We used Oraquick as part of a study of high-risk individuals, and would confirm positive results. It's also a fairly economic way to do quarterly screenings for people who are in high risk categories. Of course, an individual with the means, would opt for a full screening if they were worried about exposure from a particular event.
It's used in developed nations primarily in the same way it's used in developing nations - for people who do not necessarily have the resources for and access to medical care. Inexpensive and better than nothing.
In general, people in Africa probably have a lot more understanding of HIV/AIDS and the testing procedures than people in the West do. For example:
You say that HIV testing requires drawing blood and testing at a lab. Nope - HIV testing can now be done with saliva, in a cheap ($40) device, and give you results in about 15 minutes. A person in a country with a high rate of infection would very likely be at least somewhat familiar with such a thing considering that those tests are vastly cheaper than the old blood tests. Moreover, as far back as 2015, there was a smartphone dongle that came out that can test for HIV.
Given that we have gone from tests that required a doctor visit, could take days for results, and required blood to tests that can be done anywhere, require a little spit, and 15 minutes to get results, it absolutely wouldn't surprise me that someone would think that advances made it so that perhaps sweat from a fingertip could be analyzed to give a diagnosis. Given that we have gone from gigantic, hideously expensive satellite phones that didn't do anything but allow you to (barely) make and receive calls, to tiny, dirt cheap, and ridiculously capable smart phones, it absolutely wouldn't surprise me that someone might think that a phone could now be capable of performing that analysis.
And finally, she probably knows many, many, many people who have HIV or have died from AIDS. In many countries in Africa, HIV/AIDS is a common, everyday thing that many people deal with, either as having it or having people close to them who have it. To say someone is stupid because they allow a prank app that's just shy of feasible and that preys on an omnipresent threat - that's not just ignorant, but cruel.
The golden path should be: 1) User reports a problem to the service desk. 2) Service desk looks into the problem and either addresses it if it's user error or punts it to QA/testing. 3) QA/testing investigates and documents as much as possible about the bug - replication steps, affected screens, whatever. They would do this both in production and a staging environment to see if it's an environmental issue. 4) Developer takes the bug and figures out the issue, creates a fix, which is then sent back to QA/testing. 5) QA/testing tests the fix in a staging environment and signs off on it. 6) Fix gets deployed to pre-prod staging, QA tests it. 7) Fix gets deployed to production, QA tests it.
I get that in smaller shops devs tend to just push stuff out (I worked in a few of those) but that's really not a great way to do things.
Have you considered that maybe your brain and eyes are damaged or inferior? I put it in that way because you seem to have anger at people who don't get motion sickness from VR and went out of your way to preemptively belittle and insult.
I've had a dozen or so people over to play with my Rift ad Sony VR systems, and only one person indicated discomfort, and that was at the teleport mechanic in a couple of games.
Mostly I find games are substantially more immersive, and the only issue I have is when I run into a real-life obstacle that isn't visible in VR. I have scraped knuckles from smacking into a (very real) wall when trying to pick something up in VR.
Which human's math skills? Humans have a staggering range of capabilities. Average? Then average in which way? A savant? Then a savant in which way?
And what about autistics who happen to be very good at poker but lousy at reading human expressions?
There are multiple different ways to be good at poker, and this system is just using one of them, and is clearly quite good at this particular way.
I also didn't see anyone making the claim that this was a hard or general purpose AI. It's not, and you acting like someone did make that claim is kind of weird. It's a system that is beating some of the best players at a game that was previously deemed to be very challenging to do computationally.
I'm curious about this - do you grab people's junk before using a gendered pronoun with them, or just ask? It seems really awkward.
Follow-up question - if you're not having sex with them, why do you care about what they have between their legs? It seems a bit weird to me to put that much emphasis on someone else's genitals, but hey, whatever floats your boat!
Stating specifically what they are concerned with in this particular case doesn't state that they aren't also concerned with other behaviors if they see them. They mentioned the specific behaviors they found problematic in this case.
However, by all means, if you see advertisers on this network engaging in hate speech against majority groups, you should bring it to their attention.
You don't have to wonder - just look at migration to the US in the 18th and 19th centuries.
