James Connolly, born on this day in 1868, was an Irish socialist revolutionary, founder of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), and leader of the Easter Rising rebellion, for which he was executed by the British government.

Connolly was born in a poor Edinburgh neighborhood and spoke with a Scottish accent. He joined the British Army at age 14 to escape poverty and developed a hatred for the institution from firsthand experience. He deserted when his regiment was set to deploy to India.

He was also member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party. With labor radical James Larkin, he was centrally involved in the Dublin lock-out of 1913, after which the two men formed the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) the same year.

Connolly was opposed to British rule in Ireland and played a leading role in the Easter Rising of 1916, signing the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic” and serving as Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, the regiment that played the most substantial role in the Rising. Connolly was executed by firing squad following the Rising’s defeat.

“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

James Connolly

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  • Hohsia [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    29 days ago

    Sir the chatgpt hype has hit the second tower (a mention outside of work)

    Still trying to find some answer from it that I can’t get myself from stack overflow or a random blog

    • rafflesia [she/her, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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      29 days ago

      This is what I find so maddening about it. I have to work closely with it and its like, what the fuck are we spending all this money and time on exactly? What is the use-case? Cheating on homework? Awesome, now uni students no longer have to spend time writing the code they won’t test and doesn’t work. Garçon, another blank VC check please!

    • hello_hello [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      29 days ago

      Most of my classmates in university have used it in one way or the other. I went into a computer store and the newest laptops all have a “co-pilot” button. the chatgpt is already occupying Afghanistan for me right now.

      • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        29 days ago

        One of my coworkers swears by it, but everytime I use the Azure copilot feature it’s just really broken. Like it’s usefil if you want some boilerplate code, but anything with logic in it will be often wrong, and it seems wholly unaware of the context you’re in half the time. It ends up being equivalent to just copying a random stsck exchange thread and at some point it’s almost quicker to work from scratch than copy code and edit.

        • hello_hello [they/them, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          29 days ago

          Like it’s usefil if you want some boilerplate code

          which could just be done via a template file or a manual. It’s so maddening to the point where I think this AI hype train is a plot by the techno-capitalists to make the next generation of programmers so inept that free software stuff can’t be engineered anymore but only shitty web apps and even worse attitudes about technology.

          university level CS is a fucking joke because none of the CS majors I meet actually seem to understand anything about computers.

          • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            29 days ago

            Relatedly, one thing I didn’t believe before starting in industry is that a typical data scientist can’t do shit unless they’re reading a csv into a jupyter notebook. Most recent place I started with both a team lead and a senior with close to a decade of experience started with me. Apparently neither could get the SQL connector in python running, both uses google colabs until they got in trouble because handing proprietary data to google is against company policy lol.

            They’re both very smart, just have these small weird technical ineptitudes.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          29 days ago

          It can’t understand context, there’s no ghost in the machine. It’s terrifying that code hacked together out stack exchange comments is going to end up written in to critical infrastructure.

          • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            29 days ago

            At least for the time being it’s mostly going to end up in codebases for some dumb app. But you just made me realize that as boomers retire we’re going to need to maintain a lot of very important code bases written in fortran and C, mostly not available to train these models (not that we’d want GPT reponsible) that do stuff like run nuclear power plants and train signaling. Christ. Just remembered when a recruiter asked me to lie on my resume so I could apply to a safety critical software engineering role. We’re so cooked.

      • Hohsia [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        29 days ago

        Bo burnham was right

        Covid was the catalyst for a complete and total bureaucratic capture. Did you see how much was spent on the marketing for “AI?” The copilot thing is just clippy with clothes I swear to fucking god