With drivers that actually work, for everything. If I billed myself my normal hourly rate for what it's taken to get linux drivers working for a lot of my machines I'm at the cost of a Mac anyway.
Who didn't see this coming? Did people honestly think their business plan was to hire random people to drive their own cars? Right now that's the cheapest way to collect data. A year ago they went in and poached Carnegie Mellon's Robotics department (Those guys behind the Red Humvees in the DARPA autonomous vehicle project).
Taking vacation in Florida I can't wait for a self driving future over the current crop of aging drivers. Grandma doesn't need to own, maintain or anything a car. She just uses the Amazon Echo-ish device to order a car to take her to the store and home.
Look at the polls of him vs Clinton in a theoretical general. He most certainly does.
That said, there is a lot more in play if Trump wins.
For example the GOP already hates him, meaning they might actually have to create a new party to leave him behind (and run in 2020). Congress might actually work together against the president, something that certainly won't happen with Clinton.
I would take 4 years of Trump over 8 years of Clinton. Additionally if you look past what he says to get his core voters he doesn't have half bad ideas. Protectionism is what helped build US's industry. An import Tax from China would be an entertaining shit show but might cause companies to actually spring up in the void.
Or you can vote Clinton and get more of the same. Who knows what she'll believe in 6 months once Bernie stops pulling her left.
IF it comes down to a Clinton/Trump general I'm voting Trump. Short of them reforming the vote laws so we stop doing 'first past the post' and a legitimate 3rd candidate showing up.
I don't like Trump. But I loathe Clinton. Her family has continually shown that they think they're above the law. The "Clinton Foundation" is little more than a slush fund. 6 out of her top 10 contributors are banks she voted to bail out while in the Senate.
And is "Slick Willie" the guy you really want as First Gentleman? The guy that settled a rape case out of court and then was prohibited from practicing law for 5 years in Arkansas? With the Clintons in a political office I know exactly what I'm getting and because of that I would vote for Inanimate Carbon Rod over her.
I will pay for a modern, fast, memory efficient ad blocking browser. It literally needs to have literally 2 features on top of "rendering shit correctly". Ad blocking. Tabs. While I'm not the sharpest tool in the toolshed Might I suggest ad blocking not be written in Javascript. Make it part of core functionality.
I have reached a point in my life where not only have I stopped pirating expensive stuff but am tired of dealing with "Free" stuff that is near useless. My time is how do you say it... "valuable" and dealing with all of the feature bloat that has crept into every browser on the market is wasting it. And no, not as a 'service' or subscription.
I hand you money. You hand me a browser that works like I want it. And if you come up with a new browser with Features+1 and I want Features+1 I will pay for that too. I don't need an SSH client. Or 'apps' that let me play Angry Fruit Jeweled. And I really don't want something written in C that interprets something in XML to render something through Javascript to display HTML5.
Multimedia aside, the 2016 web shouldn't feel slower on my 25Mbit connection with an 4 core i7 than I remember it being on my.056Mbit connection and my single core 68k. Hell you could host an IRC server with hundreds of thousands of users with as much CPU as it takes to stay up on 5-6 Facebook 'discussion' open in separate tabs.
Heck I do a good 80% of my Python development through a Jupyter Notebook hosted on one of the other machines in my house. I could get by just fine with a browser and ssh client.
Just because a company has been around for more than 10 years doesn't mean they aren't a 'tech' company.
Do people honestly think big corporations like Walmart, Caterpillar, GM, etc are all still banging rocks together? I would wager any 3 of those are as 'tech' if not more than any company in the SF area.
I think you overestimate how much the average government worker has to do. It's not like the person that did replied to these e-mails was taken off off solving the US debt crisis to answer them.
If anything they were probably happy to have something to do.
You and I seem to be in the minority on Slashdot. I'm not a CS major. I'm not a computer or software engineer. I'm a Mechanical engineer. Most people in my profession consider coding up there with alchemy and voodoo. I just see it as a tool to get a job done on par with a good hammer or wrench set.
