If this is true, he's in for a real "Eureka!" moment sometime after his talk concludes.
This basic computer literacy stuff is picked up through experience. Unless he can fuck around on the command line for days like we did, he won't make the basic connections/associations that make the examples you gave obvious to us. Nigga just needs to install baby's first linux on another partition or drive and dive in head-first.
I see, I'll probably tell him to get a spare laptop (a second partition is probably too risky at this point) and to try to install Linux on it. I've been a bit hesitant to suggest Linux up until now because I'm unsure of how he perceives it. The only exposure he has to it must be from social media. Of course after some time fiddling around it will be clear that the Mean Scary *UNIX world is not so Mean and Scary after all, but for someone who has never asked himself how the websites he uses run it must seem like No Man's Land. I fear that he might get impatient, but if he's not cut out for the computing world, I guess there's no helping that.
I agree. I've told him that if he wants to learn programming he should just think up ideas and try to implement them. Thing is, at this point they're too grandiose. He wants to make a GUI app in C++. I think it's too early to introduce widget toolkits or SDL to him, plus he relies heavily on AI, so my gut feeling is that even if I did talk to him about these, he'll just ask ChatGPT to make an app for him instead and look at that. I'll probably have to convince him about the importance of documentation at some point soon.
He asks a lot of questions about many different subjects. Broad strokes about operating systems, web browsers, the internet, various (popular) programming languages. It seems to me he just wants to learn everything and anything he can about how computers work. He has made no inquiries about the electronics inside yet.
I wanted to learn to program and use a good IRC client without paying for mIRC, so I dual-booted Linux. This was back in the early 00s when programming on Windows was either awful or expensive. Getting Linux to do what I wanted and work right meant I spent a lot of time perusing man pages or writing one-off scripts or talking to people on IRC about my problems to learn how the system worked and how I should fix it.
I've done leetcode but only insofar as to memorize the common problems because interviewers love to drop one on you with basically no time to organically solve it. If you don't have much of a background in CS, leetcode is decent for giving a reason to dig into algorithms and data structures concepts but the system exists more so shitters can justify their employment via rote memorization.
Why? The worst that happens is that he grinds on too big a problem for a while and doesn't actually succeed but gains more experience in the subject area. Even failure can be a powerful teacher.
These days baby's first Linux for Windows users is just to enable WSL(Windows Subsystem for Linux) and pick a distribution from the Windows Store. Another option would be a Raspberry Pi if he has a monitor and keyboard and mouse. Neither require 'installation' but will quickly give him a command line and a bunch of dev tools.
My issue with WSL is if your goal is to learn Linux then you really need to disconnect from Windows at least partially. Part of what makes Linux autists is being thrown in the deep-end on a machine that only runs Linux and having to figure out how to make things usable.
There's a headless option but I remember it being quite a pain to set up, that was back when rpi2 was new so maybe things are better now.
Sorry, the correct answer is now "Raspberry Pi Pico"
No if anything he should start with assembly and reverse engineering; This learning path will teach him basic shit like what an executable file actually is, how it's compiled and how it's made to exist in memory.
Also no, get him started with VMs so he can go through the installation and basic usage of various (preferably CLI) operating systems and distros without having to pump the brakes on everything else he's doing. If he's been messing around with C++ for some time he's probably already indirectly used QEMU to some capacity for testing across platforms so being more aware of it would also be helpful.
ChatGPT now is just what Google was in the 90's. Use it to learn, don't use it to replace thinking for yourself. It's a great way to learn things if you treat it as a (fallible) teacher, and not some infallible preacher of programming truth.
i use chatgpt as a more convenient google tbh. if i think it has a better way of formatting something or may be able to give me some sort of insight into a particular portion of a project. I used to just ask it to generate code and copy and paste but then id realise it would change things that worked just fine before. i'd ask why it did that and it'd just say nevermind and make something else entirely. I wouldnt trust it unless you know what your doing. have the documentation on hand so you can look up what its doing. if your using as an aid or tutor its a little different because its much better at explaining coding concepts than creating consistent code. but dont take my word for it. the best way to learn is to experiment with it and see what works for you.
Skip ML if you want to learn anything. You're starting from nothing; you are inevitably going to have to trust the LLM because you don't have any knowledge to fall back on to know if it's just lying to you, or worse, correct but giving very, very bad advice, and then you're fucked. It's already chopped your legs off while you're still trying to crawl.
