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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2023

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  • For the latter, a good approach is to pick a project or idea and try to make it. If you’re familiar with the logic you can look up the syntax for the new language, but it you’re fresh off the boat then there is a bunch of good stuff on YouTube, Khan academy and stack overflow that are geared to newbies.

    Some starting ideas:

    • Make a text based tic Tac toe/card game
    • Make a number guessing game
    • Find all prime numbers under a number given by the user

    Once you’ve got a decent grip on the logic involved, it can be quite effective to implement more complex approaches to the solution. Instead of guessing randomly, implement a binomial (1:N divided by 2) search algorithm, or have the game play against itself. Go back over how you wrote the solution, and add some good comments, improve the functions descriptions, even refactor some code to be more efficient and more readable. I learnt how to code through doing, textbooks are great for some people but my preferred approach is to make something, break it, and learn how to fix it.


  • Part of the identity crises that comes with(out) religion is the ultimate question of purpose: why are we suffering, surely it has a reason? Some of us are content to accept that there is no purpose, and therefore we must define our own; others need a purpose greater than themselves and/or to have one defined for them, and look to religion for that purpose. There is no right answer, and the struggle of identity and purpose are well documented in religion, fiction, history, and philosophy.
















  • I was curious if a robots.txt equivalent exists for AI training data, and there was some solid points here:

    If I go to your writing, I read it & learn from it. Your writing influences my future writing. We’ve been okay with this as long as it’s not a blatant forgery.

    If a computer goes to your writing, it reads it & learns from it. Your writing influences its future writing. It seems we are not okay with this, even if it isn’t blatant forgery.

    [AI at the moment is] different because the company is re-using your material to create a product they are going to sell. I’m not sure if I believe that is so different than a human employee doing the same thing.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34324208

    I still think we should have the ability to opt out like we do with search engines and webcrawlers, but if the algorithm works ideally and learns but does not recycle content, is it truly any different from a factory of workers pumping out clones of popular series on Amazon? I honestly don’t know the answer to that.


  • I joined maybe 6 years ago, and there was a bit of shit talking and most posts had a troll answer hitting the most votes for some reason, but it was usually pretty good to scroll straight past and find some really insightful comments. There was a lot of good stuff around reddit, but slowly the absurb number of awards, NFT avatars, reposts, and ads every third post started to corrupt it. It was simple enough to switch to a third party app for quite a while, but the garbage slowly took over.

    Even if they hadn’t pulled 3rd party apps, it was getting pretty close a point where it wasn’t worth scrolling past the bullshit.