I'm sure some CS guys would look at my code and say I did something wrong on improper, but at the end of the day if 20 minutes of code saved me 10 hours of messing around in Excel I count it as a win.
90% of the coding I do is just pattern recognition and figuring out how to do it in a loop. Freshmen year we were supposed to write our own linear regression tool. The teacher gave us bonus points if we extended it to x^3 and x^4, right off the bat I noticed the 'pattern' of going from x^2, x^3, x^4 and just made it x^n and left it. I have no problem calling myself lazy. I hate doing things twice, I'd rather find the pattern and be done with it. I've been converting a bunch of Matlab code to Jupyter Notebooks. After the first one I decided copy and pasting sucked and was time consuming, so ended up banging this script out in a hackathon. It's not perfect but it's saved me probably 3x as much time as it took to write.
I find it funny that all these guys (Slashdotters) that use coding to do their job can't see how coding can be used to do any other job. Every single article that talks about teaching kids coding has the exact same comments on how kids don't need to know how to code since they might not be interested in CS.
The one and only time I ever learned assembly was making a PID controller for 68k and learned enough that I never, ever want to do assembly ever again. Same with C. I do most of my 'coding' these days in Simulink which is exactly what most Slashdotters say will never work. A simple drag and drop way to make code.
The German companies do it a bit different than American companies, they pool resources for the common R&D good. It's why they had stuff like CAN bus while Ford and GM were all developing their own unique busses.
I had a BMW and Benz rental in 2012 that had the auto stop feature that is just now starting to show up in American cars. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
If there is any group of car companies that is going to give you autonomous driving with manual over ride it's going to be the German ones. German drivers also have a different mentality towards driving. Driving falls into two categories, either you have to do it and you can automate it or you want to do it and you don't want to automate it. I would say of my driving there's a good 80/20 split. 80% of the time I'd like the car to just get me somewhere but 20% of the time I do want an autobahn experience.
Just because you don't think BMW hasn't done any research into self driving cars doesn't mean they haven't. It is an incredibly long process and Germans have had an ISO standard for testing it since 2011 as well. The TÜV doesn't mess around when it comes to safety or testing and I trust anything they verify much more than the DOT.
I was always the kid that never stopped asking 'why', 'because' was never a valid excuse (and still isn't). Teachers that showed me how ___ could be used to do what I wanted to do were far more effective than telling me what ____ could do for me.
If you ask a classroom of 30 students what they want to do you're going to get 30 different answers. They key to teaching them advanced concepts it telling them how advanced concepts can help them achieve those goals.
You like photography? Why not make a SQLAlchemy database for your images. Don't like that? Why not use OpenCV to automatically categorize your photos. I *hate* sorting photos. I just want to dump them to disk and move on. Now that I have 10 month old I certainly have less time to mess around with stuff, so I'm writing a script to do facial recognition, pull out the photos. The goal is to 'Tinderfy' the sorting process for my wife, then use a neural net to figure out what faces she finds good and then automatically e-mail them out to family.
I get to take photos without dealing with the boring part. My wife gets to look at photos without dealing with the boring part. My family gets to see photos daily without human input on our end.
And if a middle schooler asks 'why' something like neural networks work, I'll point them to algebra and if they ask why that work's I'll point them to linear algebra and if they ask how that works on computers I can point them to BLAS. But a kid that just wants to sort photos just needs to use the end tool.
Based on my female friends in engineering's interests they were attracted to engineering because they were the girls that like cars and the current 'message' about what engineering is seems to involve cars and mechanical contraptions. But if my daughter is more interested in selfies and facebook status updates then I'll show her Facebook's API and cron jobs. She can spend 30 minutes a week setting up posts for the week and not 30 minutes an hour.
If you don't mind me asking what did you end up getting interested in after D&D and how have you used those basics of programming to help with that?
You don't need to teach kids CS to get them into CS. You need to teach them programming and give them practical applications to how they can use it to do what they are interested in
Someone interested in baking doesn't need to know how to make a good bubble sort. They should be able to make a basic PID controller and a ramp-soak controller. Brand new oven 'controls' are an embarrassment to the field of controls. But I would bet that no one sat down someone interested in baking and explained to them how programming could help solve problems they're having.
