Parapsychology proponents put forward their claims as reality.
Not all proponents...but just enough to give them most of them a bad name. Such people are "useful idiots". They give parapsychology a bad name with people who desperately want to believe such things are B.S. (a case of confirmation bias). This allows the real practitioners to do what they do, without drawing undue attention to themselves. An ideal state of affairs for them, really. And your skepticism lets them get away with it.
"Science" can't study parapsychology, because science believes that reality is something that's outside of us, and can be objectively observed and measured. Instead, the scientists are simply observing and measuring the aspects of subjective reality that we all agree upon. There's some value in that — no doubt, science has been a good thing for our species, and has produced all sorts of advancements — but it's not going to lead to the ultimate truths. Those exist within us. Science needs to realize that the right question to ask is "who is asking the question", and then it might get somewhere with parapsychology.
I have some hope that quantum physics will be the conduit for leading science out of its "objective reality" bias, but it's still too early to tell.
In the meantime, keep in mind that science has a terrible track record of claiming that something is impossible.
hey man thanks for the response. it was interesting to read your job experiences, especially what happens when you're 'too good' at the job.
Glad you appreciated it. If you'd like a more verbose description of what my jobs are like, check out this comment.
as another person pointed out on this thread, you could start your own biz
In my experience, that just trades taking crap from the boss, to taking crap from customers. Besides, I've tried to start my own business before...in retrospect, Asperger's Syndrome mostly explains why I didn't succeed. I'm just not good at dealing with people.
since I see an area in biz where the incentives are backwards, I should **capitalize** on it...and I am trying now.
IMHO, there is a bright future for American computer programmers. We're needed more than ever, and good ones are harder to find per capita. Pay is good.
I sure hope you're right. I've got another ~25 years before I can take Social Security (assuming it still exists then...big assumption), and fear the day that age discrimination ruins my remaining chances to stay employed.
That's awesome. I've bookmarked that in my "job search" folder.
As to your personal situation and why you've been scrounging since the dot-com bubble burst...well, it could be a lot of things. Maybe your idea of "scrounging" means turning down a job a Microsoft because you don't want to work for the man...maybe you're a true genius who makes everyone even the bosses look bad so is ostracized...hell, idk...but I don't think your experience is representative...
No, "scrounging" is more like having to (repeatedly) uproot my life and move hundreds of miles just to stay employed...a few years back, I left Southern California, where I've lived all my life, to take a job in Sierra Vista, Arizona, with the U.S. Army. So obviously I'm not that averse to working for "the man", nor am I unwilling to live in the middle of freaking nowhere. Now I live in Phoenix...another extremely undesirable place to live.
I hate the word "genius". What that really means is I have to do all the hard work myself, and that no one can help me. I'm no genius; I just work really hard and read a lot. Then I get stuck cleaning up everyone else's mess. That's enough to make everyone else look bad. But what else am I supposed to do? Not notice how bad things are? Not know how to fix it? Not work hard to fix it? Seems like my so-called co-workers have those bases thoroughly covered.;-)
I'm glad to hear my experience isn't representative. I wouldn't wish my career on my worst enemy.
Everyone knows that there's no future for American computer programmers. I've been scrounging since the dot-com bubble burst. That was followed by the outsourcing phenomenon, the guest worker/fake job ads phenomenon, and the perfect-fit phenomenon.
That's why kids don't want to become computer programmers. Because they're not as stupid and gullible as you think.
Kids can easily teach themselves to program well? Then why do a grand majority of programmers suck at it completely?
In my experience, sucky programmers are the way they are because...they didn't learn to program as kids.
I did, and was shocked when I entered college (late 1980s) to find that the vast majority of my peers in the CS program had never touched a computer before going to college. They majored in CS because they thought they could get a good job and make a whole lot of money. Love for the craft (or any actual aptitude for programming or engineering) was never part of it.
The next problem is that, when they get out of college and enter the workforce, they bristle at the idea that there's anything else to learn. After all, they went to college, and they know everything. I'll never understand that...I have to learn constantly just to stay relevant. But most industry programmers developed lots of false confidence by bashing around toy problems in college, and try to be just as sloppy and short-sighted in their paid work.
Finally...because bad code is not a life-or-death thing like bad work in other fields is. Can you imagine chemists as sloppy and incompetent as the average industry computer programmer? They'd either poison themselves, blow themselves up, or dissolve themselves before long. Oh, how I wished I had stayed with chemistry.
