#how to learn python python development

[technicalmanoj]

Python: A Beginner's Best Friend

Python, often praised as the "programming language for everyone," has established itself as a welcoming entry point for beginners venturing into the world of coding. This article delves into why Python is considered easy for beginners and outlines the steps to learn Python development effectively.

Python: A Beginner's Best Friend

Readable and Simple Syntax: Python's primary allure for beginners is its clean and readable syntax. Unlike some programming languages with complex and cryptic code, Python's structure resembles the English language, making it easy for new programmers to understand and write code. The simple syntax eliminates the need for excessive punctuation and curly braces, resulting in concise and easy-to-follow scripts.

Comprehensive Documentation: Python offers a wealth of official documentation and tutorials. The Python community is renowned for its friendliness and willingness to help newcomers, and this extensive documentation serves as a valuable resource for learning and troubleshooting. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced developer, Python's extensive resources are a significant advantage.

Large and Supportive Community: Python's global community is a treasure trove of support for beginners. Online forums, social media groups, and local meetups provide ample opportunities to connect with fellow Python enthusiasts, share knowledge, and seek help. This vibrant community ensures that beginners never feel alone in their coding journey.

Versatile and Cross-Platform: Python's versatility is a significant asset for beginners. It can be used for a wide range of applications, from web development and data analysis to artificial intelligence and scientific computing. The ability to explore different domains allows beginners to find their niche in the programming world.

Immediate Gratification: Python's interpreted nature allows beginners to see the immediate results of their code without the need for complex compilation steps. This instant feedback helps learners understand their mistakes and progress quickly.

How to Learn Python Development

If you're a beginner eager to start your Python journey, here are some steps to effectively learn Python development:

Choose Your Learning Path: Decide on your primary motivation for learning Python. Do you want to become a web developer, data scientist, or automate repetitive tasks? Understanding your goals will guide your learning path.

Set Up Your Development Environment: Install Python on your computer. You can use Python's official website (python.org) or popular Python distributions like Anaconda. You'll also need a code editor or integrated development environment (IDE) to write and run Python code. Editors like Visual Studio Code and PyCharm are excellent choices.

Start with the Basics: Begin with the fundamentals, such as variables, data types, loops, and conditional statements. Online tutorials, courses, and textbooks are valuable resources for learning these basics.

Work on Projects: Hands-on practice is essential. Start small by working on simple projects that interest you, such as building a to-do list app, a basic website, or a data analysis task. Projects not only reinforce your knowledge but also provide you with a portfolio to showcase your skills.

Learn from Others: Join coding communities and online forums to learn from others. Participate in open-source projects or collaborate with peers on coding challenges.

Seek Specialized Knowledge: As you progress, explore specialized areas of Python development, such as web development (using frameworks like Django or Flask), data analysis (utilizing libraries like NumPy and Pandas), or machine learning (using libraries like TensorFlow or PyTorch).

Stay Consistent: Consistency is key. Allocate dedicated time to practice and learn Python regularly. Set achievable goals and milestones to track your progress.

[sidewalk-scrawls]

Fellow game devs who are fleeing Unity, what are your thoughts on Godot vs Unreal for making 2D games? I know Unreal is pretty over-powered for most 2D development, but given I'm used to Unity, how is Godot feature-wise? Are there any features it's noticeably lacking?

[pauljonessoftware]

Real Talk: Wanna Learn Web Development?

Web development is one of the most in-demand skills in the tech industry, whether you’re an aspiring IT contractor, a software developer looking to expand your expertise, or a recruiter wanting to better understand what makes a great web developer. But where do you start? What’s the minimum you need to know? And what tech stacks should you focus on? Let’s break it down. The Minimum Tech You Need…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[whereserpentswalk]

Humans are fundamentally rare in the multiverse. There are likely well over 2000 billion humans in the multiverse, but that means nothing when there are far more multiverses then there are humans, much less human civilization. There are a few pockets, but if you go to most habitable universes you'll find nobody is there, and if there is someone there they're mostly surrounded by nobody. And where there are humans sometimes they've changed themselves into things that aren't really human anymore.

