I resisted the urge to post the text of the article here because the article is actually all about the simple clean and open approach that made the web good at its genesis. You couldn’t get anything further from the ad infested, tracking, AI garbage and hot take nonsense that the modern web is infested with right now.

Visit the site, read, bask in its glorious simplicity. Go and do likewise.

It’s never too late to start programming. To get a job though you need to show you can get things done. Even if you’re going for junior roles, you’ll benefit from being able to include links to some finished projects on your CV. For most basic entry level it is far far far better to have something that was finished, and works, but isn’t perfect rather than nothing at all.

Don’t put too much trust in so called “certificates” from these schools. A company will, again, be more interested to see what you can do than what pieces of paper you’ve earned. Having said that some courses are good (some are not). Only sink money into it if you have scrutinised the reviews and seen good words about them on here or Reddit or other popular program discussion places. Don’t go off their own testimonials.

If you were willing to be relaxed on salary (if the alternative is indeed homelessness) then you ought to be able to get your toe in the door somewhere. After that don’t feel too loyal, do what you need to, but study and build study and build in your own time and keep yourself out there open to job #2.

I wasn’t aware, thanks

The US should have humane worker rights.

I didn’t mean it makes sense as in I agree. I meant, ‘oh, a lot of this is going on and it fits in’

Ah well that makes sense then

I get it, but also can you imagine a foreign country banning Amazon because “it means the US can see what you’re up to and it gets to choose what deals to push at you” etc?

I mean… Facebook for god’s sake…

Being protectionist makes sense sometimes but it screws you over when other countries start banning your apps in favour of home grown alternatives…

I had nearly no idea what I was doing and starting with Debian seems to have gone ok. Others said Linux mint is beginner friendly but I haven’t tried it.

Mate, I’ve built a career on that

So, I’m a bit rusty, but I believe in Kate you would hit F4 to get a terminal window and you would execute

gcc your_file.c -o your_output_file

Then after that’s run you’d type just “your_output_file” and hit enter

I think on windows you’d need to make sure the output file name ends with .exe but I’m not sure about that, maybe someone else can chime in?

What language are you programming in?

As far as I’m aware, in many cases, Kate just gives you access to the terminal where you can type commands to compile / run your code.

Unification of European and North African economic areas

Minority rights for whites in America

Losing track of how many of your friends are AI

Very accurate. Working for a small dev shop with sympathetic senior team members brought me through 2 and into the start of 3. But a job change (into something I only barely qualified for) meant I had to trek phase 3 alone. It’s a loong slog, and the myriad of technologies in the intro without ever feeling like you know anything is spot on (I would frequently be reading web pages for help only to pull my hair out at how often they mentioned things I should know but didn’t). Fortunately I had gone to work for an IT team embedded in a larger company, not a software company itself, and they had far lower standards. I don’t think that’s a good thing in general, but it did allow me to get semi hacky things done during the desert of despair and I felt like I was delivering just as often as I was floundering. The upswing of awesome is real though. I hit it about 5 or 6 years in. I found my niche, everything id been reading and studying suddenly started to reinforce one another rather than sow deeper confusion and confidence and productivity started to multiply. About 7 years in I was technical lead in a couple of business critical areas. After 8 years I started my own consultancy in those technologies and have never looked back. I take care now to give junior staff projects that stretch them, and they need to work at, but which aren’t soul crushing.

I don’t think that the time difference between the two events would be significant enough for the drop in birth rate to be that damaging

Let’s hope so!

Yes true. But people need friends, sometimes an assistant too. That’s the kind of role I imagine it slotting into. But I agree in many cases it could get overly parental and actually hinder people from being independent. I don’t think it would be an LLM though, they’re wholly unsuited to the task. Some as yet unreleased model of AI probably…

Any% enshitification speed run GO!

When a mental health issue affects men and women equally you end up with more women at the doctor and more men dead.

But that’s besides the point. Schmidt is calling out his concern for young men in particular because I think he knows a thing or too about what people google and what obsessive behaviours they can fall into especially regarding sexual fantasy.

He already has a front row seat to stats on porn addiction and how this fuels male isolation in particular. If you read the article you’ll see it cites an example of a young boy committing suicide through his romantic interactions with a chatbot.

Women are exposed to impossible beauty standards and have higher anxiety, OCD and other disorders than men. But Schmidt isn’t referring to that.

Men are lonely, have lower life satisfaction, and are far more likely to get sexually addicted to increasingly sophisticated immersive porn.

At some point they’re going to have to depart from the “single name” branding. Because the selling point is going to be how unique the AI is for you, how different from all the others. I wonder how they’ll handle branding at that point? Maybe if you create “Marla”, Apple are still going to say it’s a type of “Siri” if that’s the base technology. But I think we may start seeing weirder more organic things like “your AI Marla - a daughter of Siri - is ready”

True. But I’m not talking about fooling people. Just lowering the amount of “willing suspension of disbelief”.

I think the part that feels ‘sad’ to you is what’s going to change socially over the next 50 years. I think it’s going to become extremely normal to at least have a “mental health AI friend” who knows you really well and keeps you going through the day, is someone to talk to, someone who’s always there, someone who’s the first to detect that you may be in danger. Overall I think society’s going to receive that as a good thing. And it will, I think, be normal because it will be so believable, and so useful, and for a large number of people, keep them well and feeling good about themselves. In that context some of those attachments turning romantic, or people just being sexually into whatever that assistant can say or do will be increasingly normal. It will also feel really good, let’s not forget that. We’re really only at the very start of what immersive VR is going to be. Once AI becomes not a little better but 50-100 years of innovation better I don’t think we can really underestimate how much it’s going to feel like you’re actually interacting with [insert fantasy here]. Once tactile feedback sees similar improvements we’re about 75% of the way to what people would use an actual holodeck for anyway. I can’t see how that doesn’t have a dramatic effect on how people view human-human romantic relationships. Over time the proportion of people who can have a believable experience of their absolute sexual fantasy is only going to grow over time. With how ubiquitous that will be I can’t see how in most relationships people know they’re “second best”. I think that has a profound effect on how people make attachments to one another. I think once “having a real girlfriend” is seen as the secondary way to get your sexual needs met, that that will have a terminal effect on how many young men even want to be in relationships let alone stay around to be a father.