PixelProf

Absolutely! One of the difficulties that I have with my intro courses is working out when to introduce the vocabulary correctly, because it is important to be able to engage with the industry and the literature, but it adds a lot of noise to learning the underlying concepts and some assessments end up losing sight of the concept and go straight to recalling the vocab.

Knowing the terms can help you self-learn, but a textbook glossary could do the same thing.

There was a lovely computer science book for kids I can't remember the name of, and it was all about the evil jargon trying to prevent people from mastering the magical skills of programming and algorithms. I love these approaches. I grew up in an extremely non/anti-academic environment, and I learned to explain things in non-academic ways, and it's really helped me as an intro lecturer.

Jargon is the mind killer. Shorthands are for the people who have enough expertise to really feel the depths of that shorthand and use it to tickle the old familiar neurons they represent without needing to do the whole dance. It's easy to forget that to a newcomer, the symbol is just a symbol.

Functional programming is much more math oriented and I think works well here, as it likes to violate a lot of these rules as a rule. I think it's what makes it so challenging and so obvious for different folks.

I really want to see if worker owned cooperatives plus AI could do help democratize running companies (where appropriate). Not just LLMs, but a mix of techniques for different purposes (e.g., hierarchial task networks to help with operations and pipelining, LLM for assembling/disseminating information to workers).

It is real, you just have to have sufficient funds already to be able to pay someone else to do the active part of the income and make sure they are earning less than their worth so that you can pick up the excess. Most effective if there are many layers in between, so that the income becomes increasingly passive as you move up the chain, so that those under you have something to strive for, because you don't want to be in charge of hiring all of those people, so you hire people to hire those people, each taking a cut of the value along the way.

But don't worry, the American Dream™ is that, as long as you keep working about 10 layers deep in value cuts, eventually you might be able to get into layer 3 or 4 and get your kid into the job early so that they can get to layer 5 or 6, and maybe they'll have enough money to get their kid to 6 or 7.

C could just be a blank and you have to bit blit the arrow on yourself.

I don't know why, but I still can't open a core file without going I'm in. I don't do QA, though, and so tinkering with final breath of my program frozen in time maintains some novelty.

My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I'm really enjoying Typst. It didn't take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven't gone too deep into it but I'm excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.

Lots of immediate hate for AI, but I'm all for local AI if they keep that direction. Small models are getting really impressive, and if they have smaller, fine-tuned, specific-purpose AI over the "general purpose" LLMs, they'd be much more efficient at their jobs. I've been rocking local LLMs for a while and they've been great as a small compliment to language processing tasks in my coding.

Good text-to-speech, page summarization, contextual content blocking, translation, bias/sentiment detection, click bait detection, article re-titling, I'm sure there's many great use cases. And purely speculation,but many traditional non-llm techniques might be able to included here that were overlooked because nobody cared about AI features, that could be super lightweight and still helpful.

If it goes fully remote AI, it loses a lot of privacy cred, and positions itself really similarly to where everyone else is. From a financial perspective, bandwagoning on AI in the browser but "we won't send your data anywhere" seems like a trendy, but potentially helpful and effective way to bring in a demographic interested in it without sacrificing principles.

But there's a lot of speculation in this comment. Mozilla's done a lot for FOSS, and I get they need monetization outside of Google, but hopefully it doesn't lead things astray too hard.

I get both sides of the argument here. I think we need to have this big reaction because companies have held so much power over employees for so long - I'll avoid ranting about worker-owned cooperatives here - but the past few years I've surprised myself by moving into a bit of a "slippery slope" camp with these things. Not to say it shouldn't happen, but that we need to be prepared for the follow-up.

Hopefully related example, in education: There were some really big push backs recently where I am over bad treatment of the students in highschool, all legit. The school board ignored it for a long time, it got bad, they finally took it seriously. Then they overcorrected and stopped believing teachers at all and started jumping straight to firing at almost any complaint. Then students started weaponizing complaints, and now teachers are getting fired for trying to enforce deadlines and for giving low marks because students are complaining about how deadlines, grades, and meeting grading requirements are detrimental to mental health and well-being, and now there are a bunch of these students from this board in my university classes failing hard and filing complaints about courses being too difficult and other things despite them having glowing reviews just a few years prior.

I guess what I'm getting at: I think it's fair for someone to choose not to hire people like this because it's possible that the people willing to stand up and make an important fuss over these things might not know where the line stands between a worthwhile complaint and a non-worthwhile one, and might make a company look badexternally even though it's doing good internally, just not to someone new to the workforce's expectations.

I also think it's fair to go the opposite direction, because ultimately we need major change in the way companies/everything are structured that lead to these nasty layoffs and poor conditions and if someone does raise issues where there aren't, hopefully we are prepared enough and in the right enough to take it seriously, but weather it and act in everyone's best interests.

You get meat from butchering them though, right?

That too, and I can really efficiently manage the items going into bags given I backpack my groceries and want pretty specific configurations...