Remember to reject outright any patches submitted by anyone outside your chosen circle of top developers. You don't need contributors, and you certainly don't need users. Then you'll have a real free software project.
Amen to that, brother. I can't count the number of open-source projects I've tried to contribute to, only to be met with outright hostility.
Want to read a gem? It'll take a while, but check this out. The coding guidelines said "when in doubt, use the Google C++ Style Guide". What it should have said is "we have a huge boner for the Google C++ style guide, and we'll harp on every minor deviation from it, since we have no other insight into the worth of code, up to and including complaining that your indenting is off by a space".
At my last job (and this is one of the reasons I no longer work there) we had a big client. A really big client. A client that was big enough to bully their way into creeping the scope and providing inadequate (and by inadequate, I mean non-existent) specifications. A client that would not allow us to bill them for additional time when they changed their requirements and demanded new features. Without that check (increased costs) the development process went way beyond initial estimates to the point where we ate most of the development costs and burned out our resources.
Yeah, I heard about the healthcare.gov debacle. Sad.
The real problem is that some people tend to implement an agile process in terrible ways, more so with "extreme programming" (XP).
Extreme programming RUUUULES!!!!
I come to work, wearing big old Birkenstocks and long board-shorts, with my long curly hair wrapped up in a rasta-colored nappy, then I pound on my keyboard while yelling "Woooooooo!", then I grab my snowboard and go down the side of the building.
If there was ever any argument for not letting the U.S. government collect massive amounts of data on us, take over the entire healthcare system, etc., it's stories like this. They're simply not competent to do so. They're not even close.
The U.S. government was originally envisioned as a limited government, with a short list of enumerated powers, and all other government functions were left to the states. Over the years, and in wild violation of our Constitution, the federal government has grown way past that. Not only is their size and function not legally justifiable, but it's simply too big to work.
A wonderful reform would be to cut down the size of the U.S. government to just what the Constitution allows. Anything that requires coordination between the 50 states can be done in a "clearinghouse" manner, with the federal government providing a mechanism for coordination, but not control over it. That would be a much better way than letting the federal government assume primacy on subjects not in its Constitution.
Thanks for the clarification on that! I'm amazed that the GPL has such a big loophole in it. I'll no doubt review the current state of open-source licenses. (I have a lot of reading to do.)
I just hope that Steam Box & OS take off, esp. OS as it would mean finally that I could probably dump using Windows altogether as I primarily only use it for gaming.
Have you tried using Wine to run MS Windows video games? I started doing that about 6 months ago & have had very good results.
And no, I'm not talking about the Android-related controversy. I'm talking about all the GPL'd code that they use internally.
According to the GPL, if you modify some GPL code and then make your modified version available to others, you also have to make the code available.
Google isn't releasing desktop apps with most of their products, but they are making it possible for people to use the GPL code they modified through their web services and whatnot.
It seems to me that just because they let the public make use of their modified GPL'd software through web services, instead of by shipping desktop applications, that it shouldn't make a difference. They should still be required to release the source code to the public.
Just in time...an article about an NSA employee that tried to blow the whistle on them back in 2007.
I remember someone in Congress saying that Edward Snowden should have gone through the proper channels to blow the whistle. That's what this guy did. You can read the article to see how that worked out for him.
I wonder why Edward Snowden got attention when he blew the whistle, and no one up until that point did? Hard to say...though it may have had something to do with his hot girlfriend.
It amazes me that no one seems to remember Autoduel. It was a free-roamer, way before the Grand Theft Auto series. It was sent in a post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" sort of world. It was made by Lord British, the same guy that brought us the Ultima series. You could design new cars with an incredible level of detail, balancing features and power with weight. I spent months of my life on that game.
In modern times, there was Auto Assault, but that was one of those stupid MMORPG things. As if I want to hear 12-year-olds mouth off. Give me that game with a deep single-player experience, and I'll probably forget to go to work! Hell yeah.
Granted, you can download the original if you want, but I'd rather see a modern version.
The prevalent attitude seems to be 'The code is there for you to modify. Do it yourself.' For the average user, that could mean developing proficiency in some programming language, familiarity with that software's architecture before they even begin to understand how to get what they want.
