I'm guessing that the text interface is nicer if your use case is reading mostly text-based emails from newsletters or forums. But yeah, for general email use I don't see this as a plus unless you really like TUIs.
"Scroll art" is procedural generated ASCII art that fills the terminal and causes the text to move up, producing an animated effect. Once text is printed, it can't be erased. The window can only scroll up. I made these as a series of programming projects for beginners that can be done in any language and doesn't require installing additional libraries. You only need print and loops and random numbers. A collection of scroll art is online at [https://scrollart.org](https://scrollart.org)
It's funny that this got posted right now. I'm working on exactly this project. You can find a collection of text-based Python programs written in the style of the games in Basic Computer Games here: https://github.com/asweigart/gamesbyexample and installable through `pip install gamesbyexample` More info here: https://pypi.org/project/gamesbyexample/
Hi, I'm Al Sweigart. I wrote Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. My next book (working title The Big Book of Small Python Projects) is exactly what Jeff talks about in the article. I started on this three years ago, and the style of the programs are 1) short (under 256 lines, as an arbitrary limit) 2) text only (so that readers can link cause-effect between the print() calls and the text that appears on the screen 3) requires no additional libraries outside the standard library 4) fits in one source code file for easy copy-pasting, along with some other guidelines.
My main fear is that I'm just old, and I'm mistaking the nostalgia of how I learned to program for good pedagogy in modern times (this is a mistake the One Laptop Per Child project made). But I figure this might be a good start for beginners who want to see what programs "look like". I already have JavaScript, Java, C#, Kotlin, and Go versions also planned. The books, like all of mine, will be released under Creative Commons licenses. The first book should be out in a few months.
Teaching. All education politics aside, in my experience teaching is hard because you have to juggle and be responsive to so many people at the same time. Teaching is hard to scale. Everyone complains that schools are so regimented and conformist, but when YOU are the one in front of a group of two dozen (or three dozen!) kids who don't want to be there and are distracted by everything and you only have 90 minutes to get them through a lesson, you realize how hard it is to convey information.
Especially since in every class there will be one or two kids who take up like 40% of your energy, and you end up completely ignoring self-disciplined kids.
If there was a way we could provide automated teaching, that would be huge. And I mean teaching, not just making resources available. Stack Overflow and Wikipedia and Khan Academy are great, but they won't replace schools and teachers. An AI system that could motivate, answer questions, pose questions, encourage learning without judging failure, etc. would be wonderful.
As a dev with constant pressure to learn new stuff I'd prefer the flip side: learning / acquiring relevant skills for my career. The perfect future AI-driven tutor that presents me exactly what I need to study and at the exact level of difficulty so that learning becomes fun and seemingly effortless (btw something I try to solve)
Those who have worked with Jake won't be surprised at all by this. These are accusations coming from multiple people in the tech/privacy/infosec crowd, not from the government.
> .@mmeijeri Jake finally raped enough people that Tor as an organisation couldn't ignore it anymore.
I worked around Jake around 2009ish in the early years of the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco. I've seen his charismatic pushiness routine that he uses to get what he wants. I joked that if you ever wanted to find him in a group photo, just look front and center. As time went on, I did hear more uneasy things about him. His name came up with a person I met at PyCon last year in Montreal, who then relayed a story that didn't go as far as sexual assault, but was very troubling. He's one of those people that you step aside and warn your friends about. Keep an eye on your intoxicated friends when he's around.
The stories I read on http://jacobappelbaum.net/ fit exactly with the Jake that I knew. He is focused on his own wants and laughs off people's boundaries. Reading the stories on that site doesn't make me think of an elaborate conspiracy to discredit him but of how Cosby was able to get away with his crimes for years.
Before people start saying I'm a shill: I don't have any connection to the http://jacobappelbaum.net/ nor do I know the people who made it (or, at least, I don't know if any people I know made it). [I wrote a book on cryptography, and 100% of the proceeds go to the Tor Project, the EFF and Creative Commons.](http://inventwithpython.com/hacking/proceeds)
"Three current Tor employees—two of which agreed to be named on the record—have confirmed that they personally know the authors of the alleged victim statements on the site, JacobAppelbaum.net. Although they continue to maintain anonymity for the authors of the stories, these Tor employees are now publicly vouching for the site’s authenticity, which Appelbaum has called into question.
Andrea Shepard, a senior Tor developer, confirmed to the Daily Dot that she was in touch with at least one of the victims on the website several months ago. Alison Macrina, a Tor employee and advocate as well as the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, also vouched for the authenticity of the anonymous victims' statements.
"It’s related to something that started happening in earnest about three or four months ago," Macrina said. "Which is simply that people stopped being afraid to talk to each other about Jake. That’s how I heard from some victims.""
As an outsider, I don't know what is going on at all, but since you linked to some people that are notable that are willing to go on the record, it seems appropriate to quote some of what they said,
"Andrea Shepard, a senior Tor developer, confirmed to the Daily Dot that she was in touch with at least one of the victims on the website several months ago. Alison Macrina, a Tor employee and advocate as well as the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, also vouched for the authenticity of the anonymous victims’ statements."
I feel like a conspiracy theorist by saying there are far too many rape allegations against people associated with wikileaks. Cui bono?
Edit: As someone that has almost exclusively hung out with educated/privileged people, I am just not used to anyone that would tolerate any assault occurring around me. People have never even joked about it around me, and I am the most crude person IRL. I am aware that I could be wrong, this story just sounds difficult to believe.
If I were a beginner, I'd take BASIC over most of those. BASIC does have warts and having it ubiquitous did help its adoption, but the language itself was "easy to use" for its day. (Perl is pretty good, but BASIC had a two decade head start on it.)
Author here. I guess so, but there are plenty of software companies with products to "increase office productivity".
But at the same time, there are a lot of times where you need a very specific, one-off, 30 line script to do something for your particular job/company. This is where knowing a general (and easy to use) programming language like Python comes in handy.
Hence why I wanted to write a programming book for office workers who wanted to skip the computer sciencey and software engineering aspects. Who cares if a throwaway script is O(N^3) if N is going to be a few hundred? Most of the time these things don't matter, because it's still faster than doing this stuff by hand.
You'll get the full PDF/epub/mobi version immediately, and the print book will be shipped soonish. (Or maybe immediately. They've come in from the printer and I have my author copies.)