Are all people going to learn to code? No, but if they know that coding can help them solve their problems it's going to be a lot better carrot to learn to program than hearing "Because".
You're making the assumption that people need to learn to do all of that.
Most people would be good knowing 1-3 and spending 4-11 learning how to apply it to solve their problems. Someone interested in baking doesn't need to know everything else, they need to learn how coding can help solve their baking problems.
The problem is that it's not being taught with practical applications to most people.
How many people interested in cooking, baking, or wood shop know what coding can do for them?
I have yet to see a high school or voctech program that teaches practical uses to coding.
To a controls engineer the modern home kitchen is an embarrassment of control systems. Steam engine centrifugal governors had better control than an over bought in 2016. It has zero disturbance rejection (opening the oven door). And has one setting. I've got all the items and am going to make my own ramp/soak controller so that I can have perfectly consistent baked goods.
Measuring by hand still? I know some refrigerators have a 'measure x amount' but it's only on the high end ones. I should have a counter top device that can measure out with perfect accuracy any liquid.
Doing wood working projects is painfully slow because it's measure, cut, measure cut... I stepper motor, arduino and you can tell it how many boards and of what length you need and all you need to do is pull the circular saw down when the green light tells you it's ready. With better precision than I could ever do in a reasonable amount of time.
I could teach a middle schooler to do anything I've mentioned in a semester and for under $50 but kids aren't taught the practical applications to coding. It's all "Learn to do a for loop" without explaining the physical equivalent of a for loop.
Coding isn't a job. It's a skill. Hearing that kids don't need to learn to code because some don't have a 'knack' for it is like hearing that most people don't need to learn to type because there isn't a real need for some professions to learn to type.
Unless you plan on dying sometime soon, it will. It isn't? 12 years ago self driving cars were a pipe dream. Now they're here.
Yes the technology is getting better but that's not remotely the same thing as letting non-surgeons cut people.
The number of luddites on Slashdot amazes me for a side for nerds. Pick and place machines are populating PCBs faster and with better accuracy than any human ever could. They've gotten to the point where they're using feed forward non-linear control to correct for vibrations in the floor. With a decent accelerometer a robotic surgeon could perform surgery on a boat in the middle of a hurricane and have every roll of the ship perfectly compensated for.
Wow, smart people training to be surgeons get proficient at basic surgery quickly. How astonishing....
People training to be doctors are the only ones that are in the right place to be able to play with these.
The good thing about decoupling the human from the instrument is that you can dial in your coarseness. Full scale on a joystick can be 0-1M or 0-1um depending on how it's configured. However for 99% of surgeries you're going to have semi-automated control with visual recognition doing the hard work and for the 1% it's going to be someone specifically trained into doing what ever surgery you need to have done. Having someone that can do a dozen different surgeries makes them a master of none.
I'll take a highschool student vocationally trained in how to do an ACL surgery with an Xbox 360 controller over someone that had to spend 40 years of their life just to operate out on their own. Surgery, orthopedics, in general is one of the oddest specializations when it comes to medicine. They only accept the absolute best and in the end they're little more than butchers and woodworkers. The entire process is asinine since surgeons will spend thousands of hours learning and training for something they will never, ever do. The current med school and residency setup was great when you had one doctor in town and one surgeon in the area.
Even now I'd take Watson's opinion of a doctor in their 40s. There are too many studies done every day for any one doctor to keep up on all of the evidence based medicine.
And don't worry, robotic surgeons and autonomous vehicles aren't going to be forced onto anyone. But when you go to buy health or car insurance you're going to have the option of picking the robot that does it with 0.001% accuracy 24/7 at all hours of the night or with the human that may be operating under the influence, tired, overworked, depressed or with a slight hand tremor.
Based on the comments on multiple 'automation' articles that have come out in recent times I wonder how many Slashdotters would have been defending horse and buggy whip manufacturers saying that a mechanical device could *never* replace humanities beast of burden for the last millennia.
