After chatting with some of you on this forum and seeing that we all are on Lemmy rather than Reddit, I think it would be a good idea for us to have some study groups to improve our technological literacy and competency.
During my time on Lemmy, I've been able to increase my digital literacy and overall knowledge surrounding my system. I've loved the nearly endless rabbit holes Wikipedia has pulled me into, as well as the resulting happiness that comes from finally fixing a broken Linux system or piece of technology.
But what exactly does technological literacy encompass, one might ask? I'd like to illustrate via anecdote. When I first got into Linux, I was told to "Get a terminal emulator to SSH into the HPC so that you can run computational jobs". To most of you this sentence is completely normal, but to my unconditioned mind, I felt like a big bright light was flashed before my eyes while my PI spoke martian to me. After the initial disorientation, I downloaded what I thought was my only option for a terminal emulator (MobaXTerm), and found myself sitting in front of a pitch black terminal screen with a blinking prompt. Not knowing what a host was, how to manage a network, any Linux commands (coreutil, never heard of her...), or really do anything past opening up WoW and Google Docs. The only things more advanced than the plug and play Google/Microsoft software solutions I'd use, was my botched LaTeX setup. I used it to typeset math equations for my students, homework, and lab reports from how much faster I could type in the TeX format than click on every Greek letter/symbol I needed. Overall, it really messed with my ability to do the research I was tasked to do. I was supposed to learn how to use Vim as my IDE when the only IDE I had ever worked in was Spyder from Anaconda! VSCodium, CodeBlocks, Emacs, etc, I did not know that any of these existed.
Needless to say, this was extremely discouraging to be thrown head first into a difficult scenario with very little assistance whilst trying to juggle coursework and outside responsibilities. Humble beginnings reinforced in me that if I experimented with my computer and messed up on the OS side, that I'd brick my hardware and have some variation of Homer Simpson holding up the "So you Broke the Family Computer" book.
I'm sure that we all come from varying origins of computer literacy, which IthinkI've proposed a couple of possible areas of study, that we could set up in small or large groups depending on interest. The frequency, literature references (textbooks, white papers, blogs, forums, etc.), and the project goal (could be concrete or abstract) should be drawn up and worked towards to keep the topic focused. I've come up with a couple of fields for us to start with, feel free to add to the list or modify what I've written.
Cryptography with a rigorous mathematical foundation applied to both classical and quantum computing paradigms (AES, RSA, Hash functions deeper than just the surface, information theory (We love our boy Claude Shannon), Cryptographic primitives, Shor's Algorithm, etc.)
A hardware agnostic study of firmware (What are some unifying principles about firmware that can empower the user to understand why certain aspects of the device are not functioning)
Form factors (How geometry can impose certain design decisions, and so forth
Fundamentals from First Principles, i.e condensed matter physics theories to understand the classical computing systems. The group can also choose to segwey into topological states of matter (Dirac fermions, Weyl semimetals, Mott insulators, and a myriad of other cool matter states that aren't really discussed outside of physics / graduate engineering classes) Qubits (Bloch sphere representations) and loads of other things that I'm sure exist but am unaware of.
LLM Inference technology and how it can be applied to case law, accounting, stocks, and various other fields where the solution to the problem lay somewhere in an encoded technical language.
I'd like to begin the discussion with this as our starting framework, does anyone have any interest in the topics listed above or suggestions for other subjects? How should we manage these groups? Should we add some chats to the Matrix instance?
I work as a software engineer on Linux systems and also have interest in most of these subjects both in learning and teaching. However, I am not diagnosed as on the spectrum (do have adult ADHD and a sibling on the spectrum though). I don't want to intrude into a space intended for building autistic community but, would be interested in participating, if my participation would be welcome.
Your participation is more than welcome in this project! You are still neurodivergent as well, so as long as you're here and ready to obsess about the topics, your expertise would be great to have on board. Do you have a particular interest in any of the sub-categories?
I noticed that I failed to mention a group specialized to learning programming languages. I kind of got obsessed with learning "what" other programming languages existed, like Zig, OCaml, Go, Julia, Lua, and some of the lower-level languages like C, ASM, Forth, and BASIC. Would this be more of your wheelhouse, or are you interested in a different facet?
Thank you! I would say that I have the most interest currently in hardware architecture and recently got an FPGA board to try to learn more about it, especially RISC-V and vintage/extinct architectures, as well as GPU (at some point, I want to build an entire computer that is capable of running modern software, completely on open-source hardware, gateware, firmware, and software).
I have a bit of interest in cryptography but, my ADHD has been a bit of a blocker from digging too deep into it. And less interest in LLM, though I am supporting some coworkers in their interest in it - probably a bit fatigued from hype and wishing it were actual AI.
I would indeed say that, skill and experience-wise, programming languages, virtualization, and operating in Linux are indeed well in my wheelhouse. I mainly use neovim as an IDE and program in Go and Python, though I've learned a bit of Rust (embedded), Lua (for neovim), and C (mainly Arduino). Frontend is less in my interest/skillset.
I'm AuDHD and I'm probably the same type of guy who gave you that first task. I run an HPC for scientists to do analysis (although in my case it's mostly bioinformatics)
That's so cool that you work on HPC systems. Do you ever have to work on the hardware side of things if some piece of the system suddenly stops functioning?
I watched a video awhile back on Ruler SSDs (U.1 I think?) So I imagine there's some modularity in the systems? Would you be interested in being part of an HPC group for those trying to learn more about them?
I'm more on the sysadmin and systems engineering side of things. The guy who was in my position before me was the one who built the system we run currently.
I've had to do some system maintenance before, but I didn't build 'em, and I didn't make any choices about what parts to put in 'em. If something in the datacentre breaks, I call one of the datacentre guys and have them check it out physically. I work for a federal government, so it's an absolutely huge organization with lots of teams to do every different job. The datacentre is actually physically not in the same facility as my office, and either way, I work from home.
Most of my job nowadays is actually more providing expert advice on HPC and scientific computing for the upper management of my organisation. There's a guy on my team who services support tickets from the scientists, and I help him out if he gets stuck. I also help out a lot with documentation and training to help onboard scientists who've never used computing like this before in order to get skilled up and start doing science.
I imagine it similar to a book club. Weekly main post, and then there's a tag for peole submitting new poats about it if they need help and feedback, at the end of the week another main post to talk about how it went?
Exactly! Nobody wants to hear us rant about init system design or ways one could design hardware abstraction layers for new architectures :( That's why we have each other :D
Welcome aboard the crew. Do you have a Matrix account? I was thinking we should get a group chat going, introduce ourselves, and get some project ideas going
I am not a programmer but I know a little bit about coding. The thing I know stuff about is modding and repairing technology like computer and older games consoles. For me preservation of hardware is necessary. Eaven tho emulation is great all consoles arnt supported yet (like the ps3).
I want to learn how to create a website with html but right now I'm not that intresed in coding.