My grandfather came here from a farm in Mongolia in 1906, alone, at the age of 12, and found himself in New York City. That might as well have been going 500 years into the future, just he did it by boat rather than time machine. Given the difficulties at the time as well, there was no going back.
People did it all the time back then, and still kind of do today, though arguably globalization has made it substantially less jarring. Some fail, some merely survive, and some manage to thrive.
There's a bit of difference between using pictures a person had taken voluntarily for sexual gratification and actually objectifying the person themselves.
Or, in another way of putting it, just because someone posed for explicit pictures does not mean that's the sum total of their value as a person, which is what "sexual objectification" is usually taken to mean - they aren't a person, but an object that has no value other than to be used for sexual gratification.
Given what I've read from you in the past, I'm pretty sure you'd agree she's still a human being, even if she is married to a walking bottle of spray tan with a shitty hairpiece.
Only a moron thinks the world I'm talking is hypothetical - it's the world we live in today.
Look at food production. It used to consume huge amounts of human labor, proportional to the population, and yet now it takes vastly less, in part due to tooling and automation. Do you seriously think that trend won't continue?
Look at construction. It's a hugely labor intensive industry... Except where robots are working on putting together (and in some cases making) pre-fab components. Do you seriously think that this trend won't also continue?
Look at the cost of obtaining raw materials and how it has vastly decreased over time. Do you think that trend won't also continue? Imagine herds of bots and bacterium going through landfills and converting yesterday's trash into today's materials. Oh wait, you don't have to - this is already being done, on a very small scale, in labs today.
It's actually more expensive - and dehumanizing and demeaning - to provide social services today in the way that we do rather than it would be to just give those who can't afford it a basic (and by no means luxurious) standard of living.
The majority of people ALREADY don't do a damn thing to ensure that we have the basic essentials of life, and the vast majority of people ALREADY do work that can (and most certainly will) be easily and more effectively done by machines.
It's amusing - and a little sad - that you seem to lack the ability to think of humans at leisure as anything other than "loafing around." Why should only a select few be allowed to focus on pursuits that interest them rather than just survival?
What makes them so special that they should be spared from toil? Look at someone who slaves away in a sweat shop 16 hours a day for scraps and tell me - with a straight face - that they aren't working as hard as some IBanker who just shuffles money around and creates nothing. Yet one of them would die in a month if they lost their job, and the other will make enough money by 40 to live like a god until the end of their days.
It's people like you who are exactly what I'm referring to when I talk about people with their heads in their asses.
The sooner we all come to realize that the very fundamentals of human survival have changed, the sooner we can embrace what's already happened and the less disruptive it will be.
Our economy is ALREADY in the shitter, by the way: we have children who go hungry, despite the fact that we make enough food to feed the entire planet several times over. We have mothers and daughters and sisters and fathers and sons and brothers who die to easily preventable diseases and easily treatable illnesses just because they can't afford to pay for it, despite the fact that the necessary vaccines and treatments are actually very inexpensive. We have young minds going into crippling debt to obtain a college education because they HAVE to in order to get a low paying job that will never make use of that education or risk starving amidst plenty.
If you don't think THAT is a description of an economy in the shitter, then I pity you.
What happens is that we finally pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and realize that maybe there should be more to "being human" than slaving away for 40+ hours a week doing busywork just to scrape by.
We give everyone a minimum level of housing, food, clothing and access to services, and quit worrying about what they do to earn it. Maybe most will just fuck off and watch endless Law & Order reruns, but who cares? It isn't like they're taking anything away from anyone else. But we might also see an explosion in people turning towards more creative pursuits because now they aren't so bone weary from putting up with some bullshit McJob and can actually focus on something with a bit more meaning than flipping burgers or cleaning grills.
We could do this *now* except we're too fucking up our own asses with the whole protestant work ethic thing that we're acting against our own best interest.
The American people had a voice: They re-elected President Obama in 2012. Either he's President or he isn't, and either it's the President's job to submit nominees, or it isn't. The only temporal limits are the date's the President is in office, period, full stop.
