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jamesgillon Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine

The fundamental question that AI raises for me, but nobody seems to answer:

In our competitive, profit-driven world--what is the value of a human being and having human experiences?

AI is neither inevitable nor necessary--but it seems like the next inevitable step in reducing the value of a human life to its 'outputs'.

jamesgillon Find Your People

It's great advice. Reminds me of Steve Jobs' statement:

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

jamesgillon Caesar's Last Breath

"Obviously, many simplifying liberties were taken."

Yes, I would agree. Perhaps too many. But it's a fun exercise.

jamesgillon Ask HN: Why did Python win?

Data science/analysis.

jamesgillon Compuserve

Compuserve was where I had my first email account in the early/mid 80s, dialing in on a C64 and a 300 baud modem. God, the amount of time I spent playing Megawars and cursing my slow modem.

jamesgillon Nobody ever paid me for code

See a related concept in product development, ‘jobs to be done’. In a sentence: people don’t pay for products, they pay for jobs to be done. There’s a famous example about milkshakes (YouTube).

jamesgillon Zoom terms now allow training AI on user content with no opt out

It seems to me that every ‘AI’ effort I see today utterly depends on circumventing or ignoring privacy.

jamesgillon The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries

The tedious ranting aside, this is way off base—and really about ebooks, not libraries.

Public libraries are not monolithic; they’re operated differently depending on where they are, and all are trying to navigate ebooks—which, by the way, make up only a small fraction of patron demand. Libraries also serve many functions besides lending books.

Public libraries are not being ‘enshittified’. They are more popular than ever (in the US, anyway), and ebooks are just another area where they’re navigating as best they can to offer patrons options.

jamesgillon Google’s Plan to DRM the Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For

I’m fascinated by this rose-tinted view of Google as once being ‘good’, but somehow being ‘evil’ now. I watched this film lay out with Microsoft over decades, too.

But, TL;DR: Google and Microsoft have always been ‘evil’. We’re just arguing about which circle of hell they rule over.

jamesgillon Oregon decriminalized hard drugs – early results aren’t encouraging

No doubt that the reform isn’t perfect, but this is such a poor, confused attempt at creating a story of causality (or even correlation).

jamesgillon Help the Library of Congress create games to improve public knowledge of civics

You gain knowledge of civics by participating in civic activities. We don’t need more learning gimmicks, we need more (and easier) opportunities for people to participate. Beyond that, it’s not a knowledge problem, it’s a cultural problem.

jamesgillon Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

—Carl Sagan

jamesgillon The Anti-Ownership eBook Economy

Remember when you could buy and own a copy of a software program? And how today you just ‘license’ or ‘rent’ or ‘subscribe’? Ebooks aren’t unique—the model is part of a larger, longer-term trend, and we’ve been willing participants and creators of it.

jamesgillon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

www.jamesgill.net

jamesgillon Common bugs in writing (2021)

For god’s sake, ignore rules for writing. Except the ones that end up making you money. —Mark Twain

There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are. —W. Somerset Maugham

jamesgillon Tell HN: Interview take home assessments without feedback are frustrating

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing otherwise smart people that job interviews are quantitative, unbiased processes rather than emotional, biased crapshoots.

jamesgillon Ask HN: What do you put in a “in case of death” file?

I’ve written a ‘what to do upon my death’ checklist with some explanatory instructions for my family. What to first and when, where to find things, contacts, reiteration of cremation vs. burial, etc.

I have a ‘fire resistant’ case for…fire, but I also put relevant death documents there. So, my wife can just grab that case.

And trust me: Get a legal will, no matter what state laws you live under. Cheap, quick, easy.

Other than that, it depends a lot on your situation—married, kids, amount of possessions, special requests, etc.

jamesgillon Show HN: 77 Year old launches SaaS platform today. Seeks feedback

Main feedback: There’s no way I’m trusting an online third party to facilitate my home purchase/sale. Also: when doing FSBO, most of the work and difficulty is manually dealt with—negotiation back and forth verbally or on simple standardized legal documents. Then an escrow company takes over. Hard to see the benefit a third party in the middle who isn’t taking that off my hands (i.e., a human agent).

jamesgillon The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities

"Normally, when I say this is something that has happened, I find I encounter a great deal of incredulity among the general public."

No, not just the general public; the 'long peace' is a hotly contested idea amongst academic and professional circles too. And, it's arguably a rather large amount of hand-wavey bullshit trying to paint certain nation states in a particular light and narrowly define 'war', 'peace', and 'violence'.

jamesgillon Apple Announces New MacBook Air with 15.3-Inch Display and M2 Chip

I think it's also a clever way to compare performance to other, non-Apple Intel machines--without mentioning them.

jamesgillon He made linear algebra fun

For those unfamiliar: Dr. Strang is still very much alive and active and involved in math; he just retired from his full-time job at MIT.

jamesgillon The Analog Thing: an open source, educational, low-cost modern analog computer

I love the idea as a learning tool, but:

1. ~USD $535 isn't exactly 'low-cost'

2. I'm confused who the audience is.

It can't be kids--this is too advanced. It can't be engineers (or student engineers)--there are better, more practical learning tools. Maybe people with an extra $500 who just enjoy fiddling around?

jamesgillon TV doctors say annual checkups save lives – real doctors call bullshit (2016)

I’m not a care provider, but I’ve worked in healthcare for a long time. The real answer is: there is no consensus among doctors about this. Opinions vary widely. The article alludes to this. One thing I do know: tests are not the reliable gold standard they’re believed to be, and even when ‘accurate’, interpretations of results vary and evolve over time.

jamesgillon Lenovo profits sink 75% as PC demand continues nosedive

I bought all of these used.

jamesgillon Lenovo profits sink 75% as PC demand continues nosedive

For computers, I actively use:

* A nine-year-old desktop Mac Mini (2014)

* An eight-year-old MacBook Pro (2015)

* A five-year-old ThinkPad T480 (2018)

And a nine-year-old home server sitting in the basement (Optiplex 9020).

I rarely need new computers.

jamesgillon Memory Allocation

This is incredibly well done. I've never seen malloc/memory allocation explained so clearly. I'd buy a book written like this.

jamesgillon A $200 mini-laptop with a Intel 8088 chip and 640KB

640k is all you’ll ever need.

jamesgillon DM32 – a modern take on the HP-32SII calculator

I still have (and use) an HP-15c from the mid-80s. I know it's nostalgic, but you had to have lived it to appreciate the power these had/have--and the fun of manually programming stacks. I've owned a 32S and many others over the years, but this one has stuck.

jamesgillon A raw dump of companies from all over the world by LinkedIn handle

They (Microsoft) have APIs for app/website integration, but that's all I know about.

https://developer.linkedin.com/

jamesgillon You studied computer science but Big Tech no longer wants you

It's as if there were never ups and downs in tech before 2022. As someone who was working in the dotcom era (and before), I've seen so many booms/busts/layoffs and gluts/shortages that I've lost count.

TL;DR: This is nothing new. At all. And it's certainly not limited to the 'tech' industry.