You've bought into a stereotype. And an easy one to buy into as most want to believe in some sort of cosmic fairness. The other reason is a lot of smart people simply don't place priorities the same way as others and get considered clueless for not playing keep up with the Joneses or choose a happy life instead of an ambitious one.
I buy into the stereotype, but primarily as a model, not as reality. It helps me remember to look for people's gifts and talents when they appear to be stupid. And it's a model I can never disprove, so it's easy enough to hang onto.
Now, the INTP thing. That's a Myers-Briggs [personality] Type Indicator. I've never been much into classifying people, but I felt personally validated after reading some material on the subject. Basically I'm an INTP which is less than 5% of the world's population, so I figure it's okay that I don't seem to think like "everyone else" (for better or worse).
I don't know much about M-B, but I gather there are four "booleans", thus 16 possible personality classifications. So the average size of these will be 6%. Being in one of 5% doesn't seem to be much of a distinction to me, but I guess it depends on the distributions...if they're say 94%, 5%, 1%, 0%, 0%... then being in the 5% class is indeed distinctive.
The descriptions of INTP's thinking, working and love habits really hit home, too, so that made me feel better. David Keirsey has a couple of books _Please Understand Me_ and _... II_ which cover the subject.
I wish I had kept the reference, but one of those famed psych papers is about a prof who wrote some generic stuff about how you feel like you don't fit in, and sometimes you think people are just using you or whatnot, and gave (the same text) to a bunch of psych students. The vast majority accepted that it was specifically about them, and insightful to boot. One must read any kind of personality description with a salt lick at hand, IMO.
(Aside: This is the first slashdot story that I've really dug into, and it's really hard to not come off as an asshole, because the 'community' has so little trust. One gets the sense that everyone is just out fucking with everyone else. Not exactly a good environment for productive discussion.)
So all you dumbasses out there, you know, those that could never fabricate a circuit board, never write a line of Perl, or tell the difference between Everclear and a nice Amarone: Consider yourselves lucky. You live nice, happy, simple lives. Fulfilling lives. You feel good when you die.
I see all the issues that you see. I feel bad when I don't buy my products carefully. I have what I have come to term "Affluent White Male Guilt." That makes me sound like a whinging middle-ager with a potbelly. I'm not.
Lately, I've been thinking about ambition and ego. And I realized that some of this guilt that I have, and I'd guess you share, about not doing enough is because we can do so much. I'm comfortable in social situations, get along well with people, intelligent with computers. Those are my traits. But the rest is luck: I'm in the luckiest 100th of a percent in the world in terms of where I was born, when I was born, how I was raised. Wealthy enough to go to school, not so wealthy to be shielded by it. I've traveled, etc.
All of this sounds like a giant ego trip, and to some extent it is, but the point is this: I think that those of us who, like me, are just that lucky, share a certain guilt. This is the guilt of being lucky, and knowing it, and knowing that you don't do enough with it.
And I believe that is the curse that you speak of. It's not intelligence, but intelligence is part of the luck.
Sorry kid. The world sucks. Everyone's out for number one and they don't give a fuck about you unless they get something good in return; no matter if it's your boss, your wife, your parents, or your kids. You're the same way, so you might as well accept it.
I call bullshit. You can model things this way, and in some sense it's true, but people do heroic things all the time. You can always say they were doing it for themselves, but that's just forcing cynicism on reality, not extracting it from reality.
The real thing you need to do is get over yourself. You're not special. There's lots of people in this world that are just as smart as you. Once you get over yourself, the world is your oyster. "unusually but non-traditionally 'bright' "...jesus...Kill me. Get over yourself.
There's nothing wrong with thinking that you're bright in an unusual way. I generally try to model things as "everybody's equally 'intelligent', but some people are intelligent in ways that don't matter much any more -- 'brute skills' -- while some people (like me, and probably most of 'us') are intelligent in a way that didn't used to matter, but does a lot now -- math, logic and critical thinking." That is my model. Sometimes it breaks down, when I meet people who seem to be very intelligent in many many ways. Sometimes, but not often, I meet someone and I can't even fathom where their intelligence lies, but I try to keep an open mind.
That being said, posting that entire Ask Slashdot without any kind of self-deprecation or ego disclaimer strikes me as...well...a bit egotistical.
Work very hard suffering mentally at first, and eventually have big payoffs (psychologically and likely financially).
Work very hard suffering mentally the whole way. Rewards come but you push them away because they just interfere with what's important.
Resign yourself to become just a mindless peon.