Onli if that someone that hasn't spent the last 10 years continuing education such they have "faith that if IBM were to fire me tomorrow, I'd be able to find a job in the market reasonably quickly based on my skills, capabilities, experience, and reputation."
Even in tech and engineering jobs quite a few workers always learned the bare minimum because "learning sucks". They learned enough to pass the test in high school. They learned just enough to get their degree. And once they got a job they said "Wheee, I don't ever have to learn again" and somehow thought that they would work the next 45 years doing the exact same thing.
If you are set to retire in 2016 it means you entered the job force in ~1970. C wasn't invented yet. Python wasn't invented yet. There was no such "personal computer" let alone the internet as it exists today. I've found that most people learn the bare minimum to keep their jobs but are never actually proactive in continuing education. "Learning" isn't just something you do until you're 20 and stop for life.
If you have 1000 guys with masters degrees in engineering that only know how to draft by hand and drop them into a 2016 work environment with CAD you end job shortage because the skills they have are no longer useful or in demand. However if you were to ask them why they were getting laid off they would insist they are "Highly skilled" workers and that it's the H1B's stealing their joerbs.
When I was a fresh faced grad I was sympathetic to everyone being replaced. I was terrified that I was going to be replaced by a H1B a year or two into my job. Now a decade out I'm sympathetic to all of those being replaced's coworkers. The ones that have had to work with these guys for the last decade while trying to do more with less dealing with co-workers that refused to learn anything new. Most of these guys are the 21st century equivalent of switch board operators, punch card operators, and human computers. Corporate dead weight that for various reasons were just easier to keep on board than get rid of.
I wish I got a bonus for every time I heard "Nah, I already know ${old lang}. Sure it takes me 5x longer than you to do something in ${lang}, but I don't want to learn something new". If you aren't going into work every single day trying to replace or automate yourself, someone else is. Eventually that is going to catch up to you. It's also something that is not unique to IT. Engineering, medicine, farming, are all progressing with society. If you're someone that insists on doing something the 'old' way, society is ready to leave you behind. The fact that it doesn't take 50% of us out in the field doing manual labor just to eat sort of illustrates that.
And you see both sides of it constantly on Slashdot. In one thread you have a bunch of people wondering why they're being replaced by cheaper, faster labor and in others you have old timers insisting that 4th graders don't need to know Python because they couldn't possibly grasp O(n) problems or do a bubble sort correctly.
What most of these IT guys don't realize is what took a 1990 BS, a 1980s Masters or 1970s PhD to do is now a skilled trade. You can give a highschool student hands on training akin to how electrician and plumbing apprenticeships and have them doing the same work for cheaper, faster and better. The problem in America is we sort of forgot about trades, shoved everyone into college so they're backfilling those positions with Visas. If I was starting a new company I would be hiring 1 PhD. 1 MS, 1 BS and a handful of trainable, intelligent voctech high school students over 20 bachelor degrees, they cost way too much.
I'm early into my career but have already accepted that my eventual replacement hasn't learned to wipe his or her own ass yet. It also means I have a good head start on preparing for the job of 2060. OR, I could keep my mouth shut, not update my resume and maintain my current work for the next 10-15 years and then sit around and bitch that it's somehow someone else's fault that I'm no longer employable.
Slashdot Mirror
OSX is BSD with a pretty face.
With drivers that actually work, for everything. If I billed myself my normal hourly rate for what it's taken to get linux drivers working for a lot of my machines I'm at the cost of a Mac anyway.
powered by Google's self driving software.
Powered by their own software:
http://www.theverge.com/transp...
http://www.wsj.com/articles/is...
Who didn't see this coming? Did people honestly think their business plan was to hire random people to drive their own cars? Right now that's the cheapest way to collect data. A year ago they went in and poached Carnegie Mellon's Robotics department (Those guys behind the Red Humvees in the DARPA autonomous vehicle project).
Taking vacation in Florida I can't wait for a self driving future over the current crop of aging drivers. Grandma doesn't need to own, maintain or anything a car. She just uses the Amazon Echo-ish device to order a car to take her to the store and home.
