Non-quantifiable nonsense. "Programming" or "coding" are nonsense, just like amateurs without proper background designing bridges and electrical systems. What matters is SOFTWARE ENGINEERING and all that matters in engineering is MEETING THE SPEC! In this regard the programming world is terribly dysfunctional, far beyond any considerations of the proportions of women vs. men.
Unless you can come up with some sort of research that shows quantifiable, objective measurements such as: that when men AND woman collaborate on software engineering projects that the result is smaller, faster, more reliable solutions??? Then there might be something worth considering real about the hypothesis that there is something about one's GENDER that makes them able to come up with fundamentally different kinds of solutions, such that having a deficit of women is therefore predictive of non-optimal results.
However, considering that programming is ultimately just mathematics and logic, I strongly suspect that the exact opposite would be proven, if such terribly costly and time consuming objective measurements could actually be made--that highly mature programmers regardless of gender, converge to quite similar approaches to solving programming problems, when the ultimate criteria for correctness are SPECS. and the merit functions are purely based on code size and execution speed.
You can't even buy sockets for older RAMs anymore. I designed a DSP real-time controller platform based on DIMM168 sockets, and it's a good thing I bought two trays of them because now they are gone. Yet you can still buy new production 12AX7 and other vacuum tubes!
I just want my phone to call people. I just want my car to go. I want my refrigerator to be cold inside. I want my computer to communicate via email, www, viewing YouTube, online shopping other bullshit, and sometimes to actually compute shit. Why can't things just do what they are for instead of all sorts of other stuff?
I do not want a beer can refrigeration compartment on my phone, a TV in my car, an internet connection on my refrigerator, or my computer to have an engine, wheels, and able to take me to physical places vs. virtual places.
Memory busses already transfer more than one octet at a time, in fact, more than the 64-bit architecture size for typical implementations of x64. Having the effective address space for 64-bit words be 61 bits isn't really much of a problem. Who is going to have nearly 2.15GiGiB of memory (attached to one CPU) any time in the next century?
I program the TI C2000 series 32-bit microcontrollers, where the 16-bit word size can be a significant headache when trying to deal with 8-bit IO streams.
So I'd opt to keep the 8-bit memory addressing granularity, or else what are you going to do with all the 8, 16, and 32 bit data? Are you going to store 8-bit data with each byte in one 64-bit memory location? That's obviously silly. Without 8-bit addressability, to get an 8-bit stream to pack each memory cell, you have to do a bunch of algorithmic work (shifting each octet into place in a 64-bit register, making sure things line up where they belong, etc.), whereas with 8-bit addressability, this isn't so difficult.
Why can't we just give up on this stupid idea of going to Mars which has a low probability of success and even lower probability of actually being seen through, and instead just send more robots each of which has an excellent chance of success?
Reading is pattern recognition and mapping to innate experiential meaning primitives conditioned since birth. Writing is just transcription.
Programming is entirely different: decomposition, 1-N stages of abstract generalization, followed by iterative optimization of mapping to the thinking primitives of an alien life form.
All I know is that I've seen people of average intelligence who simply couldn't get the most basic programming concepts. Even if they could grasp programming primitives at some level, they were still miles from being able to know WHY to program. They simply couldn't see the connection between tasks they perform, and telling a computer to do it for them in an automated way.
It seems modern GUIs require us to manually perform many repetitive tasks with our computers. It's highly regressive.
My 10 yr old has had a few sparks of interest to try using the shell on her Linux box (she's only ever used Linux, except for occasional fiddling on my Surface Pro when we're out and about. She's nearly a Gimp expert, self-taught). I've given her some elementary shell command instruction and guidance, plus some tricks to play with hoping to inspire more curiosity. Now I'll be looking for reinforcing opportunities.
For ex. I had her install Rur-ple by following an instruction, that mostly spelled out what do in some places, but only described what to do in others (based on her prior experience having similar concepts spelled out and practiced a few times.)
In some cases she lurched past my perceptions of her understanding, and in others she stumbled where I thought she should get it.
My job, is to mostly listen and feed additional indirect help when asked. Also, to try very hard to understand what assumptions I take for granted that, absent in her mind, make certain concepts initially extremely non-obvious.
Young kids need to be stepped patiently through the most elementary concepts at times, and yet given room to play with concepts that they grasp and quickly sprout ideas from as to their interesting implications.
Most of all this requires a great deal of sincere kindness, empathy, and humility.
Most of what OOP is about is several levels too high in abstraction for young kinds to deal with. The linked articles explain it well enough.
A language like Python, while being OOP by design, doesn't force one to deal with OOP program design if they don't want. In Java this is not so.
We are only partly conscious of the decision making processes in our brains. That is why we think we have some sort of creative ability that AI can never match. This is most likely an error.
