What radicalized me was a discussion on the Snap! forum. Re: therat755 -- quien es? The reason for this page -- so why. departures.to
Hacker News: a news source I browse a lot. I think there's some cool things on it --- when you go to my cool page, that's where a lot of the links are from. Others I've just happened to collect over time while looking for things. The ubiquity of Generative AI on HN, though, is crazy to me. Saw a post by a '15-year-old' and it was fully just totally AI!! Agh! There are so many cooler things you could be doing! You could be building a website and figuring things out yourself, but capitalism and the horrible black-hole industry that is Big Tech (esp. in the era of the AI model) have combined with toxic masculinity to teach baby hackers that this is the right thing to do. And that you must become a billionaire to succeed. And then the antithesis of that happens to be cults for some reason. Why are the only good hackers cults! Well there's also SiegedSec; man, go SiegedSec. Bring them back.
Instead of communism, techbros want Web 3. The open web is dead and so no one can trust it. What will breaking that trust up even more do?
this could be a separate weblog entry about Snap!. I think I'll make it that at some point. Was reading about WASM today (from HN, see below) and it really made me think about Snap!, because the manner in which---languages control the DOM is something that I think Snap! could easily do. It is also implemented in JavaScript, so there's that; there's a much smaller barrier to the outside. The "glue code" is baked into the language, you can just select "Enable JS" and you can use it... I digress. Easily-accessible, student-oriented languages---I'm mostly thinking about Scratch in the modern day, although I guess you could talk about Lisp too, or Logo (Brian Harvey, where art thou?)---are what get people interested. They get people into coding, get people into things, you could have this culture debate that you see on the forum post I linked but that's not a necessity. It's casi the new Flash, right? There are people who animate, people who do insane games and feats of programming that nobody would've thought possible (mostly to show off), there are also people who just log onto the site for fun. I taught a club of a bunch of 2nd to 6th graders how to make games in Scratch for a few weeks, and they all picked it up so quickly, and were making things way beyond what I'd taught them. Those things get people engaged and picking it up as a hobby. For me, I went from Scratch to Snap!, I felt like I'd levelled up. And that's where I really felt like I learned the Hacking Principles of Things. I learned more computer science stuff because I was in this environment where I was so interested and engaged by other people, by Brian Harvey and others. It springboarded me onto this!! This website! Fiddling around with tech and whatnot! I've been doing this for 10 years! There is always of course when we're talking about internet community something to be said about the internet and of course as linked above web3. Do with that what you will.
take me home