Your post hit a nerve with a few people, myself included. But it's not clear what choice you're suggesting is right -- or maybe none, but only the last one is wrong?
It's hard to have a serious discussion about this on/., but essentially I've been pondering for a year or two how to balance my ambition (which sometimes seems to overwhelm me) with my ego (which I've been keeping in check since grade school when I realized I wasn't "Uniquely bright", just smart in a narrow way that society likes -- sorta).
To believe that I should pursue my ambition, I (might?) have to give up some aspects of normal life. And I need to buy into my own ego, to believe that I *can* do the kind of things that I want to do. (To take it to the extreme, that would probably be going into politics, with the goal of going for something pretty high-up. Or starting a business, with the goal of changing how people think/buy/don't buy.)
That's true. After taking CS246 with Cowan, and CS342 with PK... I did claim to know OOP and C++, and put those keywords on my resume.
Are you 8-stream frosh '99 by any chance? 'cause those are the same two that taught me shit. And I think I might recognize your username.;-)
But my point is that taking a couple of undergrad courses* does not make you a "real programmer". At least no more than getting an BMath make you a "real mathematician"
No, it makes you someone who jumped through the hoops necessary to get a B.Math in CS from UW, nothing more, nothing less.
Coding lots (generally) makes you a good coder. Not much else will. And a CS degree shouldn't require you to code enough that you are a good coder. You don't need to be for most of CS.
Then you weren't paying enough attention in CS130/131.
Or maybe you skipped it, claiming that you already know how to program. Then that would be why they didn't teach you. 246 spent a fair bit of time on "how to program" C++, and 240 and 251 hit assembler, 240 also hit scheme. Sure, they didn't handhold, but they gave you what you needed to know.
Well, CS at Waterloo starts with Java. Then you hit Scheme and Assembly and C++. Most people hit something else on their co-op jobs, like C# or C or ASP/JSP/Perl/Python/PHP. But there's no C in the core curriculum.
And at least when I took it, the third year "baby OS" (CS354) course was still in the core. I think it's not now, as there's significant curriculum shuffling going on.
The source of the problem are sandboxes. With most open source projects, spam in a wiki will be quickly spotted and gotten rid of, but in sandboxen junk can sit for months, long enough for google to make note of it.
Bah! The source of spam is not email. The source if this problem is not the sandbox, it's the wikispammers. I watch the Sandbox page like any other. Moreover, the Sandbox's history is kept, just like any other page, so the spam is still successful in creating links even if it's removed.
There is little that can be done about this particular case, but another powerful tool against automated wiki spam is use of captchas. We need more captchas everywhere.
Captchas are a stopgap solution, since you can eventually write software to guess a captcha. Putting up captchas drives an arms race. I recognize that arms races are sometimes inevitable, but they certainly aren't desirable.
First of all, while my wiki is mostly personal junk, there's no reason it shouldn't be indexed. And many open source projects use Wikis as a primary source of documentation.
Secondly, the cat is out of the bag; I doubt these spammers are checking whether the sandboxes are indexed by Google.
I'm mostly pissed off that the edits to my sandbox have been only from nigritude ultramarine people. Frankly, I think google should stomp on that contest by not allowing the words to be searched for together.
Whenever restrictions are proposed, it is those who are for it who must answer the question, "Why?" It is not necessary for those who oppose a restriction to answer the question "Why not?"
Errr...why not?
(But seriously. Nobody really just randomly proposes something, and this has a pretty obvious (if misguided) "Why?" answer available. So they've done your part, no you do yours.)
(For the record, and because I like parenthetical remarks, I do think this is a silly place/way to deal with this problem. So there's also a pretty easy "Why not?" answer available.)
Don't stifle debate by pretending the "other side" hasn't made a contribution when they have.
hmm. right. But I don't think it obscures the MAC address completely; that is, software could still use it just like they could use a CPUID as a GUID for your machine, which is what spawned all of this.
MAC addresses can be changed by swapping out a $15 part and in some cases can be changed in firmware, so they're not an effective tracking/identification tool. Processor IDs are hardcoded and unique. Thankfully, they can also be turned off.
That's a silly argument -- the CPU can be swapped out too, and in modern machines it's not so expensive anyway.
Interesting; that's almost exactly where I am. +/-1 on both axes, I think. It'd be pretty neat to see a plot of slashdotters on that; I suspect the majority view is somewhere there. Certainly not a lot of authoritarians here, though perhaps some pretty right-wingers.
