Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Why learn? (Score 1) 175

So I did my CS degree 25 years ago now.

Programming was always a means to an end. I had a couple programming courses, but almost all my classes were things like graph theory or compiler fundamentals or graphics or similar things. We learned algorithms and complexity and the history of computing that brought us to the point where we were at. I did a class on hardware where we used and/or/not/etc. gates with physical wires and solved simple logic problems. I learned the optimal rasterization of a line. I learned how lisp was designed and what left-hand recursion was. I've forgotten most of it and much of it was not useful to my career, but that's fine. When I left university, I had a deeper understanding of how computers and computing worked, the class of problems that were or weren't solvable and so many other things.

So if CS has been about teaching people how to program since I left university, it should stop being that. University is not a trade school (not that there's anything wrong with trade schools--we need more people doing those things).

Programming is a tool--a means to an end, and usually that end is learning computing science and understanding the problems that exist in the space. You're expected to learn how to use your tools almost entirely on your own time, you should not spend an entire semester on learning how your hammer works (unless you're also spending the entire semester designing a new hammer).

And look, the PROFESSORS don't need the correct answers that you hand in. Tests and assignments are also just a means to an end--you're not teaching the professor anything, you're merely demonstrating that you've been learning. Plugging things into a chatbot to get the right answer is fundamentally not the point of the class. If you don't want to learn, fine, go do something else.

Stop making university degrees mandatory for every garbage job out there, first of all. If there needs to be 4 more years of education to get a basic job, the state should make public school curricula last 4 years longer.

Second, only let people in that are interested in the topics they're studying. The ultimate goal of university should be to gain knowledge so you can CREATE knowledge yourself one day. Universities are not job training centres, they're institutions of higher learning. I get that capitalism has ruined everything, but this is what you get when it does.

Comment Re:Deficit spending causes inflation (Score 1) 245

Rand Paul isn't particularly conservative, like most Republicans. He's for small government except when he's not. But to be fair to him, he's for slightly smaller government than most of his colleagues, and he does actually vote that way. I think he's wrong about most things, but he's MOSTLY honest and up front about what he thinks.

But yeah, that's a pretty dismal headcount for a party that consistently runs on fiscal responsibility. But again, to be fair, they also consistently fail at it.

Comment Re:Cheaters will cheat (Score 4, Insightful) 49

This isn't cheating. If a fucking journal is garbage enough to let AI review papers, then the whole thing is suspect and this is actually the best thing to happen.

The slop infects everything. Neither journals that allow AI reviews nor those papers should exist at all. One scammer was trying to play another and I don't feel bad for any of them.

Comment Re:It's always about what you want to pay for.... (Score 1) 269

"those goals seem to be nearly impossible to attain"

Is it impossible to obtain - the national ethos sees absolutely no problem with the unbounded consolidation of wealth and power, so long as it is in the private sector.

The joke is the private sector is so powerful at this point, your public sector is just a sock with the private sector's hand up its ass.

That'll never change as long as the concept of even moderate, reasonable redistribution of wealth is a national non-starter. It's impressive watching the way the US twists itself this way and that, where everybody is just a temporarily embarrassed billionaire voting for less taxes, less spending to make their supposed future rich selves happy for when they finally join the billionaire class.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 179

1. The ApplePay system is more secure because you have to initiate the payment. Nobody can just walk up and press a payment terminal up to your card.
2. Additionally, the ApplePay system uses a rotating number in the background, so your real CC number is actually used (from what I understand)
3. In my own personal experience, the tap-to-pay system on my card is much less reliable than my phone or watch. I don't know why or how; it used to be better, but then I got a new card and now it's terrible.

I use my card when making large purchases that require a chip-and-pin. I would actually go so far as to say that NFC should be removed from cards because of point 1, and they should only be used for chip-and-pin transactions, while phones take over all tap-to-pay transactions.

I don't understand QR codes on smartphones, but apparently they're popular in other countries because they can be used by even extremely cheap dumbphones.

Comment Re: Useful If Verified (Score 5, Informative) 247

Dunno if you're a programmer or not, but if you're not extensively testing and verifying what you wrote before you put it in production, you're doing it wrong.

You have to verify and test *all* code. LLMs are great for producing a bunch of boiler plate code that would take a long time to write and is easily testable. The claim that LLMs are useless for programming flies in the face of everything happening in the ivoriest of towers of programming these days. Professionals in every major shop in the world use it now as appropriate. Sorry that makes you mad. I'm not young either. I've been producing C++ on embedded systems used by millions of people for 20+ years. Nobody doing serious programming takes the "LLMs are useless" opinion seriously anymore.

Comment It's a bunch of fucking assholes (Score 1) 124

Saying fucking asshole things. They're tired of having to pay skilled labour what it's worth, and AI isn't going to actually take the jobs, so they have to make everyone scared by saying things like this and laying off hundreds of people at a time.

Funny how such easy to predict actions aren't being threatened with being replaced. As more than one other person has said here, CEOs are ripe for replacing; nobody would even notice the difference.

Comment Re: How is a 10% reduction in traffic a success? (Score 1) 111

How would you know what a shot number was? If the goal was to restore flowing traffic, reduce horn honking from standstill traffic, increase city revenue for mass transit, seems like a decidedly non-shit number to me. You dont need to cut traffic in half to make the roads work, a modest decrease from full capacity will do it.

Comment Re:What a horrible idea. (Score 3, Insightful) 137

"To cease all production and consign us all to a pre-industrial way of living? "

This is weapons level stupid and or disingenuous. Do you actually think a) that's the point of the suit b) the person who filed it wants that?

It's mostly a bad idea because it will not succeed, and in the current judicial climate (no pun intended) of the USA may very well set some kind of precent at complete odds with the goal of the lawsuit.

And I say this as somebody who thinks the people behind such a lawsuit are not in it for money or notoriety or whatever. People can be driven by emotion for certain things that are right - you know, like if your mom died on a night that was substantially warmer than you remember experiencing when you were a kid. Suing oil companies could *very well* help with "the transition" as you call it, if only to decimate their ability to lobby for policy - people really don't understand how subsidized their industry is.

None the less, what appears to really sell right now in the US is antagonization so here we are. It's somehow "our fault" witch to me smacks of somebody who really isn't particularly interested in the larger scale details.

Slashdot Top Deals

To see a need and wait to be asked, is to already refuse.

Working...