I thought China wanted more people who could read and write code?

Nobody codes in Mandarin! No, not even Chinese people.

They code in English and for a reason! It's not a great or reassuring reason, but it's a logical one: English doesn't have any accent marks and a simple, 26-character alphabet. This means the meaning of code can be understood by a compiler or interpreter without having to deal with encodings or enormous lookup tables to determine if a character is valid for say, an assignment (e.g. foo = 1).

I've met developers that tried coding in their native languages using Python, which is one of the few languages that actually supports using non-latin Unicode characters and even right-to-left writing. They all say the same thing: It sucks and it's not worth the trouble.

I’ve heard from copywriters who now fear losing their apartments, one who turned to sex work,

One of these jobs is not like the others!

The reason why you hear this so often is because academia is designed to teach students based on a logical, reasonable curriculum. The curriculum will be mostly well-thought-out and cover all the important topics.

Then you take someone who followed this perfectly reasonable path and you place them in front of the total shitshow that is most businesses. Everything they think they know won't be applicable because most of the time, logic and reason were not what drove adoption of any given tool or practice.

Hasn't anyone taught you how to download more?

I like super obscure achievements that aren't documented at all. Like, your weapon and armor just broke but you're in an easy area so you just keep grinding, trying to find that rare loot (or whatever). Suddenly, you get an achievement, "Naked Brawler" 😁

You check the wiki and that one's not in the list 👌

I remember getting an achievement for something like, "Last Light" in some game where I ran out of torches in an area where you take severe damage from darkness. I got the achievement when I lit that last torch, very close to the end of the area.

It wasn't documented anywhere! I posted about it to the game forum (this was back when forums were the primary place to talk about such things) and no one had seen it before.

Like a year later, the community finally figured out the sequence of events necessary to get that achievement and it only gets awarded to characters who are too far in to make it out before the torch goes out and those that read a very specific, obscure book in a starter area.

"You read the book‽"

"I... Uh... Read all the books. Doesn't everyone read all the books at least once?"

🤣

What a childish thing.

I still have the proprietary cable that lets you hook up a 1992-ish Sony Handycam to a TV with RCA inputs.

I know exactly where it is in my attic: Under the S video cables, an original FireWire cable, and the cable that lets you hook up two Atari Lynx portable consoles together in order to play Warbirds against each other in real time.

Truly, a keystone of a wise and connected culture.

Easy: CircuitPython running on an RP2040 or RP2350 microcontroller. Being able to write a simple bit of code and have it control something in the real world is sooooooo satisfying. OMG: You'll jump for joy the first time you get it controlling some LEDs, a display, a servo, a motor, etc.

Programming a microcontroller for the first time was definitely the most fun I ever had when programming. CircuitPython makes it so easy, too! Oh if only it had existed back when I started learning electronics.

This is super interesting. I think academia is going to need to clearly divide "learning" into two categories:

• What you need to memorize.
• What you need to understand.

If you're being tested on how well you memorized something, using AI to answer questions is cheating.

If you're being tested on how well you understand something, using AI during an exam isn't going to help you much unless it's something that could be understood very quickly. In which case, why are you bothering to test for that knowledge?

If a student has an hour to answer ten questions about a complex topic, and they can somehow understand it well enough by asking AI about it, it either wasn't worthy of teaching or that student is wasting their time in school; they clearly learn better on their own.

Finally, a listicle that could save ~~lives~~ Christmas.

👍

I'm sure tigers say the same thing about us.