if you're not leveraging Facebook in some way you're really missing the boat.
I gave up using Facebook as a social network and am starting to use it like 'normal people'. I moved to Snapchat for my 'social network' to keep up with family and friends. But when I need to call out a company I'll do it on Facebook and Twitter. Nothing gets PR reps moving faster than a bad experience waiting to go viral.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car bent over backwards on and after Facebook after ignoring e-mails and phone calls.
Facebook is 'pivoting'. They've taken over as the defacto 'forum' software for a large demographic. There are a lot of private invite only groups that people are on. It was just last year that they rolled out half assed threaded discussion. You can reply up to 1 level deep.
My wife was invited to one for her profession that's ~5000 MDs and she loves it. She's buried into it like I used to be to Slashdot. They have pretty good discussion and discourse despite Facebook's shitty "discussion" system.
Every time I try to move one of my groups to a forum or even Reddit it's a constant "But I'm already signed in with Facebook". If there was any way to describe how Facebook has embedded itself the online space it's like a cancer. It'll take years to cut out all the 'share on facebook' links and tracking hooks.
I would kill for a Facebook 2004 to come out. As a social network Facebook is absolutely terrible. As a "place where people are on the internet" it's not bad.
Software engineers should not just batch up black boxes they don't understand.
And if they want to become software engineers they should go to college. This should expose a broad spectrum of students to programming. I absolutely treat printf as a blackbox. I trust its output, I trust that the authors of the black box did their job. But if I spent my career reinventing BLAS I'd never get any work done.
I say start highlevel to appeal to a broad number of students and then if the rabbit hole they want to go down is CS, then they can learn how the blackboxes work.
Preface: I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I went back and decided to audit some of my undergraduate classes to refresh my memory I realized there aren't any good 'toolboxes' for any of those classes. AeroPython is a good graduate level class for Aerodynamics-Hydrodynamics with Python but there's nothing more basic.
Last night I decided to cram Kindergarten -> Statics into one module just so that I could build on top of it for Mechanics of Materials.
It is in no way complete but it served a purpose, here's just an excerpt from what I threw together:
class Shape2D(object):
def __init__(self,area=None,perimeter=None):
self.area=area
self.perimeter=perimeter class Circle(Shape2D):
# This could be a lot cleaner, but it works.
def __init__(self,diameter=None,radius=None,area=None,circumference=None):
# By doing this, we can define these as symbolic in the future.
# aka, solve for the unknown.
d, r, A, c = sympy.symbols("d r A c")
circ_eqn1=sympy.Eq(2*r,d)
circ_eqn2=sympy.Eq(pi*r**2,A)
circ_eqn3=sympy.Eq(2*pi*r,c)
if diameter is not None:
self.diameter=diameter
self.radius=sympy.solve(circ_eqn1.subs(d,diameter),r)[0]
self.area=sympy.solve(circ_eqn2.subs(r,self.radius),A)[0]
self.circumference=sympy.solve(circ_eqn3.subs(r,self.radius),c)[0]
return
@property
def I_0(self):
return 1/4*pi*self.radius**4
However going forward I can define a circle and use it in anything I need. I can add a length and make it a tube. Revolve it and make it a sphere.
Don't teach them something completely foreign, have them make a module/class for something they know rather well and then as step 2 'automate' something about it, make it programmatic.
Teachers don't have to know anything. "Follow these good tutorials" or better yet. "Here's your project for the semester". Building the logic by hand they might accidentally learn basics.
Teach them to change the colors of anything in the game. Teach them hex and how to count to 16.
I used to hack around in a hex editor to change how much money I started with in Oregon Trail.
Uber can find a body builder easier than GM is going to find Uber's expertise.
We're going to see a major shakeup in transportation across the board in the next 15-20 years, I wouldn't be surprised if GM didn't survive (or got broken apart and acquired). They've missed the boat on quite literally everything.
Netflix, Amazon Prime and Comcast's "X1 on Demand" have now caught up with how I was pirating and watching shows a decade ago. I didn't even know "binge watching" was a thing, I would just get an entire series and watch it and move on to the next series. It's what I've always been asking for but Comcast said "nah, you'll watch it on our schedule". Blockbuster required me to make an additional stop in my my way home. I could queue up a movie before I left work/school and watch it that night.