Making matters worse...most open-source projects are severely under-documented. Even though the source is available, getting past the hurdle of severe under-documentation is too much of a hassle. It takes dedication to get to the point where one can contribute meaningfully to an open-source project, and not for any good reason — it shouldn't take that much effort.
Making matters even worse...in my experience, most open-source-project maintainers will resist documentation. I just went through this with an open-source project I've been interested in a long time. Since the source-code had practically no comments whatsoever, I took it upon myself to learn the subject matter (in this case, NOT an easy task), then learn large parts of the source code. Then, being the sort that's willing to contribute, I offered to document the code. The maintainer was willing, even eager, for it. Then I submitted my first patch...and he immediately changed his tune. He found my documentation to be "excessive", and quoted chapter 8 of the Linux kernel coding guidelines to bolster his case. Frankly, I couldn't disagree more with his viewpoint.
I'll never understand, for the life of me, why programmers don't document their source code, especially open-source programmers. How is anyone supposed to contribute to their project if the hurdle is set so high? Hell, how do they remember how a piece of code works if they haven't seen it in a long time? It boggles the mind.
I don't have any good theories for why this is...just a disparaging one. Every time I encounter this problem, I get a vivid image of Gollum grasping some source-code printouts and hissing "Nooooo! My preciousssssss...."
I certainly document my open-source code. My biggest project to date is a temporal analog-video denoiser called y4mdenoise. Feel free to look at the code, if you'd like to see an example of what I'd consider a proper level of documentation. Start with the high-level overview and find out for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Brilliant. Deserves a reference to the United Negro College Fund parody from the TV show "In Living Color".
That reminds me of a South Park episode...25% of the population is retarded, and needs to believe in an all-powerful government.
What should we do with them, then?
Parapsychology proponents put forward their claims as reality.
Not all proponents...but just enough to give them most of them a bad name. Such people are "useful idiots". They give parapsychology a bad name with people who desperately want to believe such things are B.S. (a case of confirmation bias). This allows the real practitioners to do what they do, without drawing undue attention to themselves. An ideal state of affairs for them, really. And your skepticism lets them get away with it.
"Science" can't study parapsychology, because science believes that reality is something that's outside of us, and can be objectively observed and measured. Instead, the scientists are simply observing and measuring the aspects of subjective reality that we all agree upon. There's some value in that — no doubt, science has been a good thing for our species, and has produced all sorts of advancements — but it's not going to lead to the ultimate truths. Those exist within us. Science needs to realize that the right question to ask is "who is asking the question", and then it might get somewhere with parapsychology.
I have some hope that quantum physics will be the conduit for leading science out of its "objective reality" bias, but it's still too early to tell.
In the meantime, keep in mind that science has a terrible track record of claiming that something is impossible.
hey man thanks for the response. it was interesting to read your job experiences, especially what happens when you're 'too good' at the job.
Glad you appreciated it. If you'd like a more verbose description of what my jobs are like, check out this comment.
as another person pointed out on this thread, you could start your own biz
In my experience, that just trades taking crap from the boss, to taking crap from customers. Besides, I've tried to start my own business before...in retrospect, Asperger's Syndrome mostly explains why I didn't succeed. I'm just not good at dealing with people.
since I see an area in biz where the incentives are backwards, I should **capitalize** on it...and I am trying now.
More power to you. Good luck.
IMHO, there is a bright future for American computer programmers. We're needed more than ever, and good ones are harder to find per capita. Pay is good.
I sure hope you're right. I've got another ~25 years before I can take Social Security (assuming it still exists then...big assumption), and fear the day that age discrimination ruins my remaining chances to stay employed.
[H]ave a gander at this borderline psychotic but not a joke job ad for a web coder for Penny Arcade.
That's awesome. I've bookmarked that in my "job search" folder.
As to your personal situation and why you've been scrounging since the dot-com bubble burst...well, it could be a lot of things. Maybe your idea of "scrounging" means turning down a job a Microsoft because you don't want to work for the man...maybe you're a true genius who makes everyone even the bosses look bad so is ostracized...hell, idk...but I don't think your experience is representative ...
No, "scrounging" is more like having to (repeatedly) uproot my life and move hundreds of miles just to stay employed...a few years back, I left Southern California, where I've lived all my life, to take a job in Sierra Vista, Arizona, with the U.S. Army. So obviously I'm not that averse to working for "the man", nor am I unwilling to live in the middle of freaking nowhere. Now I live in Phoenix...another extremely undesirable place to live.