No. It's a "relatively" good thing, since it's better than one-dimension. And in fact it's *much* better. The muddling of authoritarian vs. libertarian (social) and socialist vs. capitalist (economic) is one of the great confusions for anyone trying to get a basic grasp on the political landscape today.
Besides which, we need summaries in life; we can't approach everything in detail.
Check out the Political Compass. It divides the left/right spectrum into a liberal/conservative (i.e. social policy) axis and a capitalist/socialist (i.e. economic policy) axis, to give a plane rather than a spectrum.
It's pretty neat, and it seems to peg me fairly accurately as a moderate socially liberal socialist. It obviously doesn't express all of the nuances of a possible view, but it certainly demuddles concepts that the left/right spectrum fucks up.
porn spam comes with subject lines ranging from (no subject) to "Your Mother Called".
I dunno if you've noticed, but they also come with "From" headers. If "Your mother called" comes from someone other than your roommate, it's spam.
Filtering them without reading them (From the subject and from headers) is not particularly difficult. But filtering them before they get to my inbox would be better.
You forgot "I ain't got shit to say about the article, but I reckon if I mention that it's not possible to post something funny about it, I might just get modded up".
MOD GRANDPARENT DOWN FOR CHYINT OUT LOUD, IT'S NOT FUNNY!
No, it's not funny, but the fact that it's moderated as +5, Funny is funny, and thus the comment as a whole is funny, and should be moderated as such. See? It's recursive meta-humour, but you might have a hard time understanding it.
Meh. It was a shot in the dark. Mirko sounds like a standard finnish name, although apparently it isn't. (I've been pondering writing a "Random Finnish name generator." I think I'll do it closer to when I leave, though.:-)
What sort of George 'verbal abortion' Bushism is " privilegiate "?
You (presumeably) wanted just 'privilege' as a transitive verb:
you either privilege front end services (GUI) or back end services (apache, etc)
Given the name "Mirko", I would imagine that the grandparent was Finnish. Finnish is not an indo-european language, and has very very different suffixing rules from English. They commonly then derive interesting suffix-forms of words.
Nice of you to point out the mistake like an ass, though. (Yes, just like I'm doing.)
They are a popular website and the stylesheet rarely changes, so the chances of it being in somebody's browser cache are high, the chances of it being in their ISP's cache is high, the chance of it being in neither is extremely low.
Except that browsers like Firefox check whether the stylesheet has been updated with (I presume) a HEAD request, or a if-modified-since, which still requires both bandwidth and server time, and if keepalives aren't supported then it involves building up and tearing down a socket.
I don't think an ISP cache will interfere with that request, and as somebody else said, when you deal in the kind of traffic google has, every (literal) bit counts.
Sure. Depends on the guy. I thought my "buy a tiger" hit on those kinds of things, but more free software shops were on the tip of my tongue than good international organizations.
Slashdot Mirror
I buy into the stereotype, but primarily as a model, not as reality. It helps me remember to look for people's gifts and talents when they appear to be stupid. And it's a model I can never disprove, so it's easy enough to hang onto.
-Rob
I see all the issues that you see. I feel bad when I don't buy my products carefully. I have what I have come to term "Affluent White Male Guilt." That makes me sound like a whinging middle-ager with a potbelly. I'm not.
Lately, I've been thinking about ambition and ego. And I realized that some of this guilt that I have, and I'd guess you share, about not doing enough is because we can do so much. I'm comfortable in social situations, get along well with people, intelligent with computers. Those are my traits. But the rest is luck: I'm in the luckiest 100th of a percent in the world in terms of where I was born, when I was born, how I was raised. Wealthy enough to go to school, not so wealthy to be shielded by it. I've traveled, etc.
All of this sounds like a giant ego trip, and to some extent it is, but the point is this: I think that those of us who, like me, are just that lucky, share a certain guilt. This is the guilt of being lucky, and knowing it, and knowing that you don't do enough with it.
And I believe that is the curse that you speak of. It's not intelligence, but intelligence is part of the luck.
-Rob, taking it one step further.
I call bullshit. You can model things this way, and in some sense it's true, but people do heroic things all the time. You can always say they were doing it for themselves, but that's just forcing cynicism on reality, not extracting it from reality.
-Rob
There's nothing wrong with thinking that you're bright in an unusual way. I generally try to model things as "everybody's equally 'intelligent', but some people are intelligent in ways that don't matter much any more -- 'brute skills' -- while some people (like me, and probably most of 'us') are intelligent in a way that didn't used to matter, but does a lot now -- math, logic and critical thinking." That is my model. Sometimes it breaks down, when I meet people who seem to be very intelligent in many many ways. Sometimes, but not often, I meet someone and I can't even fathom where their intelligence lies, but I try to keep an open mind.
