Why?

Because if we don't have the keys to the machine, then we don't actually own our computers. If we don't own our computers, then we have no freedom.

Because everything the word "hacker" ever stood for will be destroyed if this nonsense gets normalized. The day governments get to decide what software "your" computer can run is the day it's all over.

The salesman would give you the key if you're over 18

> Because if we don't have the keys to the machine, then we don't actually own our computers.

It is not self-evident to me that people under 18 should "own [their] computers" or have unrestricted "freedom".

In the modern world, this is like saying people under 18 shouldn't have the freedom to be able to read and write. We would be decades back into digital stone age if we had held onto such a preposterous idea in the 80's and 90's. Virtually everything we have now is basically built by people who were hacking on their computers in elementary school and exercising their freedom of speech in terms of writing code freely at the discretion of their own imagination.

Then their parents should own it. Not the corporations, and certainly not the government.

Think about how the proposed idea would most likely be implemented. It would be used as justification for manufacturers to sell devices that the end use doesn't control. They already do that; this would give them legal justification.

I'm a non-native French speaker, but I am pretty confident that's not true. They are actually different sounds, not just the same sound at a different pitch.

French is not a tonal language like Chinese. Pitch is not used to distinguish between different phonemes.

> (is there a name for roughly "unaccented" Northeast/West Coast/DC English?)

General American English.

Although it's traditionally much more common among white people in the western half of the country. People on the east coast, as well as black people everywhere, traditionally have distinctive accents (though these are fading over time, and many people from either group now speak pure General American).

Spanish does have a few exceptions, mainly due to loanwords from indigenous American languages. For example, it would not be possible to guess that the X in México is pronounced like Spanish J.

You do not guess, you learn.

> And the least phonetically consistent is English.

I guess maybe they're not "languages you know", so your statement is still accurate, but surely the Chinese languages and Japanese are even further than English on this spectrum. Some (but not all) Chinese characters encode how the character was pronounced in ancient Chinese, which might give a vague hint to how it's pronounced in modern Chinese languages, but that's about it. And Japanese is even worse: most Japanese words are written using Chinese characters, but the same character can have several different pronunciations (for example, the same character might have three pronunciations: one for a Chinese loanword, another for the same Chinese loanword that entered Japan in a different century, and a third for a native Japanese word whose pronunciation isn't connected to the Chinese pronunciation at all). Also, one character in Japanese can have a several syllable pronunciation, whereas in Mandarin and Cantonese at least, polysyllabic characters are extremely rare.

Have you tried a recent version? An issue I opened about this years ago was finally closed, they claim it’s fixed now. I haven’t tried the purported fix, though.

Yes. It has improved, but it's still not there, and probably never will be. See my reply to your sibling comment.

Readline is close enough to being part of bash that it’s not really inaccurate to call these all shell features imo.

Except not everyone uses bash shell - so it's not really accurate.

C-a and C-e are your friend.

Not sure if it did at the time, but today emacs comes with a tutorial. You’re not expected to learn it by starting on page 1 of the manual.

Why not? I expect to learn how to use a software by reading its manual.

Surely you can still do that, but starting with the tutorial will be easier and more efficient.

Computer programming has been accessible to the masses for years. All you need is motivation to learn.

The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.

I disagree. I’ve had almost 20 years of professional programming experience. Spent a decade in FAANG, the rest in startups.

It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too.

I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy.

Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true.

However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.

I'm sure certain people accustomed to hand assembly were saying this when compilers emerged on the scene.

They absolutely were. The parallels are stark.

You could use this exact same argument about any discipline and/or tool that has been made to support that discipline. A part of me loathes to make the comparison, but is an "audio engineer" any less of a musician than a traditional pianist? Maybe? It probably depends, but music has been made more accessible by the introduction of digital tools.

Regardless of whether or not AI is generally positive or negative, it's just not a compelling argument on it's face.

We've had this discussion back when high-level languages started becoming popular. Do the unwashed masses deserve to be programming a computer when they don't have a love and appreciation for assembly, or even the underlying ISA and its instruction encoding? And before that: How dare these whippersnappers just hand in their punched cards when they don't even know how to bit bang the boot sequence of the very computer executing them?

It's not even limited to a given occupation. Many hams were outraged about the FCC handing out amateur radio licenses without ANY demonstrated proficiency in morse!

Fortunately, at least in technology, nobody cares what these gatekeepers say. I guess that's an upside of software engineering never having graduated to be "actual engineering" (i.e. one with certifications and personal liability).

Nobody is preventing anyone from going as deep as they want to, and I expect that going one layer (or ten) deeper in understanding than your peers will still pay off even in a post-AI world. The nice thing is that now, nobody has to to just try something. (And you can ask the same system building these things for you how they work!)