Look at the polls of him vs Clinton in a theoretical general. He most certainly does.
That said, there is a lot more in play if Trump wins.
For example the GOP already hates him, meaning they might actually have to create a new party to leave him behind (and run in 2020). Congress might actually work together against the president, something that certainly won't happen with Clinton.
I would take 4 years of Trump over 8 years of Clinton. Additionally if you look past what he says to get his core voters he doesn't have half bad ideas. Protectionism is what helped build US's industry. An import Tax from China would be an entertaining shit show but might cause companies to actually spring up in the void.
Or you can vote Clinton and get more of the same. Who knows what she'll believe in 6 months once Bernie stops pulling her left.
Yes, and that says more about how Evil I find the Clintons than anything else.
It's my vote, I get to do with it what I want.
Well. Yes.
IF it comes down to a Clinton/Trump general I'm voting Trump. Short of them reforming the vote laws so we stop doing 'first past the post' and a legitimate 3rd candidate showing up.
I don't like Trump. But I loathe Clinton. Her family has continually shown that they think they're above the law. The "Clinton Foundation" is little more than a slush fund. 6 out of her top 10 contributors are banks she voted to bail out while in the Senate.
And is "Slick Willie" the guy you really want as First Gentleman? The guy that settled a rape case out of court and then was prohibited from practicing law for 5 years in Arkansas? With the Clintons in a political office I know exactly what I'm getting and because of that I would vote for Inanimate Carbon Rod over her.
"Hackers" are what brought to light the fact that Clinton had a private e-mail server.
Are you saying that we would have been better off knowing she thought she was above the law?
Given that they went in and poached Carnegie Mellon's entire robotics department, that's exactly what they're doing.
Finally, someone sees the long game. Uber is just in data collection mode right now.
Doesn't look like they support FreeBSD yet. But I'll keep an eye on it.
I will pay for a modern, fast, memory efficient ad blocking browser. It literally needs to have literally 2 features on top of "rendering shit correctly". Ad blocking. Tabs. While I'm not the sharpest tool in the toolshed Might I suggest ad blocking not be written in Javascript. Make it part of core functionality.
I have reached a point in my life where not only have I stopped pirating expensive stuff but am tired of dealing with "Free" stuff that is near useless. My time is how do you say it... "valuable" and dealing with all of the feature bloat that has crept into every browser on the market is wasting it. And no, not as a 'service' or subscription.
I hand you money. You hand me a browser that works like I want it. And if you come up with a new browser with Features+1 and I want Features+1 I will pay for that too. I don't need an SSH client. Or 'apps' that let me play Angry Fruit Jeweled. And I really don't want something written in C that interprets something in XML to render something through Javascript to display HTML5.
Multimedia aside, the 2016 web shouldn't feel slower on my 25Mbit connection with an 4 core i7 than I remember it being on my .056Mbit connection and my single core 68k. Hell you could host an IRC server with hundreds of thousands of users with as much CPU as it takes to stay up on 5-6 Facebook 'discussion' open in separate tabs.
(That goes for a 2016 E-mail client as well).
Heck I do a good 80% of my Python development through a Jupyter Notebook hosted on one of the other machines in my house. I could get by just fine with a browser and ssh client.
Just because a company has been around for more than 10 years doesn't mean they aren't a 'tech' company.
Do people honestly think big corporations like Walmart, Caterpillar, GM, etc are all still banging rocks together? I would wager any 3 of those are as 'tech' if not more than any company in the SF area.
Because of licensing I can see them going with a *BSD first.
I think you overestimate how much the average government worker has to do. It's not like the person that did replied to these e-mails was taken off off solving the US debt crisis to answer them.
If anything they were probably happy to have something to do.
You and I seem to be in the minority on Slashdot. I'm not a CS major. I'm not a computer or software engineer. I'm a Mechanical engineer. Most people in my profession consider coding up there with alchemy and voodoo. I just see it as a tool to get a job done on par with a good hammer or wrench set.
I'm sure some CS guys would look at my code and say I did something wrong on improper, but at the end of the day if 20 minutes of code saved me 10 hours of messing around in Excel I count it as a win.
