Science never takes a break at Scott Base – not even on Christmas Eve. Ross, our elf near the shelf, has been taking measurements on the @niwa_nz Dobson spectrophotometer. It has been measuring the ozone layer directly above Arrival Heights since the 1980s! #Elfontheshelf# https://t.co/wHWh84FUzQ

Since 1990s, Armenia has consistently resorted to brutality and violence which led hundreds of innocent civilians lose their lives. Armenian troops keep ignoring the ceasefire agre. Karabakh is Azerbaijan!🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿 #StopArmenianAggression# #KarabakhisAzerbaijan# #stoparmenianterror#

On this day in 1980, a vision took shape — a vision of a strong, self-reliant, and united India. Let's together celebrate the BJP Foundation Day at party office Kamlam honoring decades of dedication, service, and commitment to the nation. #BJP4India# https://t.co/BP2HubyEvH

Jean Bertin's Aérotrain, powered by a Pratt & Whitney JT8D turbofan. It was a 1970s French experimental Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle (TACV) guided by a reinforced concrete guideway. https://t.co/YCxiZT4uRR

The Minister caught up with Peter Watson, a long-time champion of the New Zealand-United States relationship. The Minister and Dr Watson were contemporaries at the University of Auckland in the early 1970s. 🇺🇸 🤝 🇳🇿 https://t.co/MRTzPr9XIV

STORY📰 Captain Zarra Houpapa and Major Catherine Dymock are among the latest in a long line of Military Observers sent to the UNTSO by New Zealand since the early 1950s. Read more ⬇️ #NZArmy# https://t.co/6OggiriDyN

“Like the post-1945 British Labour governments, he wants to shelter domestic manufacturing and the working class behind tariffs while reducing overseas commitments. But the net result will be both economically damaging and geopolitically weakening. Americans will come to miss globalism and policing the world. They will belatedly realize that there is no portal through which the United States can return to the 1950s, much less the 1900s. And the principal beneficiary of Project Minecraft will not be Russia, but China. Call it Project Manchuria.”—@NFergus

Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given. I disagree with the Turing Award and Nobel prize winner who wrote, “It is far more likely that the programming occupation will become extinct [...] than that it will become all-powerful. More and more, computers will program themselves.”​ Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful! In the 1960s, when programming moved from punchcards (where a programmer had to laboriously make holes in physical cards to write code character by character) to keyboards with terminals, programming became easier. And that made it a better time than before to begin programming. Yet it was in this era that Nobel laureate Herb Simon wrote the words quoted in the first paragraph. Today’s arguments not to learn to code continue to echo his comment. As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer! Over the past few decades, as programming has moved from assembly language to higher-level languages like C, from desktop to cloud, from raw text editors to IDEs to AI assisted coding where sometimes one barely even looks at the generated code (which some coders recently started to call vibe coding), it is getting easier with each step. I wrote previously that I see tech-savvy people coordinating AI tools to move toward being 10x professionals — individuals who have 10 times the impact of the average person in their field. I am increasingly convinced that the best way for many people to accomplish this is not to be just consumers of AI applications, but to learn enough coding to use AI-assisted coding tools effectively. One question I’m asked most often is what someone should do who is worried about job displacement by AI. My answer is: Learn about AI and take control of it, because one of the most important skills in the future will be the ability to tell a computer exactly what you want, so it can do that for you. Coding (or getting AI to code for you) is a great way to do that. When I was working on the course Generative AI for Everyone and needed to generate AI artwork for the background images, I worked with a collaborator who had studied art history and knew the language of art. He prompted Midjourney with terminology based on the historical style, palette, artist inspiration and so on — using the language of art — to get the result he wanted. I didn’t know this language, and my paltry attempts at prompting could not deliver as effective a result. Similarly, scientists, analysts, marketers, recruiters, and people of a wide range of professions who understand the language of software through their knowledge of coding can tell an LLM or an AI-enabled IDE what they want much more precisely, and get much better results. As these tools are continuing to make coding easier, this is the best time yet to learn to code, to learn the language of software, and learn to make computers do exactly what you want them to do. [Original text: https://t.co/HdI3Jb9HmF ]