The American people had a voice: They elected every member of the Senate. Either they're the Senate or their not, and either it's their job to consider and confirm/deny nominees, or it isn't. I don't care if they vote down any nominee outright, but refusing to do their jobs is bullshit.
If the American people want more direct say in such matters, then they should vote for officials who will vote for constitutional amendments that will make this a direct democracy. It's the dumbest fucking idea I can imagine (in this context), but that's how they have a voice.
Don't like it? Then either work to change it or fuck right off.
With kids especially, since they tend to developmentally lack certain structures that are essential to abstract thinking. You have to be practical because nothing else will work (except in extremely rare cases).
After D&D, we got a modem and I totally lost my mind when I realized that there were other human beings out there who also had computers and wanted to talk, so I started using a really simple chat program on The Source to bug people who were on line (with appropriate parental supervision).
Then someone mentioned BBSs, and after that I wanted to make my own BBS software, so learned a bit about that; I wound up writing a basic wardialer (didn't know things like that existed but I got curious to see if anyone else had a modem). Then after I saw a bunch of different BBSs, I wanted to run my own. I learned how to write a program that would have the modem answer the phone and try to handshake with a caller, then I made a user system, and then a simple menu system, then messaging, and then games, etc. Every time I learned one thing, I saw another feature out there that I wanted to add, so I just kept on learning more since I had a never ending series of problems to solve.
At some point, around 14 or so, I lost interest (or gained an interest in dating and seeing the sun and the outdoors). I didn't start writing software again until years later in grad school (for public health) and had to create a response & notification system for disaster first responders; we were supposed to just make process manual, but I thought hey, maybe this would be less prone to error or panic or human factors if there were software that could tell you what you needed to do, step by step, and how that might make it a LOT easier to train dispatchers.
My faculty advisor said hey, would you take a look at this other thing I've been working on and I'm like oh, hey, you know, we could have a system to do this, that ant the other thing... And years later, despite totally changing fields 2x, I'm pretty much doing that same thing all the time.
Who knew my brother being a dick would lead to this career?
When I was very young, my older brother would have friends over and they would play D&D. Being the pesky kid sister, I wanted to play with them, and my folks insisted they let me play. So I made a character (a very time consuming process) and triumphantly joined their game and... my character was immediately killed by a dragon swooping down from the sky who then flew off, job done.
So I took a couple of hours to make another character and... killed by a random passing ogre. My brother and his friends were laughing their asses off about it, and figured they had gotten me to stop wanting to play, because it took me like an hour or so to make a character and if they kept dying...
I told my dad what was going on and, rather than tell my brother and his friends to knock that shit off, he said hey, let's see if we can make it so you can make a new character faster than they can kill it off. We spent about 3 weeks building a character creation program on our Apple ][; it just HAPPENED to also teach me the basics of programming.
Next time I gamed with them, they predictably killed my character right away. So I ran off, printed out a new one and came back. They killed her, too. Came back a minute later with another, then came back with a stack of them and at some point they said fuck it and actually let me play.
Give a person a problem they actually CARE about solving and that is amenable to an engineered solution and some support while they're surmounting the learning curve, and they'll probably pick stuff up really well. Necessity first, THEN abstraction.
I don't mean to intrude on a good rant, but if you *really* want to improve things, you need to re-examine this statement. Do you truly believe that your elementary school maths teachers did not know elementary school math?
Yes, I truly believe my elementary school maths teachers did not KNOW elementary school math.
I believe they could DO elementary school math - as in, they had, as most people do, the processes down and could arrive at a correct answer when presented with an arithmetic problem.
But they did not KNOW elementary school math. They didn't understand why those processes worked and weren't able to do anything but shrug and say "that's just how it is" when a student would ask the why, rather than the how. They weren't able to present multiple different approaches to solving the same problem and use that to get at larger concepts like critical thinking.
When I was in those classes, I did NOT learn elementary school math. I learned very specific processes to obtain "correct" results, but not WHY those results were correct, why the processes worked, or even if there were other processes for getting those same results. Unless one wants to argue that rote memorization IS elementary school math, in which case I say, what a fucking waste of 4-5 years of prime learning time.
