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I feel like this isn’t super new. You haven’t been able to do things like talk academically about network security or cryptography without being incredibly critical of government for decades.
My professors sure were. I felt really bad for them, honestly. They were the driving force to make philosophy and ethics courses mandatory at my university in order to recieve a comp sci degree.
“If you work in these areas long enough, at a high enough level, you WILL be asked to compromise something for the benefit of a state actor, and you might not even realize it’s happening. The person asking you to do it might not even realize what is really happening.” Was what our prof told a packed lecture hall.
This is pretty much my inspiration for self hosting. A three letter agency needs to infiltrate my network or show up to my house with a warrant. I’m not going to be able to stop them, but at least they’ll have to work for it. I’d love a CSI Miami’s episode level of effort for them to discover that I’m just a fucking nerd sharing Linux ISOs.
This made me image an exchange like
Agent 1: OK McNulty, you have finished your forensic scan of that scumbag’s computer. I can’t wait to hear whether we are taking this monster down for espionage, stealing classified information, or even just another copyright infringement case. What is really in that folder of “Linux ISOs?”
Agent 2: You are not gonna believe this…
Wasn’t even the wildest. Before compsci I was doing mechanical engineering.
We had an assignment to design a railcar layout for transporting livestock. It gave the minimal parameters for the animals, established client driven acceptable losses for the livestock, etc…
We all cracked away at it. After we handed them all in, the profs were like “nowhere in the spec was the actual animals named, was no one curious?”
Silence.
They had given us a literal Nazi RFP discovered post WWII. It was for moving people to fucking concentration camps.
“You’re smart people. People are going to ask you to do bad things. They’re going to try and hide thier intentions. Don’t collaborate with Nazis. Don’t ever use what I teach you to hurt people.”
I don’t think OP is implying while loops require ideological understandings, but rather more foundationally as to understand how computer commodities are made and traded, the concept of centralization simply arises. Thus, the discussion of control, IP, etc, and now AI and labor.
But why would that be discussed in an intro to programming class?
Typically, historically, it didn’t matter really. Moore’s Law, general positive vibes from the prospect of computer tech in the future of the industry, and why scare undergrads seeking good salaries away from institutions taking donations from said corps? But things are pretty different now. AI is less of a thought experiment than before. What better lens to analyze AI than from labor in economics, i.e., Marxism?
The students joined the class to learn programming, and not to analyze AI? It’s like if I joined a pottery class and the teacher spent an hour talking about how pottery isn’t a high paying profession. I didn’t come for life advice or economic rambling, I came to learn pottery.
My bad for looking for nuance in a microblog meme, jesus. Education ain’t just the literal skills and nothing else, y’know. Teachers and classes are more than just human textbooks and tutorials.
And yet, the intro programming class I took just focused on the skills and I thought it was great. I’m mainly refuting OPs implication that you have to teach leftist ideology in order to teach programming. It sounds like they just want to teach leftist ideology, which imo is fine as long as it’s stated in the syllabus, so the students know what they are signing up for.
I’m glad your personal experience was great, I get where u are coming from. In most other similar situations, that tracks. Some topics do truly have little to no need for an in-depth political angle. And yes, most of my enjoyable classes too were non-political, although not because they were non-political.
But what is so fundamental to “leftist ideology” (I take that as Marxist economics, to be clear), is the role of labor in the material world. That’s the shortest I can boil that down to. And today, in “2026,” with the prevalence of AI, and based on the post mentioning “leftist ideology” and “teaching an intro to comp sci class,” what else could they be talking about? AI, as we all know, is a labor-cost saver for bosses. Economically, that is what it is hoped to function as. It is (ideally) a profit increaser. That’s just the math that any and all capitalist follows. A teacher that understands that, and is in the position of progressing their students’ careers, yeah, can’t blame them for “seeing it everywhere” and wanting to share that.
Honestly there’s hundreds of other ways you can tie leftist ideas to CS and modern software. Like alienation of labour, powers of scale, etc. You could teach a whole class on it if you wanted. You could so so even before AI. I don’t think many of the students would be happy about that though.
Because people are using AI in programming now. It will only be utilized more as time goes on. Getting into the risks and reward are necessary to know what to do and what not to do. Or at the very least what to be wary of.
