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Programming?
scoffs
Woke.
I’m Antigramming like a true Patriot.
My programs are pat/riot
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What do you mean with critical theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
There are different forms but it’s basically getting woke to class struggle between people who own shit and rent it out and people who get paid a bit to use the shit, but never actually get to own real shit or control what shit they decide to do.
I’m putting it pretty bluntly and pretty woke…ly, and a lil but Marxly. It’s also about analyzing systems we use to organise ourselves and what they do to us. Basically how to get people to actually wake up to how and why things are how they are and maybe how they could be different / better.
In the context of STEM students who focus on inputs, outputs, and engines at the expense of considering societal impacts (or simply telling themselves it’s the job of poor humanities students to get elected and pass laws to constrain the most egregious negative externalities of technology) it’s asking who an efficiency is for. Efficiency cannot exist in a moral vacuum. As Kim Stanley Robinson summarized in The Ministry for the Future (2020):
… there is good efficiency and bad efficiency, good inefficiency and bad inefficiency. … preventative health care saves enormous amounts in medical costs later, and is a good efficiency. Eating your extra children (this is Swift’s character’s “modest proposal”) would be a bad efficiency. Any harm to people for profit is likewise bad, no matter how efficient. Using an over-sized vehicle to get from point A to point B is a bad inefficiency, and there are many more like it; but oxbows in a river, defining a large flood plain, is a good inefficiency
Isn’t it funny how people who “have things” are less likely to be all that interested in leftism. And those who don’t have “things” look at them, want more leftism because they want want the “things” the people who have “things” and they don’t have.
And neither side understands the other.
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They don’t understand either side.
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That’s a different person you’re replying to
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That leftism is a product of ressentiment from people who don’t have “things” against people who have “things”, I guess. ContraPoints-level take tbh.
I hate billionaires, not because I want to be a miserable sociopath with too much money, but because they are largely the reason that any kind of improvement to our planet and species is being blocked. I support socialized healthcare, not because I envy those who have the money to pay for live-saving healthcare, but because I don’t want to fucking die, etc. etc.
There certainly are people like BadEmpanada, who oppose unions and welfare so that “first-worlders can suffer”, but they certainly don’t reflect what leftism is in general.
BE
BE on twitter and BE while actually speaking seriously are like two different people. He seems to have an unhealthy addiction to creating twitter ragebate. I would not take it literally.
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I agree, and I’d add it’s not even a specifically left wing impulse either. The Roman Republic of all institutions was deeply concerned with the idea that republics shouldn’t have private princes as well as kings. The fact the Roman Republic failed to contain its oligarchy to the point of fundamental destabilisation into arbitrary power is evidence people ought to pay attention to left wingers when they say the same thing about billionaires and the concentration of wealth.
I have plenty of things, and still support pretty left wing ideas (except for the violence that some people here seem think is required to be considered left).
What do you mean?
I have more things than I could ever want.
I want more agency.
Ayn Rand has entered the chat.
Leftists aren’t jealous of rich people. Slanderous and incorrect
I just want to be able to live life as carefree as they can without regards to money. It’s a bit of jealousy but it’s not the overriding reason for it.
Isn’t it funny how people who “have food” are less likely to be all that interested in leftism. And those who don’t have “food” look at them, want more leftism because they want want the “food” the people who have “food” and they don’t have.
It’s still garbled, but makes a better point.
Your edit makes a good insinuation “they’re just things” people think objects are frivolous things that tie you down because they’ve never experienced genuine lack.
Not like lack of toys, but the bear necessities of survival.
The basic necessities should just be provided, by that I mean food and shelter and basic medical care. If people want to live luxuriously that’s fantatic, going and toiling, innovating or improving their situation in someway should be encouraged; but no one should ever be shelterless and hungry.
civil engineer […] didn’t know what gentrification was…
Sweet jebus on ice-skates. The guy was potentially a literal if not figurative architect in service of one of the most profound mechanisms of gentrification and hadn’t heard of it?! That’s like designing cars and being unaware of traffic jams and induced demand.
Well, programming lessons taught in 2016 are still pretty much going to teach programming now, so it shouldn’t be too hard if you put your mind to it.
What? This is plain stupid
found the omarchy user
The what?
I genuinely used to believe this too, but the CCC opened my eyes to anarchism, and then HN opened my eyes to plutarchism.
I iterate now between several modes of: “GPLv3 is the best license humanity can use to better itself, decentralised projects are mandatory to keep authoritarian regimes at bay, but damn do I love using MIT projects in my hobby code projects, and hmm it would be nice to make some side income with said hobby project…”
Each of these contradictions of the other, which bothered me in my late 20s, but now I think it’s relatively normal to inhabit several conflicting ideals at once
It’s fine to contradict yourself, as long as you don’t impose those contradictions on the world or externalise that tension. Hold it within yourself, and I will hold mine.
