The site that got me into programming as a teenager was called "FromZero" and explained how to write programs in C for non-developpers. From installing the IDE, to how to open the console, it carefully explained each step, sometimes saying "don't worry about Snarfus, we'll get into that later". It was amazing, and I owe this website my career.
That being said, I agree writing doc is time consuming and it might not be your priority, in this case partial docs is better than no docs at all. But if your target is beginner developpers, imo you should consider them as non-developpers, as you correctly descibed them.
I owe so much to that website. I first had access to a computer at 13, some nights of the week and only some of those nights did I also have internet access. Somehow I still discovered le Site du Zéro at that time. While I barely touched a computer the year before, I still was able to go through the whole C++ class and learned most of the basic things and reflexes I've ever needed to work in software development. That makes it really hard to listen to people who dismiss C++ because it's "not beginner friendly".
They used to have "users" who are more advanced in a class review the work of people who are behind them, and that's how you got credits to get your own homework reviewed (based on what I remember). I still daydream about building something like that, not just to learn programming, but for everything.
Now openclasssrooms is really weird, no idea what's going on on there. Their landing page is like a synthesis of every corporate website ever made. But I found an archive of the content of the old website here: http://sdz.tdct.org/
SDZ should have been Heaven for me, but even as a teenager, I just couldn't get past the omnipresent enthousiasm and the smileys at the end of each sentence :)
:)
Guess I've always been grumpy.
Oh and yeah it's probably been enshittified nowadays, everything has. Wouldn't surprise me if they partnered with Ecole 42 to inundate the job market with programmers without degrees and drive the salaries down even more.
It seems you're all missing the point here: it's not about storing useless data, it's about destroying the environment in the process. I understand you all want to keep everything, just in case, because it's cheap and you don't see the externalities. But there are externalities, and they are big.
We need to think about the data we need to store before we store it, only store the data that we need to store, and only store it for as long as needed.
It reminds me of CIs. It's now so easy to throw 40 jobs on GitHub actions that people don't think about them. I have been in a startup where people would debug in CI: they wouldn't have e.g. Windows on their machine (maybe they should have, given that their product was supposed to run there) and were fixing compilation issues by sending patches and patches to the CI. Every single time it would trigger the 40 jobs. Sometimes you could see a patch sent every 5 min for 3 days (where reproducing the issue locally would actually take 3s and not 5min). They did not even bother disabling the 39 uninteresting jobs.
For open source projects, it's just wasted energy, for private repos it was costing the company a lot. This was just malpractice. But nobody cared. The finance person would say "GitHub is expensive", the CEO that "well we need it" and the engineers that "I don't want that Windows crap on my computer", I suppose.
Well that article clearly says "it's hurting the environment, and in my experience the vast majority of that data is useless".
Which I believe is not uninteresting, given the amount of answers here where people say "Is that data useless? I don't know, I could imagine that it's not, I think it's a hard problem". Well here we have one person saying "I have experience in that, and I can tell you that most of it is useless". Just a data point, but that's still interesting.
Deezer has human curated playlists updated frequently, which has been my main way of discovering new artists these days. For example, the prog metal playlist as been updated 5 days ago. [0] There are lots of those playlists..
It won't change much if only small groups of citizens starts taking individual action to mitigate their environment footprint. But I strongly believe that it is nonetheless a mandatory step towards global awareness.
It is not "the magical solution", but I don't see any solution that don't starts with individuals taking action to start trends.
Political action will start only when the people electing government starts caring. And that starts by individuals convincing the others.
If you mandate that all meat come from field fed, hay fed sources, with no fertilizer (hay is a great rotational crop), instead of corn or other crops, solved problem.
You know, like the rest of the world does it.
(That is, unless you plan to shoot and kill and exterminate all bison, deer, etc, that would take over any land we leave fallow...)
I ask because I've met Europeans who were convinced that all of their beef was grass-fed, while I've personally seen cattle being grain-finished (and/or fed a variety of supplemental non-pasture-grass feeds like sugar beets) in places like Ireland and Germany. Marketing != reality.
> Now you are staring into the big bang in all its glory; make sure to wear safety squints.
Wait what? That's not true right? All the light we see is concentrated in one point but it's not really the big bang that we see, it's an illusion, is that correct?
You are correct, and this highlights the biggest challenge of our time (in my opinion): people are not ready to make compromises on their lifestyle, even if it is proven that this lifestyle is unsustainable and threatens the future of humanity.
