It’s called Hitman.

There’s also a series of science-based, 100% hitman simulator video games of the same name.

How easy or hard is it to hire a Hitman?

That’s the man right there, Officer.

So much yes on the typing, The number of young people who don’t even own a laptop and do all homework/correspondence on their phone is too damn high. (Which coincidentally, is tied to how they don’t understand file systems/path)

That’s not to shun the use of phones or that form factor, and maybe this is just the old fogey in me, but phone interfaces are so limited and you have to jump through so many hoops to do what amount to keyboard shortcuts on a PC. (Yes I know some young people can be quite quick and accurate with them… thus old fogey)

It’s rather more about how long it ends up taking them because they’re shunning a device that is aimed at streamlining such processes, instead of a device that is aimed at being a phone, with a computer slapped on for funsies.

Literally half this stuff were first-year college courses for me, even though I was already familiar with a bunch.

I agree it needs to be pared down a bit, but I also agree with OP that actually a lot of this should probably be being taught at the high school (or german equivalent) level. I think we do a disservice to students by not having some of this available to children in lower grade levels.

hand out USB drives/cheap SSDs

learning some “real” programming

1. Handing out drives has to go hand-in-hand with education about how “you shouldn’t just plug in any drive that someone hands you or you find on the street.” That’s basic security consciousness at this point. You might point them towards the Open Source schematics for this USB Firewall: https://globotron.nz/products/usg-v1-0-hardware-usb-firewall

2. Don’t start with “real” programming. Start with scripting. A place where you can get the feel of the ideas of programming while starting somewhere more basic. Linux scripting and Powershell scripting are both good places to start. You still get programming fundamentals (what is a loop, what’s an if-else statement, etc) without jumping into confusing versioning or where to get updates (should I let Windows update Python, or do I want to update it with pip? You have to choose one or things get fucky with them overwriting each other).

3. When I mean more basic I mean literally things like SYNTAX and PATH are way more important for students to be understanding before they start programming. Syntax and path (relative and absolute), in my opinion, are easier to learn when you’re learning them on the OS you’re using. That means “real programming” is obfuscating things like syntax and path, and students need to understand these core concepts before they move on to "real programming.* EDIT: Like seriously, students need to understand what the fuck a delimiter is and why it is!

How terrible to biased in favor of *checks notes… the frail, the sick, the old, and those in need.

Ah, yes, my favorite activity at parties, looking at some weirdos trash collection.

It’s called a joke. We’re in a sub called “programmer humor.” You must be fun at parties.

But the Lord came down to see the city OS and the tower app the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking programming the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city OS. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

This message brought to you by TempleOS

I don’t know, that mindset is so foreign to me. If someone was overestimating how long it would take because they were simply trying to be conservative and not run into unexpected cost overruns, I would commend them. I’ve always considered it more prudent to expect something to take longer so you know the kind of budget you need up front instead of lying to yourself about it. It costs a lot more (in terms of lost time and productivity) to have to swing a new budget mid-project because it turns out you’ve burned through the planned budget and you’re only 2/3 the way done with the project.

So, screw your manager, you’re doing the right thing, in my eyes. I guess that’s why I’m not in charge of anything.

Montgomery Scott of the Starship Enterprise has entered the chat.

Every answer so far is wrong.

I wouldn’t say wrong so much as leaving out the detail that LLMs aren’t evil and that open source LLMs are really what the world should be aiming for, if anything. Like any tool, it can be used as a weapon and for ill-purposes. I can use a hammer to build a house as much as I can use it to cave in someone’s skull.

But even in the open source world, LLMs have not lead to a massive increase of new tools, or a massive increase of finding bugs, or a massive increase in open source productivity… all things LLMs promise, but have yet to deliver on in the open source world. Which, based on how much energy they use, we ought to be asking if that’s actually truly beneficial to be burning so much energy for something which has, as of yet, to prove itself as actually bringing the promised increased open source productivity.

Someone’s been watching way too many movies and isn’t familiar yet with how mind bogglingly stupid “AI” actually is.

JARVIS can think on its own, it doesn’t need to be told to do anything. LLMs cannot think on their own, they have no intention, they can only respond to input. They cannot create “thoughts” on their own without being prompted by a human.

The reason they spout so much BS is because they don’t even really think. They cannot tell the difference between truth and fiction and will be just as happily confident in the truth of their statements whether they are being truthful or lying because they don’t know the fucking difference.

We’re fucking worlds away from a JARVIS, man.

Like half the stuff they claim AI does, like those “AI stores” Amazon had, where you just picked up stuff and walked out with it and the “AI would intelligently figure out what you bought and apply it to your account.” That AI was actually a bunch of low paid people in third world countries documenting videos. It was never fucking AI to begin with because nothing we have even comes close to that fucking capability without human intervention.

Tracy, California.

All I know about it is when my friends car broke down there for two days. Sounded awful.

So yeah, a terrible place for a road trip destination.

Similarly, I’d also say Monroe, Louisiana. To quote an old B-movie from the 50’s “There’s nothing off of I-20!”

There’s no unfortunately named landmarks, just unfortunate people in unfortunate towns.

Primus had its own genre tag

are you referring to Trump’s civil case against E. Jean Carroll

Yep.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/19/trump-carroll-judge-rape/

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.

He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

Probably a step too far to say “convicted” (since that implies criminal court) but I don’t particularly feel bad when I’m dealing with people who lie as easily as they fucking breathe.