throwaway47292

Hey, things will get better.

Nothing good comes out of being pessimistic (by definition), sometimes I get into a state where I confuse my pessimism with realism, but remember: everywhere you look you see what you are looking for.

I can relate to that comment, as I feel the same way. So much that it causes me pain.

I have to constantly remind myself:

In chaos, all predictions are possible, solarpunk is just as likely as cyberpunk.

Everywhere you look, you see what you are looking for. If you are looking for death all you see is death, if you are looking for god, all you see is god.

Hi, I am exploring new ways to teach programming to my kid(10).

Yesterday I made this strategy-like game, and I think it has potential, and I feel I can make it much more interesting, but it eludes me how.

The goal is to have 'hacker' like game, where you see the opponent's code and can react to it.

If anyone has ideas please make pull request at https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids (punk dir) or send me email at detectiveninja@fastmail.com

Amazing!

I have only one recommendation that might make the search a bit more relevant, e.g when searching for 'linux locking' or 'kernel locking' kind of things.

Try to upsort things that match near the top of the content, like the top of the man page vs middle vs bottom.

One easy way to do it without having to store the positions, is to index the ngrams with max(sqrt,8) of their line number, this will cover first 64 lines, you can also use log() or just decide ad hock, top, middle, bottom of the document, so you can use only 3 values.

e.g. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.0/kernel-hacking/locking.... would do unreliable_1 guide_1 locking_1 ... then at line 4 kernel_2 locking_2 ... after line 50 ... then_7 ... and after that everything will be _8.

then just make the query "kernel locking" to "dismax(kernel_1 OR kernel_2 OR kernel_3...) AND dismax(locking_1 OR locking_2 ...) with some tiebreaker of 0.1 or so, you can also say "i want to upsort things on the same line, or few lines apart" by modifying the query a bit.

It works really well and costs very little in terms of space, i tried it at https://github.com/jackdoe/zr while searching all of stackoverfow/man pages and etc and was pretty surprised by the result.

This approach is a bit cheaper than storing the positions because positions are (lets say) 4 bytes per term per doc, while this approach has fixed uppre bound cost of 8*4 per document (assuming 4 byte document ids) plus some amortized cost for the terms

I just feel somehow personally responsible for the way things went with the internet and surveillance capitalism.

I remember in early 2000s how I used to download some programs[1] to pay me to watch ads. I didn't pay content creators anything, didnt donate, I didnt have money, but I could've spared some.

I just didn't do anything to stop it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf

keep in mind mask alone is not enough

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

and glasses + mask as well

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

and this is https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition completely out of the box, no tuning or anything, just copy pasted the example

you have no idea :)

hahaha i cant help but to laugh in despair

look what we have built

this is the internet we made

for our children

we should do both

as political changes are incredibly slow, in the meantime we need to make it harder to collect

you know very well no data will be deleted, in the modern 'data is money' mode of operation

its not even on purpose, its just hard to delete from petabytes of hadoop garbage

thanks for the link! i immediately tried it https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

its a screenshot of detecting me despite the paint, and i tried whole bunch of colors and etc to trick it that my eyes are not where they are, and it did not work, I think it was easier in 2014, seems you really need to hide your eyes now, and its gonna be quite annoying for bald people like me haha

anyway, i updated the book as well, with the link

thanks!

offtopic: ipv6 is fine, but the ipv6 internet is just broken

few days ago I had ipv6 enabled on my pi4 and was trying to update it, turns out that the ipv6 address of archive.raspberrypi.org was returning 404 (its fixed now)

but it took me like 3 seconds to just net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1, and i am not gonna enable it until something on ipv4 does not work

(and by ipv6 i mean native ipv6 from my ISP)

it has been like that for the last 15 years, since we gave native ipv6 to our users in my ISP, people just had worse experience than not having it.

haha i didnt tell her that yet, she is only 10 :D

Sadly, I think we are beyond opt-out with any facial recognition.

I recently showed[1] to my daughter (10) as teaching her python, how easy it is to build some basic facial recognition using modern libraries and models.

I had it running with one of her pictures, and i just asked her to come in front of the computer for a second to check something out, and she was completely shocked when the video put her name below her face, and my name below my face. She was shocked, a bit curious, and a bit revolted.

On the next day when I took her to school, I just showed the amount of cameras on the way, and in the mall. At first she thought that its not an issue, as every camera only sees locally around it, so they cant connect her journey, but then she realised someone can own many cameras.

I think we need to invest much more into adversarial machine learning[2] and possibly form some sort of organization to fund it. (I hope it will be called move-78 as Lee Sedol's hand of god move against alpha go)

[1]: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxbazQ6wJlU

i used revolt to be more dramatic :)

i meant i will take action against the evolution, and one of the things i can do is spend as much time as i can in educating my daughter.

that is of course true

but now we are at a day where "Amazon to remove more content that violates rules from cloud service" is on the front of hackernews together with "Visual Studio Code now available as Web based editor for GitHub repos"

evolution or not, i will revolt, if i think the path its taking is harmful. (not that i can do much besides teaching my kid to know how computers work haha)

haha maybe Christopher Domas knows :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmTwlEh8L7g [x86 god mode]

but there is a difference between knowing vaguely how internal combustion engine works versus treating your car as a magic box from the future. (which of course now most cars are, you can not even disable the tire pressure alert after you pump your tires without going to the service shop)

I fear that nobody will even teach the fetch-execute cycle to our kids.