The easier it has been to get new, good content for a reasonable price the less I pirate.
most people in most jobs are simply not going to be able to do that
Maybe we should start teaching middle schoolers LaTeX. It's already integrated into Notebooks. It's actually not that hard to pick up, especially just learning to type an equation or two.
So your argument is school kids should all be thrown into programming classes so they can "automate their jobs" but then they need a full college education to be able to understand enough to be able to automate their jobs?
Yeah, that's how it work. It's like complaining about teaching kids multiplication when they clearly need to know college level stuff that uses multiplication to actually use it. You need to give kids the groundwork. How many CS students had the opportunity out of school to program? Slashdot is full of people that learned Basic or HyperCard when they were young even if they didn't know what they were eventually going to use it for.
You're expecting non-CS graduates to be able to program well enough to "automate their jobs"?
Mechanical engineer. I do it literally every day of my life.
Say a high school gives kids a year of Python programming.
Only a year? By time a student graduates high school they could have 5+ years,
Except their job involves using Word, Excel, and some bespoke LOB applications.
What's your point? I've replaced Word documents with Python + LaTeX. Excel can be automated, Engineers have had automated Excel for the last decade. Since there is little crossover between programmers and Engineers there are some 'golden' Excel spreadsheets that do a lot of very complex math for specific applications in VBA. Years ago I worked with a co-worker that didn't even know about Sort, they were manually sorting excel documents, because that's what they were told to do.
If you want people to automate their jobs teach them VBA and introduce them to AutoHotKey.
VBA is locked in and dying. AutoHotKey is mono-OS. Jupyter Notebooks are platform agnostic and can be centrally run. (Requiring no setup for the users part).
It's technically possible for them to do some automation using Python but requires a significant amount of extra knowledge on top of knowing Python itself
Yeah, that knowledge they pick up in college. I knew how to script and write simple TI-89 programs before college. I didn't have a use for them until I learned mechanical engineering. I went to college to pick up that "significant amount of extra knowledge". My wife is an MD and we joke that 80% of her job could be automated. I'm showing her Python so she can make her own EMR. (Since all EMRs have been seemingly been written by CS students that don't understand how Medicine works).
I think Slashdot seems to be most upset about the fact that most people that use programming don't need to know how the sausage is made. Some other, very smart people wrote the compilers I use. I don't need to have full understanding of how compilers work to do my job because I trust their output. However I do have a lot of specific
> Knowing theoretical CS allows you to be flexible, but it won't give you the necessary background to do much that is interesting in the economy.
Knowing how to program allows you to automate your job. Programming is the new 'keyboarding'. You're looking it like CS is the 'job'. The 'job' is something else that needs to be automated.
I'm a mechanical engineer that spends 80% of my time coding, why? I automate my job. I automate report generation. I automate mechanical tests. The job that I did when I started is now 100% automated. Now I spend my time working on other, harder problems.
This initiative isn't going to crank out thousands more CS graduates. It's going to turn out a Doctor... that knows Python. A mechanical engineer, that knows python. I'm using deep learning and visual recognition to classify test results. No more flipping through 10 graphs to determine what is going on, I can run through 10,000 and have the results on my de Coding is not a jobsktop in the morning.
Coding is not a job to me, it's why I became an engineer instead of a CS student. Coding is a tool I use to get my job done.
Is it always the most optimized, fastest, most logically correct? No. But if I can do anything at my job 100x faster with a few lines of code, I'll do it in a few lines of code.
And that's not to say hard core theoretical CS is going away. I thank all of those theoretical CS students for giving me tools like deep learning and modern image recognition. That stuff didn't exist years ago when I started, but my job (and interests) weren't in doing that. I've been writing algorithms and software to go in heavy equipment.
> If half of CS and IT doesn't require a college degree, then teaching it to little fellers and claiming it is somehow preparing them for the workplace is isn't a career path to anything except obsolescence.
It is and they already are. Vocational schools of the 21st century aren't vocational schools of the 20th. A highschool near me has a Internet, Network and Security Technologies track. I'm friends with the principal and he said he can't graduate students fast enough. Most are hired straight out of high school. You don't need a college degree for the work they're doing. It's mostly hands on training.
