Posts by withQuietEyes 53 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2022
My dad likes his gadgets, and I'm at my parents' helping them set up the new house they just moved into. Guess who's been fixing everything from soundbars to TV setups to printers since arriving.
(With the dog forever attempting to help by drooling on the technology in question.)
I thought, when his transphobic nonsense went down on Tumblr (and I found out he was the CEO of fucking WORDPRESS), that it was a Musk-like situation: some intelligent subordinate had redirected his more loony instincts towards Tumblr, the useless moneysink (/affectionate) that they'd somehow ended up with, in order to keep him from making trouble in the actual important shit in the company. Sure, he'd piss off Tumblr instantly, but that's a bit like pissing off the three specific sparrows who live in your favorite park bench. Pissing off the entire WP Engine userbase seems a very different affair.
This prompted me to go wandering around my apartment to actually find my smoke alarm. It is outside of my delightfully separate kitchen, over the door to the corridor, which in fairness is still within three meters of the door (oldish build, so the kitchen is separate but also a little galley thing)
In fairness, I wouldn't expect false positives to be as big an issue for smoke alarms as for cars or the like. 1. they are SO loud that it's hard to ignore them, and 2. Usually when the false positives happen, you are physically standing over a pan of smoking oil and can identify the source. If it starts blaring and I don't already know exactly where the smoke is coming from, I know to be, well, alarmed.
As one of the young ones - you need to accept that open source doesn't attract geniuses. They'll use it, but there are other new and interesting things for them to work on. Those of us who are interested in open source are, well, average. A bit slow, not great at getting engaged in things without guidance or motivators or *someone who'll talk us through it*. If you keep trying to motivate young geniuses to work on open source, you'll get nowhere. They're off making hundreds of thousands of dollars in cutting-edge computing and AI research. Focus on teaching the B- students why and how to contribute.
And yes, that means answering a lot of dumb questions. Or accepting that open source is going to have a much smaller base of maintainers in the future.
I mean yeah, that sounds like exactly the reason why nobody i know (even those of us who like and use open-source) want to join old or important open-source projects. The attitude of everyone in them is "You young kids don't know how to write Real Code! You need to be whipped into shape!" ... and then fail to provide any whipping. Or explanations. People with the will and ability to sit down and independently read through thousands of lines of code are few and far between, and they're mostly busy doing things that make a lot more money than open-source. The rest of us do actually need our hands held if you want us to become useful.
This is it, yeah. I tried to get into understanding open source (nothing fancy; trying to understand how Arch worked, attempting to read source code for open-source programs I was using) and hit that wall of sarcasm pretty much immediately. I don't think I even got to the point of asking my own questions! I found questions other people had asked and got scared off by the replies they were getting. I can't speak for others, but personally I'm definitely more sensitive than the average programmer, and being scolded for asking a question scared me off trying all that hard at the time.
I mean, I know a fair number of women whose exes would have felt entitled to do this sort of thing and just couldn´t be bothered/wouldn't have known how to. There's a level of entitlement that some men will have towards women they're attracted to; they treat it almost as a crime when they get turned down or broken up with. It's a more common mindset than I think any of us like to think about.
I found and watched the reporting on this from one of the big radio/tv groups here, and only about half of currently used cars have DAB+ radio. In a country where the radio is regularly used to warn about traffic hazards, jams, closed tunnels.
This'll go well.
Plus there's a 10% of the population who don't use it yet, especially for local stations, and that's an awful lot of people to shove off their favorite channels.
Can I join your class? I started on Linux in university and I'm now very comfortable messing around with software and operating systems, but I never quite got past the "electronics are scary and also for boys" phase, and now I don't really know where to start. (And I make miniatures, so I may be an adult but I'd still want to set up a dollhouse! It's actually what got me to start at least trying, now; I managed a very simple circuit with two LEDs and one of those giant batteries, but I don't know how to actually install it or have it turn on and off)
I bought the Pavilion when I started a computer science degree at uni, so excited for my first Real Laptop (had a Chromebook before that because it was cheap and a pretty color). It broke down on me three times that first year, and was hot and making screaming fan noises all the rest of the time. Gave up on it the next year, when my dad found a half-price Thinkpad that I've been using ever since. Only problem I've ever had with my Thinkpad was my own stupid fault. (I busted up the charging port somehow).
Base KDE is incredibly ugly, but I keep coming back to it because I can customize it to hell and back from the actual settings, rather than having to do it through config files, and I'm lazy like that. (Although lately it's been crashing on me a lot, so it might be time to look at other ideas.)
I don't know about the specific process Workday uses, but I've encountered a few where the DOB was a required field - you couldn't even submit your application otherwise. And for photos, I was told by every adult I know (Switzerland) to put one on my resume, so it might have been something along those lines. (I like the Canadian style way better - you're not even allowed to have one!)
In fairness, aren't basically all application portals terrible? I've yet to encounter one that didn't make me seriously reconsider how badly I wanted to make that application. (And I've never heard back from a single one, which, while a standard part of the application process, is fucking frustrating.)
I had the same reaction - I'm more surprised that there aren't more (entirely justified) lawsuits against this kind of AI nonsense. They work exactly as designed: make the same selections as the assholes whose decisions you fed it. Perpetuate our biases, but give us the shield of objectivity because "a machine made that decision, so any discrimination is the machine's fault!"
(Though I do wonder if the lawsuit would make more sense if a few more people banded together, I think this guy on his own might have trouble winning.)
In general, the letter on your passport/driver's license is meant to serve as identifying information - like your eye color, or your height. In which case, preferred gender identity is exactly what you'd want on your ID.