90% of the coding I do is just pattern recognition and figuring out how to do it in a loop. Freshmen year we were supposed to write our own linear regression tool. The teacher gave us bonus points if we extended it to x^3 and x^4, right off the bat I noticed the 'pattern' of going from x^2, x^3, x^4 and just made it x^n and left it. I have no problem calling myself lazy. I hate doing things twice, I'd rather find the pattern and be done with it. I've been converting a bunch of Matlab code to Jupyter Notebooks. After the first one I decided copy and pasting sucked and was time consuming, so ended up banging this script out in a hackathon. It's not perfect but it's saved me probably 3x as much time as it took to write.
I find it funny that all these guys (Slashdotters) that use coding to do their job can't see how coding can be used to do any other job. Every single article that talks about teaching kids coding has the exact same comments on how kids don't need to know how to code since they might not be interested in CS.
The one and only time I ever learned assembly was making a PID controller for 68k and learned enough that I never, ever want to do assembly ever again. Same with C. I do most of my 'coding' these days in Simulink which is exactly what most Slashdotters say will never work. A simple drag and drop way to make code.
The German companies do it a bit different than American companies, they pool resources for the common R&D good. It's why they had stuff like CAN bus while Ford and GM were all developing their own unique busses.
BMW, VW and Benz all have a lot of research into this. I sat in on a grad seminar given by VW engineers back in 2010 on lane change obstacle avoidance. They certainly have the IP already, even if they aren't announcing it state side. They even have ISO standards for how to test obstacle avoidance: ISO 3888-2:2011 defines the dimensions of the test track for a closed-loop, severe lane-change manoeuvre test for subjectively determining the obstacle avoidance performance of a vehicle, one specific part of vehicle dynamics and road-holding ability. It is applicable to passenger cars as defined in ISO 3833 and light commercial vehicles up to a gross vehicle mass of 3,5 t.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I had a BMW and Benz rental in 2012 that had the auto stop feature that is just now starting to show up in American cars. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...
If there is any group of car companies that is going to give you autonomous driving with manual over ride it's going to be the German ones. German drivers also have a different mentality towards driving. Driving falls into two categories, either you have to do it and you can automate it or you want to do it and you don't want to automate it. I would say of my driving there's a good 80/20 split. 80% of the time I'd like the car to just get me somewhere but 20% of the time I do want an autobahn experience.
Just because you don't think BMW hasn't done any research into self driving cars doesn't mean they haven't. It is an incredibly long process and Germans have had an ISO standard for testing it since 2011 as well. The TÜV doesn't mess around when it comes to safety or testing and I trust anything they verify much more than the DOT.
If you code on a table the surgeon is going to look at you and shrug. That's not what surgeons train for.
For the want of mod points.
I was always the kid that never stopped asking 'why', 'because' was never a valid excuse (and still isn't). Teachers that showed me how ___ could be used to do what I wanted to do were far more effective than telling me what ____ could do for me.
If you ask a classroom of 30 students what they want to do you're going to get 30 different answers. They key to teaching them advanced concepts it telling them how advanced concepts can help them achieve those goals.
You like photography? Why not make a SQLAlchemy database for your images. Don't like that? Why not use OpenCV to automatically categorize your photos. I *hate* sorting photos. I just want to dump them to disk and move on. Now that I have 10 month old I certainly have less time to mess around with stuff, so I'm writing a script to do facial recognition, pull out the photos. The goal is to 'Tinderfy' the sorting process for my wife, then use a neural net to figure out what faces she finds good and then automatically e-mail them out to family.
I get to take photos without dealing with the boring part. My wife gets to look at photos without dealing with the boring part. My family gets to see photos daily without human input on our end.
And if a middle schooler asks 'why' something like neural networks work, I'll point them to algebra and if they ask why that work's I'll point them to linear algebra and if they ask how that works on computers I can point them to BLAS. But a kid that just wants to sort photos just needs to use the end tool.