For example, you'll end up in a universe that's a flat endless plane, covered in lush rainforests. And you'll hear that there's a human civilization of 14 million people there. But then you'll see that in the heart of that human civilization is a great city of about ten million people. And that great city is an amazing place, a civilization with countless great things, thousands of years of history, and multiple distinct cultures and ethnic groups living there. But then you realize that the majority of the humans in that universe live in one city. And then you learn that two million people outside the city live a day's drive from the city, most of them near one of the rivers intersecting the city. And beyond that there's an infinite plane, larger then humanity's first planet, and it has only two million to populate it, most of them so isolated they'll never know a multiverse, or even other humans, exist. Most of this "human inhabited" universe is continent sized stretches of forest no human has ever been, where only pythons the size of whales, eusocial monkeys, venomous tree cats, wolves that hunt by echolocation, and other such creatures lay. And with how far it is from any other human inhabited plane it is, they'll likely never know other humans exist in any sense other then vaugly knowing their origins.

Back when humanity's home universe wasn't lost, people thought the idea of empty land was a dream, that they could be the ones to populate it. But now there's so much of it, that it's useless trying to inhabit it all.

There's humans who've adapted harshly to their planes. For example, there's a universe where everything is filled with a poison gas. But it's where humans ended up, so they attempted by wearing skin tight rubber suits and gas masks while outside. After countless generations of multiple humans civilizations and nations existing in that plane, humans have entirely lost their skin there. At least they don't have skin like most people do, it's like it's all a sensitive second layer not meant to ever be exposed, sof moist and hairless. They don't need to eat when they inject nutrients, so their jaws have fused together, and their digestive system is gone. And since they have goggles on at all times no eyelids are needed. They wouldn't consider a human without their protective suit to even be naked, they'd consider them to be flayed. They only ever take off their suits when they grow out of one, or when they take on the painful burden of reproducing with eachother. They're all fine with how things work, none of them like the idea of having proper skin again. And the few times they've interacted with humans from other dimensions they treat them as one would a civilization of walking skeletons.

Sometimes things become incredibly strange just from how colonization happens is an example of humans who ended up on a near perfect copy of humanity's hone universe, but who lost a lot of their initial population and had to resort to unorthodox means to repopulate. They reproduced through artificial wombs, mixing DNA through blood instead of through natrual reproduction. And because of this they lost the ability to reproduce naturally through generations of evolution. For thousands of years, and countless civilizations and countries, they've been entirely sexless. The genes that cause them to develope secondary sex characteristics never trigger, and their genitals are basically nothing but holes for them to urinate through. Even the part of their arm where blood is drawn has naturally thinner skin and no pain receptors. They think of sex as just something animals do, and they find the idea that humans from other universes do it completely disgusting, like seeing a human with the traits of a wild animal.

There's also examples of humans who don't lose their bodies but they do lose their culture. For example, there's a group of humans who ended up on a plane of endless forests, inhabited by countless insectiod creatures, with several sapient species between them. The humans didn't have any land to take, so they became a middle man minority for most of the major civilizations there. There are no human kings or republics, no human armies, no humans cities. Humans there are a loose diaspora, with a culture that's built in the shadows of other creatures empires. The time since they had their own plane, and their own sovereign civilizations, is so long gone it seems strange to think of. They're entirely a people defined by serving other species, sometimes they're rich merchants and allies to the state, sometimes they're poor and destitute, sometimes they're equal and partially assimilated, but they are by their definition part of a greater whole. And most of them live without ever thinking of their species as one that can even have its own nations and cities.

