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How good you feel good about your privacy using apps such as Signal?
  • the Matrix stack. BUT! It’s hard to set up and nobody uses it!

    Is it really that hard? For me it was just downloading an app and creating an account--easier than setting up Facebook Messenger. I think it doesn't yet have the network that Messenger/Signal/Whatsapp have, which makes it harder to use with others, but setting up has been easy in my experience.

  • How would you teach digital literacy to 13-18 year old students?
  • Honestly, probably the most important thing is to move away from any tools that hide what is going on. "Magic" is bad for learning, though it can be useful once you already know what is going on.

    If I were to teach a class like this, it would be something along the lines of:

    • start in a terminal, perhaps using the Ubuntu server distro
    • begin with basic commands like help, ls, and cd.
    • show how to write shell scripts
    • show how to install new programs using a package manager like apt

    After they are comfortable with the terminal, I would walk through installing the Ubuntu desktop distro so they now have a GUI. Then, I would teach them a "real" programming language, probably Python:

    • at first, I would require them to write their program in a plain text editor and compile/run it from the command line
    • after they are comfortable with that, I would let them use a code editor
    • as part of the programming unit, I would introduce the network stack and have them create a server
    • at some time during this unit I would also teach them git

    After that, I'm not sure where I would go--there's a lot of different directions! Some ideas:

    • how computers work on a more low level (transistors to assembly)
    • how to build a desktop computer (or even just take one apart and put it back together)
    • how operating systems work (syscalls, time sharing, memory management, basics of C)
    • bootstrap their own programming language (assembly -> Forth -> Lisp -> ???)
    • web development (requests, databases, basics of HTML+CSS+JS)

    I also think a capture the flag event would be fun (like /u/half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world suggested), but maybe wait till closer to the end of the year/semester for that

  • Student charged with felony after pointing finger gun
  • The only time I really heard this talked about was in elementary school, and finger guns were never a threat at the school I went to. Not even once, but the teachers and administration would harp on about it like kids were demonic for making them.

  • Would you join a fediverse coop?
  • Yes, it's short for "cooperative". All of "coop", "co-op", and "coöp" are all technically correct (historically cooperative was spelled coöperative and co-operative), but co-op is probably the best to use because "coop" usually refers to chicken coops.

  • Just browsing my photos from 10 years ago. I was amused when I browsed the university library computer science artificial intelligence shelf. ...I sometimes wish AI had stayed at this level.
  • Unless every browser decides to allow scripting in a less shotgun-your-foot language, javascript will remain widely used.

    It's called web assembly, and all the major browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge) now support it. That's not to say that Javascript is going to disappear, but other languages might take over much of its marketshare.

  • How can money be both devalued and expensive?

    An acquaintance who works in finance said that the USD was devalued during COVID but hasn't yet experienced much inflation except in household goods because money is still expensive. What does that even mean? How can money be expensive? And how does that differ from being valued/devalued?

    I would think "money is expensive" means something along the lines of "there isn't much liquid cash", but I thought the money injected into the economy was liquid cash.

    Would someone more into finance/trading than me explain how this is possible? Thanks!

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    fractal_flowers @lemmy.ml
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