I was looking for something like this. I used to use Replit to teach code (even integrated it into discussion sections when I was a TA) but they absolutely destroyed the product with AI vibecoding integrations over the past year.

I'm glad you liked it! I initially designed it as an alternative to replit, taking an anti-AI approach instead of their AI-first approach

Replit gets a total fail for me because the AI integration took the homework assignments I was giving my students, read the instructions to them, and then did their homework for them! There wasn't a way to turn it off when I talked to support, so I just had to tell my students "pretend you didn't see that". We moved off of Replit asap, after that.

Interestingly, the three careers you listed are protected by strict professional credentialing systems that do not exists for programmers, and professionals in law and medicine enjoy a social prestige that is certainly attractive to a group of people who might not innately enjoy the work itself.

i have no idea what's interesting about this? guilds make it more likely that people are willing to grind? less likely? i don't understand?

There used to be a variety of exchanges on the West Coast but it seems like they couldn't compete with the automation and HFT innovation happening in NYC, all the west coast engineers were too busy with the dot-com bubble it seems.

Chinese century incoming.

NYC's homicide rate is lower than that of the USA as a whole. Violence is very avoidable, especially during the daytime.

In other words, drug dealers are privacy-conscious and the Google Pixel is one of the strongest hardware platforms for privacy-aware configurations.

> GrapheneOS boasts particularly secure and well-executed full disk and metadata encryption, a security feature

So, the default iPhone experience?

GrapheneOS goes much, much further than that, providing stronger sandboxes for apps and Google Play Services. GrapheneOS also allows multiple users, isolating things like your filesystem and camera roll from groups of apps.

You can do things like install and update apps in one profile with stronger permissions, and then actually operate the apps in another profile that's locked-down. You can also do things like install apps that require Google Play Services in one profile, but then run them in another with no Google Play Services. In practice, you can have a phone that never phone homes to Google while still running apps that depend on Google Play Services. If you're really savvy, you can even protect your identity from google entirely, using anonymous accounts for the Play Store. You can even get RCS up and running with no Google Services running or Carrier apps running.

As far as I know, you can't turn off phoning home to Apple on iOS. Nor do you know what, exactly, is being phoned home.

Yeah I would have guessed it was more the easy availability of cheap android burner phones than Google Pixel specifically.

Maybe they can also sideload custom apps that would never pass App Store review?

Being in Europe, I think that's not an issue for iOS anymore.

They can use alternative AppStore’s now, but that isn’t sideloading. It still is a centralized place to track/attack/control what I can do. Which would be a problem for someone doing something illegal in that same jurisdiction.

Also, if I was doing something illegal, the other controls Apple has over iOS would make me reconsider using it, even with the ‘other AppStores’.

At least if I’m flashing my own OS, and installing things directly and locally, I can think I’m bypassing most factory level spyware and without centralized monitoring. In theory at least.

The first IBM PC in 1981 cost $1,565, which is comparable to $5,500 after inflation.

I unironically agree with this. 100 years ago, Skid Row and Bunker Hill in Los Angeles were full of SROs, boarding houses and long-term hotels. The people who lived there didn't disappear, they're just all sleeping in the street now.

I guess you never had the misfortune of sleeping in a flophouse to say something like that.

One time I had this project in Switzerland and my co-worker, who also travelled there, figured he'd save money if he rented a bunk bed in illegal (due to density) quarters.

Terrible experience, which got him fired eventually because he quickly lost steam due to having to share a tiny room with three other people.

I on the other hand moistened every Swiss Frank banknote with tears, but splurged thrice the amount on a proper room and survived until the end of my involvement in that project.

The person you're responding to suggested Single Room Occupancies, flophouses, etc. are a better alternative to sleeping rough (on the street).

You suggested that flophouses are worse than a proper room.

Both of these things can be true.

As an aside you can see why it is hard/impossible for a homeless person to pull bootstraps when a successful person can't keep their job living not-even-homeless.

The lines representing the routes now show a more schematic view which enables you to more easily tell how the lines connect and where/how to transfer trains. For better or worse, it prioritizes showing the routes and connections over landmarks and scale.

Map vs wayfinding

I've always enjoyed the practical research and projects that happen at the CalPoly schools, my friends who attended always seemed to be doing some very neat hands-on work.

Anecdotally, my occasional interactions with Linux kernel source code have always impressed me with how the project manage to effectively structure such a large C codebase. Until I look at FreeBSD code, which is even more impressively organized. Both of these projects have really helped me think about how to best organize huge complicated systems.

I'm also curious about what impressed you. Most of my interactions with Linux code have been trawling through either crufty or just poorly-written subsystems/drivers because they're causing me problems, which I realise is a bit of a biased sample.

If that were the Windows source, you wouldn't have been able to find it. Parts of the "driver" would be found in seventeen different systems, using seventeen different styles of coding, using macros that look the same but act differently in different files, leaving the driver as nothing more than a side-effect of the whole.

... I might not miss that codebase.

And don't forget the brainf*k hungarian notation...

I was working with network drivers and the core network stack. I've heard bad things about questionable device driver implementations, I could only imagine what you saw.

If you're willing to share I'd be interested in hearing more about what you learned. What is it about those two codebases that you've used to inform your own choices?

The kernels are pretty sizeable and pretty specialized pieces of software so it's kinda fascinating that useful lessons for other projects could be extracted from it.

I did an internship where I had to write fake network devices to test some server platform firmware configuration. I spent a bunch of time digging around the core PCIe code and Linux network stack. The first few weeks were a bit overwhelming but by the end of the internship I was really impressed with how clean and relatively understandable the interactions between userland, kernel space, and hardware operations were. It really made me aware about the importance of deliberately designed API surfaces that are critical to millions of users.

I also enjoy C programming, and it was interesting to see how the developers built out such a complex system without the more friendly programming language structures that I was first exposed to in school (mostly C++ and Java).

Note that Diomidis is at AUEB, not CalPoly.