I hate the word "genius". What that really means is I have to do all the hard work myself, and that no one can help me. I'm no genius; I just work really hard and read a lot. Then I get stuck cleaning up everyone else's mess. That's enough to make everyone else look bad. But what else am I supposed to do? Not notice how bad things are? Not know how to fix it? Not work hard to fix it? Seems like my so-called co-workers have those bases thoroughly covered. ;-)
I'm glad to hear my experience isn't representative. I wouldn't wish my career on my worst enemy.
Everyone knows that there's no future for American computer programmers. I've been scrounging since the dot-com bubble burst. That was followed by the outsourcing phenomenon, the guest worker/fake job ads phenomenon, and the perfect-fit phenomenon.
That's why kids don't want to become computer programmers. Because they're not as stupid and gullible as you think.
Kids can easily teach themselves to program well? Then why do a grand majority of programmers suck at it completely?
In my experience, sucky programmers are the way they are because...they didn't learn to program as kids.
I did, and was shocked when I entered college (late 1980s) to find that the vast majority of my peers in the CS program had never touched a computer before going to college. They majored in CS because they thought they could get a good job and make a whole lot of money. Love for the craft (or any actual aptitude for programming or engineering) was never part of it.
The next problem is that, when they get out of college and enter the workforce, they bristle at the idea that there's anything else to learn. After all, they went to college, and they know everything. I'll never understand that...I have to learn constantly just to stay relevant. But most industry programmers developed lots of false confidence by bashing around toy problems in college, and try to be just as sloppy and short-sighted in their paid work.
Finally...because bad code is not a life-or-death thing like bad work in other fields is. Can you imagine chemists as sloppy and incompetent as the average industry computer programmer? They'd either poison themselves, blow themselves up, or dissolve themselves before long. Oh, how I wished I had stayed with chemistry.
Please consider reapplying after...
So only hipster douchebags need apply?
You cracked the code!
I challenge you to find a position where relocation benefits are offered for anything less than CxO or VP x positions.
Pro: I got relocation benefits to move for my previous job, and I'm not C-level, I'm just a principal software engineer.
Con: It was to Sierra Vista, Arizona. They really do need to pay people to move there.
Texas has hurricanes.
Remember to reject outright any patches submitted by anyone outside your chosen circle of top developers. You don't need contributors, and you certainly don't need users. Then you'll have a real free software project.
Amen to that, brother. I can't count the number of open-source projects I've tried to contribute to, only to be met with outright hostility.
Want to read a gem? It'll take a while, but check this out. The coding guidelines said "when in doubt, use the Google C++ Style Guide". What it should have said is "we have a huge boner for the Google C++ style guide, and we'll harp on every minor deviation from it, since we have no other insight into the worth of code, up to and including complaining that your indenting is off by a space".
I started "real" programming on the Fat Mac 512
Pile on the newbie!
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000, with 2k of RAM and that silly "membrane" keyboard. And I'm about a decade younger than you.
At my last job (and this is one of the reasons I no longer work there) we had a big client. A really big client. A client that was big enough to bully their way into creeping the scope and providing inadequate (and by inadequate, I mean non-existent) specifications. A client that would not allow us to bill them for additional time when they changed their requirements and demanded new features. Without that check (increased costs) the development process went way beyond initial estimates to the point where we ate most of the development costs and burned out our resources.
Yeah, I heard about the healthcare.gov debacle. Sad.
The real problem is that some people tend to implement an agile process in terrible ways, more so with "extreme programming" (XP).
Extreme programming RUUUULES!!!!
I come to work, wearing big old Birkenstocks and long board-shorts, with my long curly hair wrapped up in a rasta-colored nappy, then I pound on my keyboard while yelling "Woooooooo!", then I grab my snowboard and go down the side of the building.
Extreeeeeeeeme!
If there was ever any argument for not letting the U.S. government collect massive amounts of data on us, take over the entire healthcare system, etc., it's stories like this. They're simply not competent to do so. They're not even close.
The U.S. government was originally envisioned as a limited government, with a short list of enumerated powers, and all other government functions were left to the states. Over the years, and in wild violation of our Constitution, the federal government has grown way past that. Not only is their size and function not legally justifiable, but it's simply too big to work.
