have friends like that. Certainly, I have found that when I'm tired and depressed is when I am most distant from would-be friends, and there have been times when I have effectively had to build up a support network from scratch (which is especially difficult when depressed). Or you may have friends who you hold at arm's length because you don't want to burden them with how you're feeling. I may be projecting here, but when I have been depressed in the past, I end up feeling like I'm almost "infectious", and I end up withdrawing. If you relate to this at all, try to resist the instinct to isolate. Try your best to put yourself in situations where you could meet people, such as if any hobbies you have had (or considered) have a social component to them. If you're starting from nothing (which I'm assuming you are, given your aforementioned loneliness), a large chunk of forcing yourself to engage with things will feel like a chore, but in my experience, that's the only way out (ideally paired with professional support, if available)
"Anyone else here feel like that? If so, how do y'all cope?"
My honest answer to that is either "I don't know if I am coping", or "solidarity". My above response may sound like I'm relatively coping, but in many ways I'm not. The times when I feel like I'm most achieving what I need to in life are often the times I feel most exhausted. In a way, it would be nice if I could think of myself as struggling due to some innate brokenness, but there are so many people struggling in the same way we are that it's abundantly clear that our material conditions are the problem. It's depressing to see how many people feel the same as I do. But it doesn't make me feel less alone, and that feeling is something I cling to. It's something, at least.
When I read DeepSeek's privacy policy, I was creeped out by the invasiveness of the keystrokes thing. Then I realised that ChatGPT is just as creepy, but less upfront about it, and DeepSeek's relative transparencyn caused me to see them in a more favourable light
I haven't seen any tutorials that include the training data. As you highlight, these would make for poor tutorials. If you know where there are more complete tutorials, I'd appreciate it if you could share them
(n.b. I got here after OP deleted their comment, so I don't have the context of what you were replying to. This is just a reply to you)
I felt a sad wistfulness upon reading your comment, because of how deeply I wish this were possible.
I'm reminded of an exhausting dinner in which a friend and I were trying to explain to his Dad why doctors and the like don't work for free. It took us a while to figure out what he was actually saying, but in the end, we understood him to be arguing roughly: "It sure would be nice if people could work for free, because things like the NHS and other social safety nets only exist if people feel a duty to society, or their community. It sucks that selfish motivations seem to be guiding people's decisions instead, and this isn't their fault, but a product of them having to struggle to fulfill their basic living needs under capitalism. Maybe if we had a comprehensive, universal basic income, we would see more people able to exercise their duty to society".
This memory sticks out to me because we spent most of that conversation exasperated and confused because it seemed like he was arguing that people should work for free, in the here and now. Your comment brings me back to that memory because I do believe that sufficiently robust social safety nets would lead to far more people doing work because they find it rewarding; I'm imagining a world where they still get paid, but the money is far less of a determining force in people's decisions. It would be nice to be able to be an idealist like this, but we're a long way off from that world
This article blew my mind when I first read it. The unsustainability of the current academic publishing situation made a lot more sense after learning how we got to this point. Strongly recommended this article to anyone who doesn't know how huge Maxwell's influence was in this area.
I know quite a few people who fit into that category, although I imagine they would take issue with how this meme characterises them.
A widespread concern that I see is that paid peer review may make things worse via a perverse incentive. Consider, for example, paper mills, and the conditions that cause them to arise: Publish or Perish; poor pay in academic research; lack of stability of jobs in academic research (tenure Vs adjunct) etc.. If we're concerned about the quality of peer review, then it doesn't seem unreasonable to be concerned that paying may exacerbate the problem.
So the thing is with Oxbridge is that they are tremendously overhyped, in that much of their prestige comes from the fact that they're self perpetuating prestige machines at this point — they have their pick of the best and the brightest, from all over the world, and their name holds a heckton of power in the research world too, resulting in somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy
Regarding lecture recording, I know that this wasn't commonplace before COVID; disabled students who needed this for access reasons had to wade through a lot of nonsense to get that, even after it was officially a part of their support plan. Something I found very silly was that there would often be people(non students) who were hired by the disability service to attend the lectures and record the lectures for students with health problems that prevented their attendance, on a per student basis. It was an administrative nightmare, especially for the disabled students. They apparently pulled their shit together and did a proper rollout of lecture recording during COVID, for obvious reasons. People I knew were salty that it took a global pandemic to lead to change, but hey, progress!