There are ones which went the other way. For example on a cold and desolate plane, there's a human civilization that got sentient machines to do all their labor for them. On this plane every human is nobility, and infact their word for human and their word for lord is the same thing. There are no humans who aren't part of the ruling class, with countless sapient robots as their subjects. Some humans there won't even see another human outside of their family unless they're doing diplomacy with other noble houses. Of course, if a human loses their wealth, they're no longer considered humans, just being one of the countless robot subjects. And if a machine gains enough resources to be given a noble title, then they're considered human. There is no way that that society comprehends humanity without comprehending its ruling caste.

We've even found a few very far planes where humans have been stranded and forgotten they were from anywhere else. For example there's a colony vessel that became standed on a universe that's mostly a weightless void, but has a few habitable orbs. They luckily found an orb with the closest equivalent life to their homeworld, but by the time they got there they reverted to the stone age. They fought off the local demihumans that they later named the denisovans and neanderthals, but by the time they had technology to understand their history they just assumed they evolved from the local demihuman lines. They're at a high level of technology now, with some very interesting cold weather adaptations (including the unique trait of colored hair) but they don't seem to know about humanity's history at all. Wish them luck out there, it's very cold, and very lonely in this multiverse, mabye they're happiest to think it's as small as it is for them.

[izicodes]

I got accepted into a University!

🎊 Exciting news: I've been accepted to one of the two universities I applied to! I really doubted that I could even get into THE university of my city since they are harder to get into with higher grades for the entry requirements, but I think I only got in because of my apprenticeship experience. For example, if I had went straight to applying at the university at age 18, I wouldn’t have gotten in. I even thought when I was younger “oh I couldn’t ever apply because that’s for the smart smart people” BUT I GOT IN and I’m not even maths smart!

So, thank you God that I studied coding when I was studying Biology, Chemistry, Maths during my last two years of school. Although I had to drop out due to health reasons, thank you God for the opportunity to learn how to build websites and explore Python while working as a call centre agent. Thank you God for the confidence to apply for an apprenticeship, even though I didn't complete my schooling! Thank you God for helping me complete the apprenticeship with a pass mark and then continue working there as their Junior Web Developer. And thank you God for helping me randomly apply to these universities and I got a place!

My journey has been filled with challenges and opportunities, and for that, I am grateful!

⤷ ♡ my shop ○ my mini website ○ pinned ○ navigation ♡

[nixcraft]

The Union of Software Developers

Alright, alright, settle down everyone! So, the software developers are trying to unionize, right? But first, they're stuck in this endless meeting.

"Okay, so for our official documents, are we going with Python?"

"Python? Are you kidding? It's dynamically typed! We need the rigor of Java!"

"Java? That's so verbose! We should use Rust, for its memory safety!"

"Rust? What about the learning curve? Let's keep it simple with JavaScript!"

"JavaScript? That's... well, JavaScript. We need something functional, like Haskell!"

"Haskell? You want to write a union contract in a purely functional language? Good luck with that! How about C++?"

"C++? Are you trying to make this negotiation take longer?"

A lone voice from the back: "Anyone considered... COBOL?"

The room erupts in chaos.

"Okay, okay, how about we just write it in pseudocode?"

Another voice: "But... which pseudocode standard?"

[ayeforscotland]

Ad | Some Humble Bundle Goodies

One for the audio engineers - The Audio Arcade bundle gives you a whole bunch of royalty-free music and SFX as well as plugins to insert in all the major game engines. Ambient tracks, environmental sounds, explosions, you name it.

Money raised goes towards Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

For those who dabble in Virtual Reality, the Upload VR Showcase with Devolver Digital has a bunch of Serious Sam VR games as well as the Talos Principle, a really solid puzzle game.

Money raised goes to Special Effect which helps people with disabilities enjoy games via accessible controllers. I've seen the stuff they do and it's honestly great.

Want to get into programming but don't know where to start? The Learn to Program bundle has a tonne of resources covering everything from HTML and CSS through to Python, C# and Ruby.

Money raised goes towards Code.org which seeks to expand participation in computing science by helping women and students of colour.

The Future Tech Innovators Toolkit is a software bundle with courses on Robotics, Electronics and programming with Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

Money raised goes towards Alzheimers Research UK.

