I've spent some time thinking about this earlier as this indeed is one way a teacher would introduce a young child to programming (but by using actual bread, pb and j). An important underlying question is why kids would learn programming in the first place if they're not going to be programmers... one answer, which applies to math as well, is that it is learning another way to think. The whole point is that it is difficult to specify exact behavior, especially when you can't lean on someone's already established understanding of the world.
Another related idea (if I don't misremember) is brought forth in the book "Program or be Programmed": that it's not the programming itself but learning that things powered by software are intentionally (by meticulous instruction, like above) made to work like they do rather than just happen to work a specific way. Which hopefully leads to the realization that we have agency and can change how things work in the world, should we want to.
Now, some people are arguing for teaching kids programming via vibe coding and one the one hand I can see their point but on the other hand, it was never about the programming in the first place. Vibe coding is kind of the opposite of the two ideas if you don't first teach them. It's making the PBJ-making teacher/robot go "oh, so you want a PBJ, here's one". There's no learning new ways of thinking. It's also making it seem like things are not intentionally made to work a specific way but more just happened to become that way. Some of that empowerment and agency is lost, I feel, although I can see that there is agency in creating things too.
Same in Sweden! One of the public radio channels (P2) had some nighttime shows with Commodore 64 programs. I can't remember if it was purely BASIC programs or just loaders using data statements for machine code. Seems really impractical now but back then everyone was using cassette tapes to record music from the radio and the C64 had a cassette deck to load software, so it worked quite well. Except that they, as far as I remember, did not use compression so most programs took ages to broadcast.
My experience too. Early Spotify had the best music and I could find pretty much everything I liked, plus excellent recommendations. I don't think it was that the music I liked was particularly obscure or anything, it was just that it was all there. I just couldn't believe how great it was! Once out of beta (alpha?), it lost that magic.
I can definitely see the use case as it is annoying having to choose between actively looking at participants of a meeting on screen or _appear_ to look at the participants by gazing into the camera and not actually looking at them.
I sometimes use an Elgato Prompter to better enable eye contact during meetings. The camera and lens is mounted behind the screen so looking at the screen is also looking at the participants. The downside is that the screen is tiny and you leaning forward to read, say, a document does not look that great on camera. So either you have to zoom it substantially or read it on another screen, thus looking away from the participants. In this case though, you are not looking at the participants and faking that eye contact in this case would be kind of weird.
Somehow the idea of everyone looking at the camera to wave goodbye, while in the process only seeing the camera and not the people you are trying to make virtual eye contact with, is hilarious to me. Like some dystopian comedy.
Like others have said, get a used Sony a6000 (or higher model, try to get one where the screen can be swiveled to point forward). If you expect to be sitting close to the camera, you can't go wrong with a Sigma 16mm 1.4 lens. If you have the space to place the camera further away, you should probably get a slightly longer lens.
Can’t speak for others but I use it in the context of a web app that really needs to be full screen on a mobile and that is delivered by/connects to embedded hardware without internet access.
Not an answer to parent comments, just wanted to emphasize that coming from "somewhere else" <=/=> invasive. Not an expert so there are likely edge cases but one example would be a meadow where many different plants grow, flowering from early spring to late autumn. Introducing a new plant could mean it finds its own niche in this system or could mean that it completely takes over the whole system, reducing the overall flowering period to a limited time and thus causing problems for pollinators. If the latter is the typical result, the plant would likely become classed as invasive.
Side note: In Sweden, Harry has once again become a quite popular name for children. My two-year old is named Harry and out of 15 kids at Kindergarten, there are two Harry :)
"By the end of October 2016, before its official release and after only three pre-release screenings in September 2016 at the Toronto International Film Festival to small audiences, IMDb had registered over 86,000 ratings for the film. 55,126 of which were one-star and 30,639 of which were 10-star, with very few ratings falling anywhere in between. The majority of these votes had been cast by males outside of the US. By mid-November the total was over 91,000 votes, with over 57,000 one-star votes. Commentators assessed that these were mostly votes by people who had never seen the film, and that the one star voting was part of an orchestrated campaign by Armenian Genocide deniers to downrate the movie, which had then initiated an Armenian response to highly rate the movie."
The problem is a weird type of nationalism, that not only does not allow them to see over their own biases, but it kinda goes like this Turkey>Islam>Rest, and you can't be a good Turk if you don't slam all your enemies 24/7 :)
I wonder what the best solution to this is? Amazon has "Verified Purchase" on reviews that ensure the person at least has bought the thing they are reviewing. I could see a system that is "Verified Watching" which confirms the person has watched the thing all the way through. This would be easier to implement on something like Netflix where that data is already available, but you could probably work some verification process through third parties with IMDB. Of course, this wouldn't stop people from just sitting through a showing and manipulating the votes but it certainly makes it harder.
Personally I think Verified Purchase on Amazon does more harm than good.
Many of the spam reviewers are still a Verified Purchase through Amazon and were just reimbursed after (it doesn't actually provide much benefit because VP is a poor proxy for legitimate customer). I always turn it off and wish they allowed making this the default.
There are too many products, office chairs are one example, where buying on Amazon is more expensive than buying elsewhere. So in this case the verified purchase reviews are not from the consumers that did the best research... not necessarily the people you want to give credit to. Ikea products on Amazon are another example.
Still Amazon reviews have de facto standardized as the central hub for product reviews on the web. I might never buy orange juice from Amazon when it's much easier and faster to grab at the grocery store, but before I plop down $8 for a jug of organic, all natural, etc from a brand I've never heard of, it's nice to be able to validate it a little bit.
If they expanded verified purchase to include other sources, eg uploading a receipt to prove verification, then this would change my stance. However, does that really align with their business?
I think verified watching is a similar circumstance.
A simple fix I'm thinking about would be IMDB simply ignoring all the pre-release ratings once the film has been released and received a number of more reliable ratings.
Additionally, they might ignore all ratings from people who clearly submit fraudulent ratings.
It's not fool-proof, because you can still use throw-away accounts to nuke the ratings after release, but it would fix and discourage the most obvious fraud.