I agree that there is a ton of ancillary, non-subject related skill and knowledge that teachers must have; we put a huge burden on teachers, treat them like shit, and pay them as little as we can get away with. We set things up so that people who actually do have subject mastery wouldn't be willing to put up with the bullshit they have to in order to be teachers, except in very rare cases.
That's ridiculous. Many, many people come to things later in life that they were initially turned off of by truly horrid teachers.
When I was in elementary I *HATED* maths and science because the way my teachers taught it was aggressively boring. It was all rote memorization of formulae and processes, and there was zero joy or excitement - they taught it like people who didn't actually know the material and were just reading from a teacher's guide, because that's exactly what they were.
We moved and I went to a better school, and I was STUNNED at how interesting the teachers were able to make subjects I previously hated and dreaded.
Flash forward to now and I've had a long career as both an engineer and a research scientist. Given my successful career, I'd say I definitely have a mind for it, which I might never have come to realize if I'd had to continue staying with shitty teachers who seemed to go out of their way to make it boring.
And I know a LOT of people who have had similar experiences. Dismissing a huge swath of people as somehow unworthy or incapable simply because they don't immediately become fascinated by a subject is absurd. Funny enough though, it's a pretty common attitude by people in tech.
Because there exist a number of very vocal idiots who think their belief in contradictory morals dictated by invisible sky wizard gives them some kind of say in what consenting adults who are not them are allowed to do in private.
Said vocal idiots are really fucking bothered by the idea that other people who aren't like them might be considered equal in the eyes of the law, so they go out of their way to try and come up with special terms to describe the relationships that have not a single fucking thing to do with them. They really need to make sure that "people not like them" aren't allowed to be "married" because somehow that lessens the meaning of their "marriage" despite the fact that "people who are like them" often do a perfectly fine job of making a mockery of "marriage" just fine. Hence the "special label" you seem so puzzled by.
I agree that this is probably their reasoning, and yes, it's extremely fucking stupid, with potentially tragic consequences. All too often people equate "typical" with "normal" and "normal" with "good" and it's pretty dumb.
Maybe I'm weird, but what I want is for my kids to be healthy, happy, kind and capable. Who they love, as long as it's consensual and doesn't interfere with their health, happiness, kindness and capabilities, is fine by me.
You think kids aren't exposed to sexual preferences all the time?
"Oh, so cute - you're 3 years old and playing with Molly; is she your girlfriend?"
"Timmy only pulled your hair because he likes you! You're gonna marry him someday!"
Parents or partners kissing or showing physical affection in front of their kids. Literally everything in mainstream media. Kids are bombarded with this stuff from the get-go; it's only when it's not heteronormative that people seem to have a problem with it.
Yes, forgetting you have a deadly weapon that you're expressly forbidden from carrying in a certain place is EXACTLY the same as not having an ID for some reason.
"I forgot" as an excuse for bringing a firearm on a plane should mean you are instantly put on a no-buy and no-fly list, and that any other guns you own must be turned over to authorities.
If you're so irresponsible that you can't remember that you're carrying a firearm, let alone a loaded one, onto a plane, then you're far, far, far too irresponsible to be trusted with a firearm under any circumstances. It very likely means you "forget" to put the guns properly in a safe or "forget" rules of responsible use, or "forget" who the hell knows what.
If you're so paranoid about terrorists that you'll try and sneak a firearm onto a plane "just in case" (and then cowardly enough to lie about why you did it, to boot) then you're probably not mentally stable enough to be a responsible firearm owner and the same rules should apply - no-buy, no-fly and your guns are confiscated.
I don't have a problem with responsible, sane gun ownership, but in no way, shape, or form does bringing a firearm onto a plane in your carry-on unless you're an air marshal, intersect with either "responsible" or "sane."
Slashdot Mirror
We used Oraquick as part of a study of high-risk individuals, and would confirm positive results. It's also a fairly economic way to do quarterly screenings for people who are in high risk categories. Of course, an individual with the means, would opt for a full screening if they were worried about exposure from a particular event.
It's used in developed nations primarily in the same way it's used in developing nations - for people who do not necessarily have the resources for and access to medical care. Inexpensive and better than nothing.
