hongdao

joined 2 years ago
 

I keep waffling about what domain of software dev I should focus on: web, data, games, who knows. It is like Sylvia Plath about the plum tree, but more nerdy and less personal. But I am thinking that "security dev" might be the perfect niche for me; I would love to learn to read assembly code, reverse engineer, etc. Don't want to be too far from development, would love to develop skills that could hypothetically one day be used to protect the people's movements from attacks.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Where should I start with Immanuel Wallerstein and Arghiri Emmanuel?

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 6 months ago

thank you, this checks out

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 6 months ago

It appears that Sakai's answer is that land hunger was so severe that, yes, petty bourgeois individuals would be willing to endure it to have something like the standard of living they had been used to.

the sons and daughters of the middle class, with experience at agriculture and craft skills, were the ones who thought they had a practical chance in Amerika... What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land.

Here is a quote he takes from ""Social Origins of Some Early Americans". In SMITH, ed., 17th Century America. N.Y., 1972."

Land hunger was rife among all classes. Wealthy clothiers, drapers, and merchants who had done well and wished to set themselves up in land were avidly watching the market, ready to pay almost any price for what was offered. Even prosperous yeomen often could not get the land they desired for their younger sons...It is commonplace to say that land was the greatest inducement the New World had to offer; but it is difficult to overestimate its psychological importance to people in whose minds land had always been identified with security, success and the good things of life.

 

Marx:

Today's wage-labourer is tomorrow's independent peasant or artisan, working for himself. He vanishes from the labour market - but not into the workhouse.

Sakai:

A study of roughly 10,000 settlers who left Bristol from 1654-85 shows that less than 15% were proletarian

many English farmers and artisans couldn't face the prospect of being forced down into the position of wage-labor.

Is it the difference of time periods? I just noticed now that the time period Sakai is talking would be a pretty early period of colonization, wouldn't it? So it may be that by Marx's time of writing (late 1860s-early 70s?) it was proletarians headed to America and had been in recent historical memory?

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 7 months ago

四叶妹妹 is yotsuba&!,btw

 

immediately downloaded 宝葫芦的秘密 and 四叶妹妹 for later reading.

So i havent looked at much else, but it already has more hits than Libgen, and I am not really in the know about the actual sites popular in China for this.

 

I've been studying this book all summer (in my free time) and am a bout halfway through and feel I've learned a lot.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 9 months ago

Thanks for your viewpoint and I think I'll do that and keep working towards my first dev co-op etc. Nice to have the flexibility to transition down the line.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for your input. Web dev seems great and I've considered trying to deploy some kind of useful REST API, like for computing directions from one place to another on campus, probably with FastAPI in Python. Doing something with Docker is also on my todo-list...

17
IT or software dev? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by hongdao@lemmygrad.ml to c/comradeship@lemmygrad.ml
 

I'm a little over half done my CS degree. I love programming, Linux, etc. I am considering getting CompTIA A+ and Linux+ this summer with pirated Udemy courses. I do coding projects too, like I am almost done my homebrew NDS game, threw together a Tkinter pomodoro app last week, and in the past I made a command line program that computes a readability score on a body of text. Finally, I am participating in 100 days of leetcode problems together with my CS club. So I've done a lot to move towards coding professionally.

The question is what kind of career should I go for to suite my goals in life. I would like to be able to own a place to live in Quebec (don't live there yet) whether it is in MTL or a rural area, not sure what I want yet. So software dev. gets a point for higher income, I think, plus it's what I've studied for, mostly. But it's important to me too that I have free time outside of work and so can participate in social movements. Would working in helpdesk allow a better or worse WLB? Would it be more likely to be unionized and thus a better place from which to participate in tech labour struggle? I'd really like to achieve fluency in French and Chinese (currently a beginner and intermediate learner respectively) eventually, and maybe the IT world would have me talk to people more. Is it easier to break into than software, like, so much easier that it would be worth changing course, or just doing IT as a stepping stone for my first co-op (internship program in Canada) or two?

Interested in others thoughts on how to proceed here.

For the meantime I think I'll start the A+ course because it can't hurt, and keep working on my DS game, cuz it's almost done.

I don't even know if I want to do either of those professions, I could see myself teaching English too, to Francophones and Chinese especially as I want to learn those languages...

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 11 months ago

I just started Forces of Production the other day. It's interesting.

The other day I started reading a Chinese scifi novel 猫城记 Cat City/Cat Country. I thought about trying to translate it even though it's above my reading level by just looking up all the words as I go. But I'm below that threshold of 95% understanding or whatever and have to look up many phrases on each page.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 1 year ago

Behind the Urals is great. John Scott was a fellow traveller or party member in New York as I recall. Immigrated to the USSR to work in Magnitogorsk.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

interesting thoughts

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm asking because I wondered if dependence on colonial wealth could inform an argument that capitalism is historically contingent, that it was possible for there not to be capitalism

 

My hunch is yes, because of how successful English agrarian capitalism was early on... but likely more slowly?

 

According to Marxist historians writing on the origin of capitalism, namely Ellen Meiksin Wood (Origin of Capitalism) and Ian Angus (War Against the Commons), the first capitalism was defined by a particular triad arrangement: landlord, yeoman / capitalist tenant, and wage labourer.

Does anyone know good sources to particularly examine the circumstances and lives of each? Short little descriptions of the daily life of a landlord, capitalist tenant, and wage labourer in 1400s-1800s England?

Btw, I was taught Northanger Abbey for a class last year and I think I could pick any random character to get a depiction of the life of a landlord or hanger-on, just kidding, looking for non fiction anyway.

[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago
[–] hongdao@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is no doubt that the unpaid internship is exploitative, moreso than the already discouraging/tiring path to a first job programming. But I also think you were right to accept it as a step towards launching a career. It's something you will never have to do a second time... onward and upward

 
 

I'm sketching out an idea for a readability assessment program. It will report the education level required to comfortably read a body of text using formulas, Dale-Chall being the most significant, that count length of sentences, what level of vocab a word is considered to be, etc. I was inspired by the word counter website I always paste my essays into. When it's done, I would like to plug it into APIs for it to be used on Lemmy, Mastodon, and Discord.

 

If not, I think we need one. I want to start postering again but I haven't had the motivation to make the posters myself, in part because I want them to be really good. Also of course historical agit prop is OK if it is still applicable which much of it, but not all, is.

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