Does that mean that that PhD CS students are just going to disappear? No, they're going to be working on the 22nd century trades. In 10 years you won't need a PhD in ME and EE just to debug an automated driving car. It'll be standard training at any dealership.
If you haven't spent the last 20 years of your career learning what the new grads in your field were doing then you haven't kept up with progress. Your job is now done people with high school displomas. "Skilled trades" aren't just plumbing and welding anymore. The only reason companies are replacing you with cheaper Indians instead of cheaper Americans is we didn't spend the last 20 preparing to backfill those positions.
It's happened in every industry since the beginning of time. Nurses do more now than Doctors did 200 years ago. Nurse Practitioners do more now than Doctors did 50 years ago. And at the bottom end of everything it's unskilled labor or automation. Engineering Technologists are doing what Engineers did 20 years ago. Engineers are doing now what Engineering Technologists will be doing in 20 years.
This is how progress happens, teaching kids how to do the 'hard' stuff and let them grow up with it as normal and go on to discover something else. Calculus used to be the stuff of PhD mathematicians too. I don't remember their outcry when we started teaching it as an AP highschool course.
There is no reason a senior in highschool that started learning CS in middle school couldn't make that. You don't throw them straight into OSes or Compilers. You have to start with the basics.
I learned to code and go on to learn that in college because I had HyperCard. I didn't understand why #FFFFFF was the color it was on our Commodore 64s at school, but years later when I was shown how to convert binary to hex it all clicked.
And now when I'm watching CAN datamessages flying by in CANape/CANalyzer I can look at the data signal mask and know what is going on.
I have no clue why Slashdot thinks we're going to be teaching senior level college concepts to middle schoolers. We're going to be introducing them to the concepts. And just because someone has a cell phone doesn't mean they have access to a Python prompt.
I ended up where I am because I learned to code HyperCard on my Mac. I spent hours making animations and other 'stupid' stuff. I never showed it to anyone, it was hacky at best but it set me on a course to being an engineer and using Python/Matlab daily.
How long before the car shuts itself down or the government mandates repair rules and demands everyone upload their telemetry to the DMV for safety inspections?
Already happens in heavy trucks. If your emissions are out of compliance you'll run at reduced power output.
Of all my resources 'time' is the only one that I can't make more of.
If I could summon a car on my phone and it would take me anywhere I wanted I'd do it in a heart beat. How much time do you spend on your vehicle? Cumulatively over the last 2 decades of driving I've probably spent at least a few entire days of my life just filling up. With my wife's EV that's no longer a time consumer, it takes 10 seconds to plug it in when she gets home.
I'll probably keep my TDI in a garage for the apocalypse but for 90% of my day to day driving I don't want to be driving. I want to be doing something else I just have to drive somewhere to do it. The other 10% of the time I'd rather be in a controlled situation like a track.
Do you think that when they invented the transporters on Star Trek people lamented the loss of having to wait to go somewhere?
His UID has an entire extra digit than ours. Not just an extra digit, nearing 3x. I don't think he remembers old mods or moderation.
I got 5 mod points once every other month. I certainly didn't squander them on bad posts. It's not like Reddit where it takes a fake account (or bot net) and you can easily push conversation however you want it.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's a poorly implemented jail.
I actually like it because it's not as full featured.
GitLab is a bit on the heavy side. Gogs runs very fast on the smallest VPS digital ocean has while GitLab was not.
Gitolite, Gogs, GitLab all work great on VPSes. Even Amazon's free tier.
This is like complaining to Dice about Slashdot and expecting something to change.
if you're not leveraging Facebook in some way you're really missing the boat.
I gave up using Facebook as a social network and am starting to use it like 'normal people'. I moved to Snapchat for my 'social network' to keep up with family and friends. But when I need to call out a company I'll do it on Facebook and Twitter. Nothing gets PR reps moving faster than a bad experience waiting to go viral.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car bent over backwards on and after Facebook after ignoring e-mails and phone calls.
Facebook is 'pivoting'. They've taken over as the defacto 'forum' software for a large demographic. There are a lot of private invite only groups that people are on. It was just last year that they rolled out half assed threaded discussion. You can reply up to 1 level deep.
