I’ve taught a few developers and have pretty extensive experience on the topic

Tutorials are fine, but don’t get stuck on the idea that you need guidance through the whole process, it’s better to avoid tutorials entirely than it is to follow a bunch of tutorials.

For example, when I started out my most recent student we began with some challenges that I knew would provide some context for future projects, then immediately jumped into those projects. Depending on what you’re passionate about, the best project for you can differ, but we did the following projects:

1. A lemmy face wizard page, literally just a list of lemmy faces that clicking on will copy to your clipboard
2. An invoice maker, since they needed to send me invoices because I was paying them for their time
3. a react native sudoku app, this one was challenging and took them a couple months, but when they were done they took over one of my contracts for mobile development

And the challenges that led to these projects? Everything from basic algorithms to api interaction puzzles.

My advice would be to pick something that you love and come up with the tiniest project you can possibly think of, then cut the scope a little more.

For example, love pokemon? Maybe make a website that you can click on one of the types and it will highlight the strengths/weaknesses of that type. Love golf? Maybe make a golf score tracker mobile app, a big button to add a stroke and another to move to the next hole.

If you are passionate about something it gets a lot easier to get better at programming because the stuff you’re missing will become obvious and you’ll need to look it up to finish your project.

My very first project nearly 30 years ago was a windows 95 app that moved your mouse to draw in mspaint automatically.

I’d say starting a new language is a pretty big mistake until about 4-5 months after you feel proficient with your first language. Starting over with new syntax has actually caused more than one of my students to quit

That’s pretty concerning, my mother went through a similar relationship early in her life, he was older than my grandparents.

You do you, but anecdotally, for her, the relationship may have started out okay, but they were never equal. He treated her like a daughter that he fucked every once in a while. Power dynamics in relationships are extra screwy when the age gap is more than 20 years. Our holiday dinners at home were always very awkward.

Their relationship lasted about 20 years, imo it should never have started in the first place. She remarried afterwards to someone her age and finally found some companionship instead of stewardship, that relationship lasted much longer

Super cool of your parents to support you like that, not cool of them to control you, most parents like this miss the memo that kids need to actually start making decisions for themselves.

By sunk cost fallacy, I assume you mean about the money. Giving them all the money back at once is an interesting idea, how would you feel if a child of yours did that? How would you feel if they were up front about their new situation?

You know your parents and your situation better than any of us, use empathy and put yourself in their shoes and make the best decision you can.

It can be hard to put this into words well because it’s different in every situation and making universal statements are rarely correct but I’ll do my best

The problem here is twofold, 1. You feel insecure and 2. Your job is at risk

When interacting with people, not just at work, there are some keys to being well liked. You can be direct, but being direct often comes across as an air of superiority, as if you’re saying “I’m too good to pretend or do what everyone else is doing”. You’re saying you are above thinking about how your words will be received, and it’s the receiver’s job to avoid getting their emotions involved.

In a community, when one person considers themselves better than everyone else via this kind of “better than you” behavior, people will generally consider that person unfriendly or outcast them.

Capitulation and going with the flow of expectations is surprisingly one of the best ways to get ahead, it’s counter intuitive but debasing yourself for the ego of others (harsh way to phrase it, but true) can often make them amenable to just about anything you want. We are remarkably complex, yet fundamentally simple creatures, it doesn’t take much to make a person likable.

I see how you could draw that conclusion, but it’s definitely far from the default

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1

Number 7 by github project stats

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular-technologies

12 by stack overflow’s survey

Reading news websites without ad blockers is genuinely such a gross experience, why is there a video playing? Why can’t I close it? More ads than content, feels like sitting in on a culty mlm presentation or something

2k downloads weekly it looks like not dollars

As someone who has experienced feelings for both genders, it has been my experience that feelings can develop without trying to start a relationship. That said there are people out there who are demisexual, but I doubt that would be limited to one gender for you.

