beej71

15 ms·

361.
by beej71 6mo ago
> Compulsory education actually reduced US literacy levels after it was introduced I can't find any data that supports this causal assertion, and I can find plenty that contradicts the premise that US literacy rates have reduced sin
362.
by beej71 6mo ago
Before LLMs, a friend of mine lamented that all the juniors at his gig were really fast at producing buggy code. The greater lament was that his bosses loved it. And as a dev, you're getting paid to do what your bosses want. LLMs can r
363.
by beej71 6mo ago
I drank a lot of coffee until I forgot to pack instant on a 3 day backpacking trip. Headache the whole time that I cured in 5 minutes by drinking a mt dew the minute we got back to civilization. Figured it wasn't worth it and weaned of
364.
by beej71 6mo ago
I was so impressed by this when I saw it. Big-ass cable. :) Great ferry trip.
365.
by beej71 6mo ago
I wonder how much is supply and demand. Hasn't the rate of reading been decreasing?
366.
by beej71 6mo ago
Yeah. As a college instructor, I now require zero textbooks that have a cost. There's lots of great material out there that instructors have put out for free use. School's expensive enough as it is.
367.
by beej71 6mo ago
If you don't have the money, you don't have the money. IMHO I'd rather have people without the means pirate books rather than go without. (Though the library is usually an option.) But if you do have the means, drop the autho
368.
by beej71 6mo ago
Their notification says they're out of disk for Lemmy. For my part, I sent them $50 for more. I agree with you that the social downtime is bad. People just won't use the service.
369.
by beej71 6mo ago
> I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years. I don't have that faith either, but it still irks me when good hardware has to get chucked for software reasons. And this goes
370.
by beej71 6mo ago
If they have DRM the answer is almost certainly no.
371.
by beej71 6mo ago
I just jailbroke my old Kindle 4 for fun. Found out of it ever connects to WiFi it unjailbrakes itself. :) The email Amazon sent out said that if you factory reset your device after May 20 it becomes inoperable. I wonder if that means brick
372.
by beej71 6mo ago
Harder, for sure. But you just need one copy in the wild...
373.
by beej71 6mo ago
I've considered the PocketBook. How do you like it vs the Kobo?
374.
by beej71 6mo ago
I'd like to see some data on this. My general-ed recall is minimal, and in programming before school, I certainly learned a ton more by coding than by testing. That's my perception of my time in school, as well.
375.
by beej71 6mo ago
> If DRM is the price I have to pay for a dead-simple ecosystem, multi-device support and free cloud storage, well, I guess I'm happy to pay it. That makes one of us. To each their own, I guess.
376.
by beej71 6mo ago
The Kindle isn't a bad device on its own. Personally I use a Kobo. But I never pay for any ebook that I can't keep indefinitely one way or another. I also have an old Kindle 4 that needs to be jailbroken before the May 30th deadli
377.
by beej71 6mo ago
If the book is readable, it can be pirated. Even the most labor-intensive piracy technique is not that difficult. And once a drm-free book is out there, it's out there.
378.
by beej71 6mo ago
That's definitely optimal, but I don't think a lot of people are going to have that opportunity. It's not really in the short-term interest of a company to have people spending time on that.
379.
by beej71 6mo ago
I recently revisited my childhood town and walked from my childhood home to my school. I hadn't done that for nearly 50 years. It was shorter than I remember, of course, but it was still several blocks. The last time I walked it, I was
380.
by beej71 6mo ago
I grew up in the 70s in a town of 30,000 and consider that time free-range. There was no public transit, only bicycles.
381.
by beej71 6mo ago
I'll bet we see more and more of this in the future. As developer skills atrophy due to over-reliance on LLMs, we'll have to keep our skills sharp somehow. What better way than a sabbatical?
382.
by beej71 6mo ago
News like this always makes me wonder about running my own model, something I've never done. A couple thousand bucks can get you some decent hardware, it looks like, but is it good for coding? What is your all's experience? And if
383.
by beej71 6mo ago
It misbehaves on Android FF, as well.
384.
by beej71 6mo ago
Wonder what the job security is like.
385.
by beej71 6mo ago
It is one of the better options. Instead of vaporizing the ship, it only blows it in half at the keel. As TFA notes, once this is in place, we're behind the eight ball from then on. You want to post something that the government doesn&
386.
by beej71 6mo ago
This response, however, does not really address protecting the children.
387.
by beej71 6mo ago
What bugged me the most was that it was really not concise and a bit ranty. But I couldn't tell at a casual glance if it was AI or not.
388.
by beej71 6mo ago
I prompted Claude for some demo code to appreciate the language and it did a good job. Definitely some pretty neat stuff in there that exposed some unrealized FOMO. Of course I knew of Ada for decades, but I never got into it.
389.
by beej71 6mo ago
There's a further argument being made here that being literate changes the way you'd interpret and understand a YouTube video as you absorbed that information.
390.
by beej71 6mo ago
I use FF, but it seems like something Claude should be able to whip up... There we go. Took two attempts, but I basically told it to make something like FF's JSON formatter, and it did. I won't share it because I'm sure it le

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