My wife was invited to one for her profession that's ~5000 MDs and she loves it. She's buried into it like I used to be to Slashdot. They have pretty good discussion and discourse despite Facebook's shitty "discussion" system.
Every time I try to move one of my groups to a forum or even Reddit it's a constant "But I'm already signed in with Facebook". If there was any way to describe how Facebook has embedded itself the online space it's like a cancer. It'll take years to cut out all the 'share on facebook' links and tracking hooks.
I would kill for a Facebook 2004 to come out. As a social network Facebook is absolutely terrible. As a "place where people are on the internet" it's not bad.
And learning 2D shapes like triangles and squares isn't high level engineering but you wouldn't be able to do a statics or dynamics course without it.
Remember these are still high schoolers.
Software engineers should not just batch up black boxes they don't understand.
And if they want to become software engineers they should go to college. This should expose a broad spectrum of students to programming. I absolutely treat printf as a blackbox. I trust its output, I trust that the authors of the black box did their job. But if I spent my career reinventing BLAS I'd never get any work done.
I say start highlevel to appeal to a broad number of students and then if the rabbit hole they want to go down is CS, then they can learn how the blackboxes work.
Preface: I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I went back and decided to audit some of my undergraduate classes to refresh my memory I realized there aren't any good 'toolboxes' for any of those classes. AeroPython is a good graduate level class for Aerodynamics-Hydrodynamics with Python but there's nothing more basic.
Last night I decided to cram Kindergarten -> Statics into one module just so that I could build on top of it for Mechanics of Materials.
It is in no way complete but it served a purpose, here's just an excerpt from what I threw together:
class Shape2D(object):
def __init__(self,area=None,perimeter=None):
self.area=area
self.perimeter=perimeter
class Circle(Shape2D):
# This could be a lot cleaner, but it works.
def __init__(self,diameter=None,radius=None,area=None,circumference=None):
# By doing this, we can define these as symbolic in the future.
# aka, solve for the unknown.
d, r, A, c = sympy.symbols("d r A c")
circ_eqn1=sympy.Eq(2*r,d)
circ_eqn2=sympy.Eq(pi*r**2,A)
circ_eqn3=sympy.Eq(2*pi*r,c)
if diameter is not None:
self.diameter=diameter
self.radius=sympy.solve(circ_eqn1.subs(d,diameter),r)[0]
self.area=sympy.solve(circ_eqn2.subs(r,self.radius),A)[0]
self.circumference=sympy.solve(circ_eqn3.subs(r,self.radius),c)[0]
return
@property
def I_0(self):
return 1/4*pi*self.radius**4
However going forward I can define a circle and use it in anything I need. I can add a length and make it a tube. Revolve it and make it a sphere.
Don't teach them something completely foreign, have them make a module/class for something they know rather well and then as step 2 'automate' something about it, make it programmatic.
8-bit computers
& Automated farms
Teachers don't have to know anything. "Follow these good tutorials" or better yet. "Here's your project for the semester". Building the logic by hand they might accidentally learn basics.
Teach them to change the colors of anything in the game. Teach them hex and how to count to 16.
I used to hack around in a hex editor to change how much money I started with in Oregon Trail.
People have built 8-bit computers from logic blocks
You can use the logic to build automated systems.
Watching people build in Minecraft mirrors a lot of what my job looks like working with Simulink.
It's barely a pretty GUI on top of basic logic.
I could see a 6-7th grade course on 'building an automated farm' following tutorials and then breaking down what they did into logic diagrams.
You could easily train 8th & 9th graders in industrial automation tools if they were interested in the subject material.
GM has missed the boat on this one. Uber already went in and poached all of CMU's top robotics individuals. The same CMU team that failed to finish DARPA 2004. GM has had the last decade to hire away self driving car experts but decided to make deadly design decisions instead.
Uber can find a body builder easier than GM is going to find Uber's expertise.
We're going to see a major shakeup in transportation across the board in the next 15-20 years, I wouldn't be surprised if GM didn't survive (or got broken apart and acquired). They've missed the boat on quite literally everything.
A remix on youtube doesn't increase pollution.