In general, people in Africa probably have a lot more understanding of HIV/AIDS and the testing procedures than people in the West do. For example:
You say that HIV testing requires drawing blood and testing at a lab. Nope - HIV testing can now be done with saliva, in a cheap ($40) device, and give you results in about 15 minutes. A person in a country with a high rate of infection would very likely be at least somewhat familiar with such a thing considering that those tests are vastly cheaper than the old blood tests. Moreover, as far back as 2015, there was a smartphone dongle that came out that can test for HIV.
Given that we have gone from tests that required a doctor visit, could take days for results, and required blood to tests that can be done anywhere, require a little spit, and 15 minutes to get results, it absolutely wouldn't surprise me that someone would think that advances made it so that perhaps sweat from a fingertip could be analyzed to give a diagnosis. Given that we have gone from gigantic, hideously expensive satellite phones that didn't do anything but allow you to (barely) make and receive calls, to tiny, dirt cheap, and ridiculously capable smart phones, it absolutely wouldn't surprise me that someone might think that a phone could now be capable of performing that analysis.
And finally, she probably knows many, many, many people who have HIV or have died from AIDS. In many countries in Africa, HIV/AIDS is a common, everyday thing that many people deal with, either as having it or having people close to them who have it. To say someone is stupid because they allow a prank app that's just shy of feasible and that preys on an omnipresent threat - that's not just ignorant, but cruel.
The golden path should be:
1) User reports a problem to the service desk.
2) Service desk looks into the problem and either addresses it if it's user error or punts it to QA/testing.
3) QA/testing investigates and documents as much as possible about the bug - replication steps, affected screens, whatever. They would do this both in production and a staging environment to see if it's an environmental issue.
4) Developer takes the bug and figures out the issue, creates a fix, which is then sent back to QA/testing.
5) QA/testing tests the fix in a staging environment and signs off on it.
6) Fix gets deployed to pre-prod staging, QA tests it.
7) Fix gets deployed to production, QA tests it.
I get that in smaller shops devs tend to just push stuff out (I worked in a few of those) but that's really not a great way to do things.
Have you considered that maybe your brain and eyes are damaged or inferior? I put it in that way because you seem to have anger at people who don't get motion sickness from VR and went out of your way to preemptively belittle and insult.
I've had a dozen or so people over to play with my Rift ad Sony VR systems, and only one person indicated discomfort, and that was at the teleport mechanic in a couple of games.
Mostly I find games are substantially more immersive, and the only issue I have is when I run into a real-life obstacle that isn't visible in VR. I have scraped knuckles from smacking into a (very real) wall when trying to pick something up in VR.
Which human's math skills? Humans have a staggering range of capabilities. Average? Then average in which way? A savant? Then a savant in which way?
And what about autistics who happen to be very good at poker but lousy at reading human expressions?
There are multiple different ways to be good at poker, and this system is just using one of them, and is clearly quite good at this particular way.
I also didn't see anyone making the claim that this was a hard or general purpose AI. It's not, and you acting like someone did make that claim is kind of weird. It's a system that is beating some of the best players at a game that was previously deemed to be very challenging to do computationally.
Over that many days and that many hands and that consistently? That wouldn't be luck, that would be a quantum miracle.
I'm curious about this - do you grab people's junk before using a gendered pronoun with them, or just ask? It seems really awkward.
Follow-up question - if you're not having sex with them, why do you care about what they have between their legs? It seems a bit weird to me to put that much emphasis on someone else's genitals, but hey, whatever floats your boat!
Stating specifically what they are concerned with in this particular case doesn't state that they aren't also concerned with other behaviors if they see them. They mentioned the specific behaviors they found problematic in this case.
However, by all means, if you see advertisers on this network engaging in hate speech against majority groups, you should bring it to their attention.
They're certain he won fair and square and keep on saying there's a mandate for him, right?
If they're smart, they'll insist on a recount so that they can remove any doubt about the legitimacy of this election.
If they're actually interested in democracy, they'll want to make sure that everything is above board.
I actually don't know why we don't automatically recount after an election, period, if only to make sure we got something this important correct.
