Readit Newsthesauri commented on Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program · Posted by u/lmilcin
Not a parent, but sharing my experiences as a kid.
GameMaker (https://www.yoyogames.com/get) was my gateway drug to programming. It's an environment for making games that covers everything from programming the game logic, to designing game "rooms", the sprites and sounds in one package.
I was introduced to the software by my father at roughly the age of 9 to 11 and we did the introductory tutorial together. After that, I continued messing around mostly on my own.
What in hindsight turned out to be quite brilliant, was that GameMaker supports both drag-and-drop programming and scripting. I was able to start off by using drag-and-drop, but quickly realized that scripting was the way to go for more complex logic. The combined environment made it a rather smooth transition, as I only had to add the scripting part to an otherwise familiar graphical environment.
It seems like GameMaker is still around, so that can definitely be something to check out. Making games is fun and I remember having great times in the community, too.
thesauri commented on Underwater Roundabout in the Faroe Islands bbc.com/news/world-europe... · Posted by u/lqet
That’s quarterly earnings type thinking, if you do the projections on a 50 year basis they almost certainly come out as a net gain, at least for Norwegian money. As they have lots of money looking for returns on investment overseas already.
The Faroe Islands are part of Denmark, not Norway.
thesauri commented on To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2... · Posted by u/app4soft
I've been thinking about some of these guys a lot lately.
When are we going to collectively unpack the fact the Media Lab/Berkman Center project has been a complete failure?
I worked at these places and mingled on the outskirts, and for a long time really believed all the bullshit they were spouting at the time - that the internet was a positive force, if we just connected enough people, surely their "stories" and "empathy" would "revolutionize" the world, etc., etc..
They were all wrong.
Digital, networked technology seemed exciting for a brief and beautiful moment, but has turned into nothing more than a global system of surveillance, advertising, propaganda and skinnerboxing, far worse than any television ever was - forget about your "global library" dreams.
And yet - they persist, despite their ever increasing irrelevance. Spineless hucksters like a Zittrain still get wheeled out occasionally for their take on some hot new trend in Wired magaize, they still get private and government grant money, and, of course, they still keep taking on hapless graduate students.
Just when will we call a spade a spade?
EDIT: This little tirade made me go back and re-read some of the Cluetrain Manifesto - I feel almost ashamed of myself to reread something like "markets are conversations" and remember thinking it was ever good, important, or even valid argument. I now see this as evil thought.
Solving a problem with technology does solve the initial problem, but at the same time it introduces new ones.
There has been a naïve belief that the Internet would be an all-positive force, which it is not. For instance, we used to have a constant lack of information, now there is information overflow. Content consumption used to be synchronous (people watched the same broadcasts, live), now content consumption is asynchronous.
The problem is that our old tools and concepts to navigate the world around us don't work in this new era anymore, not that the development in itself is inherently bad. Real problems have been solved.
Absolutely proper and correct use of em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens is, to me, the most obvious tell of the LLM writer. In fact, I think that you can use it to date internet writing in general. For it seems to me that real em dashes were uncommon pre-2022.
Hyphen -: -
En Dash –: alt -
Em Dash —: alt shift -