If you actually value your anonymity, you will not be able to use most popular communication platforms in the coming months. It’s a perfect storm for the outright invasion of privacy in the USA right now.

Learning to code allows you to build and use your own (as well as other less known) tools.

Does this make sense?

Learn. To. Coed. Code.

  • Spider@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    35 minutes ago

    Learning to code isn’t it. Spending so many hours practicing Dijkstra’s algorithm and object oriented programming is relevant to building software for other people to use, not controlling it or maintaining your own things.

    If you want control of your own machines, learn the terminal, learn operating systems and how to understand network APIs. Learn how to use WireShark to examine how your own devices talk to the internet so that you understand how they work. A generic programming course will not take you in this direction.

  • Annoyed_🦀 @lemmy.zipEnglish
    311·
    13 hours ago

    Shouldn’t you just, you know, meet your friend as much as possible physically instead of creating app that no one will bother to use thus making communication hard?

    • forestbeasts@pawb.social
      1·
      20 minutes ago

      Bold of you to assume that it’s POSSIBLE to meet your friends physically.

      Half of our friends are on other continents. The ones who aren’t are still hundreds of miles away.

      – Frost

  • renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    4·
    9 hours ago

    but my favourite ai company ceo said coding by hand is dead and if I don’t learn how to make apps using their cool and awesome ai agent then I’ll be left behind!!!

  • one_old_coder@piefed.socialEnglish
    245·
    13 hours ago

    We are already flooded with bad coders who went to bootcamps because money. We need way less coders. Do something useful that you enjoy instead.

    And no, you won’t make your own tools, because privacy and the underlying cryptography is fucking hard.

    • Otter@lemmy.ca
      2·
      8 hours ago

      I think if someone is interested in the topic, then they will be better equipped to navigate tech products if they’ve learned about what’s going on under the hood. Same as health/science education for navigating pop science, or mechanical knowledge for navigating scammy car mechanics.

      I agree on some of the other points though. I would not use any of the random chat apps that these new accounts have been posting

    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipEnglish
      41·
      11 hours ago

      I disagree.
      No matter how many coders exist, you always need to pay attention to quality. If there are lots of coders out there, finding a few good ones shouldn’t be hard.

      Inexperienced coders can still contribute even if they don’t write anything big. FOSS needs all kinds of contributions.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      13 hours ago

      As someone who has a fair bit of experience with coding and with charlatans, don’t trust the one in the OP. They just joined Lemmy today, and they’ve been spreading unfounded conspiracist FUD. Learn IT stuff first and foremost if you value your privacy; the OP has no fucking idea what they’re talking about and gives zero practical examples to illustrate their point. Programming knowledge has rarely if ever been anything more than a tangential aid in maintaining my privacy.

      By all means, learn how to program; it’s a great skill. Just don’t learn it because some stranger on the Internet tells you “I promise bro it’ll be the privacy apocalypse if you don’t know how to code in, like, the coming months™ for some reason.” The OP doesn’t even indicate they know how to code, not that it’d make much of a difference.

      (Also, this isn’t a shower thought; this is the OP soapboxing.)

      Edit: Just to steelman the OP and assume their wholly unfounded and obviously bullshit claim of “you will not be able to use most popular communication platforms in the coming months” (which ones, fuckass?): amateur programming knowledge does not help with that, and it shows they know absolute jack shit about infosec. If you’re an amateur programmer building your own communication platform for the sake of privacy, you’re about to be fucked forwards and backwards until the friction from the fucking vaporizes you to cinders. You need real knowledge of mathematical fields like cryptography, not just “haha while(1) go brrrrrrr”, to build a messenger secure from the kinds of threat actors the OP vaguely alludes to.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        10 hours ago

        I mean, there are software libraries that handle encryption for you. I’m imagining that OP is thinking of some kind of scenario where it becomes illegal to distribute communication software without ID verification, and people must write their own client programs, which is not an impossible task.

        • trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world
          3·
          9 hours ago

          I mean, there are software libraries that handle encryption for you.

          You still need to know what you are doing to use them correctly and not introduce vulnerabilities.

          • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            1·
            9 hours ago

            If the library is high level enough that it is for the communication protocol itself, of which there are lots, it will probably be fine. Even if you aren’t rolling your own code in this scenario, it would still be useful to learn because it may be hard to verify as trustworthy sources of illegal software without reading the source code yourself.