The Home How-To Guides bundle offers a complete set of books for home improvements and projects. Want to know more about plumbing, home repair, bathrooms, wiring or carpentry? This bundle has you covered.

Money raised goes to It Gets Better, a charity that supports LGBT Youth.

Want to pick up the latest Elden Ring DLC? It's also available on the Humble Store with the key being redeemable on Steam.

[tf2vnthingy]

Devlog 1 - Names, References and Revisions

Today's agenda: The name of the game!

What should I name the game? Give me all of your wackiest suggestions and I'll make a poll to see which does best! Just anything that you'd like to see in a TF2 vn. (If anyone could possibly, maybe, want to volunteer in helping/proofreading the current drafts, that'd be awesome!!)

Story

As I write this, I am currently within the 3rd draft/revision of the beginning of the game. I'm a bit conflicted on how to start it. I'm jumping between this being a one week experience for the MC to show how short Ms Pauling's vacation is OR the idea that this is the last week of the internship and you're on your way to say goodbye.

The middlest parts are the easiest to write as they're rather independent from each other. The endings are already fully conceptualized but that's classified, no matter how much I wanna info dump about it!!

Designs/Art

My friend is currently helping out with the project! He's going to be in charge of the backgrounds and other assets in exchange for me helping with his commissions lol! For now, I've been drawing sketches of poses and figuring out which poses work best through reference gathering.

These would work for Sniper and Spy, maybe.

Coding

This part is the trickiest since I don't have my laptop with me for another week or so. But, for now, I'm learning through basic python tutorials and implementing a lot of the script in Twinery.org to keep track of the branching paths. I do intend on using Ren'py for development.

This is mostly a bunch of dialogue because I refuse to write actual lengthy descriptions for a DRAFT...... (shush, I barely even started)

[mariacallous]

In the near future one hacker may be able to unleash 20 zero-day attacks on different systems across the world all at once. Polymorphic malware could rampage across a codebase, using a bespoke generative AI system to rewrite itself as it learns and adapts. Armies of script kiddies could use purpose-built LLMs to unleash a torrent of malicious code at the push of a button.

Case in point: as of this writing, an AI system is sitting at the top of several leaderboards on HackerOne—an enterprise bug bounty system. The AI is XBOW, a system aimed at whitehat pentesters that “autonomously finds and exploits vulnerabilities in 75 percent of web benchmarks,” according to the company’s website.

AI-assisted hackers are a major fear in the cybersecurity industry, even if their potential hasn’t quite been realized yet. “I compare it to being on an emergency landing on an aircraft where it’s like ‘brace, brace, brace’ but we still have yet to impact anything,” Hayden Smith, the cofounder of security company Hunted Labs, tells WIRED. “We’re still waiting to have that mass event.”

Generative AI has made it easier for anyone to code. The LLMs improve every day, new models spit out more efficient code, and companies like Microsoft say they’re using AI agents to help write their codebase. Anyone can spit out a Python script using ChatGPT now, and vibe coding—asking an AI to write code for you, even if you don’t have much of an idea how to do it yourself—is popular; but there’s also vibe hacking.

“We’re going to see vibe hacking. And people without previous knowledge or deep knowledge will be able to tell AI what it wants to create and be able to go ahead and get that problem solved,” Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, tells WIRED.

Vibe hacking frontends have existed since 2023. Back then, a purpose-built LLM for generating malicious code called WormGPT spread on Discord groups, Telegram servers, and darknet forums. When security professionals and the media discovered it, its creators pulled the plug.

WormGPT faded away, but other services that billed themselves as blackhat LLMs, like FraudGPT, replaced it. But WormGPT’s successors had problems. As security firm Abnormal AI notes, many of these apps may have just been jailbroken versions of ChatGPT with some extra code to make them appear as if they were a stand-alone product.

