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What ever happened to exploring computing through just building small, cool, things? Maybe I'm old now, but this trope has been parroted here and elsewhere as a panacea. Need a job? Contribute to open source for the CV experience. Need something to do? Contribute to open source.

I could see this as maybe something for a small software engineering course to do. maybe. I think in those cases it might even be better to split the class into teams and have them develop a product idea, elect people to various roles, and execute the plan as a semester long project. Midterms, quizzes, etc become sprint reviews and plannings. It would be great if you could get some of the b-school kids to roll over for a combined class where they takeover PMing.

Admittedly I am cynical. But the way I got into programming was many, many years before I started my CS degree. I just built cool things I needed. I got into reverse engineering because being a lazy high schooler I wanted to build trainers for video games so I could get a high level without actually working on it. Call it pathetic - sure. But playing video games is so boring. It's much more fun to get them to play for you :).

What ever happened to just being interested? I hesitate to suggest this but could it because a lot of people are getting into computer science strictly for the job? So that they reach the terminal points in the program and are completely without direction?

I dunno, just rambling I guess. This just strikes me as so odd.

> but I've come to accept that the only way to not be bullied or harassed online is to not expose yourself too much online

I've been on the internet for almost 30 years. This is something that we've lost in the last decade of people dying to tie their real identity to everything. The wild west internet was actively hostile and you had to be smart about not only what you said, but who you were associating with.

This form of "internet bullying" has existed since the dawn of the internet. That doesn't make it any more correct and it's only gotten more vicious with age. Especially because finding exploitable weaknesses is extremely easy when people leave themselves exposed on social media, twitter, discord, etc. We haven't solved it because I don't believe there is an actual solution. You get rid of KF and 4chan, another 10 communities pop up and the most popular one survives. You hit the registars, and they find another. Eventually they'll end up on one of the many registrars located outside the US that could not care any less what is hosted there.

The best thing you can do is compartmentalize. The problem is people, for better or worse, tie their entire identity to whatever they do on the internet. This is fraught with danger because it makes you easy to attack. But being easy to attack isn't enough, you have to also have to have shown some weakness they can use as leverage. Near is an unfortunate example of this. KF bullied them mercilessly because they possessed enough exploitable traits to make it profitable. This isn't victim blaming, but unfortunately something we must learn from. Privacy, compartmentalization, and good operational security are the only things that can protect you.

Maybe we can return to the internet of psuedonyms and lies that I remember. It was safer then, because no one trusted anyone implicitly and no one was willing to expose weaknesses that could be exploited.

Regardless of your feelings you're missing the point. The middle class is the bellwether of the economy. Though, I don't think you're truly interested in the economy at large.

When middle class wages go up, small businesses open, they employ more people, creating more middle class people, and the cycle continues ad infinitum. The middle class pays the bulk of the taxes since they lack the finances to avoid them, and additionally is responsible for creating the bulk of the jobs in small business. The middle class also leads consumption. See the previous point for why this is important.

If the middle class fails everything below them fails. The only people that win in all scenarios are the ultra wealthy. If the middle class cannot retire, effectively no one can retire. Since their suffering is magnified in the lower economic strata.