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tducasse

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tducasse
·last year·discuss
My problem with RSS is that I tend to subscribe to too many things and then it's too much. Also I wanted a solution that was free or self hosted, but I realized it's much better if someone manages the complexity for me, so I just ended up going with the paid hosting for miniflux (https://miniflux.app/).

Now I've just subscribed to a few things I care about, I open the website from time to time, quickly mark as "read" stuff I'm not interested in, and when I have more time I just go through everything that is still unread, because it's been "filtered in". Seems to work!
tducasse
·4 years ago·discuss
My wife went to this indian alternative education school, a boarding school called Rishi Valley. They've opened many branches now, though I can't speak for the ones I don't know, all based on the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti; you can read more about them here: https://jkrishnamurti.org/schools

Rishi Valley's teachning style is, honestly, what I wish my education had been. I remember being a kid and asking my teacher for "more", questions about what happens _beyond_ what we had just learned, and them saying "don't worry about it, you'll learn next year". Rishi Valley's approach is "why don't you come later and I'll show you? is anyone else interested?". They really try to emphasize learning for the sake of learning, and kids can choose from multiple subjects.

The teachers are often PhDs who have decided that they care a lot about education. Since it's a not for profit school, they're not paid a lot, but they live on campus, and get to interact with kids all day everyday. Most of the money the school gets is put back into rural education.

Now, the transition back to the "standard" system when the kids have to go to college is not smooth. Most of the ones I've talked to mention that they were extremely overwhelmed with the "rat-race" and the fact that everyone was so competitive, where they had been focusing on learning for the sake of learning. Everyone I've met from this school is very good at critical-thinking, and they don't accept a conclusion just because "someone said so", they will fact-check, do their own research, debate, ... Which I think should be the goal of education.

My anecdotal experience is that they overperform their non-weird-school peers though. But is that due to the teaching itself? Or is it maybe because the kind of parents who would put their kids in this school already did some sort of ground-work? I'm not sure!
tducasse
·4 years ago·discuss
this is cool! I've recently tried to write a very basic shell in multiple languages, as a way to try a few languages [1].

I focused on languages I already had _some_ experience in for now, and I think my favorite so far is the one in Go – it's a good mix of things I care about: simple syntax, good performance, fast compilation, good tooling, rich standard library.

Nim comes close, except the error messages are harder to understand, and a few concepts are a bit foreign to me.

[1] https://github.com/tducasse/ysh
tducasse
·4 years ago·discuss
I've always had trouble understanding intellectual property when it comes to code, because if I read open source code, remember everything, and write my own version (even if slightly different) 10 years later, I am not 100% sure whether it's copyright infrigement or not.

I see it as something akin to a painter studying someone else's work, then reproducing some of the techniques invented by the original artist... except that their techniques didn't have a license I guess?

I think I am not equipped to fully understand the legal boundaries between inspiration and theft, and I think most programmers are in the same situation.
tducasse
·4 years ago·discuss
Yeah this case is interesting actually, I had never thought of a legitimate derivative landing on github, not something the original author intended to happen...

My guess is that you're right and it does mean 1) and 2), but again, it's probably a matter of interpretation and actual ruling on the matter.
tducasse
·4 years ago·discuss
I have no opinion on whether there's infrigement or not, as I am not a lawyer, but I found the argument that the terms of use specify that you allow them to analyze your code pretty convincing:

> We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.
tducasse
·4 years ago·discuss
Except that's not exactly what they are doing, is it? Following on your example, it'd be like selling the advice of someone who has seen a lot of these pictures passing by windows, with a very good memory and understanding of pictures.

Github Copilot is not spitting out code verbatim, it's learning what code is, what shape it usually has, and trying to retrofit your own code onto the shape it thinks code should have.

It's not like it's doing a query like `SELECT * FROM COPIED_CODE WHERE CODE STARTS_WITH "def my_func("`.