Everyone has heard of AI in the past few months, but not enough people understand the black magic which it runs on. This includes you, so stop writing essays with ChatGPT and read this.

Earlier this year, I wrote my class 12th board examinations, which marks the end of my school journey. A few days ago, I got admission in a B.Sc. Computer Science course. In the intervening four months, I realised how deeply inadequate the formal education system is. This is my experience as a survivor of this flawed system.

After being sent a stupid article written by a tech-illiterate churnalist about how some washed up businessman with no computer experience claims “AI is going to take away the jobs of software engineers” for the nth time, I am writing this blog post which you can send to anyone peddling this theory.

This is why AI will not take away the jobs of programmers and software engineers.

So here’s the situation. This kid on Discord with a Hackerman profile picture is telling you that they are going to “hack your IP address” and “DDOS your Wi-Fi router” using Kali Linux or Parrot OS or something. They might even send you a screenshot of some sort of “hacking command”. And you are now thinking, “wo my gad thees person is going to yack me what do I do nau???????” You don’t need to do anything, except maybe laugh at them. Because – and I want to make this very clear – They. Are. Lying. They CAN’T hack you – the people at your ISP, or Internet Service Provider, are way smarter than 14 year old kids, and YOU ARE SECURE – as long as you haven’t given them any serious personal information, like usernames or passwords or OTPs or something. If you have, change it. Right now. GO! And with that out of the way, let’s get onto the details.

Look, I tried to be positive in the title. However, there probably is no positive take on this, except maybe, “Google is taking over the world, but we may be able to slow this down by conducting a massive boycott of their services and getting all the countries to do some extreme legislation”, which is both unwieldy and impractical.

There has already been several discussions about the problems with social media, both in my articles on Google and Facebook, and on the rest of the internet. This is Mrwhosetheboss’ video on why he is ‘worried about humanity’s future’, and is a very good video which describes the most well-known issues with social media very clearly and easily. Any attempt from my side to write all that is wrong with social media would be a waste as it has already been made so well. Please watch it before reading the rest of this article. What follows are my thoughts not just about that video, but about social media, and its aspect of social surveillance.

Debian 11 has been released recently, but one of the admittedly few reasons I am excited for it is that testing/ unstable will be unfrozen soon.  I have already lost my main Debian install due to dependency hell resulting from an impulsive jump to sid+experimental in need for newer packages. (Testing had been frozen since January.) I wish I switched to Flatpaks instead.

Did you get to know about the study conducted by Instagram which showed that the platform was extremely toxic to teens and negetively affected their mental health? You didn’t? I’m not surprised – they kept in under the covers since 2019. If you are using Facebook, Instagram and other such sites regularly, you may not realise it, but these ‘services’ are slowly taking over your social and personal lives.