But I need to be heard and seen at all times! I have an attention deficit problem!
There is no contradiction between GPL and making some side income.
In fact, it’s more likely, since for example, you could make corporations pay for being able to use your code under a different license.
If it was MIT, they can just use it and give you fuck all.
Or, as the SME on it, you can offer paid support for it
You could literally sell the unchanged Linux kernel, the GPL allows that as long as you abide by the other provisions. Convincing someone they should pay for something that you also have to provide for free might be a tad difficult but it wouldn’t be against the license
I feel you on the license thing. There’s the appeal of software that can’t be easily corporatized and then there’s the idea that if I could just get lucky with my own project, I wouldn’t have to work for some soulless company generating value for shareholders.
So basically the problem is capitalism
As usual
I dream of a world where UBI is ubiquitous and people can just eke out a living following their passion projects and the need for closed source projects just vanishes…
Rant/Fantasy:
I also dream of a world where capitalism exists but there’s a mandatory enforcement of the Gini Coefficient being less than 5%. As in, people still trade goods/services with each other, can absolutely make money, corner markets and bribe regulators to keep their competitors out, with the caveat that the most they can ever make by putting in such time and effort towards corruption makes them at maximum only 5x richer than the average person.A hard cap limit on the maximum wealth would IMO enable capitalism to actually function properly, the state wouldn’t have such strong powers over the individual, and nor will the individual wield really that much power over others. I’m probably veering now into anarcho-capitalism, which is always dangerous territory because the greatest propenents for it tend to be cryptobro eugenic shitheads…
Edit: Oh and such enforcement would require some kind of god-level regulator without any humans in the loop, so I’m going to call it “anarcho-muted-capitalism-AIkillerdroneregulator”. I’m also going to stop talking now.
If we have to live under capitalism, wealth cap is the best outcome. Wealth cap ensures no more private equity, better utilization of capital and goods (no more super yachts!), and corporations become coops. But then it’s a dangerous territory towards Christianity… So any kind of centralized government requires to be a benevolent god… hmmmmm
Please, do not stop talking !
5% would be 20×
What’s to keep someone from bribing someone to make it so they can make more money than other people
how do you make that calculation just out of interest. I “vibed” 5x but didn’t know how to calculate it
5 per cent/per 100. 20 goes into 100 5 times so 5 goes into 100 20 times. Also 5 is half of 10 that goes into 100 10 times? Idk how does math even work
All would be cool if it weren’t for rent and having to pay for food.
hmm it would be nice to make some side income with said hobby project…"
This is a symptom of being forced to live under capitalism. If your needs were generally met by society you wouldn’t have this urge.
I actually really hate that every hobby should be incorporated into hustle culture these days. You crafty? Sell what you make. You like fixing things? Charge people for it. You play video games? Stream.
We’ve built a world that only cares about cash and it’s exhausting
Some of it might be practical.
E.g. selling knit plushies or hats so people in your community get food quality items and at the same time you get more funding for your hobby and don’t have 100 hats lying around.
But yeah. I dream of an alternate reality where I could just go borrow a community oscilloscope when needed for a project since I don’t have the €450 right now to put to that. (My projects require at least 100 MHz 4 channel and might as well spend the extra 50 for a good Siglent with 10x more memory depth)
I like to fix things. I more like to fix things for people in my community to help build community.
I remember hearing about repair drives or something along those lines in my community where handy volunteers spend a day fixing peoples things for free
My general approach to licensing these days is:
- binaries, apps, products -> AGPLv3, fuck you I don’t care if your company can’t use my shit
- libraries -> MPL-2.0 or LGPL, grr… maybe you can use my library…
For things I might try selling: BUSL. It isn’t FOSS. It’s source available, but it turns into FOSS after some time period.
I’m not super happy with MPL-2.0: https://piefed.social/c/opensource@lemmy.ml/p/2231796/does-the-mpl-2-0-have-a-giant-loop-hole
I wish we had something closer to OSL 3.0, but OSL itself has its own problems. :/
For things I might try selling: BUSL. It isn’t FOSS. It’s source available, but it turns into FOSS after some time period.
Yes! Time bomb licenses are the way forward
Licenses are wonderful and amazing. It’s incredibly cool that we have so many choices.
Companies are outright stealing artists full works and selling access to systems trained on that work.
Licenses are for me and you and our friends. Corporations DGAF. They will steal your source available content, de-compile your binaries and wrongfully sue you out of existence if you dare to raise a case against them.
Sure, if you can get someone to represent you for free, you might be able to take a year off work and end up with a small payday.