Generally lecture materials such as PowerPoint slides would be available on the virtual learning environment (which I assume is the case for recordings too), but I think a big reason why you can't find stuff online about this is that lectures are fairly "meh" quality, especially compared to other universities' (now that I've seen the quality of undergraduate teaching from multiple angles). I speculate that the lack of availability of study materials from Oxbridge is because anyone who graduates has an incentive to continue to perpetuate the prestige that they're now benefitting from, so it would be a bad look to be sharing lecture materials. I genuinely mean it when I say that if you could have complete access to the English literature section of the online materials, you'd be disappointed. No doubt you'd find the syllabi and materials useful, but I wager you'd be surprised to see how mediocre some of it is
Unfortunately, the real meat of the teaching at Oxford or Cambridge is something that's far harder to record or share, and that's the tutorials system. This involves a small group (2-4) of students discussing problems or essays with a tutor, usually in college. The tutors are often academics who are renowned in their field, so it's really cool to get such in depth teaching from them. Tutorials would be weekly, give or take, and they would typically involve writing a multiple page essay for each one (and also do other work that was typically less frequent and more centralised). The pace of it was insane, and whilst I think the pressure can be good for output, I always hated how I never had time to go back and review or rewrite old work based on tutor's feedback — the pace was just too frantic.
I fucking loved the tutorials though, partly because the tutor for my subject at my college was one of my favourite people I've ever met. I always came out of a tute feeling like I'd done a workout, but for my brain. I never really felt like I understood the material until I'd done the tutorial on it (ideally the tutorials are meant to be after the lecture content on them, but sometimes it didn't work out that way, and you had to scrap by). The discussion aspect of the tutorials were especially key in the humanities, because it forces students to argue their viewpoint.
That brings us back to you, and the question of how one could emulate the effects of a tutorial (which would be tricky even if you had all the material). Even if you had a list of tutorial essay questions that you could work through, they're not the kind of thing that are marked with a rubric. Even the official grade boundary guidance for exams are frustratingly vague, because they rely a lot on the experience of the tutors. Without someone like a tutor to mark your work and push your understanding in the tutorial after, it's much harder to do that kind of in-depth learning. That being said, a key thing is producing something, I think. It was a hellish rhythm, but weekly tutorials were great at making me produce something. It was super uncomfortable at first, because I didn't back myself enough to really try to put my own opinions through in my essays, but by being forced to argue my side, I improved. Even if you don't have someone to mark work/discuss with you, when you read a piece of literature, try to formulate your own ideas and write them down. If you need some prompt style questions to get you going, then search for resources for particular texts online.
The discussion aspect of tutorials can also be replicated somewhat just with a reading group of motivated and intense nerds. Being able to access or create something like that may not be easy for many, but the format isn't the big part — having external viewpoints to challenge your own is.
I can ask a couple of people who I know about if they have any old downloaded resources, even if it's just exam question papers (because I realise that it's useful for calibration purposes if nothing else). So I can ask the right people, what's your current age or education level, and are there any particular areas of English literature that you're interested in?
"Follow makeup tutorials" is pretty vague, do you have more specifics on what you're aiming for with that? Part of why I ask if because I know that I can find the functionally infinite array of tutorials overwhelming, and if I don't have a clear goal, I'll end up burning out.
The other part of why I ask is because I'm curious about your style goals — what do you want to be able to do that you can't currently do? Is this part of a larger endeavour to shape your style?
Tagging onto this comment to say that I'm also very impressed by stirlingpdf.com for pdf stuff.
I've recently started using KDE for the first time, so I'll see how I get on with Okular
I'm proud of you and anyone else who reads this for persevering. I'm glad to not be alone in this.
God, that's a horrifying thought.
Huh, I never thought about it that way. A friend told me she speculated that trans girls liked chokers because chokers were fashionable when she was going through a male puberty; for her, at least, getting to relish in styles like that felt like a form of healing.