ganymede

If you're in a position to get more euro funding, have a look around here there's projects listed which seem similar(ish) in spirit https://international-partnerships.ec.europa.eu/index_en so i think you might be in with a fair chance.

free speech ≠ hate speech

Be warned. The erroneous belief that "free speech" is a right wing concept is exactly the lie right wing lunatics want you to believe. it suits them very nicely.

right wing loonies have a long history of hijacking and destroying empathetic terms like this.

if they believed in freedom or free speech, why is it always them who are burning and banning books? why are they always the ones trying to control other people's bodies? when they talk about freedom, they mean their freedom to take yours away.

should we let them kill yet another canary of a healthy society? that's a different discussion. but it would be a substantial error to assume anyone who won't let them hijack it are actually right wing.

i don't know about more notorious.

that may merely be the propaganda we're exposed to.

but for sure, noone has our back here, we have to have eachother's back

identical experience. 100% would do again

so true

Write many small programs as often as you can. That is, write new programs often, and make them small so you learn the full cycle of beginning, middle and end, over and over. This is the best way to learn.

Learning programming consists of 3 main things (imo):

1) The problem:

Learning to break a problem down and solve it in individual steps.

eg. Fill Car With Gas:

• Turn Engine off
• Open fuel cap
• Get out of car
• walk to fuel pump
• etc etc

This is fundamentally what you will end up telling the computer to do when you write code, breaking a big problem into smaller problems, and smaller problems into individual steps.

Sometimes before writing a program, we will do the steps manually ourselves first to understand them. Then you write the code.

Its like when telling your friend how to do something its much simpler when you've done it yourself before.

2) The Machine:

When you're first learning its not required to worry about the actual machine the computer is doing. Just to note a few quick things.

The computer can really only do a few very simple things, almost everything the computer does is literally just combinations of the following very simple things:

• INPUT - Read a number from somewhere (from memory, from disk, from network, from a previous step)

• OPERATION - Do something with the number (add, subtract, multiply, compare etc)

• OUTPUT - Write a number somewhere (to the display, to memory, disk, network, to a subsequent step)

• Do combinations of any of the above IF some thing is true (eg. number is bigger than 10)

3) The Language(s):

To tell our computer friend the steps we want it to do, we need to use a language it understands. Don't get hung up on languages, in the end most of them have alot of similarities, and learning the core concepts is more important than memorising specific syntax.

To say this another way, while syntax is important to USE a language, it doesn't always have a huge bearing on the core concepts underneath. A classic beginner mistake is muddling the language vs the core computing concepts.

In the end, almost whatever code you write, no matter the language, it ends up doing a combination of those simple steps from #2.

The job of the language is to make it easy and efficient for a human to tell the computer which combinations of those steps from #2 we want the computer to do to achieve our task. And if the language has done its job, it will hide many of those tiny steps from us, so we can worry about the main steps which relate to our problem.

Re. first language choice, python is probably a good starting point, since if you use it properly it's often almost like writing in english to the computer. In the end it doesn't matter so much as sticking with it, practicing and slowly learning the core concepts. In general any user friendly high level language will have an easy learning curve, Python, Javascript etc.

General Tips:

Learn some basic debugging & troubleshooting methods, at first this might just be displaying numbers during calculation steps to check the computer is doing what it should be doing, and then slowly move to more sophisticated methods. Along with basic commenting etiquette etc.

Avoid stackoverflow like the plague. There is some good discussion there, but if you want to actually learn, you need understanding. And copy/pasting someone else's code will not give you this.

Same goes for chatgpt coding, autopilot etc.

When googling deliberately search for the official manual/documentation, or even a tutorial is fine if it's unfamiliar or the official docs aren't easy for you to understand, but absolutely avoid pre-cooked answers on stackoverflow etc as google will also push them on you when googling programming stuff.

The only exception is if you're absolutely stuck, when doing learning exercises it's ok to view someone else's answer as a 'solution', but IMPORTANTLY, do not move forward until you have understood at least 90% of how and WHY they did it. Without that understanding you're wasting your time, and sometimes you will even find mistakes in those answers, so blindly copying is only hurting you.

Get onto IRC (or matrix, discord whatever), and TALK with other programmers. Don't go running to someone every time you stumble, but you can learn ALOT from others when you put in the right amount of groundwork and sometimes you will learn just by seeing other people solving their own problems.

easiest question we're gonna answer all year:

fuck microsoft and their stooges

opensource driver hackers ftw!!

excellent research Arthur Besse!! this cuts through any speculation right to the point. well done!

Yes the Allies relocated many nazi/German 'experts' after the war ended.

The US program was called Operation Paperclip

The Soviet program was called Operation Osoaviakhim

out of interest, how would that hostile SMS URL work with those SMS preview things alot of mobile SMS messaging implementations use?