“Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.” --hn guidelines (there are links to examples in the original)
[picture of Tips Kitty] Don't forget! Every time you see " ⦙ " in the listing, press the [Tab] key on your keyboard. See page 23 to learn why this is important.
And page 23 teaches you about significant whitespace, and how to configure several text editors that a kid's likely to have available to actually show it like that. Heck, I use Panic's Nova for my text editing and it does that out of the box with no configuration needed.
> [picture of Tips Kitty] Don't forget! Every time you see " ⦙ " in the listing, press the [Tab] key on your keyboard. See page 23 to learn why this is important.
I don't think you actually used those books :-/
No one linearly writes code, from the start of the file to the end; they edit it. They move blocks around if they missed a page, they navigate around putting in missing if statements and removing incorrectly-added loops. Those programs were very much not one-and-done, they were heavily modified by the kids.
Your proposal of "Tell them to configure their editor for Python" and "add in unicode symbols to represent whitespace" is the exact opposite of what those books were about.
The books were about removing superfluous barriers, not adding them! Using Python would result in a whole lot of incidental complexity for literally no gain.
I never used the Usborne books because I was a US kid but I sure typed in a lot of stuff from books and magazines for my c64, often while modifying it on the fly. And dealing with accidentally skipped pages. And went on to learn assembly language.
Python is also already all over the Raspberry Pi and MicroPython/CircuitPython spheres, so there's an easy road into SBCs and microcontrollers.
Education has already chosen Python as the preferred language for this sort of thing. It has some unfortunate bits, but it's certainly a more ergonomic language than BASIC. Counting tabs is less arduous than messing with line numbers and GOSUB.
moll | mäl |
noun informal, dated
1 (also gun moll) the female companion of a gangster or other criminal: I'd rush the money over to his moll.
2 a prostitute.
> I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources".
How about both? Both are pretty terrible for society IMHO. Some shithead's making 6000x of what average worker at their company because they're on top and they're treating everyone under them as interchangable tools with zero compassion. If they were limited to only making like 3x then they'd be on a much more equitable place with their underlings and might even be more likely to see them as fellow humans instead of disposable work units.
I can't decide if this is AI imagery or not and I hate this world.
The absolute amateur hour choices going on in the lettering is tipping me towards AI, this is lettering by someone who thinks they know what "a comic" looks like and used "comic book" fonts but has zero idea of how word balloons actually work. Piss-poor internal margins, balloon tails that point nowhere near their supposed speaker, balloons that are weird-ass hybrids of captions and dialogue that have a tiny little vestigial tail that points nowhere in particular, captions and balloons crammed into odd corners of the panels with no concept of overall compositional flow.
Oh and now that I look closer at some panels, yeah, it's AI.
As always when someone shits in my eyes with a bunch of AI imagery, I'm just gonna assume the script is also the result of pointing one slop machine or another at the Wikipedia article and telling it to generate text rather than any sort of human understanding and summarizing going on here. I hate this fucking future.
I guess I'm doing a good job of pruning my inputs, the vast majority of the imagery I see online is from human artists whose work looks largely the same as it did before all these slop machines got popular, so I don't have as finely tuned a slop detector as you must.
(Although really "I followed a link from HN" is depressingly correlated with "the images in it are slop".)
I concluded "this is definitely AI" when I looked closely at one panel and what initially looked like a halftone pattern on a person was actually weird mottling that looked like an unpleasant flesh disease.
This page is copyright 2005 by Graeme Cole. What are you allowed to do with it? Pfft. Anything within the realms of common sense, really. I don't want to prescribe rigidly what people can and can't do with it, so I've decided on a benchmark. It's this: you're allowed to do with this page anything you wouldn't mind me doing with your cat. So yes, you can photoshop it for comedy effect, you can copy bits of it for illustrative purposes and so on, but you can't steal it and pass it off as your own.
reply