You don't have to wonder - just look at migration to the US in the 18th and 19th centuries.
My grandfather came here from a farm in Mongolia in 1906, alone, at the age of 12, and found himself in New York City. That might as well have been going 500 years into the future, just he did it by boat rather than time machine. Given the difficulties at the time as well, there was no going back.
People did it all the time back then, and still kind of do today, though arguably globalization has made it substantially less jarring. Some fail, some merely survive, and some manage to thrive.
There's a bit of difference between using pictures a person had taken voluntarily for sexual gratification and actually objectifying the person themselves.
Or, in another way of putting it, just because someone posed for explicit pictures does not mean that's the sum total of their value as a person, which is what "sexual objectification" is usually taken to mean - they aren't a person, but an object that has no value other than to be used for sexual gratification.
Given what I've read from you in the past, I'm pretty sure you'd agree she's still a human being, even if she is married to a walking bottle of spray tan with a shitty hairpiece.
Or how about a fine for drivers who cancel a pick-up right when a surge pricing change kicks in? Fair is fair...
Only a moron thinks the world I'm talking is hypothetical - it's the world we live in today.
Look at food production. It used to consume huge amounts of human labor, proportional to the population, and yet now it takes vastly less, in part due to tooling and automation. Do you seriously think that trend won't continue?
Look at construction. It's a hugely labor intensive industry... Except where robots are working on putting together (and in some cases making) pre-fab components. Do you seriously think that this trend won't also continue?
Look at the cost of obtaining raw materials and how it has vastly decreased over time. Do you think that trend won't also continue? Imagine herds of bots and bacterium going through landfills and converting yesterday's trash into today's materials. Oh wait, you don't have to - this is already being done, on a very small scale, in labs today.
It's actually more expensive - and dehumanizing and demeaning - to provide social services today in the way that we do rather than it would be to just give those who can't afford it a basic (and by no means luxurious) standard of living.
The majority of people ALREADY don't do a damn thing to ensure that we have the basic essentials of life, and the vast majority of people ALREADY do work that can (and most certainly will) be easily and more effectively done by machines.
It's amusing - and a little sad - that you seem to lack the ability to think of humans at leisure as anything other than "loafing around." Why should only a select few be allowed to focus on pursuits that interest them rather than just survival?
What makes them so special that they should be spared from toil? Look at someone who slaves away in a sweat shop 16 hours a day for scraps and tell me - with a straight face - that they aren't working as hard as some IBanker who just shuffles money around and creates nothing. Yet one of them would die in a month if they lost their job, and the other will make enough money by 40 to live like a god until the end of their days.
It's people like you who are exactly what I'm referring to when I talk about people with their heads in their asses.
The sooner we all come to realize that the very fundamentals of human survival have changed, the sooner we can embrace what's already happened and the less disruptive it will be.
Our economy is ALREADY in the shitter, by the way: we have children who go hungry, despite the fact that we make enough food to feed the entire planet several times over. We have mothers and daughters and sisters and fathers and sons and brothers who die to easily preventable diseases and easily treatable illnesses just because they can't afford to pay for it, despite the fact that the necessary vaccines and treatments are actually very inexpensive. We have young minds going into crippling debt to obtain a college education because they HAVE to in order to get a low paying job that will never make use of that education or risk starving amidst plenty.
If you don't think THAT is a description of an economy in the shitter, then I pity you.
What happens is that we finally pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and realize that maybe there should be more to "being human" than slaving away for 40+ hours a week doing busywork just to scrape by.
We give everyone a minimum level of housing, food, clothing and access to services, and quit worrying about what they do to earn it. Maybe most will just fuck off and watch endless Law & Order reruns, but who cares? It isn't like they're taking anything away from anyone else. But we might also see an explosion in people turning towards more creative pursuits because now they aren't so bone weary from putting up with some bullshit McJob and can actually focus on something with a bit more meaning than flipping burgers or cleaning grills.
We could do this *now* except we're too fucking up our own asses with the whole protestant work ethic thing that we're acting against our own best interest.
How is this insightful?
