Yes. But it cuts both ways. People are complaining about content that they value, being censored by Meta; but it's of course, legal. The point is that the line should not be drawn at legal. There should be a strong impulse in society towards letting people speak, and letting other people hear, things we disagree with. So that means, letting LGBTQ+ say their piece, but it also means letting people who have "bad medical advice" blather on as well. And if you think the world is better off by censoring either of those groups, don't be surprised when they're both censored (and a lot of other people too). Once the cultural norm is suppression and censorship, there's no end of places where people will want it applied.
I'm definitely against the government censoring any of those groups. But I don't see how the First Amendment allows Congress to pass a law telling web sites what they must publish.
I definitely started reading more when I quit "algorithmic" social media a couple years ago. Still do. But I'm also mid-50s so I could just be reverting to my base. Maybe it's different for younger folks.
That's proved to be an idea only held up by the fig leaf of norms like the independence of the DOJ and the idea of the other two branches actually acting as a check on the others. Instead after the 70 year project we now have a compliant Supreme Court rubber stamping practically every action and flirting with ratifying the unitary executive as law. That plus a compliant Congress either ideologically aligned or cowed by the idea of his power over the voters means we very much have a President able to exert huge amounts of influence over companies.
For minor things with immediate payoffs like a pardon that seems correct. If you're ask is longer term though I'd be hesitant, he shows the same inclination to go with whatever the last person in a room wanted for longer term stuff, see his aggressive oscillations on Ukraine.
I do believe it really is this simple. I don't buy a $47 carton of eggs because it's just not worth it.
People do the math and think, "I don't want to spend $40,000 on this. I can get a decent job without spending that, and then I can buy a car, too."
Politically and economically, it's incredibly dangerous for universities to keep going down this path. When the common citizen finds low value in a particularly expensive-to-run government institution, they elect lawmakers who dispose of those institutions.
As a society, we need to highly value widely-obtainable post-secondary education, from the citizens to the President. Or we're doomed.
One good thing about Direct File being cancelled is that I get to make spreadsheets for taxes again (in Libre). Worth it? Not at all. But a consolation prize.
It's not so much that, although I'd argue that LLMs can certainly teach you some bad habits from time to time, much more so than Deep Blue ever would.
Rather, it's because early on, when beginners are learning the basics, they need to do the hard work of figuring stuff out so they develop problem-solving skills. It's not the code-writing skills they need to develop--that's easy. It's the problem-solving skills.
If I could figure out a way to grade on effort rather than correctness, I'd do that every time. Bust your ass and get a program 80% working and learn a ton doing it? You get an A. Spend 2 minutes copying ChatGPT output of a perfectly-working solution? F.
The effort is where you build the skill. And the skill is critical problem-solving. Having someone (or something) else do that work does not improve your skill.
Now, eventually, when you get to be better than the AI (and it's not hard to do that), stuff that you find easy is not longer beneficial to your learning. I've implemented linked lists a hundred times by now; I no longer learn anything from doing it. When you're that experienced with a subtopic, then sure, get ChatGPT to write it, and you verify it.
Going back to the weight lifting analogy, once you've been lifting the 2 kg weights for a while, you're not going to get much out of it. At that point, if the 2 kg weight must be lifted because it's part of your job description, have your robot do it. Meanwhile, you go on to the 4 kg weights and build muscle.
Maybe we crossed the Rubicon and there's too much opportunity cost to learn how to implement the fundamental DS&A. Instead of memorizing the ~10 lines of code for binary search, memorize the words "binary search". Thanks to the C compiler, we don't have to remember to push our registers and then jump to the subroutine. I think LLMs provide similar benefits. It frees your headspace for other stuff.
The analogy isn't perfect since a compiler will error if it can't create valid output. LLMs hallucinate. But still. Time is limited. I don't think it's a good idea to spend your formative years learning how to manage registers.
We don't tell chemists they shouldn't spend their formative years learning how to manage electron orbitals. You need to understand the fundamentals of how a computer works, or else you get people who write software with the wrong mental model of the machine (namely, that it's some sort of inscrutable, magic black box). Learning the fundamentals of the machine teaches you that is not, in fact, magic at all, it's just a lot of simple circuits built on top of each other, providing what we know as computation. Will you sling bits in assembly all day at your job? Probably not, but that knowledge is invaluable to being a better programmer.
We make surgeons learn anatomy. We make hardware engineers learn physics. I think we can expect programmers to learn how computers work.
This response turned into more of an essay in general, and not specifically a response to your post, marginalia_nu. :)
Sharing information, to me, was what made things so great in the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s. Just people helping people explore and no expectation of anything in return. What could you possibly want for? There was tons of great information[1] all around everywhere you turned.
I'm disappointed by how so much of the web has become commercialized. Not that I'm against capitalism or advertising (on principle) or making money; I've done all those, myself. But while great information used to be a high percentage of the information available, now it's a tiny slice of signal in the chaff--when people care more about making money on content than sharing content, the results are subpar.
So I love the small internet movement. I love hanging out on a few Usenet groups (now that Google has fucked off). I love neocities. And I LOVE just having my own webpage where I can do my part and share some information that people find entertaining or helpful.
There's that gap from being clueless to having the light bulb turn on. (I've been learning Rust on and off and, believe me, I've opened plenty of doors to dark rooms, and in most of those I have not yet found the light switch.) And I love the challenge of finding helpful ways to bridge that gap. "If only they'd said X to begin with!" marks what I'm looking for.
I'm not always correct (I challenge anyone to write 5000 words on computing with no errors, let alone 750,000) or as clear as I could be, but I think that's OK. Anyone aspiring to write helpful information and put it online should just go for it! People will correct you if you're wrong[2] :) and you'll learn a *ton*. And your readers will learn something. And you'll have made the small web a slightly larger place, giving us more freedom to ignore the large web.
[1] When I say "great information", I don't necessarily mean "high quality". But the intention was there, and I feel that makes the difference.
[2] It can be really embarrassing to put bad information out there (for me, anyway). I don't want people to find out I don't know something and think less of me. But that's really illogical--I don't even personally know my critics! And here's the thing: when the critics are right (and they're often right!), you can go fix your material. And then it becomes more correct. After a short time of fixing mistakes critics point out, you get on the long tail of errors, and these are things that people are a lot less judgmental about. The short of it is, do the best you can, put your writing out there, correct errors as they are reported or as you find them, and repeat. I cannot stress how grateful I am to everyone who has helped me improve my guides, whether mean-spirited or not, because it's helped me and so many others learn the right thing.
You're absolutely correct, of course. And part of that is because the degree that you get when you want to be a programmer is a "Computer Science" degree in the US.
I've added a clarification to the first chapter about the naming and rationale.
Does the First Amendment not also give you editorial control over your websites, including which third-party content you host?
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