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 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.
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”
I want to hear that lecture!
The absolute worst thing about how STEM is taught in my country is how entirely devoid curriculums are of critical theory. You take inputs, outputs, energies and production as-is, and you get a crop of drones who think such discussions are irrelevant. Then they graduate, start working and earning good money – and suddenly they support capitalist production structures because they’re “rational” and “objective”. Some then become the biggest chuds ever known to man.
I remember that I discussed gentrification with a civil engineer who happened to be my boss, a very renowned and talented person in our branch. He didn’t know what gentrification was…
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.
What do you want to say, exactly?
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.
I understood that tbh. I just wanted the person to say it in their own words…
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.
deleted by creator
That’s a different person you’re replying to
That’s embarrassing … 🤓
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.
Programming?
scoffs
Woke.
I’m Antigramming like a true Patriot.
My programs are pat/riot
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.
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
Haha, that’s either horrible if you don’t know what you just did there or brilliant parody if you did.
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.
Using arabic numerals to code? I thought this was merica!!!
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
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
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
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 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.
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.
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
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 !
So basically the problem is capitalism
As usual
All would be cool if it weren’t for rent and having to pay for food.
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.
Top-level comment:
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
I don’t think that commenter can sell a project under a non-GPL license if they use someone else’s GPL library in it.
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
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!
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?
https://piefed.social/c/opensource@lemmy.ml/p/2231796/does-the-mpl-2-0-have-a-giant-loop-hole
My delusions of grandeur involve adding a massively useful addition to a successful MIT/BSD licensed project, but release it in strict AGPL. Companies steal volunteer work all the time and those licenses let them. I want to put a wrench into that. All I’m missing is a lot of talent, experience, time, and money. Any day now.
If it’s science, it’s woke!
Real patriots use the abacus.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
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!
It’s not even that “hardcore” of ideology honestly. It depends a lot on the lens you view it through your society. If it’s far right, then saying “water is a human right!” is going to seem extreme leftism.
Republicans have never forgiven Alan Turing, and much prefer the contributions of IBM during the same period.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Honestly there’s hundreds of other ways you can tie leftist ideas to CS and modern software. Like alienation of labour, powers of scale, etc. You could teach a whole class on it if you wanted. You could so so even before AI. I don’t think many of the students would be happy about that though.
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.
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
LLMs do have purposes, and they had purposes before this current crop of chatbots dubbed “AI” came along. The problem is with “generative AI”.
Cory Doctorow has a great article about it here. It’s an “emperor wears no clothes” situation.
In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted — or even spared from being fired — were people who professed “religious declarations of faith” about “the transformative power of AI.” Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.
This has created a situation in which everyone — “boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants” — has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he’s seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.
Suresh says he’s never seen a successful enterprise AI project: “Every single one — we have seen 0% success in a year and a half.”
Additionally, all of the AI companies are still operating in the red. They still aren’t turning a profit 4 years after the release of ChatGPT.
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 chemical industry.
AI is basically a slippery slope in all directions surrounded by pitfalls it misuse and abuse. People are too quick to trust it. I think a syllabus that includes a lesson warning people as early as possible about the dangers/risks is a good idea that is still relevant to the course. An ethics class for the deep dive is a fine idea, but I don’t think a chapter on analyzing this stuff in an Intro course is that out of bounds. Intro should at least address it, or at the very least not considered a waste of time.
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.
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