The American people had a voice: They re-elected President Obama in 2012. Either he's President or he isn't, and either it's the President's job to submit nominees, or it isn't. The only temporal limits are the date's the President is in office, period, full stop.
The American people had a voice: They elected every member of the Senate. Either they're the Senate or their not, and either it's their job to consider and confirm/deny nominees, or it isn't. I don't care if they vote down any nominee outright, but refusing to do their jobs is bullshit.
If the American people want more direct say in such matters, then they should vote for officials who will vote for constitutional amendments that will make this a direct democracy. It's the dumbest fucking idea I can imagine (in this context), but that's how they have a voice.
Don't like it? Then either work to change it or fuck right off.
With kids especially, since they tend to developmentally lack certain structures that are essential to abstract thinking. You have to be practical because nothing else will work (except in extremely rare cases).
After D&D, we got a modem and I totally lost my mind when I realized that there were other human beings out there who also had computers and wanted to talk, so I started using a really simple chat program on The Source to bug people who were on line (with appropriate parental supervision).
Then someone mentioned BBSs, and after that I wanted to make my own BBS software, so learned a bit about that; I wound up writing a basic wardialer (didn't know things like that existed but I got curious to see if anyone else had a modem). Then after I saw a bunch of different BBSs, I wanted to run my own. I learned how to write a program that would have the modem answer the phone and try to handshake with a caller, then I made a user system, and then a simple menu system, then messaging, and then games, etc. Every time I learned one thing, I saw another feature out there that I wanted to add, so I just kept on learning more since I had a never ending series of problems to solve.
At some point, around 14 or so, I lost interest (or gained an interest in dating and seeing the sun and the outdoors). I didn't start writing software again until years later in grad school (for public health) and had to create a response & notification system for disaster first responders; we were supposed to just make process manual, but I thought hey, maybe this would be less prone to error or panic or human factors if there were software that could tell you what you needed to do, step by step, and how that might make it a LOT easier to train dispatchers.
My faculty advisor said hey, would you take a look at this other thing I've been working on and I'm like oh, hey, you know, we could have a system to do this, that ant the other thing... And years later, despite totally changing fields 2x, I'm pretty much doing that same thing all the time.
Who knew my brother being a dick would lead to this career?
When I was very young, my older brother would have friends over and they would play D&D. Being the pesky kid sister, I wanted to play with them, and my folks insisted they let me play. So I made a character (a very time consuming process) and triumphantly joined their game and... my character was immediately killed by a dragon swooping down from the sky who then flew off, job done.
So I took a couple of hours to make another character and... killed by a random passing ogre. My brother and his friends were laughing their asses off about it, and figured they had gotten me to stop wanting to play, because it took me like an hour or so to make a character and if they kept dying...
I told my dad what was going on and, rather than tell my brother and his friends to knock that shit off, he said hey, let's see if we can make it so you can make a new character faster than they can kill it off. We spent about 3 weeks building a character creation program on our Apple ][; it just HAPPENED to also teach me the basics of programming.
Next time I gamed with them, they predictably killed my character right away. So I ran off, printed out a new one and came back. They killed her, too. Came back a minute later with another, then came back with a stack of them and at some point they said fuck it and actually let me play.
Give a person a problem they actually CARE about solving and that is amenable to an engineered solution and some support while they're surmounting the learning curve, and they'll probably pick stuff up really well. Necessity first, THEN abstraction.
I don't mean to intrude on a good rant, but if you *really* want to improve things, you need to re-examine this statement. Do you truly believe that your elementary school maths teachers did not know elementary school math?
Yes, I truly believe my elementary school maths teachers did not KNOW elementary school math.
I believe they could DO elementary school math - as in, they had, as most people do, the processes down and could arrive at a correct answer when presented with an arithmetic problem.
But they did not KNOW elementary school math. They didn't understand why those processes worked and weren't able to do anything but shrug and say "that's just how it is" when a student would ask the why, rather than the how. They weren't able to present multiple different approaches to solving the same problem and use that to get at larger concepts like critical thinking.
