Shibaprasad Bhattacharya @shibaprasad@qoto.org

For those of you who missed the announcement from the @freemo account just wanted to reiterate it here.

In honor of our new Indian friends we added two new emoji to the server.

Also if anyone has any emoji they want added, even if its just for personal use (like a monogram of your name or a picture of your own face, anything) we can add it. Just send a 50kb or less PNG image to @freemo and it can be added.

@ngaravind @Gargron @BhavanaVarun @Mastodon Here's a regional break-down. Source : internetshutdowns.in

What a huge spike at #QOTO. 723 new users in less than a week.

All the new STEM posts I'm seeing popping up are amazing and its also great to meet so many new people.

As many of you know they are largely from India and I for one amd enjoying all the new culture and perspectives they are bringing.

Its great being a part of this community and seeing it grow.

Reading Permanent record, autobiography of Edward Snowden.There is an intresting bit when he talks about Intelligence agencies & tech industries.The very belief that they are entitled to their unilateral decision making based on data,makes them apolitical as data itself is just information.The idea of harmless surveilance or surveilance for greater good?
Makes me feel vulnerable when one pours out into the digital world,someone is just calling it data & putting a label on you & uses it in a way profitable to them.Imagine tweeting feeling sad tonight after a break up & netflix suggests me Always be my may be😐 and Google suggests best shops that sell cookie dough near by.They know me too well.🙊
Its like they put a label on my feeling & advertise it."swapy is sad & would probably eat cookie dough today & watch netflix😣."
The otherside to this is the assumption that since I posted it, I gave them permission to use this data.But do most people even read the license agreement or data usage policies?People just click accept.I didnt agree to sell my sadness 😑.These tech companies are merging all the time.Google has taken over so many that google knows more about me than I do.Its like If I die, the google me would go on living, inactive till they archive me.creepy digital existance?

This book is a gem.Especially for people from a country like India where the Data protection laws are virtually non existant.

@shibaprasad First, I won't consider myself a master in coding with python. But, here is my approach of understanding python.
Just like learning any other languages, for me, python had some "WHYs". Firstly, I am pretty passionate and fantasized about Machine Learning and Python seems to have good ground base for all ML and AI applications. Second reason is the Python's deployment on web development. If you're learning python, you probably know about it, already.

Learning any language needs certain approach, you may dive yourself in books. Or, there are already enough resource available on internet for anyone to master it.

In simple way, you just need to have some kind of passion or excitement to learn not just Python, any other PLs.

@shibaprasad I wouldn't say im a master at python, but I use it and I'm a good programmer in general...

As for how I learn it.. well there are two parts to learn for programming to me:

1) The theory - this part is completely disconnected from a language, you can, and often should, do this in psuedocode when working with it in its pure form

2) The language / platform technicals - This is stuff like syntax, and what posix means or how some bytecode is defined or whatever. This is the concrete part

They are both equally as vital, #1 is usually neglected among many programmers in my opinion and it really hurts their abilities when this is the case.

As for how I learned, well #1 was mostly from books and then later peer-reviewed studies coupled with any internet resources I could find (a lot of IRC chat rooms too).

#2 is usually from example code snippets and API documentation and, depending ont he quality of those two, perhaps a lot of trial and error. But this half is less using books, for me, and more just digging in and coding and just reading the technical documentation as you do.