Random strangers - other drivers who i don't know - are always beaming smiling towards me as if to go "aww, so cute! Little baby's first steps." It's like being driven past loads of gawking and amazing strangers when your parents take you out in a push-chair

I'm not sure if it's because they're genuinely trying to be nice or if they're just amused by the pun-name on my instructors car.

And yes, enough people were smiling at me in this surprising but non-offensively patronising manner for me to post about it. Anyone else experienced this, perchance? Maybe it's just because I drive slow, but i think I'm already at normal speed.

I've done a bit of programming before. I'm in a bachelors program for structural engineering, but they only get us to focus on Python.

Python material is so very wordy. I often try to restart from basics, and there's a lot of 'you have to reinstall it and use the pure python version, it's the only way you'll learn it properly' - but I find this way more confusing than using an IDE. I struggle to implement new libraries as well, in my existing IDE (i use spyder). Feels so clunky.

I want to be able to make things i can actually use, practice programming regularly, but I'm really not good at self directed stuff. Or even setting things up, as i tried to explain with the second paragraph. Any pointers towards relevant resources?

https://youtu.be/LrNbOxHYv5g

Bonus points for pictures

Let me assure you that the idea of AI disgusts me. Not just because it debates the quality of work and is a "cheat" to get past the word target, but because it stripey the writer themselves of their accomplishments.

However, it does strike me that people might want to write about subjects that they don't know a lot about. Scientific knowledge, crime, historical stuff. Could that be an ethical place to use AI - not to write it, but to ask "what would confectionary in the 1300s look like?" (For instance). Just niche questions.

Or is there a much better, easier way to look up niche real-world details like that?

Even though I want to pick up the textbooks and get an early headstart I can't beig myself to do it. I think I'll be in half-full swing tomorrow, but I figured it would be worth asking people's advice about this anyway because it's something I've struggled with a lot for the last 6 years.

I study engineering.

It's Motivation Monday, I guess!

i.e do you prefer:

• technically grounded and plausible science elements (e.g The Martian)

or

• stuff so fantastical that it doesn't even warrant trying to explain it (Dr Who, some Marvel/DC stuff, Star Wars)

Another way to look at this would be Sci-Fi versus Science Fantasy, perhaps.

• Old-School Sci-Fi like HG Wells centers around a core scientific idea and the consequences arising from that,

whereas

• Science Fantasy (more prevalent nowadays) only looks to science - or the impression of some science - to serve the fantasy devices it uses.

So which is better?

a work of fiction that i really enjoy/ed is The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, which is a choose-your-own-adventure story supported with character stats to game-ify it. in it, every chapter is a defining memory randomly from the MC's life, with a choice at the end for the reader

Clearly this is quite particular to the game mechanics they wanted to create; since i haven't read many traditional novels which do that sort of thing, i presume it actually makes it harder to tell a story.

Diaries do this i guess? The Diary of Anne Frank and Jeff Kinney's *Diary of a wimpy kid *(weird to put them together in a sentence) are 2 things i've read which match this style.

But I am quite interested if any traditional-style novel does it. Or would it just de facto become a fictional diary if you told a story in that way, since you'd feel compelled to date each event or provide a chronology?

I'd love examples if anyone has them.

Just the title.

Do you know people who display serial dishonesty or other bad attitudes, and find yourself setting them on the right path?