When I was in those classes, I did NOT learn elementary school math. I learned very specific processes to obtain "correct" results, but not WHY those results were correct, why the processes worked, or even if there were other processes for getting those same results. Unless one wants to argue that rote memorization IS elementary school math, in which case I say, what a fucking waste of 4-5 years of prime learning time.
I agree that there is a ton of ancillary, non-subject related skill and knowledge that teachers must have; we put a huge burden on teachers, treat them like shit, and pay them as little as we can get away with. We set things up so that people who actually do have subject mastery wouldn't be willing to put up with the bullshit they have to in order to be teachers, except in very rare cases.
That's ridiculous. Many, many people come to things later in life that they were initially turned off of by truly horrid teachers.
When I was in elementary I *HATED* maths and science because the way my teachers taught it was aggressively boring. It was all rote memorization of formulae and processes, and there was zero joy or excitement - they taught it like people who didn't actually know the material and were just reading from a teacher's guide, because that's exactly what they were.
We moved and I went to a better school, and I was STUNNED at how interesting the teachers were able to make subjects I previously hated and dreaded.
Flash forward to now and I've had a long career as both an engineer and a research scientist. Given my successful career, I'd say I definitely have a mind for it, which I might never have come to realize if I'd had to continue staying with shitty teachers who seemed to go out of their way to make it boring.
And I know a LOT of people who have had similar experiences. Dismissing a huge swath of people as somehow unworthy or incapable simply because they don't immediately become fascinated by a subject is absurd. Funny enough though, it's a pretty common attitude by people in tech.
Because there exist a number of very vocal idiots who think their belief in contradictory morals dictated by invisible sky wizard gives them some kind of say in what consenting adults who are not them are allowed to do in private.
Said vocal idiots are really fucking bothered by the idea that other people who aren't like them might be considered equal in the eyes of the law, so they go out of their way to try and come up with special terms to describe the relationships that have not a single fucking thing to do with them. They really need to make sure that "people not like them" aren't allowed to be "married" because somehow that lessens the meaning of their "marriage" despite the fact that "people who are like them" often do a perfectly fine job of making a mockery of "marriage" just fine. Hence the "special label" you seem so puzzled by.
I agree that this is probably their reasoning, and yes, it's extremely fucking stupid, with potentially tragic consequences. All too often people equate "typical" with "normal" and "normal" with "good" and it's pretty dumb.
Maybe I'm weird, but what I want is for my kids to be healthy, happy, kind and capable. Who they love, as long as it's consensual and doesn't interfere with their health, happiness, kindness and capabilities, is fine by me.
You think kids aren't exposed to sexual preferences all the time?
"Oh, so cute - you're 3 years old and playing with Molly; is she your girlfriend?"
"Timmy only pulled your hair because he likes you! You're gonna marry him someday!"
Parents or partners kissing or showing physical affection in front of their kids. Literally everything in mainstream media. Kids are bombarded with this stuff from the get-go; it's only when it's not heteronormative that people seem to have a problem with it.
Yes, forgetting you have a deadly weapon that you're expressly forbidden from carrying in a certain place is EXACTLY the same as not having an ID for some reason.
Do please go on.
"I forgot" as an excuse for bringing a firearm on a plane should mean you are instantly put on a no-buy and no-fly list, and that any other guns you own must be turned over to authorities.
If you're so irresponsible that you can't remember that you're carrying a firearm, let alone a loaded one, onto a plane, then you're far, far, far too irresponsible to be trusted with a firearm under any circumstances. It very likely means you "forget" to put the guns properly in a safe or "forget" rules of responsible use, or "forget" who the hell knows what.
If you're so paranoid about terrorists that you'll try and sneak a firearm onto a plane "just in case" (and then cowardly enough to lie about why you did it, to boot) then you're probably not mentally stable enough to be a responsible firearm owner and the same rules should apply - no-buy, no-fly and your guns are confiscated.
I don't have a problem with responsible, sane gun ownership, but in no way, shape, or form does bringing a firearm onto a plane in your carry-on unless you're an air marshal, intersect with either "responsible" or "sane."
There are also efforts to get more men involved in nursing.
These dudes who say "men aren't being recruited" are intentionally pushing an agenda and ignoring reality to do so.