Better then, if you’re a bad actor, to just go to the source. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are easily jailbroken. Most LLMs have guard rails that prevent them from generating malicious code, but there are whole communities online dedicated to bypassing those guardrails. Anthropic even offers a bug bounty to people who discover new ones in Claude.

“It’s very important to us that we develop our models safely,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED. “We take steps to reduce the risk of malicious use, and we’re continually improving safeguards to make our models more robust against exploits like jailbreaks. For example, you can read our research and approach to jailbreaks in the GPT-4.5 system card, or in the OpenAI o3 and o4-mini system card.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2023, security researchers at Trend Micro got ChatGPT to generate malicious code by prompting it into the role of a security researcher and pentester. ChatGPT would then happily generate PowerShell scripts based on databases of malicious code.

“You can use it to create malware,” Moussouris says. “The easiest way to get around those safeguards put in place by the makers of the AI models is to say that you’re competing in a capture-the-flag exercise, and it will happily generate malicious code for you.”

Unsophisticated actors like script kiddies are an age-old problem in the world of cybersecurity, and AI may well amplify their profile. “It lowers the barrier to entry to cybercrime,” Hayley Benedict, a Cyber Intelligence Analyst at RANE, tells WIRED.

But, she says, the real threat may come from established hacking groups who will use AI to further enhance their already fearsome abilities.

“It’s the hackers that already have the capabilities and already have these operations,” she says. “It’s being able to drastically scale up these cybercriminal operations, and they can create the malicious code a lot faster.”

Moussouris agrees. “The acceleration is what is going to make it extremely difficult to control,” she says.

Hunted Labs’ Smith also says that the real threat of AI-generated code is in the hands of someone who already knows the code in and out who uses it to scale up an attack. “When you’re working with someone who has deep experience and you combine that with, ‘Hey, I can do things a lot faster that otherwise would have taken me a couple days or three days, and now it takes me 30 minutes.’ That's a really interesting and dynamic part of the situation,” he says.

According to Smith, an experienced hacker could design a system that defeats multiple security protections and learns as it goes. The malicious bit of code would rewrite its malicious payload as it learns on the fly. “That would be completely insane and difficult to triage,” he says.

Smith imagines a world where 20 zero-day events all happen at the same time. “That makes it a little bit more scary,” he says.

Moussouris says that the tools to make that kind of attack a reality exist now. “They are good enough in the hands of a good enough operator,” she says, but AI is not quite good enough yet for an inexperienced hacker to operate hands-off.

“We’re not quite there in terms of AI being able to fully take over the function of a human in offensive security,” she says.

The primal fear that chatbot code sparks is that anyone will be able to do it, but the reality is that a sophisticated actor with deep knowledge of existing code is much more frightening. XBOW may be the closest thing to an autonomous “AI hacker” that exists in the wild, and it’s the creation of a team of more than 20 skilled people whose previous work experience includes GitHub, Microsoft, and a half a dozen assorted security companies.

It also points to another truth. “The best defense against a bad guy with AI is a good guy with AI,” Benedict says.

For Moussouris, the use of AI by both blackhats and whitehats is just the next evolution of a cybersecurity arms race she’s watched unfold over 30 years. “It went from: ‘I’m going to perform this hack manually or create my own custom exploit,’ to, ‘I’m going to create a tool that anyone can run and perform some of these checks automatically,’” she says.

“AI is just another tool in the toolbox, and those who do know how to steer it appropriately now are going to be the ones that make those vibey frontends that anyone could use.”

[etymology-of-the-emblem]

Python / パイソン and Forsyth / フォルス

Python (JP: パイソン; rōmaji: paison) is a wise-cracking and apathetic member of the Deliverance in Fire Emblem Gaiden and its remake, Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. Most of you likely know that a python is a type of snake; specifically, the Python genus belongs to the Pythonidae family, consisting of nonvenomous serpents.

