I feel like this isn’t super new. You haven’t been able to do things like talk academically about network security or cryptography without being incredibly critical of government for decades.
My professors sure were. I felt really bad for them, honestly. They were the driving force to make philosophy and ethics courses mandatory at my university in order to recieve a comp sci degree.
“If you work in these areas long enough, at a high enough level, you WILL be asked to compromise something for the benefit of a state actor, and you might not even realize it’s happening. The person asking you to do it might not even realize what is really happening.” Was what our prof told a packed lecture hall.
This is pretty much my inspiration for self hosting. A three letter agency needs to infiltrate my network or show up to my house with a warrant. I’m not going to be able to stop them, but at least they’ll have to work for it. I’d love a CSI Miami’s episode level of effort for them to discover that I’m just a fucking nerd sharing Linux ISOs.
This made me image an exchange like
Agent 1: OK McNulty, you have finished your forensic scan of that scumbag’s computer. I can’t wait to hear whether we are taking this monster down for espionage, stealing classified information, or even just another copyright infringement case. What is really in that folder of “Linux ISOs?”
Agent 2: You are not gonna believe this…
When I was at Uni, we had a mandatory Ethics class for Comp Sci/Comp Eng. I think it was for all majors under the Sciences banner.
I want to hear that lecture!
We definitely had to take intro philosophy and then one philosophy elective for our engineering program. In addition to that we had like these engineering meta courses, like “Engineering History” and “Engineering Cultures”
Wasn’t even the wildest. Before compsci I was doing mechanical engineering.
We had an assignment to design a railcar layout for transporting livestock. It gave the minimal parameters for the animals, established client driven acceptable losses for the livestock, etc…
We all cracked away at it. After we handed them all in, the profs were like “nowhere in the spec was the actual animals named, was no one curious?”
Silence.
They had given us a literal Nazi RFP discovered post WWII. It was for moving people to fucking concentration camps.
“You’re smart people. People are going to ask you to do bad things. They’re going to try and hide thier intentions. Don’t collaborate with Nazis. Don’t ever use what I teach you to hurt people.”
Those sound like bad-ass professors!
I would love to have a copy of this assignment! That reveal must have been a real gutpunch. Something that may have actually stuck with most students.
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
Hooooo boy, this person is going to make a terrible and incomprehensible intro class full of irrelevant infodumping lol.
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.
Chapter 41: how to open your IDE
Chapter 42: why VIM is the best IDE
Chapter 43: So you’re trapped in your IDE
basket = [] for pos in billionaires: if pos not in basket: - basket += guillotine(b) + basket += guillotine(pos) # Corrected iterable namingbasket = [ guillotine(billionaire) for billionaire in population ]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…
Haha, that’s either horrible if you don’t know what you just did there or brilliant parody if you did.
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.
Yeah, that comment is just way over the top
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.
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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.
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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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 life-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 definitely don’t reflect what leftism is in general.
BE
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.
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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.
They don’t understand either side.
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That’s a different person you’re replying to
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I missed 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.
Yup! You get it
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).
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.
What do you mean?
I have more things than I could ever want.
I want more agency.
I guess it is just a matter of time before the Trump regime designates logic as hardcore leftist ideology
If it’s science, it’s woke!
Real patriots use the abacus.Look at the fancy pants here that uses advanced technology like the abacus instead of counting on their nine fingers like the rest of us!
The abacus is also woke unfortunately
Dang it. Is it the bead colors?
Math is woke
Are we supposed to be bartering with sheep?
Yes
I can’t help but broadly agree, computing is the new de facto means of production. It is inherently political.
Republicans have never forgiven Alan Turing, and much prefer the contributions of IBM during the same period.
It’s an introduction class, just start with history of computers and shift to programming from there.
You know, the history of computers, the Alan Turing, and the first assembly language, and the first software engineer, and “the entire pre-1992 internet.”
Even just the facts are incredibly “woke” leaning unless you just boil everything down to a single sentence factoid and dont go into much detail
That’s basically everything, though.
Reminds me of creationist textbooks trying to teach about electricity.
Sweet baby Jesus
That’s the problem, they can believe in Jesus, but not electricity.
If that’s real I assume it’s less that they don’t believe in electricity or even that they don’t understand it. Probably more “portray difficult concepts as magical so that the idea of blind faith isn’t so difficult to digest” kind of intellectual dishonesty
That’s if it’s real though and not a nonsense meme to generate outrage. Highly sus that a book title isn’t mentioned
The book title is mentioned in the meme. It’s Science 4 for Christian Schools. I got it from Anna and that page is in there.
What kind of an ego do you have to have to think you know everything about science, so you write a textbook, and when you get to electricity, you don’t know anything about it, but since you know everything about everything, if you don’t know anything about electricity, that means nobody else does, either?
I dunno, but that was my textbook growing up. College was fun.
Home schooling for the lose.
Pretty sure anyone who’s ever grabbed a live wire has felt electricity. I guess you could argue you’re still only feeling what it does, but that’s like arguing you only feel what a punch in the face does…
“…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
But that could have been the future…
What is the saying? Something about people who learn about how technology works begin to shun technology?
I wouldn’t want to be a CS teacher at this decade, more than half the code will be AI generated. Would just suck the life force out of you seeing how little students care about actually learning the stuff.
When I was a TA, I’m pretty sure 1/3 if the students plagiarized their programming assignments. Copy/pasting suspect snippets into Google would often bring up near-verbatim results, and a similarity tool would often reveal 3 students that either worked together or copied from the same source.
Programming?
scoffs
Woke.
I’m Antigramming like a true Patriot.
My programs are pat/riot
What? This is plain stupid
found the omarchy user
The what?
