She spends a lot of time at home reading books (mostly non-fiction) and browsing the net (she reads a lot of online articles about a wide range of topics) and chatting with her friends on social media (most of her friends live in different countries because we traveled a lot). We do a lot of outdoor activities together but aside from that she doesn't like to do much. We both spend most of our time at home because I work remotely. She hates working or doing anything productive. She even tried painting once and is good at it but she could never be an artist as she is allergic to the idea of earning money.
To fully grok this, the concepts you need are: the idea that you can instruct a computer to do things, the notion of source code as a list of such instructions which will normally be executed one at a time, in order, and - crucially - that the instructions can reference other instructions and that this is the fundamental leap that makes computers interesting. In other words, Turing Machines 101. It's a perfect demonstration.
Now consider the simplest equivalent program in Python:
while(true):
print("Retardo_88")
In addition to all of the insights mentioned above, you need the concept of higher order control flow statements, the concept of nested execution, the concept of boolean literals, the concept of a function call... there are so many questions that are hard to answer. Why do I need parentheses? Why do I need the colon? What's the deal with the indent? What gives with the weird grammar of "while true"? Etc...
It gets worse the moment you want to do anything nontrivial and have to wrestle with objects, methods, and dot-syntax. BASIC sends the message that computers are simple, easy to grok things that follow simple, logical rules; Python sends the message that they are a bottomless well of dizzying complexity.
I would argue that a more measured alternative to your conclusion is “people should learn computers from the bottom up”, starting with direct exposure to a program counter and ending with high abstraction. I’m not sure this is the best way to learn, but I think it would be a lot better than what we teach now.
A great intro CS curriculum could be some RISC assembly -> C -> Lua -> Haskell -> Agda, maybe also branching off into lisp and prolog.
If you wanted to get really extreme, you could even tack on “Discrete transistors -> logic ICs -> FPGA ->”
As a perpetual beginner, I feel BASIC is under-rated. We should use BASIC to start children off with computing. They'll learn the hairy stuff in due time, but the key is to get them hooked early; and BASIC does an awesome job of that.
I still find it implausible. Would a university realistically allow someone who didn't know anything beyond 6th-grade math (in her own words) to sign up for such an accelerated syllabus that she went from doing introductory physics to quantum field theory in 6 months (also according to her own account)?
“Now, she tells her full story for the first time: a story of extraordinary determination and resilience that reveals what it takes—and what it means—to be a whistleblower. Long before she arrived at Uber, Fowler's life had been defined by her refusal to accept her circumstances. She propelled herself from an impoverished childhood with little formal education to the Ivy League, and then to a coveted position at one of the most valuable companies in the history of Silicon Valley. Each time she was mistreated, she fought back or found a way to reinvent herself; all she wanted was the opportunity to define her own dreams and work to achieve them. But when she discovered Uber's pervasive culture of sexism, racism, harassment, and abuse, and that the company would do nothing about it, she knew she had to speak out--no matter what it cost her.”
To put this into context: The video is from the same guy who plagiarized a paper and replaced "quantum gates" with "quantum doors" and "complex Hilbert space" with "complicated Hilbert space".
This question sounds snarky but is actually valid, I think. Most of the parent comment's complaints about extremely popular technologies simply boil down to "Nothing works" and "No one gets it", without any further elaboration. Perhaps the problem lies with the author of the parent comment rather than the technologies themselves.
I hate the fact that it requires you to install the client for it to work.
The client randomly spikes in cpu usage while running in the background. Multiple times I've also had this issue where I'll try to right click the zoom icon in the system tray and quit zoom, causing it to hang and reach 100% cpu usage on one core.
I also don't like that on clicking on a zoom video call link sometimes the browser to client redirect works but sometimes it doesn't and you need to then go back and click the link again.
I was planning on mentioning Zoom as well. The Linux client especially is insanely bad, iirc it also drew itself on top of everything.
My suggestion on Linux at least is to use the web client. Just get the url, do a 's#/j/#/wc/join/#' to it and open it in browser of your choice. You'll need to copy the password manually, sometimes it might require captcha etc, but at least it's somewhat usable.
But why would you use it when it has like 1 second latency. Google Meet is kind of meh but works. Or pure audio calls like Telegram or something like Mumble (which has rooms, you can host a server yourself, is open source and doesn't suck).
I can see why salespeople prefer video calls but for technical topics it just doesn't make sense.
Same here (ububtu, dwm). I can use every other web-based video conference platform with no problem (jit.si, google meet, and others) but zoom eats all memory and crashes the browser. The app refuses to run, complaining that I don’t have ibus installed (I removed ibus, because it’s one of a hundred unnecessary layers of crap added by distro maintainers).
Some of the major problems: 10% of my CPU and ~1GB memory by simply launching the application on linux. Absolutely ridiculous. Can't remove passwords from my personal meetings, controls are sluggish as hell, like I'll click to either turn on or off my camera and have to wait for 3-4 seconds for it to actually do anything. Multiple smaller problems piled on the side as well.
People love to shit on Skype but even the web version of Skype behaves better than zoom for me. Google meet, Skype, meet.jit.si - I take any of those over zoom.
Additionally, this statement does not depict what many (most?) people would consider an effective or competent police force: "she was not [Japanese], which meant that the police were... less incentivized to help her".
I am currently a foreigner living in a Scandinavian country, and I simply cannot imagine facing the same kind of discrimination from the police force (nor from other authorities) here. I think many (most?) people would agree that an effective/competent police force is not one which ends up driving foreigners out of the country by virtue of being unwilling to afford foreigners equality before the law.
