The Magician

Freelance Computer Scientist https://themagician.cc

[gamer-sludge]

[depsidase]

[megpie71]

As a former humanities student, I feel it is my duty to reblog this one.

[bramblefrump]

A tech bro tried to convince me AI was amazing cause "you could make 30,000 screenplays in minutes" not realising that every single one would be shit, you'd have to sift through everything just to find some good bits, time wasted that could've been spent just writing a screenplay.

Technology Brothers know nothing about what goes into creating a work, other than the fact a work has been created to be exploited for cash. They see creativity as an investment opportunity, not a love for humanity.

[feminist-space]

Matthew Dow Smith: "Just remember: Arts & Humanities are so useless and pointless that Tech Bros were driven to spend billions of dollars to try and get a computer to do something that badly approximates something Arts & Humanities students could do half asleep and wired on coffee the night before the due date."

[vivid-sector]

open source projects with EXAMPLES in the readme I love you

[girlwithmanyproblems]

tech twitter : if u aren't a billionaire by 30 u are not gonna make it, if u aren't working for FAANG by 20 u aren't a real programmer, if u don't know everything that goes on in the computer don't even follow me

tech tumblr : oh u don't understand the "hello world" code? DM me I will personally guide u. yes here are some resources. im not a genius bcs I knew everything when I was 6...... everyone starts somewhere don't worry. 🥰

in conclusion I was shocked when I came here

[cyberpriestess]

i'm a (mostly) self-taught recreational programmer. ofc i wanna help !!!! literally the code equivalent of the girl who picked up a bass for £50 at a thrift store and started by blasting Maiden in her bedroom.

let's step through everything. let's take an example and fuck around w/ it to see how it works. let's break things and figure out how to fix them again. let's make stuff work and then come back and try to make it good. the compiler is your friend ! don't worry about all the fancy shit and ideological circlejerking. we start simple and we build up !!

[themagiciancc]

The compiler is your friend.

[sreegs]

You're interviewing as a software engineer and you sit down to begin a coding exercise via remote video chat. Your interviewer joins a minute late. You exchange light pleasantries, then intros. They ask you a few questions relevant to your experience and you answer them satisfactorily.

The interviewer says, "Right, lets move on to the coding exercise," and directs you to a collaborative coding website. You select your language of choice and they begin to describe your problem.

"You have an array of souls recently liberated from their mortal shell, represented by this array of signed floats called "theDead". You must design a function that determines which souls go to heaven and which souls go to hell,"

"Heaven and hell are empty. The cumulative value of all the souls in heaven and hell must both be nonzero, and exactly equal to each other. You may leave any number of souls in purgatory,"

"Your function must return a bool indicating whether the balance of heaven and hell can be met given the array of souls. The count of souls will be 0 < n < 1,000,000. Do you have any questions before you begin?"

[cidthecoatrack-blog]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[macmanx]

Big Media’s lobbyists have been running a smear campaign trying to paint the Internet Archive as a greedy big tech operation bent on stealing books—which is totally absurd. If you’ve ever used the WayBack Machine, listened to their wonderful archives of live music, or checked out one of their 37 million texts, it’s time to speak up. On March 20, everyone is showing their support for the Internet Archive during oral arguments.

Here's how you can help:

Battle for Libraries

Don’t let libraries die. As the future goes digital, major publishers are suing to cut off libraries’ defense of digital books from censorsh

The Internet Archive is our library, a massive collection of knowledge and culture accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Don't let greedy publishers burn down the next Library of Alexandria!

And if you're absolutely certain you don't use or need the Internet Archive, take a look at their projects first, you might be surprised. Those are all at risk too.

[thisischeri]

Displaced Windows

ig: cheri.png

[angelsallfire]

[dduane]

People... watch out for these things!

The saying applies with more than usual force here: if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer: you're the product being sold. (And maybe you're the product being sold even if you are paying for it.)

DO NOT MAKE YOUR PERSONAL PHYSICAL DATA AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE WHO COULD THEN SELL IT TO THOSE INVESTED IN USING IT TO SURVEIL YOU AND POTENTIALLY CHARGE YOU WITH CRIMES.

[obscuredfigure]

[scipunk]

Hackers (1995)

[themagiciancc]

Pool on the roof must have a leak.

[bookshop]

reminder not to do what i almost did just now and tell tumblr what your high school mascot is/was just because someone made a fun poll about it, because that's a SECURITY QUESTION ON A BUNCH OF YOUR PASSWORD-PROTECTED PLATFORMS

[themagiciancc]

I'm seeing a lot of password security posts today, apparently, so here's my hot tip again: get a password manager and use it for your security questions as well as your passwords. Congratulations, your high school mascot is now called zul562/=&biBo?.