It is important to understand that EF is "influenced" by RC, but EF is not *controlled* by CR.
To make matters confusing (for RC), feedback path RC EF, then the thoughts of "I'm going to do this because of A and B" are actually *injected into our consciousness* by EF after the decision is already made.
Pertaining to how humans appear to intuitively focus on the most probably fruitful subset of chess combinations to think about, it should be clear that brain circuits SC --> EF, SC --> RC, and RC I don't have time to elaborate further. Perhaps this is sufficient for people to grasp the implications of this, as well as to devise experiments to subject this hypothesis to scientific scrutiny.
In summary, while our brains are quite remarkable, they are also severely limiting in that much of what goes on is totally opaque to us, such that we really have no objective way to be sure why we act the way we do, feel the way we do, etc., or what kind of different person we may become when faced with stresses and challenges beyond our present experience.
Alternatively, civilizations may tend to move inward rather than outward once they develop AI and evolve into virtual life forms inside computers. They may back themselves up at a variety of locations within their solar system. If they do still find the inspiration to travel to the stars they will not be doing so for conquest, but rather curiosity. Since they are no longer sentient meatloafs, they won't need so much mass of food, water, air, etc. to put into their starships. Thus, much smaller craft could suffice. Further, they can modulate their experience of the passing of time at will, so the duration of sub-relativistic journeys is little obstacle.
The Fermi Paradox may be just anthropomorphic projection.
I know things have gotten a bit out of hand with modern Intel CPUs, but 8086/8087 assembly was not hard to learn, and I quickly developed the ability to exploit the CISC instructions to implement very fast algorithms for things like graphics and variants of C std lib functions.
My next exposure to.asm was the PIC microcontroller. Hideous!
I quickly convinced myself to make AVR my "go to" uC. AVR assembler is a snap.
Then I got into the C2000 series TI DSP/controllers. Back to hideous! But not because of severe limitations, rather that it's implemented with obscure syntax, and the documentation is little help. I've only needed a few tidbits of it in my apps which are mostly C, but I wouldn't mind doing some serious DSP coding with it. Of course, Analog Devices SHARC is very nice for assembly programming!
Driving the speed limit should be probable cause for stopping someone, since they are most likely a drug dealer transporting drugs. Driving the speed limit should result in all of your cash being forfeited even if they don't find any drugs, since it must be drug money.
Laws prohibiting corporate stupidity that might result in their being rejected by consumers and winding up bust are not necessary if WE JUST LET THEM FAIL INSTEAD OF GIVING THEM BAILOUTS!!!
Caloric restriction fails because the body will eat it's own muscle tissue before drawing upon its fat reserves. Furthermore, the fat cells themselves modify insulin regulation. Starvation is neither fun nor healthy. The solution is ketogenic diets which provide satiation while tipping the metabolism toward fat burning without excessive gluconeogenesis.
No. Not all calories are burned. There is caloric intake, but there is also metabolic efficiency, which can vary with diet, and probably also with individual characteristics.
This is flat out wrong. The whole point of a regression is to determine the correlation in noisy data. We're not talking about random points here like paint thrown at a piece of graph paper, but rather a correlation between indep. variables vs. dep. variables which have a distribution. That in no way negates the possibility that the mean values of the samples can be tightly correlated to the indep. vars.
Now what might be the physical basis for high variance in basal metabolism vs. low variance? Well, there are about a zillion parameters in the human body with complex interactions, genetic & epigenetic dependencies, etc. that we barely understand! Yet we assume that everyone is the same?
I'll tell you where this unscientific belief comes from--the "soul" model of human consciousness. Most discussions of obesity have a heavy bias toward the view that people simply choose to be pigs. Evidence that this is false is steadily accumulating, as it is clear that simply turning a few knobs on your hormone regulation, or other parameters, could turn you into a completely different person--an obese compulsive eater, a drug addict, etc. Note that it is easier to perturb a well optimized body so as to degrade health and behavioral regulation vs. bringing one from non-optimum to optimum.
Slashdot Mirror
This sort of environment is going to repel a significant proportion of men as well.
Non-quantifiable nonsense. "Programming" or "coding" are nonsense, just like amateurs without proper background designing bridges and electrical systems. What matters is SOFTWARE ENGINEERING and all that matters in engineering is MEETING THE SPEC! In this regard the programming world is terribly dysfunctional, far beyond any considerations of the proportions of women vs. men.
Unless you can come up with some sort of research that shows quantifiable, objective measurements such as: that when men AND woman collaborate on software engineering projects that the result is smaller, faster, more reliable solutions??? Then there might be something worth considering real about the hypothesis that there is something about one's GENDER that makes them able to come up with fundamentally different kinds of solutions, such that having a deficit of women is therefore predictive of non-optimal results.