Introduction Courses are the Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How. Knowing what you’re getting into and what you will be dealing with are just as foundational.
AI is used in every field now. Programming courses can just do what every other course does: tell the student that nobody can stop them from using AI, but if you do be prepared to fail the test. Leveraging AI for work, and the ethics of doing so, is something that can be covered in a different class. But my intro programming course taught the basics of programming, not what industry programming was like. Just like my intro to chemistry course never taught what it was like to work in the chemical industry.
How many programmers DON’T use AI to some degree already? As the technology continues to improve adoption and usage will only increase. Actually hand coding stuff is soon to be a mostly lost craft.
I’m sure these topics become relevant at some point, but I’m doubtful that it’s absolutely necessary to address them in an intro course. how does leftist ideology help kids understand what a while loop does
like, literacy can do all of these things too, that doesn’t mean you have to introduce those concepts at the same time as the abc’s
The distinction here is programming vs computer science. You’re correct that it’s not strictly necessary, but it really depends on the area of study. Please allow me a small rant about the distinction - this isn’t directed at you.
Programming, honestly, could be taught like a trade. It’s a skillset and a craft, with best practices and even regulations in some industries. But one doesn’t need to know anything about how we got here or the fundamentals that make a computer work electronically, in order to write code.
Computer Science necessarily tracks back through the history of computing, in order to provide a grounding in how all this stuff ticks. You can’t talk about Babbage without Ada Lovelace, you can’t talk about Alan Turing without what the government did to him, and you can’t bring up ARPANET or the internet without talking about Berkley techno-hippies. Every step of the way are people taking capitalist and government interest and subverting it to meet more worldly and socialized goals. Everyone in this story has an agenda and, shocker, the smartest people tend to dominate in this field and reliably don’t fuck with conservative nonsense.
basket = [] for pos in billionaires: if pos not in basket: - basket += guillotine(b) + basket += guillotine(pos) # Corrected iterable naming
I guess it is just a matter of time before the Trump regime designates logic as hardcore leftist ideology
Haven’t they already? Wasn’t that what the attacks on the various universities were last summer?
I genuinely used to believe this too, but the CCC opened my eyes to anarchism, and then HN opened my eyes to plutarchism.
I iterate now between several modes of: “GPLv3 is the best license humanity can use to better itself, decentralised projects are mandatory to keep authoritarian regimes at bay, but damn do I love using MIT projects in my hobby code projects, and hmm it would be nice to make some side income with said hobby project…”
Each of these contradictions of the other, which bothered me in my late 20s, but now I think it’s relatively normal to inhabit several conflicting ideals at once
My delusions of grandeur involve adding a massively useful addition to a successful MIT/BSD licensed project, but release it in strict AGPL. Companies steal volunteer work all the time and those licenses let them. I want to put a wrench into that. All I’m missing is a lot of talent, experience, time, and money. Any day now.
If it’s science, it’s woke!
Real patriots use the abacus.Look at the fancy pants here that uses advanced technology like the abacus instead of counting on their nine fingers like the rest of us!
The abacus is also woke unfortunately
Dang it. Is it the bead colors?
Math is woke
It’s an introduction class, just start with history of computers and shift to programming from there.
You know, the history of computers, the Alan Turing, and the first assembly language, and the first software engineer, and “the entire pre-1992 internet.”
Even just the facts are incredibly “woke” leaning unless you just boil everything down to a single sentence factoid and dont go into much detail
That’s basically everything, though.
Reminds me of creationist textbooks trying to teach about electricity.
What kind of an ego do you have to have to think you know everything about science, so you write a textbook, and when you get to electricity, you don’t know anything about it, but since you know everything about everything, if you don’t know anything about electricity, that means nobody else does, either?
I dunno, but that was my textbook growing up. College was fun.
Home schooling for the lose.
Sweet baby Jesus
That’s the problem, they can believe in Jesus, but not electricity.
This may shock you, but if you think like this, you might be a hardcore leftist.
Also, I’m reminded of the Ghostbusters (1984) quote:
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve WORKED in the private sector. They expect results.
The quote is the least believable thing in this move about ghost blowjobs