A wonderful reform would be to cut down the size of the U.S. government to just what the Constitution allows. Anything that requires coordination between the 50 states can be done in a "clearinghouse" manner, with the federal government providing a mechanism for coordination, but not control over it. That would be a much better way than letting the federal government assume primacy on subjects not in its Constitution.
Thanks for the clarification on that! I'm amazed that the GPL has such a big loophole in it. I'll no doubt review the current state of open-source licenses. (I have a lot of reading to do.)
I just hope that Steam Box & OS take off, esp. OS as it would mean finally that I could probably dump using Windows altogether as I primarily only use it for gaming.
Have you tried using Wine to run MS Windows video games? I started doing that about 6 months ago & have had very good results.
And no, I'm not talking about the Android-related controversy. I'm talking about all the GPL'd code that they use internally.
According to the GPL, if you modify some GPL code and then make your modified version available to others, you also have to make the code available.
Google isn't releasing desktop apps with most of their products, but they are making it possible for people to use the GPL code they modified through their web services and whatnot.
It seems to me that just because they let the public make use of their modified GPL'd software through web services, instead of by shipping desktop applications, that it shouldn't make a difference. They should still be required to release the source code to the public.
Is there something wrong with my reasoning here?
Just in time...an article about an NSA employee that tried to blow the whistle on them back in 2007.
I remember someone in Congress saying that Edward Snowden should have gone through the proper channels to blow the whistle. That's what this guy did. You can read the article to see how that worked out for him.
I wonder why Edward Snowden got attention when he blew the whistle, and no one up until that point did? Hard to say...though it may have had something to do with his hot girlfriend.
It amazes me that no one seems to remember Autoduel. It was a free-roamer, way before the Grand Theft Auto series. It was sent in a post-apocalyptic "Mad Max" sort of world. It was made by Lord British, the same guy that brought us the Ultima series. You could design new cars with an incredible level of detail, balancing features and power with weight. I spent months of my life on that game.
In modern times, there was Auto Assault, but that was one of those stupid MMORPG things. As if I want to hear 12-year-olds mouth off. Give me that game with a deep single-player experience, and I'll probably forget to go to work! Hell yeah.
Granted, you can download the original if you want, but I'd rather see a modern version.
The prevalent attitude seems to be 'The code is there for you to modify. Do it yourself.' For the average user, that could mean developing proficiency in some programming language, familiarity with that software's architecture before they even begin to understand how to get what they want.
Making matters worse...most open-source projects are severely under-documented. Even though the source is available, getting past the hurdle of severe under-documentation is too much of a hassle. It takes dedication to get to the point where one can contribute meaningfully to an open-source project, and not for any good reason — it shouldn't take that much effort.
Making matters even worse...in my experience, most open-source-project maintainers will resist documentation. I just went through this with an open-source project I've been interested in a long time. Since the source-code had practically no comments whatsoever, I took it upon myself to learn the subject matter (in this case, NOT an easy task), then learn large parts of the source code. Then, being the sort that's willing to contribute, I offered to document the code. The maintainer was willing, even eager, for it. Then I submitted my first patch...and he immediately changed his tune. He found my documentation to be "excessive", and quoted chapter 8 of the Linux kernel coding guidelines to bolster his case. Frankly, I couldn't disagree more with his viewpoint.
I'll never understand, for the life of me, why programmers don't document their source code, especially open-source programmers. How is anyone supposed to contribute to their project if the hurdle is set so high? Hell, how do they remember how a piece of code works if they haven't seen it in a long time? It boggles the mind.
I don't have any good theories for why this is...just a disparaging one. Every time I encounter this problem, I get a vivid image of Gollum grasping some source-code printouts and hissing "Nooooo! My preciousssssss...."
I certainly document my open-source code. My biggest project to date is a temporal analog-video denoiser called y4mdenoise. Feel free to look at the code, if you'd like to see an example of what I'd consider a proper level of documentation. Start with the high-level overview and find out for yourself.
Sure it is a "bribe". Bribes aren't taxed! ;-)
Actually, they are. Illegal income is specifically mentioned in the IRS tax code. That's how they got Al Capone.
Give H1B holders who blow the whistle on their employers violating the law...
Getting foreigners to trust the United States that much isn't always possible.
Clayvon.
(Credited as "Trashy Guy" here, for some reason.)