Based on my female friends in engineering's interests they were attracted to engineering because they were the girls that like cars and the current 'message' about what engineering is seems to involve cars and mechanical contraptions. But if my daughter is more interested in selfies and facebook status updates then I'll show her Facebook's API and cron jobs. She can spend 30 minutes a week setting up posts for the week and not 30 minutes an hour.
If you don't mind me asking what did you end up getting interested in after D&D and how have you used those basics of programming to help with that?
You're thinking of the problem backwards.
You don't need to teach kids CS to get them into CS. You need to teach them programming and give them practical applications to how they can use it to do what they are interested in
Someone interested in baking doesn't need to know how to make a good bubble sort. They should be able to make a basic PID controller and a ramp-soak controller. Brand new oven 'controls' are an embarrassment to the field of controls. But I would bet that no one sat down someone interested in baking and explained to them how programming could help solve problems they're having.
Are all people going to learn to code? No, but if they know that coding can help them solve their problems it's going to be a lot better carrot to learn to program than hearing "Because".
You're making the assumption that people need to learn to do all of that.
Most people would be good knowing 1-3 and spending 4-11 learning how to apply it to solve their problems. Someone interested in baking doesn't need to know everything else, they need to learn how coding can help solve their baking problems.
The problem is that it's not being taught with practical applications to most people.
How many people interested in cooking, baking, or wood shop know what coding can do for them?
I have yet to see a high school or voctech program that teaches practical uses to coding.
To a controls engineer the modern home kitchen is an embarrassment of control systems. Steam engine centrifugal governors had better control than an over bought in 2016. It has zero disturbance rejection (opening the oven door). And has one setting. I've got all the items and am going to make my own ramp/soak controller so that I can have perfectly consistent baked goods.
Measuring by hand still? I know some refrigerators have a 'measure x amount' but it's only on the high end ones. I should have a counter top device that can measure out with perfect accuracy any liquid.
Doing wood working projects is painfully slow because it's measure, cut, measure cut... I stepper motor, arduino and you can tell it how many boards and of what length you need and all you need to do is pull the circular saw down when the green light tells you it's ready. With better precision than I could ever do in a reasonable amount of time.
I could teach a middle schooler to do anything I've mentioned in a semester and for under $50 but kids aren't taught the practical applications to coding. It's all "Learn to do a for loop" without explaining the physical equivalent of a for loop.
Coding isn't a job. It's a skill. Hearing that kids don't need to learn to code because some don't have a 'knack' for it is like hearing that most people don't need to learn to type because there isn't a real need for some professions to learn to type.
Not in my lifetime.
Unless you plan on dying sometime soon, it will. It isn't? 12 years ago self driving cars were a pipe dream. Now they're here.
Yes the technology is getting better but that's not remotely the same thing as letting non-surgeons cut people.
The number of luddites on Slashdot amazes me for a side for nerds. Pick and place machines are populating PCBs faster and with better accuracy than any human ever could. They've gotten to the point where they're using feed forward non-linear control to correct for vibrations in the floor. With a decent accelerometer a robotic surgeon could perform surgery on a boat in the middle of a hurricane and have every roll of the ship perfectly compensated for.
Wow, smart people training to be surgeons get proficient at basic surgery quickly. How astonishing....
People training to be doctors are the only ones that are in the right place to be able to play with these.
The good thing about decoupling the human from the instrument is that you can dial in your coarseness. Full scale on a joystick can be 0-1M or 0-1um depending on how it's configured. However for 99% of surgeries you're going to have semi-automated control with visual recognition doing the hard work and for the 1% it's going to be someone specifically trained into doing what ever surgery you need to have done. Having someone that can do a dozen different surgeries makes them a master of none.
I'll take a highschool student vocationally trained in how to do an ACL surgery with an Xbox 360 controller over someone that had to spend 40 years of their life just to operate out on their own. Surgery, orthopedics, in general is one of the oddest specializations when it comes to medicine. They only accept the absolute best and in the end they're little more than butchers and woodworkers. The entire process is asinine since surgeons will spend thousands of hours learning and training for something they will never, ever do. The current med school and residency setup was great when you had one doctor in town and one surgeon in the area.
