The four phases of the typical journey into coding

1. The Hand Holding Honeymoon is the joy-filled romp through highly polished resources teaching you things that seem tricky but are totally do-able with their intensive support. You will primarily learn basic syntax but feel great about your accomplishments.
2. The Cliff of Confusion is the painful realization that it's a lot harder when the hand-holding ends and it feels like you can't actually do anything on your own yet. Your primary challenges are constant debugging and not quite knowing how to ask the right questions as you fight your way towards any kind of momentum.
3. The Desert of Despair is the long and lonely journey through a pathless landscape where every new direction seems correct but you're frequently going in circles and you're starving for the resources to get you through it. Beware the "Mirages of Mania", like sirens of the desert, which will lead you astray.
4. The Upswing of Awesome is when you've finally found a path through the desert and pulled together an understanding of how to build applications. But your code is still siloed and brittle like a house of cards. You gain confidence because your sites appear to run, you've mastered a few useful patterns, and your friends think your interfaces are cool but you're terrified to look under the hood and you ultimately don't know how to get to "production ready" code. How do you bridge the gap to a real job?

Which phase are you in?

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/22180123

It is predominantly easy to just accept bad conditions when an alternative is seemingly unfeasible. "I need this software", a lot of us will say when even presented with a better alternative. A lot of us will argue to our bones that being subject to cruelty from software developers is necessary for one potential gain or another. All of which creates a feedback loop of re-enforcement of this parasitic idea that proprietary software is somehow inescapable and we need to give up trying to do something about it. But we shouldn't give up and we should fight. Not just to switch from Windows to GNU / Linux, but to make it so Windows itself will start respecting you too.

...

With software a lot of people lose freedom all the time. Windows is so predominately used that I don't understand why people don't get crazy over this. Yet banning Windows would be a problem, arguably a worse problem, than all those people using it. You should have the right to use software that you want to use, the same way as you should have the right to agree with that drug-lord. The fact that people have the choice to use something like Windows is not a problem. The problem is that Windows is not respecting the person back. There are two ways to solve this problem. One would be to chose something else. Another would be to make Windows better.

If you think that it is impossible to push on corporations with enough force, so they would yield, and start respecting freedom of people, you don't know nothing. Progress in this area has been done numerous times. Netscape Navigator, a popular 90s web-browser, became Free Software, and now it is known as Firefox. Linux, the kernel so associated with Free Software, was at some point proprietary. Blender was proprietary before 2002. Unreal Engine started releasing their sources to people. Not under a very freedom respecting license, but it is a start. And it is way better than having nothing at all. Hell Microsoft, of all companies, started developing Free Software. Visual Studio Code, their text editor from Microsoft is mostly Free Software. Hell "Meta" the Facebook company jumped onto the Mastadon bandwagon with their Threads. Not a very good thing. But them embracing Freedom is progress. And there are more examples of this, which I hope you would provide by using the comment section, that I worked so hard to make, in the bottom of this article.

We did all this by not yielding. Most web-servers are running on Free Software because configuring proprietary software is a nightmare. Proprietary software is basically incompatible with configurability. And configurability is a key to development. Hell, most software development happens on GNU / Linux for that same reason. So much so that Microsoft reacted and put what they call "Windows Subsystem for Linux" on their system, to get some developers away from GNU / Linux. But they are doing bad job themselves. They are constantly worsening the conditions on their systems so much so that people fly out of there as soon as they know how.

Enshitification cannot happen forever. At some point people just can't take this no longer. They would not use computers at all if that came to it. But it doesn't need to come to it. There is software available right now to switch to. Software protected from enshitification by respecting freedom. But no... "I have to use it!", right?

Computers are interesting beasts. They are designed to run anything. Any computation can be done. Any digital information can be processed in any way what so ever. All you need to do is to tell the computer how to do it. And it will!

