There was a discussion on slashdot about this in 1999. Interesting the comment quality between then and now.
From the 1999 summary (emphasis added): "It also has a lot to say about the Quality Plateau, Design Patterns, the povery of methodologies and the false goal of deskilling."
It's nice to see that the editing standards haven't declined.
Are you sure about that? Single-window mode was the top "new feature" that the GIMP team highlighted in the version 2.8 release notes. It seemed like it was a feature they were excited to have, not something they were trying to quietly implement without anyone noticing.
When you open GIMP, it throws up so many Windows that I just get totally confused
This complaint has cropped up several times on this thread already. That is somewhat incredible, because GIMP has supported a single-window interface for years. Select "Single-Window Mode" from the "Windows" menu, and the "so many windows" will become one window.
The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
Have you even used GIMP recently? If you open a file in GIMP that is not in GIMP's native XCF format, there is an "Overwrite image_file_name" option in the "File" menu that does exactly what you want (i.e., does exactly what the "Save" option used to do).
Excellent post. To make matters worse: Even though most of the time, other commenters eventually call out those early, garbage +5 "informative/insightful" posts, it often happens late enough in the thread that moderators have moved on and the corrections never bubble up in visibility as they should.
I assume this means that a new Discovery Channel/Animal Planet "reality" show is just around the corner. "Underwater Gold", "Robot Miners", or something like that. It will be a nice complement to "Bering Sea Gold", "Bering Sea Gold: Under the Ice", "Ice Cold Gold", "Prospectors", "The Gold Rush", "Jungle Gold", "Yukon Gold", etc. (Yes, those are all real television shows. And yes, that is how stupid Discovery Channel and Animal Planet have gotten.)
You are asking us to believe that they actually care about this cause?
I'm not sure I understand your question. I am suggesting that they might be primarily motivated by increasing their own profits, and that creating an excess supply of coders is a means to that end. What "cause" are you referring to?
I don't think you understand what those terms mean. It is a fact that wealthy tech business leaders (Gates, Zuckerberg, etc.) are funding and lobbying for "everyone needs to code" initiatives. There is no question of whether or not those people are "conspiring" to push these initiatives; it is a well-publicized fact that they are. They only question is what their motivation might be. A cynical viewpoint is that their primary motivation is to flood the market with a glut of "coders" in an effort to drive down wages and increase profits (as many other slashdotters have also speculated), hence my original comment.
To review: "Conspiracy theorists" question which individuals or groups are behind a series of events. Cynics question the motives behind peoples' actions and usually believe that they are motivated by greed.
Then you have depressed pricing for the labor of people who earned a degree.
The cynic in me wonders if that was the intent from the very beginning: Create a narrative that "everyone needs to go to college", create loan programs so that just about anyone can go (and rack up massive debt in the process), then sit back and watch as the value of having a college degree, and the wages of workers with degrees, both decline. At the very least, that is surely not a disappointing outcome for wealthy business owners, CEOs, etc.
A cynic might also wonder if that is the intention of all of the recent "everyone needs to learn how to code" initiatives, too.
In case it was not clear to everyone reading TFS, "GPS Always Overstimates Distances" is incorrect. The point of TFA is that, on average, distances are overestimated. GPS distance estimates are subject to random error, and the random error is biased. So more often than not, the estimate will be too large, but not "always". A better headline would have been, "GPS Usually Overestimates Distances". Less sensational, but more accurate.
As others have pointed out here before, constructive conflict/disagreement in the workplace does not require acting like an asshole. If you read any of Sarah Sharp's comments on this matter, it is very clear that she had no problem at all with technical criticism or disagreement. Her problem was with unproductive and demeaning personal attacks. The summary seems to just lump all of this together, suggesting that Linus telling people that they are worthless and should kill themselves is an example of productively harnessing "conflict in the workplace".
Also, from the summary: "...Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius." Perhaps, but it could also be because he's in charge and has more power than anyone else on the project. There are plenty of really smart people who work on the Linux kernel, but most of them probably couldn't get away with the same kind of behavior because of their position in the power hierarchy. This further emphasizes why public, personal insults directed at subordinates are decidedly not an example of "harnessing workplace conflict" for productive ends.