[sorceress-foxgirl-ariel]

ㅇㅅㅇ (use firefox)

[themagiciancc]

Use Firefox.

[catgirl-catboy]

One of my old internet security posts is getting traction, so have another internet security post ^-^

2 emails. 1 for buisness/important things/life and one for social media, fun all that shit. Never the two shall cross. (also helps you with your work-life balance by not seeing fun stuff while being productive and productive stuff while having fun.)

With accounts connected to your buisness email, never post things online that you wouldn't tell... 1.) Your grandmother 2.) Your bully 3.) Your future employer If you wouldn't tell a stranger something, don't have it connected to this email.

For your fun email, don't post your face, full name, or ANYTHING about your job. You don't want those two connected to the average person looking you up.

Assume every discord server is a public space. Even if its private now, the admin might not keep it that way. If you wouldn't say it on the web proper, don't put it on discord.

Assume every screenshot is fake. It takes <2 minutes to fake a screenshot. Don't belive me?

NEVER use the same password. Remembering shit is hard, I know. However, it is much better to write it down/have it in a password protected file/use a password manager than lastpass than to risk having a hacker get into EVERYTHING.

Don't stick a USB drive into your computer unless you know where its been.

Never make your security questions something any person can google about you, like your mother's maiden name. Favorite book-type questions work better.

Less of an internet security tip and more of a general computer one, but BACK UP YOUR IMPORTANT FILES. A cheap flashdrive with all of your important documents will eventually pay for itself.

another more general tip, but have a backup charger before you need a backup charger.

[themagiciancc]

Seconding the point about using a password manager. Most of them are able to generate passwords for you.

I usually recommend Kee PassX for regular users, but take your pick, there are lots. I only recommend that a) you use an open-source one and b) you don't upload the passwords to a cloud service. Keep it local.

If you use a service that does require you to enter "security questions" for account verification/recovery, use your password manager for that too. My mother's maiden name was alh624DN9_&)+-&6Dqo. A diagram of my family tree looks like a database schema.

Nobody legitimate is going to ask you to give them your account password over the phone (or email, or DMs, etc.). This includes two-factor authentication codes! If you're dealing with an institution you know is legitimate (like your local government) and their process does involve doing this, then they are being stupid and you have my permission to tell them they are being stupid.

If part of a service's account creation process involves them sending you your account password via email, change it immediately, even if the password itself looks secure. Then send them a customer support email telling them that email is always unencrypted (unless you're doing it yourself with PGP), that this is not terribly secure and they are in fact being stupid.

[jwolf5959]

Hey everyone. Friendly reminder that if you get a pm such as this, DO NOT click ANY suspicious links. Or any links in general. These are bots made to steal your data, and do not have your best interests in mind. Instead, you should click „Mark as spam.“ to remove the message.

Again; NEVER CLICK THESE LINKS. Just mark as spam and move on with your day.

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

It's funny how most every cyberpunk story or setting thought that due to technology taking over people's lives and humanity, computer literacy would become commonplace enough that the very term would disappear. Everyone in Night City or whatever is super into hacking or can at least give you the difference between hardware, software, antivirus, spam, etc. To not know the basic gists or cybernetics and cyber security is paramount to not knowing how to count or how to read.

In reality we're about to enter an age where knowing how to create a folder or a zip file is back to being ancient lore inscribed in tablets that only the 30 year old who works at your IT office knows how to do. Phones and the growing marketability of easy-access no-customization technology means kids just don't use computers anymore. And it's crazy how fast it happened.

When I was in kindergarten we still had "computer class" once a week, and it was objectively useless for everyone in my class. Regardless of our age or interests, all of us had casual PC time either at home or in cyber cafes, all of us knew how to do things the teachers many times struggled with. The moment typing machine class became keyboard typing class, computers were already dominating most of our time. I learned how to navigate a computer the same way I learned English; by myself, because it was vital for my own interests.

And between highly streamlined video games, single umbrella closed OSs and everything being a fucking app, a 14 year old nowadays is lucky if they know what quotation marks do to your Google results. It's genuinely harrowing how the future is tech-dependent, yet we're becoming completely tech-illiterate.

The worst part is that it's completely on purpose by the tech industry. Much like not being able to fix your own products when they break, if you simply don't know what your phone or your computer can *do*, it's much easier to sell you a borderline identical one a little earlier than you'd actually need it. Phone updates are already pretty much semantic; you can't even see the difference between new models and old ones anymore, unless the visual difference is the point. And it all just gets more and more expensive for less and less bang for your buck.

We never expected the cyberpunk dystopia to be dull, and to rely on making us dumb. Crazy how well it worked.

[escuerzoresucitado]