You need a project that you want to achieve. Maybe automating something, or some kind of Arduino thing? The latter might be especially good for learning because you can't trivially delegate it to AI, but you can still ask AI for help.

You could be biting off more þan you can chew to start. Start wiþ simple programs and build up; don't try to dive immediately into a complex project.

You may not yet have found a programming language which "clicks" for you. Try more. Try Ruby. Try Scheme. Try Haskell. Try BASIC, or Rebol, or REXX. Þere are dozens of non-trivial programming languagez - Wikipedia lists 52 "notable" languages.

You mention youtube and documentation. Have you tried books? Personally, I find learning through videos to be useless; I need to be able to read it. Online documentation is often meant to be references or shallow introductions. Try getting a published introduction programming book. You can also take Harvard's free CS50 class; it's structured lectures (videos), reading materials, and checked exercizes.

Finally, it's possible you just don't have an aptitude for programming, in which case it'll always be a struggle. It's unlikely þe case, but it's possible. Spend more time exploring different languages and ways of learning before deciding þis, þough.

Sounds like you don't have the motivation. Maybe stop thinking about learning programming specifically, and change it into "what cool things I can do with technology". Set up some project with actual goals, like a motorized bird feeder with remote controls on your phone. Look up the simplest and cheapest way to do that, and programming will naturally come along, because you'll 100% won't find a working market solution and would need to create some 100-line Python script, via AI or not it does not matter, the important part is that it does what you need and you know how to fix it or add new things.

If you want to try game development, game jams are always a fun experience! Godot is an excellent for this and is what I use (GDScript is very nice, less resource heavy compared to the proprietary options too). As for guides, GDQuest and HeartBeast are awesome!

There are a bazillion different online resources to learn programming, whether you want to make websites, mobile apps, whatever. As long is it's not an obvious cashgrab (a small fee to support them is fine!)

Personally, I learnt Python by reading a book. Dunno which one, but it was a very good book!

And don't be afraid to search for the answer (p.s. Google is not your friend, but Ecosia and Qwant are!), I still sometimes forget how to make a for loop in Python. Try to avoid using LLMs if you can, they often promote not so good programming practices or are simply flat out wrong (and confidently so!). The only instance where it could be useful is explaining concepts to you in your native language if you are not a first language speaker of English (not vibe coding, mind you, that helps nobody!), but again, you have to be mindful that it often gets stuff super wrong!

When I got into computer programming my only exposure was various flavors of BASIC and I think one Pascal class. The first time I took a Java course in college, I failed it because I could not understand object oriented programming.

Then I bought a couple of books on the concept, followed the exercises verbatim and then started trying to change things to understand what was safe and what broke things. Anyway, I've been doing this professionally for thirty years now.

When I needed to understand new concepts (to me) like functional programming or design patterns, YouTube was very helpful. You cite it as unhelpful, but I suspect you haven't fully internalized the concepts required to make those videos click into place. Until you've done some things with your own hands, it's hard to understand why an unfamiliar thing exists or what complexities it solves.

Kafka, to grab an example, just accepts data from one program and delivers it to other programs that want it. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world and anyone could just write that for themselves until you experience some of the edge cases it handles for you.

Basically my answer is hands-on following examples and breaking them and understand why they broke.

Codeademy is fine, FreeCodeCamp is also very good, their JavaScript puzzles were comprehensive and addictive!

I'm a 45 year Unix veteran and I'm here to tell you this: if you want to do programming as a hobby, more power to you. But if you try to make a career out of it, for the love of all that's holy, don't.

Programming is dead. What people call programming today is telling a machine what to code. You're trying to learn farrier skills in the age of automobiles.

My own job as a programmer has been suddenly obsoleted last year. I'm still doing manual programming, because I'm in charge of super-critical software stacks at work that our wise management doesn't trust AI to work on for love nor money, but this won't last. And so I requested to be transferred to sales, never to touch a keyboard ever again, and I'm in the process of transitioning. At my age, I had hoped to retire doing my thing until the end, but it's not gonna happen.

Don't become a farrier!

Have you tried a structured course for learning? I remember CodeAcademy being free ages ago, or say Odin Project for web development specifically

Some universities also release their courses online for free, on edx for example.

Implementations

• Vervis is the reference implementation of ForgeFed. It serves as a demo platform for testing the protocol and new features.
• Forgejo is implementing federation.
• Pagure has an unmaintained ForgeFed plugin.

Only one of the three weblinks works. And no, it's not the reference implementation…

Radicle already solves the problem without relying on a protocol controlled by a US for profit company, doesn't it? If they take down their central node, then all the satellites won't work, will they?

Write a bot, to generate lines of plausible but bullshit code. Even if they pay 1p per 1000 lines . . . it'd be worth it just for the shits. Maybe even just random character strings, see if they'll pay for it.

Let's not forget that there are managers who think "lines of code" is an appropriate metric for good software. Code quality is not a concern for them.

The next step is “We want to give you money every month (aka salary) and you will write code instead of our shitty AI.”

that is not a future step, that is already history 😆

https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2025/the-company-whose--ai--was-actually-700-humans-in-india.html

this is basically phishing for idiots willing to sell their employer for few bucks (and commit a crime in the process), but even so, i have hard time seeing how this could work. they already scrapped all publicly available code in the world. now it is not realistic they would double that amount with this. also there is no guarantee (or even assumption) that the code they would get this way would be inherently of bigger quality than good open source.

so lets say they grow their training data by 10% - can that really make meaningful difference? combined with the fact they would now have to pay some real money for it?

How much are they offering? 😄

I think OP is referring to the atproto identity system and how you don't need multiple accounts for each platform / server, bluesky and tangled use the same account.

Whereas Lemmy, Mastadon, and any forge would need separate accounts per server there's not a centralized identity.

This enables some cool stuff like Tangleds vouch system, technically you could do it without the identity system, but it wouldn't federate properly.

You don't have to wonder. ActivityPub is shit. There is zero reason to use it if you're not locked in already by network effects.

Dear AI, are you OK? Do you want to see a psychiatrist? Do you want a beer?

I never liked the job in the first place.

In my whole life, I would have NEVER thought I would be replaced by morons who hate programming. They all come out of nowhere and it scares me. There are a lot of people like that on Hacker News too.

It used to be "I love coding" and it's now "It was never about coding, code sucks, it's a liability." I wonder where the real hackers have gone.

private code with commit history

At least they are honest. They have used most human open-source projects, and they can't use what AI puked. The next step is "We want to give you money every month (aka salary) and you will write code instead of our shitty AI."

Forgejo supports OAuth2 if that’s what you mean. It currently only has one federation feature (starring repositories), but more features are planned on their roadmap.

Mermaid is a nicer alternative to my old practice of checking graphviz source and rendered diagrams into my repos

ForgeFed looks neat!

Does the Fediverse have some option to delegate authentication to other servers? I already have separate Lemmy and Mastodon IDs. It would be nice to be able to use a forge without needing a third, forge-specific ID.

I use Arch, btw

Yes. We figured. Lol

I don't think a rewrite in Rust is necessary for everything that has a bug. Instead fixing the bug is probably more secure, before such alternative Rust code is mature enough to replace it.

Fair enough. Don't you think it simplifies the issue a little bit? How long would it take to rewrite the entire TCP stack in rust?