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tptacek • yesterday at 5:39 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.

I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.


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krapp • yesterday at 5:59 PM

>I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.

No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being a consumer dependent on corporations.

And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.

Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.

It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.

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