2. Give one of them a red lab coat.
Netflix, Amazon Prime and Comcast's "X1 on Demand" have now caught up with how I was pirating and watching shows a decade ago. I didn't even know "binge watching" was a thing, I would just get an entire series and watch it and move on to the next series. It's what I've always been asking for but Comcast said "nah, you'll watch it on our schedule". Blockbuster required me to make an additional stop in my my way home. I could queue up a movie before I left work/school and watch it that night.
The easier it has been to get new, good content for a reasonable price the less I pirate.
If you need a class, you're probably not going to ever be particularly good.
You could say the same thing about keyboarding, math, science, etc. Not everyone is a self starter. Coding is a skill, not a job.
most people in most jobs are simply not going to be able to do that
Maybe we should start teaching middle schoolers LaTeX. It's already integrated into Notebooks. It's actually not that hard to pick up, especially just learning to type an equation or two.
So your argument is school kids should all be thrown into programming classes so they can "automate their jobs" but then they need a full college education to be able to understand enough to be able to automate their jobs?
Yeah, that's how it work. It's like complaining about teaching kids multiplication when they clearly need to know college level stuff that uses multiplication to actually use it. You need to give kids the groundwork. How many CS students had the opportunity out of school to program? Slashdot is full of people that learned Basic or HyperCard when they were young even if they didn't know what they were eventually going to use it for.
You're expecting non-CS graduates to be able to program well enough to "automate their jobs"?
Mechanical engineer. I do it literally every day of my life.
Say a high school gives kids a year of Python programming.
Only a year? By time a student graduates high school they could have 5+ years,
Except their job involves using Word, Excel, and some bespoke LOB applications.
What's your point? I've replaced Word documents with Python + LaTeX. Excel can be automated, Engineers have had automated Excel for the last decade. Since there is little crossover between programmers and Engineers there are some 'golden' Excel spreadsheets that do a lot of very complex math for specific applications in VBA. Years ago I worked with a co-worker that didn't even know about Sort, they were manually sorting excel documents, because that's what they were told to do.
If you want people to automate their jobs teach them VBA and introduce them to AutoHotKey.
VBA is locked in and dying. AutoHotKey is mono-OS. Jupyter Notebooks are platform agnostic and can be centrally run. (Requiring no setup for the users part).
It's technically possible for them to do some automation using Python but requires a significant amount of extra knowledge on top of knowing Python itself
Yeah, that knowledge they pick up in college. I knew how to script and write simple TI-89 programs before college. I didn't have a use for them until I learned mechanical engineering. I went to college to pick up that "significant amount of extra knowledge". My wife is an MD and we joke that 80% of her job could be automated. I'm showing her Python so she can make her own EMR. (Since all EMRs have been seemingly been written by CS students that don't understand how Medicine works).
I think Slashdot seems to be most upset about the fact that most people that use programming don't need to know how the sausage is made. Some other, very smart people wrote the compilers I use. I don't need to have full understanding of how compilers work to do my job because I trust their output. However I do have a lot of specific
> Knowing theoretical CS allows you to be flexible, but it won't give you the necessary background to do much that is interesting in the economy.
Knowing how to program allows you to automate your job. Programming is the new 'keyboarding'. You're looking it like CS is the 'job'. The 'job' is something else that needs to be automated.
I'm a mechanical engineer that spends 80% of my time coding, why? I automate my job. I automate report generation. I automate mechanical tests. The job that I did when I started is now 100% automated. Now I spend my time working on other, harder problems.
This initiative isn't going to crank out thousands more CS graduates. It's going to turn out a Doctor... that knows Python. A mechanical engineer, that knows python. I'm using deep learning and visual recognition to classify test results. No more flipping through 10 graphs to determine what is going on, I can run through 10,000 and have the results on my de
Coding is not a jobsktop in the morning.
Coding is not a job to me, it's why I became an engineer instead of a CS student. Coding is a tool I use to get my job done.
Is it always the most optimized, fastest, most logically correct? No. But if I can do anything at my job 100x faster with a few lines of code, I'll do it in a few lines of code.
And that's not to say hard core theoretical CS is going away. I thank all of those theoretical CS students for giving me tools like deep learning and modern image recognition. That stuff didn't exist years ago when I started, but my job (and interests) weren't in doing that. I've been writing algorithms and software to go in heavy equipment.