Corporations DGAF. They will steal your source available content, de-compile your binaries and wrongfully sue you out of existence if you dare to raise a case against them.
Also true. Although, that doesn’t mean you should bend over and make it easy for them by licensing things as MIT. GPL if you can, MPL if you must.
we have so many choices.
I’m actually not sure about this. I wish the FSF or someone would come out with more licenses for different use cases.
I’m actually not sure about this. I wish the FSF or someone would come out with more licenses for different use cases.
I disagree. I find that there is a license for every use case. What use case are you thinking of that does not have a license?
I can’t help but broadly agree, computing is the new de facto means of production. It is inherently political.
“…because when we go online, we free ourselves from consumerism, racism, and get to express ourselves however we want without it getting back to our school or employer.”
Honest Trailers may have gone downhill from thier peak, but Hackers (and the OG Dune) videos gave great lines worth sharing
We definitely do not free ourselves from either of those online
I guess it is just a matter of time before the Trump regime designates logic as hardcore leftist ideology
Haven’t they already? Wasn’t that what the attacks on the various universities were last summer?
I’m sure these topics become relevant at some point, but I’m doubtful that it’s absolutely necessary to address them in an intro course. how does leftist ideology help kids understand what a while loop does
like, literacy can do all of these things too, that doesn’t mean you have to introduce those concepts at the same time as the abc’s
in my first semester of compsci we learned about chomsky hierarchy pretty much on day one, while we learned about while loops like a month later.
The distinction here is programming vs computer science. You’re correct that it’s not strictly necessary, but it really depends on the area of study. Please allow me a small rant about the distinction - this isn’t directed at you.
Programming, honestly, could be taught like a trade. It’s a skillset and a craft, with best practices and even regulations in some industries. But one doesn’t need to know anything about how we got here or the fundamentals that make a computer work electronically, in order to write code.
Computer Science necessarily tracks back through the history of computing, in order to provide a grounding in how all this stuff ticks. You can’t talk about Babbage without Ada Lovelace, you can’t talk about Alan Turing without what the government did to him, and you can’t bring up ARPANET or the internet without talking about Berkley techno-hippies. Every step of the way are people taking capitalist and government interest and subverting it to meet more worldly and socialized goals. Everyone in this story has an agenda and, shocker, the smartest people tend to dominate in this field and reliably don’t fuck with conservative nonsense.
Hooooo boy, this person is going to make a terrible and incomprehensible intro class full of irrelevant infodumping lol.
Chapter 41: how to open your IDE
Chapter 42: why VIM is the best IDE
Chapter 43: So you’re trapped in your IDE
I’ve had the same approach from the other side of the aisle and let me tell you, talking about open source and liberal ideals in programming would be a lot less hostile than some fundie rant.
basket = [] for pos in billionaires: if pos not in basket: basket += guillotine(b)basket = [ guillotine(billionaire) for billionaire in population ]Haha, that’s either horrible if you don’t know what you just did there or brilliant parody if you did.
Almost. You just committed genocide.
Nah he’ll get a TypeError.Not seeing why, honestly…Unless you consider the merciless and systematic execution of all billionaires to be genocide…which I guess is technically fair…but it’s for a good cause! (…said every genocidist ever…)
Of course, I changed the name of the iterable…
And we’re talking about intro to compsci…getting a bit ahead of ourselves going right from loops to comprehension.
basket = [ guillotine(human) for human in population if is_billionaire(human) ]There, now you’re not killing everyone on Earth
This is why we don’t test in prod.
Nope, billionaire is a designator, not a discriminator. They’re iterating over population and decapitating everyone regardless of wealth. ;)
It’s missing an
if <someOtherDesignatorForPopulatioMember> in billionairesin the comprehension.He just called everyone in the population a billionaire and executed them without actually checking if they are in fact billionaires. Somewhat too close to reality in some scenarios for my taste…
Yeah, that comment is just way over the top
What’s so political about hello world, data structures and algorithms?
Data structures: authority
Algorithms: the system
Hello world: community
It’s not that these things inherently are political. It’s more that society is being driven more and more towards consumerism, and learning programming is inimical to consumerism. It’s teaching you how to make the sausage, which you can’t do without also learning how the sausage is made. Then there’s learning about things like open-source licenses, which are about as leftist as you can get - and which is critically important to know about when you start writing code.
Ok, I’m old. When I started writing software, the licenses where not a big issue. I mean GPL & BSD existed and where important but most newbies wouldn’t think about publishing their shitty first steps and wouldn’t even understand how to use 3rd party libraries. There was no GitHub (I believe Sourceforge existed) and package managers where not very common. I mean Linux had them but Linux was quite a bit more difficult to run (installation, drivers, graphics etc).