There was a time where almost nothing was possible with Free Software. It was many decades ago. And what people did about it? Did they yield to the corporations? Well some did, yes. But a lot of us stood up and said "Enough!". And we developed one tool after another. First a text editor. Then a compiler. Then a whole operating system. Why? Because we wanted those same features as in proprietary software, but without the terrible terms. Without the disrespect. Without the slavery. And it was not impossible.

Those corporations did not like it. They still don't like it. But they have no choice. We can always tell the computer to do something ourselves. And the only way they can stop us from having this freedom is if we yield to them.

The more people using Free Software, the less they can control us. The less they will have a choice. More people using Free Software is more pressure on those corporations to release their software as Free Software. They can. And they will. If people will not yield under any circumstances to their dubious demands, they will remove the demands. If people will not blindly use a program that they don't like, that disrespects them constantly, the program will have no other choice, but to stop disrespecting.

But more than that. The more people respect themselves, the more people use Free Software, the more feedback loop, more re-enforcement Freedom itself has. And in a few decades, after the war for Freedom is over, those trying to argue for proprietary software will be met with "I need to use it" as a counter argument. Which this time I will support.

Happy Hacking!!!

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Xu says that while it is likely studies that received AI-generated responses have already been published, she doesn’t think that LLM use is widespread enough to require researchers to issue corrections or retractions. Instead, she says, “I would say that it has probably caused scholars and researchers and editors to pay increased scrutiny to the quality of their data.”

“We don’t want to make the case that AI usage is unilaterally bad or wrong,” she says, adding that it depends on how it’s being used. Someone may use an LLM to help them express their opinion on a social issue, or they may borrow an LLM’s description of other people’s ideas about a topic. In the first scenario, AI is helping someone sharpen an existing idea, Xu says. The second scenario is more concerning “because it’s basically asking to generate a common tendency rather than reflecting the specific viewpoint of somebody who already knows what they think.”

If too many people use AI in that way, it could lead to the flattening or dilution of human responses. “What it means for diversity, what it means in terms of expressions of beliefs, ideas, identities – it’s a warning sign about the potential for homogenization,” Xu says.

This has implications beyond academia. If people use AI to fill out workplace surveys about diversity, for example, it could create a false sense of acceptance. “People could draw conclusions like, ‘Oh, discrimination’s not a problem at all, because people only have nice things to say about groups that we have historically thought were under threat of being discriminated against,’ or ‘Everybody just gets along and loves each other.’ ”

The authors note that directly asking survey participants to refrain from using AI can reduce its use. There are also higher-tech ways to discourage LLM use, such as code that blocks copying and pasting text. “One popular form of survey software has this function where you can ask to upload a voice recording instead of written text,” Xu says.

The paper’s results are instructive to survey creators as a call to create concise, clear questions. “Many of the subjects in our study who reported using AI say that they do it when they don’t think that the instructions are clear,” Xu says. “When the participant gets confused or gets frustrated, or it’s just a lot of information to take in, they start to not pay full attention.” Designing studies with humans in mind may be the best way to prevent the boredom or burnout that could tempt someone to fire up ChatGPT. “A lot of the same general principles of good survey design still apply,” Xu says, “and if anything are more important than ever.”

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/22040366

Abstract

Browser fingerprinting is a growing technique for identifying and tracking users online without traditional methods like cookies. This paper gives an overview by examining the various fingerprinting techniques and analyzes the entropy and uniqueness of the collected data. The analysis highlights that browser fingerprinting poses a complex challenge from both technical and privacy perspectives, as users often have no control over the collection and use of their data. In addition, it raises significant privacy concerns as users are often tracked without their knowledge or consent.

Methods of Browser Fingerprinting

• A. HTTP Header Attributes
• B. Enumeration of Browser Plugins
• C. Canvas Fingerprinting
• D. WebGL Fingerprinting
• E. Audio Fingerprinting
• F. Font Fingerprinting
• G. Screen Fingerprinting
• H. WebRTC Fingerprinting
• I. CSS Fingerprinting
• J. Additional JavaScript Attributes
• K. Advanced Techniques Using Machine Learning