That being said, posting that entire Ask Slashdot without any kind of self-deprecation or ego disclaimer strikes me as...well...a bit egotistical.
-Rob
Your post hit a nerve with a few people, myself included. But it's not clear what choice you're suggesting is right -- or maybe none, but only the last one is wrong?
It's hard to have a serious discussion about this on
To believe that I should pursue my ambition, I (might?) have to give up some aspects of normal life. And I need to buy into my own ego, to believe that I *can* do the kind of things that I want to do. (To take it to the extreme, that would probably be going into politics, with the goal of going for something pretty high-up. Or starting a business, with the goal of changing how people think/buy/don't buy.)
Cheers,
Rob
Coding lots (generally) makes you a good coder. Not much else will. And a CS degree shouldn't require you to code enough that you are a good coder. You don't need to be for most of CS.
Then you weren't paying enough attention in CS130/131.
Or maybe you skipped it, claiming that you already know how to program. Then that would be why they didn't teach you. 246 spent a fair bit of time on "how to program" C++, and 240 and 251 hit assembler, 240 also hit scheme. Sure, they didn't handhold, but they gave you what you needed to know.
-Rob
Well, CS at Waterloo starts with Java. Then you hit Scheme and Assembly and C++. Most people hit something else on their co-op jobs, like C# or C or ASP/JSP/Perl/Python/PHP. But there's no C in the core curriculum.
And at least when I took it, the third year "baby OS" (CS354) course was still in the core. I think it's not now, as there's significant curriculum shuffling going on.
-Rob
wtf. That's not insightful.
First of all, while my wiki is mostly personal junk, there's no reason it shouldn't be indexed. And many open source projects use Wikis as a primary source of documentation.
Secondly, the cat is out of the bag; I doubt these spammers are checking whether the sandboxes are indexed by Google.
I'm mostly pissed off that the edits to my sandbox have been only from nigritude ultramarine people. Frankly, I think google should stomp on that contest by not allowing the words to be searched for together.
(But seriously. Nobody really just randomly proposes something, and this has a pretty obvious (if misguided) "Why?" answer available. So they've done your part, no you do yours.)
(For the record, and because I like parenthetical remarks, I do think this is a silly place/way to deal with this problem. So there's also a pretty easy "Why not?" answer available.)
Don't stifle debate by pretending the "other side" hasn't made a contribution when they have.
hmm. right. But I don't think it obscures the MAC address completely; that is, software could still use it just like they could use a CPUID as a GUID for your machine, which is what spawned all of this.
Interesting; that's almost exactly where I am. +/-1 on both axes, I think. It'd be pretty neat to see a plot of slashdotters on that; I suspect the majority view is somewhere there. Certainly not a lot of authoritarians here, though perhaps some pretty right-wingers.
-Rob
No. It's a "relatively" good thing, since it's better than one-dimension. And in fact it's *much* better. The muddling of authoritarian vs. libertarian (social) and socialist vs. capitalist (economic) is one of the great confusions for anyone trying to get a basic grasp on the political landscape today.
Besides which, we need summaries in life; we can't approach everything in detail.
Check out the Political Compass. It divides the left/right spectrum into a liberal/conservative (i.e. social policy) axis and a capitalist/socialist (i.e. economic policy) axis, to give a plane rather than a spectrum.
It's pretty neat, and it seems to peg me fairly accurately as a moderate socially liberal socialist. It obviously doesn't express all of the nuances of a possible view, but it certainly demuddles concepts that the left/right spectrum fucks up.
Well, I believe he's got "soap" covered. And ballot, for all you know. Maybe you should choose your quotes more carefully.
Filtering them without reading them (From the subject and from headers) is not particularly difficult. But filtering them before they get to my inbox would be better.
-Rob
-Rob
Meh. It was a shot in the dark. Mirko sounds like a standard finnish name, although apparently it isn't. (I've been pondering writing a "Random Finnish name generator." I think I'll do it closer to when I leave, though. :-)
Nice of you to point out the mistake like an ass, though. (Yes, just like I'm doing.)
-Rob, a Canadian in Finland
I don't think an ISP cache will interfere with that request, and as somebody else said, when you deal in the kind of traffic google has, every (literal) bit counts.
-Rob
Sure. Depends on the guy. I thought my "buy a tiger" hit on those kinds of things, but more free software shops were on the tip of my tongue than good international organizations.
However, the red cross is very good.
-Rob