It seems we are moving to a world of magic, where developers will be alchemists, and only a handful of people will understand "physics" or "chemistry" and know what is actually going on in the cloud, serverless, fileless, functionless development.

Since google translate and google maps, I always ask myself, what is the real price for this very convenient and engaging product.

I can relate a bit, I think something is lost with scratch, it just seems fake and unreal.

I tried it with my daughter(10) and she did not respond to it, of course it was likely my fault. After that I changed the approach to be more tangible, making apps, websites, roblox games, python games etc, and she is getting better and better.

However the games 'human resource machine' and '7 billion humans' as visual programming were incredibly helpful. (tomorrowcorporation.com)

I document the process here: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids

I have not worked in any company doing ab tests like that, it is always base vs variant. Option 1 vs option 2/3 and then if the feature wins, you can try option 2 vs option 3, if not they would scrap it, or blame it on the implementation and keep retrying until they either get false positive, or survivor bias makes it positive.

I am not defending it as I also believe that ab tests ruin the web, but if anyone does option2/3 at start they are not doing AB test at all.

I havent used syntax highlighting in 8 years or so (global-font-lock-mode 0)

highly recommend it, if you could try.

for example this code[1]:

    // the code will run twice
    bool panic  = true
    while (true) {
        panic = !panic;
        if (panic) break;
    }

I can argue is easier to read without highlighting.

I think colors break the flow of code in unintended ways, and mistreat comments (either overvalue with some pink color or undervalue with some toned down gray), and almost all themes make keywords extremely important.

[1] https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/issues/3#iss...

It was 3.6 for me, I still miss it.

To be honest, I have been completely overwhelmed by the modern web, ads and cookie warnings are just giving me anxiety, and I mean real physical anxiety. I will go back to my roots, my tty only experience is getting better and better[1]. When I patched the kernel to make the cursor non blinking block, I got such joy, I felt I was a kid again.

Great news that slack is still around! It gives me hope.

[1] https://dev.to/jackdoe/tty-only-1ijn

.. they have the word naked in their titles, its not like they are hiding haha

i dont even think its AI problemm, you can probably detect half of it with dhash or something

there is incredible amount of porn in youtube as well, and in google images; i think it is really hard for them to moderate at this scale

> What was her age when you started this?

She just turned 10 when we started.

> Did she have experience with board/card/pen-and-paper games before? Dice games?

We did play https://www.thinkfun.com/products/robot-turtles/ quite often, since she was 6 or so. and we play a lot of ticket to ride, and some memory games (like Lumina). We don't play dice games though.

> What was starting typing speed and how it goes now? Do typing lessons causes frustration?

I have not actually measured the speed recently, as we use our own programs to train (she enjoys using her own programs a lot), but she is at the point that she is faster to type with 10 fingers than with 2.

> Do typing lessons causes frustration

Not at all, they are a lot of fun. I enjoy them a lot as well. Today we were using the program we wrote yesterday (https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids#day-100-basi...) and we tweaked it a bit to have 'pause/start' and she wanted to continue even after the end of the lesson.

> Have you noted some prior math skills? I see lessons start with strings but then move to "geometry" stuff

She is good in math in general, but at her age math is kindof boring. But geometry I think is fun, especially when you think of 'how do two rectangles collide', and since she plays a lot of roblox, the whole game is made of rectangles, so it is very relatable.

The one thing that helped a lot, was teaching HTML. How td is child of tr and sister to another td, and it has a child of h1, or how things have properties border=2 and etc.

It helped with understanding where does code belong, how the code in the for loop is related to the code above it and etc.

I also spend time on things like how to steal someone's cookie, and what is a cookie day 51,52,53 (https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids#day-52-basic...) and also we spend a lot of time touchtyping, so her thoughts easier to be expressed through the keyboard.

Also as the talk also mentions, we spend a lot of time reading code, https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids#day-72-basic... i just print it on paper and we go over it with a pencil.

The most difficult lessons are the more abstract ones understanding what the memory holds, and what the variable points to https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids#day-95-basic...

Also tearing down commodore64 and showing the actual memory address space in physical manner helps, the variable color points to somewhere >here<.

We are spending about 50 days now only doing lists and for loops, I write the next day's lesson after the current lesson finishes, and I try to see what she grasps, and what is somewhat interesting and prepare for tomorrow.

Teaching programming is extremely difficult, I think because it is a learning staircase instead of a learning curve.

For example, `color = input("what is your favorite color: ") .. print(color)` seems like the variable name is somewhat related to the content. The first time I saw my daughter "get" variables was after some time she just started naming them `kj`, `jdh`, `hdj` when she was going to use them immediately after.

I am writing a log of how the lessons go: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids