Funnily enough, Angela Collier also made some pretty good videos for “actually” studying physics. Spoiler: no need to go to Hawaii, or anywhere further than your own couch/desk!

how to teach yourself physics

how to solve a physics problem

Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”

Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.

How feasible is it to configure my server to essentially perform a reverse-slow-lorris attack on these LLM bots?

If they won’t play nice, then we need to reflect their behavior back onto themselves.

Or perhaps serve a 404, 304 or some other legitimate-looking static response that minimizes load on my server whilst giving then least amount of data to train on.

My reading of the article is also that the anode is bonding with the protons (aka hydrogen nuclei) as part of the redox process to generate current.

I was going to try it out, and then the website asked me for my email :(

I don’t want a feed aggregator that has its own account, I want one that just lets me use my existing network/feed-specific accounts.

I imagine (/hope) that the email-for-signup is only while the software is in alpha/beta/unreleased, to help them get user feedback.

I don’t think I was making it out to be easy at all. I expect it to be nigh-impossible. I also expect it to be worth it.

But the question was what opinion on the industry do I have that I don’t feel comfortable voicing at work, not what do I think is the most feasible way forwards.

… That’s why I ended my comment with “we should be teaching others and helping them make their own”.

We should stop making software for others.

A prerequisite for reasonable tech use is understanding the amount of energy and materials you need to “burn through” for any given piece of tech to 1) exist and 2) do its useful work. Call me naive, but I really doubt that we’d be accelerating climate change this much if every person contributing to the “X thousand hours of videos uploaded to YouTube each day” was required to write their own video hosting software first. I doubt our social networks would become so captured by propagandists of every user of one had to write their own. (Obviously as an absolute this is a bit too restrictive - it’s more the tone and direction that I’m trying to convey).

Instead, we should be teaching and helping others reach our knowledge /skill level.

Maybe the execs would stop pushing shitty UI dark patterns if they had to code the service themselves (and then use it afterwards!).

One^can^dream…

Don’t joke too flippantly about it to their face, though.

I did once and the dude sat me down and very patiently explained to me all of the ways people still suffered because of that period, like how his friend had to suddenly pay his cancer treatment out of pocket for months and months and would have ended up homeless if not for being able to crash on this guy’s couch.

Good stuff near the end:

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated.

These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told they’re geniuses for doing so because money comes out.

I care about you. The user. The person reading this. The person that may have felt stupid, or deficient, or ignorant, all because the services you pay for or that monetize you have been intentionally rigged against you.

You aren’t the failure. The services, the devices, and the executives are.

I don’t feel like Zitron completely addressed my remark in the parent comment, but the end result/destination is the same.

Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify.

Not finished reading the article yet, but my reaction to reading this line is that Zitron is missing the mark in the same way he qualifies Doctorow’s Enshittification does.

I don’t think growth directly drives companies to enshittify. Rather, infinite (and especially constant-or-better) growth in a finite space is only possible when things degrade. Physical widgets do this pretty decently on their own, though we (humans) had to come up with planned obsolescence to keep degradation above a certain threshhold. Software, on the other hand, doesn’t naturally degrade over time. It only seems to do so because the different actors in its ecosystem, from the software “bricks” to the underlying hardware, are similarly incentivized to churn out new things that deprecate the old, indirectly degrading them.

We’ll see where Zitron goes from here to the end of the article.

It just takes a little effort to filter to see and reach the right people’s content. Otherwise, I don’t think completely withdrawing would be very beneficial in my industry and the era I live in.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Wrestling with how much consumption I can allow myself to sustain, and how much I can allow myself to abstain from.

As more and more of the world around me is interfaced with through machines and/or the internet, I can’t just “take a break from computers” for a few days to give my brain a break from that environment anymore. From knowledge to culture, so much is being shared and transferred digitally today. I agree with the author that we can’t just ignore what’s going on in the digital spaces that we frequent, but many of these spaces are built to get you to consume. Just as one must go into the hotbox to meet the heaviest weed smokers, one shouldn’t stay in the hotbox taking notes for too long at once because of the dense ambient smoke. Besides, how do you find the stuff worth paying attention to without wading through the slop and bait? The web has become an adversarial ecosystem, so we must adapt our behavior and expectations to continue benefiting from its best while staying as safe as possible from its worst.

Some are talking about “dark forest”, and while I agree I think a more apt metaphor is that of small rural villages vs urban megalopolises. The internet started out so small that everyone knew where everyone else lived, and everyone depended on everyone else too much to ever think of aggressively exploiting anyone. Nowadays the safe gated communities speak in hushed tones of the less savory neighborhoods where you can lose your wallet in a moment of inattention, while they spend their days in the supermarkets and hyper-malls owned by their landlords.

The setup for Wall-E might take place decades or centuries from now, but it feels like it’s already happened to the web. And that movie doesn’t even know how the humans manage to rebuild earth and their society, it just implies that they succeed through the ending credits murals.

The most infuriating part of the exchange for me is the initial response to the maintainers’ guess of “slop” is to act hurt, betrayed, and to threaten to spread negative press about the project.

Another day, another person using LLM/“AI” to waste the curl project maintainers’ time…

The classic Scott Adams manœuvre.

Math underlies programming in a similar fashion to how physics underlies automobile driving. You don’t ever need to know about newton’s laws of motion to pass your driver’s license and never get a ticket until you die. At the same time, I will readily claim that any driver that doesn’t improve after learning about newton’s laws of motion had already internalized those laws through experience.

Math will help your intuition with how to tackle problems in programming. From finding a solution to anticipating how different constraints (notably time and memory) will affect which solutions are available to you, experience working on math problems - especially across different domains in math - will grease the wheels of your programmer mind.

Math on its own will probably not be enough (many great mathematicians are quite unskilled at programming). Just as driving a car is about much more than just the physics involved, there is a lot more to programming than just the math.