> If half of CS and IT doesn't require a college degree, then teaching it to little fellers and claiming it is somehow preparing them for the workplace is isn't a career path to anything except obsolescence.
It is and they already are. Vocational schools of the 21st century aren't vocational schools of the 20th. A highschool near me has a Internet, Network and Security Technologies track. I'm friends with the principal and he said he can't graduate students fast enough. Most are hired straight out of high school. You don't need a college degree for the work they're doing. It's mostly hands on training.
Does that mean that that PhD CS students are just going to disappear? No, they're going to be working on the 22nd century trades. In 10 years you won't need a PhD in ME and EE just to debug an automated driving car. It'll be standard training at any dealership.
If you haven't spent the last 20 years of your career learning what the new grads in your field were doing then you haven't kept up with progress. Your job is now done people with high school displomas. "Skilled trades" aren't just plumbing and welding anymore. The only reason companies are replacing you with cheaper Indians instead of cheaper Americans is we didn't spend the last 20 preparing to backfill those positions.
It's happened in every industry since the beginning of time. Nurses do more now than Doctors did 200 years ago. Nurse Practitioners do more now than Doctors did 50 years ago. And at the bottom end of everything it's unskilled labor or automation. Engineering Technologists are doing what Engineers did 20 years ago. Engineers are doing now what Engineering Technologists will be doing in 20 years.
This is how progress happens, teaching kids how to do the 'hard' stuff and let them grow up with it as normal and go on to discover something else. Calculus used to be the stuff of PhD mathematicians too. I don't remember their outcry when we started teaching it as an AP highschool course.
There is no reason a senior in highschool that started learning CS in middle school couldn't make that. You don't throw them straight into OSes or Compilers. You have to start with the basics.
I learned to code and go on to learn that in college because I had HyperCard. I didn't understand why #FFFFFF was the color it was on our Commodore 64s at school, but years later when I was shown how to convert binary to hex it all clicked.
And now when I'm watching CAN datamessages flying by in CANape/CANalyzer I can look at the data signal mask and know what is going on.
I have no clue why Slashdot thinks we're going to be teaching senior level college concepts to middle schoolers. We're going to be introducing them to the concepts. And just because someone has a cell phone doesn't mean they have access to a Python prompt.
I ended up where I am because I learned to code HyperCard on my Mac. I spent hours making animations and other 'stupid' stuff. I never showed it to anyone, it was hacky at best but it set me on a course to being an engineer and using Python/Matlab daily.
Don't try to make everyone into a programmer, computer scientist, whatever the goal is.
Because teaching kids Math is trying to force them to be mathematicians? Or teaching them biology is trying to make them a biologist?
The point is to expose kids to what is out there so that later on they can choose a career path.
Half of what CS and IT is now doesn't even require a college degree it should be an apprenticeship style learning program starting at 14-15.
Don't worry, Uber doesn't plan on letting you buy one of these.
How long before the car shuts itself down or the government mandates repair rules and demands everyone upload their telemetry to the DMV for safety inspections?
Already happens in heavy trucks. If your emissions are out of compliance you'll run at reduced power output.
Of all my resources 'time' is the only one that I can't make more of.
If I could summon a car on my phone and it would take me anywhere I wanted I'd do it in a heart beat. How much time do you spend on your vehicle? Cumulatively over the last 2 decades of driving I've probably spent at least a few entire days of my life just filling up. With my wife's EV that's no longer a time consumer, it takes 10 seconds to plug it in when she gets home.
I'll probably keep my TDI in a garage for the apocalypse but for 90% of my day to day driving I don't want to be driving. I want to be doing something else I just have to drive somewhere to do it. The other 10% of the time I'd rather be in a controlled situation like a track.
Do you think that when they invented the transporters on Star Trek people lamented the loss of having to wait to go somewhere?
His UID has an entire extra digit than ours. Not just an extra digit, nearing 3x. I don't think he remembers old mods or moderation.
I got 5 mod points once every other month. I certainly didn't squander them on bad posts. It's not like Reddit where it takes a fake account (or bot net) and you can easily push conversation however you want it.