Before the name was carried by this subset of snake, the name was attributed to the mythical Python (also called ピュートーン; rōmaji: pyūtōn), enemy of the Greek solar god Apollo. Typically depicted as a great serpent, Python resided at Pytho (later called Delphi), thought to be the center of the world. The story goes (according to Hyginus, at least) that after the goddess Hera learned that her husband Zeus had an affair with Leto, the enraged queen of Olympus sent Python after Leto to prevent the birth of the twins she carried—Artemis and Apollo. Leto found a reprieve, thanks to Poseidon, on the island of Delos and gave birth; not four days after, Apollo would pick up the bow and arrow and sought out Python. Alternatively, some versions tell of Leto and her children leaving Delos for Delphi, only to be attacked by Python once more. All adaptations end the same, however: Apollo brings an end to the serpent by arrows, and Delphi and its oracle would then belong to the sun god. Most likely, the Python in Fire Emblem being an archer was inspired by the mythological beast's slayer.

Forsyth is a straight-laced and passionate member of the Deliverance and Python's best friend. The name Forsyth is Scottish in origin, and has been carried by many notable people. Possible figures that could tie into the character's scholarly background include Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth and founder of the Royal Horticultural Society and namesake of the forsythia plant—William Forsyth. Also worth noting is the English military journalist and writer Frederick Forsyth and the historic Clan Forsyth of Scotland.

In Japanese, Forsyth is instead called フォルス (rōmaji: forusu), officially romanized as Fols. In Greek mythology, Pholus (JP: フォルス), also called Pholos (JP: ポロス; rōmaji: porosu), was one of the two wise and sophisticated centaurs alongside the more famous Chiron. He appears in the story of Heracles: after the hero captured the Erymanthian Boar, Heracles was offered hospitality in Pholus' cave as he passed through the area. However, when a container of wine was opened, the smell disturbed the wild centaurs in the area, sparking aggression. Heracles would them off with arrows coated in the blood of the Lernaean Hydra, which was capable of inflicting instant death. Pholus, the coward that he was, fled from the battle, but in his curiosity, took to examining a loose arrow, only to drop it on his foot. The gods showed him mercy and placed Pholus in the stars as the constellation Centaurus. (Note that it is common for versions to instead claim Chiron was the one killed by one of Heracles' arrows and made into a constellation).

Lastly, I feel it must be mentioned that there is a very real possibility that these two characters may be named after two programming languages. Python (JP: パイソン) saw its first release in February of 1991,in the middle of Fire Emblem Gaiden's development. Unfortunately, I have no idea how quick Python caught on in the beginning—even less how known it was in Japan in its first year—which is why I feel the Greek inspirations are more likely. That said, Forth (JP: フォース; rōmaji: fōsu) was another programming language made public in the 70's and became very popular in the 80's. Though the katakana used is different, フォルス can still be read as "fo[u]rth," and could potentially have been a stylistic choice.

[thewinastudyblog]

a day in my life as an web development intern (16/06)

i’m currently interning as a backend developer and am responsible for building an API using Flask(Python) and Postgresql.

09 - 10 = get there, turn on my laptop and open all the apps i need, most of the time it’s PyCharm for coding and Chrome cause I google a LOT. I also spend the first few 15 minutes trying to remember where I am and what I am supposed to do during the dat. and sometimes during this first hour I go get coffee.

10 - 11:30 = for my API, i needed to find a dataset that has all the schools in France with their gps coordinates, and so basically I found a database and wrote a python script to extract the data needed and then try to put a sample into my database.

11:30 - 12:30 = just like the schools, i also needed all the hospitals in france, and when I started looking at the dataset I was going to use for this I realized that there was no way I would get the gps coordinates from this specific dataset.

12:30 - 13:30 = here i went back home and ate a quick lunch.