However, considering that programming is ultimately just mathematics and logic, I strongly suspect that the exact opposite would be proven, if such terribly costly and time consuming objective measurements could actually be made--that highly mature programmers regardless of gender, converge to quite similar approaches to solving programming problems, when the ultimate criteria for correctness are SPECS. and the merit functions are purely based on code size and execution speed.
You can't even buy sockets for older RAMs anymore. I designed a DSP real-time controller platform based on DIMM168 sockets, and it's a good thing I bought two trays of them because now they are gone. Yet you can still buy new production 12AX7 and other vacuum tubes!
I just want my phone to call people. I just want my car to go. I want my refrigerator to be cold inside. I want my computer to communicate via email, www, viewing YouTube, online shopping other bullshit, and sometimes to actually compute shit. Why can't things just do what they are for instead of all sorts of other stuff?
I do not want a beer can refrigeration compartment on my phone, a TV in my car, an internet connection on my refrigerator, or my computer to have an engine, wheels, and able to take me to physical places vs. virtual places.
Because the police are the GOVERNMENT duh! Everybody knows that the government only does things for the common good. And police would never lie.
Memory busses already transfer more than one octet at a time, in fact, more than the 64-bit architecture size for typical implementations of x64. Having the effective address space for 64-bit words be 61 bits isn't really much of a problem. Who is going to have nearly 2.15GiGiB of memory (attached to one CPU) any time in the next century?
I program the TI C2000 series 32-bit microcontrollers, where the 16-bit word size can be a significant headache when trying to deal with 8-bit IO streams.
So I'd opt to keep the 8-bit memory addressing granularity, or else what are you going to do with all the 8, 16, and 32 bit data? Are you going to store 8-bit data with each byte in one 64-bit memory location? That's obviously silly. Without 8-bit addressability, to get an 8-bit stream to pack each memory cell, you have to do a bunch of algorithmic work (shifting each octet into place in a 64-bit register, making sure things line up where they belong, etc.), whereas with 8-bit addressability, this isn't so difficult.
Why can't we just give up on this stupid idea of going to Mars which has a low probability of success and even lower probability of actually being seen through, and instead just send more robots each of which has an excellent chance of success?
Reading is pattern recognition and mapping to innate experiential meaning primitives conditioned since birth. Writing is just transcription.
Programming is entirely different: decomposition, 1-N stages of abstract generalization, followed by iterative optimization of mapping to the thinking primitives of an alien life form.
All I know is that I've seen people of average intelligence who simply couldn't get the most basic programming concepts. Even if they could grasp programming primitives at some level, they were still miles from being able to know WHY to program. They simply couldn't see the connection between tasks they perform, and telling a computer to do it for them in an automated way.
It seems modern GUIs require us to manually perform many repetitive tasks with our computers. It's highly regressive.
Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP: http://prog21.dadgum.com/93.ht...
OOP Isn't a Fundamental Particle of Computing: http://prog21.dadgum.com/156.h...
My 10 yr old has had a few sparks of interest to try using the shell on her Linux box (she's only ever used Linux, except for occasional fiddling on my Surface Pro when we're out and about. She's nearly a Gimp expert, self-taught). I've given her some elementary shell command instruction and guidance, plus some tricks to play with hoping to inspire more curiosity. Now I'll be looking for reinforcing opportunities.
For ex. I had her install Rur-ple by following an instruction, that mostly spelled out what do in some places, but only described what to do in others (based on her prior experience having similar concepts spelled out and practiced a few times.)
In some cases she lurched past my perceptions of her understanding, and in others she stumbled where I thought she should get it.
My job, is to mostly listen and feed additional indirect help when asked. Also, to try very hard to understand what assumptions I take for granted that, absent in her mind, make certain concepts initially extremely non-obvious.
Young kids need to be stepped patiently through the most elementary concepts at times, and yet given room to play with concepts that they grasp and quickly sprout ideas from as to their interesting implications.
Most of all this requires a great deal of sincere kindness, empathy, and humility.
Most of what OOP is about is several levels too high in abstraction for young kinds to deal with. The linked articles explain it well enough.
A language like Python, while being OOP by design, doesn't force one to deal with OOP program design if they don't want. In Java this is not so.
Oh good grief. One last time: "Also, feedback paths: RC comes from EF, and SC comes from EF." Para. 5 is: "Finally, feed-forward path SC goes to RC."
Fucking editor! Para. 4 should be: "Also, feedback paths: RC RC."
We are only partly conscious of the decision making processes in our brains. That is why we think we have some sort of creative ability that AI can never match. This is most likely an error.
Brain architecture hypothesis (vastly simplified subset model):
sub-conscious (SC) processes --> executive function (EF) center, and rational conscious (RC) processes --> EF.