> If security are doing a body cavity search
yep! trans people would also prefer to have searches performed by people of the appropriate gender. Which won't happen if their IDs have their birth sex on them instead of their gender.
They're completely insane! And the people making them aren't thinking like programmers, so nothing's ever documented, and it seems like they just slap features together so they can sell their system as "API-capable" or whatever buzzwords they think will sell, without checking if they're actually usable in any coherent way. The amount of time I spent trying to just get a single, basic GET to run and display...
Just on a basic level, the Amazon search results are so wildly varied that I can't imagine anyone trying to shop via voice. Then again, the only people I know who use an Alexa are my grandparents, and they don't shop online at all!
My mother and grandmother use voice things to set kitchen timers, my grandparents have a single command they use to play a particular news report that they like (basically to hit play on a podcast), and my dad occasionally uses his to look up little history factoids. That's about it.
Encountered the same thing with my grandparents, although I think it was a lot longer than a month ago. They were excited about the tech, so I was showing them stuff they can theoretically do with one (my uncle bought it for them) and suggested they try asking it to play music. It did, but it started off with a big long advertisement to tell them to buy some paid music service. If the user experience is that annoying, why would anyone bother?
In every setting where I've used collaborative editing, it's just a matter of getting multiple people to contribute to one document. There's always a final owner who handles the last layer of polish before it goes out, but having collaborative tools (especially in school, where our quality standards were a bit lower) does make it a lot easier to get a report together. Formatting is obviously an issue, but it's the kind of issue that can be fixed reasonably quickly relative to the research/analysis that goes into the body of the paper.
(And again in a school environment: it helps a lot to be able to see whether you're working with the kind of classmate who pastes shit in from Wikipedia. Learned that lesson pretty quick.)
I've been using Simplenote recently and I've found it very useful, although I don't have much to compare to (I have my phone with me everywhere and don't take a lot of notes, so I was just using Google Keep before). It doesn't have much in terms of features, but it does what it says and it does it very well
I ran dual boot for a while when I worked for a company that didn't want to shell out for a new laptop (that's game companies for you I guess?) and I remember this was the one problem I never managed to fix. No matter what I did, my clock in Windows was always out of whack when I signed back in. Is this why, you think?
The thing is that one of the factors contributing to women "choosing" underpaid professions, or to leave work, often do so because of cultural forces. It's still the "norm" for the mother to take time off work, to be the first number on the kids' emergency sheet, to take time off to care for aging relatives (less so in Western countries, but still) and to be the one to stop working if that becomes feasible or necessary. Even when it's a matter of different job choices, those choices are often being dictated by the force of gender roles. (Hence the focus on flexible work schedules, and paid time off - so women don't have to choose between quitting and being seen as failures as mothers.)
1. In fairness, boys do that too. A lot.
2. Think of gender as a spectrum with big piles at either end, like an inverted bell curve - I find it's an easier way to conceptualize things. New pronouns aren't new genders, just new experiments in labelling sections of the curve.
The interesting thing with that is that there's a difference between "girls just inherently aren't interested in boy things!" (which is rampant in the comments on here) and "girls want to be like other girls, so they do things they see other girls doing" (which has been both my observation and experience.) It's a self-reinforcing cycle; it's too scary to get into a field dominated by men, so a lot of girls leave, so it's even more dominated by men... I love tech, I love FOSS, I love software development; but I'd have been much less scared of getting into it if I hadn't felt so alone. Which is why getting more representation is important!
I suspect (/hope) that if you repeated the experiment today, with parents who grew up with a more relaxed environment, you would get very different results. My parents would have been very happy for me to take shop classes, and had they existed at my school, I probably would have. My grandmother, on the other hand (a parent of high schoolers in the 80s) would have pitched an absolute shit fit if a son of hers tried to take sewing or cooking classes. Or worse, a daughter in a "boy's class". I would definitely put the self-sorting down to parental influence.
(also, not to make you feel old: I had to look up what "drafting" meant in this context, because I've only very rarely heard of it.)
Scratch is really good for getting kids to start on the concepts, especially if you're starting in third or fourth grade, when reading is probably not yet instinctive for kids. It's largely visual, which is also good for teaching the metaphors that make it easier to grasp programming. (And also, are we using different grading systems? Long division is more of a sixth grade thing in my hazy memories of school days)
If you're in the US, the abandonment of shop and home ec classes was a consequence of standardised testing and Leave No Child Behind policies! I can't find the article now, but there was a very interesting history of the American school system tying it to the current dearth of plumbers, electricians and other tradespeople.
We decided that because men make better lumberjacks, they must also be better at fixing the machinery, and made it so over the centuries. Historically, men take riskier jobs because birth control is hard and women were pregnant more often. Just because something has been baked into the structure of societies does not mean that it is correct. Practical medicine and computing were women's jobs before they were men's, remember.
Real quick: I'm one of the girls of this generation. While it is absolutely important to rethink the way we restrict children to gender roles, I'd also like to consider why we think that "girly interests" are so completely incompatible with getting into STEM, or sports, or dinosaurs for that matter. I know that it's important to get more girls into STEM (I am one!), I need to push back on the idea that you do that by rejecting all traces of "girly shit", because that also leads to people acting like girly things are inferior. (See, in your own message: "silly girl toys", and treating toy cars as an inherently "better" and more valuable interest than girly dolls.)
I don't know how to phrase this coherently, and I do think the way you raised your daughter is brilliant and you should be very proud - I just want to highlight that masculinity is not inherently better, or more compatible with STEM fields.
Signed,
My reason for switching to Linux was to make my whole desktop purple.
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