Good:

1. I have high hopes that Nepal’s new government will bring positive change
2. Crispr science combined with some new good results with protein models may help us develop some incredible new health technology
3. In the financial world, less reliance on the US, and a shift away from usd in general would be a huge boon to the international community

Bad:

1. Massive economic instability worldwide, inflation everywhere, people will have an even worse time affording things once the worlds petrol distribution eases up
2. taiwan’s troubles are likely to pick up the pace with more international events to smokescreen their bully to the west
3. The transition to ai will likely push more of our society to crime, and lower the payment bar for many professions

That was my experience a few months ago as well, but recently I’ve actually been using it almost exclusively with rust, the extra type safety and language safety features have helped a lot with the end code quality.

Claude in particular has been really impressive with compiled languages, it does take a bit more hand holding to get something workable out than with javascript or python though.

Ohh people are aren’t going to like this

AI coding, “vibe coding”

Nah our ideals are very different

The biggest issue with accepting free housing and other perks is the unspoken cost. What are the expectations in return?

I’ve spent time in taiwan and mainland china, as well as many other asian countries, china has its citizenry riled up in rampant nationalism thanks to the isolation of the people and propaganda. The propaganda of taiwan (and hong kong) being part of china is deeply rooted in the state sponsored group-think and is not going away any time soon. I will say the people I met, while angry when speaking about taiwan, did not seem to wish the people there any ill will, rather they seemed upset about the very idea of taiwan being separate.

That’s all to say, the political situation is complex. However the real question here is multifold. 1) is it against your chosen moral framework to capitulate and live in china and 2) if it is, what are your morals worth to you, what specific monetary amount would get you to renounce your views.

Parts of china are beautiful, the culture is lovely especially in rural areas, and living there could genuinely be nice. However your country is currently presenting the world’s largest bullseye and while your presence won’t swing the final result, if you feel you have a moral responsibility to stay and speak up, then do so!

The ice watch apps

Lemmy is exactly that for a lot of people, the developers are quite controversial.

Obviously most users are not installing the software from those developers on their personal machines, but serving a federated instance certainly involves doing so.

I’ve deleted a few, usually if I accidentally doxx someone or literally post the wrong place (like I intended to reply to one person but somehow the message was posted as a response to another)

So do economists!

I use it extensively daily.

It cannot step through code right now, so true debugging is not something you use it for. Most of the time the llm will take the junior engineer approach of “guess and check” unless you explicitly give it better guidance.

My process is generally to start with unit tests and type definitions, then a large multipage prompt for every segment of the app the llm will be tasked with. Then I’ll make a snapshot of the code, give the tool access to the markdown prompt, and validate its work. When there are failures and the project has extensive unit tests it generally follows the same pattern of “I see that this failure should be added to the unit tests” which it does and then re-executes them during iterative development.

If tests are not available or if it is not something directly accessible to the tool then it will generally rely on logs either directly generated or provided by the user.

My role these days is to provide long well thought out prompts, verify the integrity of the code after every commit, and generally just kind of treat the llm as a reckless junior dev. Sometimes junior devs can surprise you, like yesterday I was very surprised by a one shot result: asking for a mobile rn app for taking my rambling voice recordings and summarize them into prompts, it was immediately remarkably successful and now I’ve been walking around mic’d up to generate prompts.

Processing (cpu) doesn’t really matter as much as gpu, and generally the constraint is gpu memory on consumer grade machines. Processing via nvidia chips has become the standard, which is a huge part of why they have become the single most valuable company on the planet, though you can use cpu you’ll find the performance almost unbearably slow.

Ollama is the easiest option, but you can also use option and pytorch (executorch), vllm, etc

You can download your model through huggingface or sometimes directly from the lab’s website

It’s worth learning the technical side but ollama genuinely does an excellent job and takes a ton off your plate

https://lemmy.ml/c/fosai@lemmy.world

Maybe fosai? There are plenty of us technical folks here who have relevant experience and are keen on chatting, but lemmy is definitely generally pretty anti-ai.

Lemmy right now is not quite big enough to have active niche communities like many of us got accustomed to on reddit.