Also, feedback paths: RC Finally, feed-forward path SC --> RC
It is important to understand that EF is "influenced" by RC, but EF is not *controlled* by CR.
To make matters confusing (for RC), feedback path RC EF, then the thoughts of "I'm going to do this because of A and B" are actually *injected into our consciousness* by EF after the decision is already made.
Pertaining to how humans appear to intuitively focus on the most probably fruitful subset of chess combinations to think about, it should be clear that brain circuits SC --> EF, SC --> RC, and RC I don't have time to elaborate further. Perhaps this is sufficient for people to grasp the implications of this, as well as to devise experiments to subject this hypothesis to scientific scrutiny.
In summary, while our brains are quite remarkable, they are also severely limiting in that much of what goes on is totally opaque to us, such that we really have no objective way to be sure why we act the way we do, feel the way we do, etc., or what kind of different person we may become when faced with stresses and challenges beyond our present experience.
Alternatively, civilizations may tend to move inward rather than outward once they develop AI and evolve into virtual life forms inside computers. They may back themselves up at a variety of locations within their solar system. If they do still find the inspiration to travel to the stars they will not be doing so for conquest, but rather curiosity. Since they are no longer sentient meatloafs, they won't need so much mass of food, water, air, etc. to put into their starships. Thus, much smaller craft could suffice. Further, they can modulate their experience of the passing of time at will, so the duration of sub-relativistic journeys is little obstacle.
The Fermi Paradox may be just anthropomorphic projection.
So the only thing aliens will be likely to hear is "Breaker one nine, breaker one nine, we've got a Smokey behind exit 12A..."
I know things have gotten a bit out of hand with modern Intel CPUs, but 8086/8087 assembly was not hard to learn, and I quickly developed the ability to exploit the CISC instructions to implement very fast algorithms for things like graphics and variants of C std lib functions.
My next exposure to .asm was the PIC microcontroller. Hideous!
I quickly convinced myself to make AVR my "go to" uC. AVR assembler is a snap.
Then I got into the C2000 series TI DSP/controllers. Back to hideous! But not because of severe limitations, rather that it's implemented with obscure syntax, and the documentation is little help. I've only needed a few tidbits of it in my apps which are mostly C, but I wouldn't mind doing some serious DSP coding with it. Of course, Analog Devices SHARC is very nice for assembly programming!
I was looking to see if anyone would mention J. Now that's obscure!
Driving the speed limit should be probable cause for stopping someone, since they are most likely a drug dealer transporting drugs. Driving the speed limit should result in all of your cash being forfeited even if they don't find any drugs, since it must be drug money.
Laws prohibiting corporate stupidity that might result in their being rejected by consumers and winding up bust are not necessary if WE JUST LET THEM FAIL INSTEAD OF GIVING THEM BAILOUTS!!!
I feel better now.
It may very well be impossibly complex. But imperfect scientific understanding is still infinitely better than ignorance, assumptions, and beliefs.
Caloric restriction fails because the body will eat it's own muscle tissue before drawing upon its fat reserves. Furthermore, the fat cells themselves modify insulin regulation. Starvation is neither fun nor healthy. The solution is ketogenic diets which provide satiation while tipping the metabolism toward fat burning without excessive gluconeogenesis.
No. Not all calories are burned. There is caloric intake, but there is also metabolic efficiency, which can vary with diet, and probably also with individual characteristics.
This is flat out wrong. The whole point of a regression is to determine the correlation in noisy data. We're not talking about random points here like paint thrown at a piece of graph paper, but rather a correlation between indep. variables vs. dep. variables which have a distribution. That in no way negates the possibility that the mean values of the samples can be tightly correlated to the indep. vars.
Now what might be the physical basis for high variance in basal metabolism vs. low variance? Well, there are about a zillion parameters in the human body with complex interactions, genetic & epigenetic dependencies, etc. that we barely understand! Yet we assume that everyone is the same?
I'll tell you where this unscientific belief comes from--the "soul" model of human consciousness. Most discussions of obesity have a heavy bias toward the view that people simply choose to be pigs. Evidence that this is false is steadily accumulating, as it is clear that simply turning a few knobs on your hormone regulation, or other parameters, could turn you into a completely different person--an obese compulsive eater, a drug addict, etc. Note that it is easier to perturb a well optimized body so as to degrade health and behavioral regulation vs. bringing one from non-optimum to optimum.
That kind of assertion really begs for justification. Is there evidence supporting that basal energy burn doesn't vary much?
What about drivers that require $100000 worth of test equipment and an electrical engineer to test?
You're missing the point, which is that some of the wackos might not be wackos after all. Note that I said *some*, which is not equivalent to all.