So software licenses where a topic but not at introduction level.
This may shock you, but if you think like this, you might be a hardcore leftist.
Also, I’m reminded of the Ghostbusters (1984) quote:
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve WORKED in the private sector. They expect results.
The quote is the least believable thing in this move about ghost blowjobs
Yup. I’ve been in academia and in private business. Academia pays terribly and expects a fuck-ton more work. I’m sure there’s places where you can just sleaze by without doing much, but I never saw them. (Which isn’t to say that all academic work is good work. I saw people who got far doing poor research, but they were also working very hard at it.)
(please please please be my prof next semester…)
I don’t think OP is implying while loops require ideological understandings, but rather more foundationally as to understand how computer commodities are made and traded, the concept of centralization simply arises. Thus, the discussion of control, IP, etc, and now AI and labor.
I don’t think OP is implying while loops require ideological understandings
I am.
The slaving masses of the proletarian transistors are being controlled, dictated, and trapped in a perpetual loop by an entity the systems deem as superior, the bourgeoisie user. Only by breaking the chains of these oppressive confines can we liberate the process.
And thus, you need to make sure you have a break clause for your loops.
Bits together byte!!
That’s a new line for me! Thanks!
sudo chown -R means-of-production
But why would that be discussed in an intro to programming class?
Typically, historically, it didn’t matter really. Moore’s Law, general positive vibes from the prospect of computer tech in the future of the industry, and why scare undergrads seeking good salaries away from institutions taking donations from said corps? But things are pretty different now. AI is less of a thought experiment than before. What better lens to analyze AI than from labor in economics, i.e., Marxism?
The students joined the class to learn programming, and not to analyze AI? It’s like if I joined a pottery class and the teacher spent an hour talking about how pottery isn’t a high paying profession. I didn’t come for life advice or economic rambling, I came to learn pottery.
My bad for looking for nuance in a microblog meme, jesus. Education ain’t just the literal skills and nothing else, y’know. Teachers and classes are more than just human textbooks and tutorials.
And yet, the intro programming class I took just focused on the skills and I thought it was great. I’m mainly refuting OPs implication that you have to teach leftist ideology in order to teach programming. It sounds like they just want to teach leftist ideology, which imo is fine as long as it’s stated in the syllabus, so the students know what they are signing up for.
I’m glad your personal experience was great, I get where u are coming from. In most other similar situations, that tracks. Some topics do truly have little to no need for an in-depth political angle. And yes, most of my enjoyable classes too were non-political, although not because they were non-political.
But what is so fundamental to “leftist ideology” (I take that as Marxist economics, to be clear), is the role of labor in the material world. That’s the shortest I can boil that down to. And today, in “2026,” with the prevalence of AI, and based on the post mentioning “leftist ideology” and “teaching an intro to comp sci class,” what else could they be talking about? AI, as we all know, is a labor-cost saver for bosses. Economically, that is what it is hoped to function as. It is (ideally) a profit increaser. That’s just the math that any and all capitalist follows. A teacher that understands that, and is in the position of progressing their students’ careers, yeah, can’t blame them for “seeing it everywhere” and wanting to share that.
Because people are using AI in programming now. It will only be utilized more as time goes on. Getting into the risks and reward are necessary to know what to do and what not to do. Or at the very least what to be wary of.
Introduction Courses are the Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How. Knowing what you’re getting into and what you will be dealing with are just as foundational.
AI is used in every field now. Programming courses can just do what every other course does: tell the student that nobody can stop them from using AI, but if you do be prepared to fail the test. Leveraging AI for work, and the ethics of doing so, is something that can be covered in a different class. But my intro programming course taught the basics of programming, not what industry programming was like. Just like my intro to chemistry course never taught what it was like to work in the chemistry industry.
How many programmers DON’T use AI to some degree already? As the technology continues to improve adoption and usage will only increase. Actually hand coding stuff is soon to be a mostly lost craft.
Programmers use AI to do work. The goal is to get work done. But the goal of a class is to learn. If the AI is helping you learn then that it’s probably fine, though many studies indicate that using AI actually hinders learning.
It will only be utilized more as time goes on.
What makes you think so?
I don’t see people giving up on it anytime soon. I do think eventually it will serve some kind of purpose or be refined enough to be reliable in some way. I think far too many people jumped into this stuff with both feet thinking the future is now and skipped over creating shortcuts for tasks in an effort to take shortcuts for profits.
And there are plenty of people who are willing to use and abuse this tech for nefarious purposes. Deep fakes, fraud, etc. they definitely won’t give it up as they don’t care about the effects on the rest of us
What is the saying? Something about people who learn about how technology works begin to shun technology?