Even now I'd take Watson's opinion of a doctor in their 40s. There are too many studies done every day for any one doctor to keep up on all of the evidence based medicine.
And don't worry, robotic surgeons and autonomous vehicles aren't going to be forced onto anyone. But when you go to buy health or car insurance you're going to have the option of picking the robot that does it with 0.001% accuracy 24/7 at all hours of the night or with the human that may be operating under the influence, tired, overworked, depressed or with a slight hand tremor.
Based on the comments on multiple 'automation' articles that have come out in recent times I wonder how many Slashdotters would have been defending horse and buggy whip manufacturers saying that a mechanical device could *never* replace humanities beast of burden for the last millennia.
STEM careers of 2020 aren't STEM careers of 1990?
Sounds like IBM is culling dead weight.
Onli if that someone that hasn't spent the last 10 years continuing education such they have "faith that if IBM were to fire me tomorrow, I'd be able to find a job in the market reasonably quickly based on my skills, capabilities, experience, and reputation."
Even in tech and engineering jobs quite a few workers always learned the bare minimum because "learning sucks". They learned enough to pass the test in high school. They learned just enough to get their degree. And once they got a job they said "Wheee, I don't ever have to learn again" and somehow thought that they would work the next 45 years doing the exact same thing.
If you are set to retire in 2016 it means you entered the job force in ~1970. C wasn't invented yet. Python wasn't invented yet. There was no such "personal computer" let alone the internet as it exists today. I've found that most people learn the bare minimum to keep their jobs but are never actually proactive in continuing education. "Learning" isn't just something you do until you're 20 and stop for life.
If you have 1000 guys with masters degrees in engineering that only know how to draft by hand and drop them into a 2016 work environment with CAD you end job shortage because the skills they have are no longer useful or in demand. However if you were to ask them why they were getting laid off they would insist they are "Highly skilled" workers and that it's the H1B's stealing their joerbs.
When I was a fresh faced grad I was sympathetic to everyone being replaced. I was terrified that I was going to be replaced by a H1B a year or two into my job. Now a decade out I'm sympathetic to all of those being replaced's coworkers. The ones that have had to work with these guys for the last decade while trying to do more with less dealing with co-workers that refused to learn anything new. Most of these guys are the 21st century equivalent of switch board operators, punch card operators, and human computers. Corporate dead weight that for various reasons were just easier to keep on board than get rid of.
I wish I got a bonus for every time I heard "Nah, I already know ${old lang}. Sure it takes me 5x longer than you to do something in ${lang}, but I don't want to learn something new". If you aren't going into work every single day trying to replace or automate yourself, someone else is. Eventually that is going to catch up to you. It's also something that is not unique to IT. Engineering, medicine, farming, are all progressing with society. If you're someone that insists on doing something the 'old' way, society is ready to leave you behind. The fact that it doesn't take 50% of us out in the field doing manual labor just to eat sort of illustrates that.
And you see both sides of it constantly on Slashdot. In one thread you have a bunch of people wondering why they're being replaced by cheaper, faster labor and in others you have old timers insisting that 4th graders don't need to know Python because they couldn't possibly grasp O(n) problems or do a bubble sort correctly.
What most of these IT guys don't realize is what took a 1990 BS, a 1980s Masters or 1970s PhD to do is now a skilled trade. You can give a highschool student hands on training akin to how electrician and plumbing apprenticeships and have them doing the same work for cheaper, faster and better. The problem in America is we sort of forgot about trades, shoved everyone into college so they're backfilling those positions with Visas. If I was starting a new company I would be hiring 1 PhD. 1 MS, 1 BS and a handful of trainable, intelligent voctech high school students over 20 bachelor degrees, they cost way too much.
I'm early into my career but have already accepted that my eventual replacement hasn't learned to wipe his or her own ass yet. It also means I have a good head start on preparing for the job of 2060. OR, I could keep my mouth shut, not update my resume and maintain my current work for the next 10-15 years and then sit around and bitch that it's somehow someone else's fault that I'm no longer employable.