13:30 - 15:30 = i found a better dataset and so i wrote a script to get the data i wanted from it and also tested putting some data into my database and made sure it worked. this script also involved clinics and nursing homes for the elderly cause I also needed them for my API. 15:30 - 17:00 = around this time I started trying to put all the data I imported from the school and hospital datasets into my database, and at one point I ran into some schools that didn't have a longitude and latitude, and I was like how do I fix that. So I spent around 30 mins googling and trying to write a script that could convert addresses into latitude and longitude, but it wasn't perfect LOL. 17:00 - 17:15 = spoke quickly to my supervisor abt this issue and what could be done about it 17:15 = turn off my laptop and monitors, pack my bag and go home.

as a whole, today was kinda fun ? even tho it was mostly spent struggling and trying to figure out how to do every single thing without using chatgpt (only used it once and it was at a time of dire need so I'm really proud of myself). honestly it's way more fun not using chatgpt cause you get to truly learn how to read documentation and know on your own how things work, and you also learn so much from trying and failing and i personally enjoy it so much !!! but yeah anyways, what's coming is definitely harder than what i've already done, but I've never been more ready. here's to more days of proving to myself over and over again how powerful my brain actually is and how good i am at this.

[gingermintpepper]

Day 1: Apollo

Interpretation notes and trivia under the cut!

His interpretation for my work is based very much around the concept of his manifestation as the Radiant God of the String. Because of this, quite like Hecate, he’s triple-fold and occupies three major spaces; the string of Fate and therefore prophecy, the bowstring and therefore distance and destruction and the lyrestring and therefore music and order. He’s a somewhat melancholy figure all things considered - Fate and following Fate’s tennants is something that he struggled a lot with as a child and even now as a more mature deity, the only solution he’s truly found is to take things one day at a time. Very diligent and fastidious, he’s a hard worker and tends to put his everything into completing any task set before him which also tends to work to his disadvantage since he’s prone to becoming tunnel-visioned until he’s finished what he said he would finish. His family orchestrated his winter breaks because he had the nasty habit of working himself sick when he was still very young.

Apollo is generally represented by circles in my work - priests of Apollo will be marked with at least three circles on their face and usually wear triangular jewellry (typically earrings or necklace charms) to reflect the triple-nature of their god. His favoured colour is a rich, deep blue and while he typically wears elaborate eye paint, he rarely uses face powders. Wears gem-toned blues for his lips unless in mourning where he will leave himself unadorned and unpainted out of respect.

Some quick trivia: 

Was born identical to Artemis even though they were born (years) apart. Had brown hair, wolf’s ears and fangs and horns when he was a child but never manifested those features again after his penance for slaying Python. If he’s very stressed or angry, sometimes his fangs will show. The brown of his hair grew out to blond naturally as he developed and matured as a god.

Proficient in all instruments but has always especially preferred stringed instruments. Truly unmatched with a kithara but only uses it for special occasions and official meetings. Generally prefers his lyre for every day usage

Really good at sewing and braiding strings together due to the exercises he had to do while under the tutelage of the Moirai sisters. Can’t weave since Athena banned him from touching a loom but he does like watching her spin. The one time she caught him trying to replicate her patterns with a needle and thread, she complained to Zeus that he had broken his oath. He teases her about that even now.

Was the last of the Twelve to learn how to read and write because he hates letter systems and finds it too arbitrary. Prior to the collaboration that resulted in written letter systems, everyone was perfectly fine with remembering the important stuff and encoding the rest in artistic format such as tapestries, pottery, furniture and jewellry. Apollo himself has a truly formidable memory since he’s been composing and immortalising the events and histories of the world in song since he was very young. He finds written books very dull but Clio’s very insistent about written histories being important and convenient so reluctantly, he’s given permission for his songs and poems to be -gags- transcribed and written down.

Is only called Apollo by his parents, Artemis and Dionysus. Hermes rarely calls him by name in general and the others, including other siblings like Ares and Athena, have always called him Phoebus. Interestingly, Zeus usually calls him Phoebus but will call him Apollo when they are alone or when he’s being especially serious. Apollo is completely comfortable with either name but he does see Phoebus as a bit more formal than Apollo. (Despite his best efforts, both Calliope and Clio also still stubbornly call him Phoebus though he’s fairly sure it’s mostly because they know it bothers him.)

