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.

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.

route everything through a VPN

I can see it now:

“SOS I need help, I’m stuck in an underwater cave just outside Tulum, Mexico and I’m running out of air!”

“Finding your geolocation, we have determined your cave is in New Zealand. Dispatching rescue team to the Mines of Moria.”

EDIT: Don’t ask me how someone got satellite phone signal in an underwater cave lol.

Does the satellite stuff work in the UK and could it be bad for privacy?

I’m not sure if it works in the UK, (see below) but it’s really only meant for emergencies. Like if you’re lost in the wilderness with no cell phone signal and you’ve broken your leg. It really can only be activated when you dial 911 and don’t have signal, so I don’t expect that that’s something you’d want a lot of privacy for if you wanted you be, you know, rescued and alive. I think I’d be willing to sacrifice info like my name, location, and the nature of my emergency to stay alive but that’s just me. 😆

• This feature is currently available in the US only (except Hawaii and Alaska).

To contact emergency services when you don’t have a network coverage on your Pixel phone:

1. Dial 911 immediately.

• If you don’t have a mobile or Wi-Fi network, you’ll find an option to use Satellite SOS in the dialer.

2. Tap Satellite SOS android satellite and then Use Satellite SOS and then Start.
3. To describe your emergency, fill out the emergency questionnaire.
4. To share your emergency with your emergency contacts, answer the on-screen questions.

• To notify your emergency contacts, tap Notify.
• If you don’t want your emergency contacts to receive your location and emergency information, tap Don’t notify.

5. To connect to the satellite, follow the on-screen prompts to correctly position your phone.

• Connection and response times vary based on location, site conditions, and other factors.

6. Once you’re connected, the emergency service provider should reply via text within a few minutes.

• To receive replies, stay outside with a clear view of the sky.
• When you would like to end the satellite text conversation, press the End button and follow the prompts.

Anyway I doubt it would be sending data to satellites without you knowing simply because that’s costly and you have to align your phone properly to get signal for it to begin with.

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.

For instant messengers, I would also add Wire and Matrix/Element (Matrix is the protocol, Element is the messenger that uses the protocol).

https://wire.com/en

https://matrix.org/ - https://element.io/

Both good open source secure messengers. Matrix is made by a type of non-profit foundation made to guide the development of the core protocol, and Wire is a Swiss company staking their future on how secure their messenger is for Enterprise applications. They both have different philosophies on how their operations are ran, but they’re both open source and secure.

They’re not as privacy respecting as Briar or SimpleX, but they’re also more aimed at organizations and groups that plan on self-hosting and potentially not federating with the rest of the network to help silo their organizational data. Wire obviously aims towards Enterprise customers, but Matrix does as well, despite a different approach. Matrix has had growth with both German and French governments for various secure communications systems within their government bodies based on the matrix protocol. So good messengers, just aimed at a different group of people as Briar/SimpleX.

So maybe they could have their own “Enterprise Chat” section? I dunno, just my thoughts.

Obligatory Johnny Mnemonic:

EasyTouch maxed out at 400 DPI and the 256 was 256 shades of grayscale.

It doesn’t say when the original ScanMan Color came out or how many colors it had but the Color 2000 didn’t come out until '96 and had a 24 million color pallette.

So, yeah, sounds about right for the ScanMan 32.

Nah, scanned with that Logitech Portable Scanner.

Doing the cyberlords work