[nixcraft]

How to Become a Farmer 🧑‍🌾

00. Learn Python 01. Write code day and night 02. Become a senior developer 03. Burn out solving problems 04. Finally had enough of this. Quit. 05. Become a farmer. Work with trees and animals and grow crops.

[carlyraejepsans]

If you are going to make a game here’s some things that might be helpful!

Game engines:

Godot: very new dev friendly and it’s free. Has its own programming language (GDscript) but also supports C#. It’s best for 2D games but it can do 3D also.

Unity: I don’t even know if I should be recommending Unity. It has caused me much pain and the suffering. But Unity has an incredible amount of guides and tutorials. And once you get the hang of something it’s hard to get caught on the same thing again. It also has a great Visual Studio integration and uses C#. I will warn you the unity animator is where all dreams go to die. It’s a tedious process but you can probably get some plugins to help with that.

Unreal: Don’t use it unless you’re building a very large or very detailed 3D game. It also uses C++ which is hell.

Renpy: Made for visual novels but has support for small mini games. It only supports Python iirc. Basically if you’re making a VN it’s renpy all the way otherwise you should look elsewhere.

What to learn: Game design and how to act as your own game designer. As a designer you need to know if a part of your game isn’t meshing with the rest of it and be willing to give up that part if needed. Also sound design is very important as well. If you want to make your own sounds audacity is perfect for recording and cutting up your clips. If you want to find sound effects I recommend freesound.org and the YouTube royalty free music database.

Sadly I can’t recommend a lot of places to learn this stuff because I’m taking Game Development in Uni. So most of my info comes from my lectures and stuff. One of my game design textbooks is pretty good but it’s around $40 CAD. It’s called the game designers playbook by Samantha Stahlke and Pejman Mirza-Babaei if you’re interested (fun fact there’s a photo of Toriel in there)

Anyway sorry for dumping this large ask on you I’m just really passionate about game design and I like to see other people get into it.

please do not apologize I'd never heard half of this stuff so this is super useful!! I've seen some godot tutorials on YouTube although so far I've played around with RPG maker MV (it was on sale. very very fiddly interface, i had trouble getting around it) and gamemaker, which recently became free for non-commercial use (a lot more approachable on first impact but like i said, haven't really done anything substantial in either yet).

mostly, I'm still in the super vague stage. I've got an idea for the main story conflict, the protagonist and their foil, the general aesthetic i want to go for (likely 2D graphics, but it would be cool to make like. small cutscenes in low-poly 3D) but not much else. haven't exactly decided on the gameplay either! it's gonna necessarily be rpg-esque, but I'm not much of a fan of classic turn-based combat so. I'm gonna check out other games and see if i can frankenstein anything cooler :P

[macademiastudies]

I'm really struggling here. There are so many things I want and need to be. SO many things I should study, so many career paths I need to take, so many things in life that I need to get to. By studying it all, I'm getting nothing done. How do I get myself together? I need to be able to prioritize what I'd like to study and where I want to be in life, so I'm writing this post to puke it all out and hopefully fix it with a little glitter. I'm making a list and categorizing them with Emojis for what I should put a longer-term pause on, what I should put up next, and what I should study now. Stuff I should study now: ✒️ Python for data analysis and machine learning ✒️ Using statistical models on python ✒️ JavaScript/React for web development ✒️ Azure AZ-900 exam prep Stuff I should get to soon but not now: 📜 Data structures & algorithms 📜 A new language Stuff that would be better to pause for now: 🤎GMAT, for my future MBA 🤎Blender, to create 3D images and interactive tools With things like my GMAT exam prep I can practice 30 minutes a day or 10 pages a day instead of actively making it a major focus of my day and missing out on the things that I really wanted to study right now. Thus, it may be better to turn my 150 days of GMAT prep into just 150 days of productivity ☕ I hope you'll understand and that hopefully, you guys are also coming to a position where you can truly focus on what you want to focus on in life