There's plenty of material in the rest of the article that is even less convincing. Consider this:
"...the American Midwest is an agricultural breadbasket, not a large swamp, because railroads provided the link between that farming region and the demand of the East Coast..."
Does the author actually think the midwest was "a large swamp" prior to the arrival of settlers and the conversion to agriculture? Because it most certainly was not, unless the author thinks grasslands, savannas, and deciduous forests are the same thing as "a large swamp".
TFA was filled with sweeping generalizations like this, and mostly failed to substantiate any of them with references or other evidence. I imagine that this "large swamp" example wasn't the only case of pure BS.
The headline of the Quartz article and the Slashdot summary, "An algorithm can predict human behavior better than humans", is, not surprisingly, hugely overblown.
What these researchers actually did was develop a system for automatically taking a massive data set with a huge number of variables, identifying the subset of variables or new combinations of variables that are most likely to be useful for predicting a particular response, and then formulating a predictive model. (This is an extremely simplified summary.) That is really cool, but to present it as some sort of general "algorithm for predicting human behavior" is silly. It's no more an algorithm for predicting human behavior than are automated statistical methods for building a predictive model from a massive dataset.
Here's why. The entire article is well worth a read, but in a nutshell: The "paleo diet", as most often defined, makes all sorts of unsupported assumptions about "paleo people", their health, how they ate, and how humans have (or have not) evolved since then. For example, studies of actual paleo cultures have revealed that there was huge variability in diets. Some cultures ate lots of meat, some ate little meat, and so on.
That's not to say that the paleo diet doesn't prescribe some eating habits that are healthier than the way most westerners (or Americans, anyway) eat, but much of the supposed rationale behind the paleo diet is pretty silly.
I agree. I think it is one of the best "hacker" movies. As you and the GP have pointed out, one of the things that makes it so good is the repeated use of low tech to defeat high tech. Another good example is the way they defeat the ultrasonic/infrared motion detectors. In most films of the genre, the solution would be to magically break into the security system and remotely disable it. In Sneakers? Put on a neoprene suit and move really slowly. That is much more satisfying.
I told them when GM introduced its new fangled hydramatic transmission...
Considering that the hydramatic transmission was introduced in 1939, and you supposedly remember the good old days before the hydramatic was on the market -- how old are you?
I would have expected a much lower user ID.
For that matter, if you were just talking to your grandpa "the other day", how old is he? He must be pushing 130 years old, at a minimum. You'd better call the Guinness World Records folks before it's too late.
TFA (not the linked wikipedia article) basically just asks the question, "what if an alien's sensory systems (vision and hearing) were far more acute than ours?", and then gives a rather superficial answer to that question. TFA seems to be trying to make the argument that if an alien's vision or hearing were better than ours, the alien would not be able to comprehend our electronic visual displays or sound reproductions. The argument is not convincing at all, though. After all, we have color vision, but black and white media still works quite well for us.
TFA also makes some rather silly statements, such as, "With its advanced hearing, perhaps the Oculako [TFA's name for the alien] even transmits complex data by sound." Yeah, humans already do that, every day. Human speech is pretty good tool for transmitting "complex data by sound." Or, for a technological example, how does the author think fax machines and telephone-line data modems work?
Finally, the title of the Slashdot summary is "How To Make Messages Easy For an Alien Race To Understand", but TFA doesn't even attempt to answer that question. In fact, the article ends with this: "...it’s a very difficult problem to come up with an interspecies communication mechanism.... Given the technological advances since the 1970s how would you design this era’s golden record?" And that's it. The closest TFA comes to the question is asking the reader how he or she would solve it.
Slashdot Mirror
...the fielding of the ONLY jet fighter of WW2 [by Germany] which out classed and out ran ANYTHING flying only too late to make a difference.
Not true. The British Royal Air Force developed and flew the Gloster Meteor in World War II, which was another jet fighter of the time.
There was a discussion on slashdot about this in 1999. Interesting the comment quality between then and now.
From the 1999 summary (emphasis added): "It also has a lot to say about the Quality Plateau, Design Patterns, the povery of methodologies and the false goal of deskilling."
It's nice to see that the editing standards haven't declined.
If you want speed, go for MongoDB. It doesn't use joins & it's webscale, plus it can even use /dev/nul as storage for ultra-high throughput.
For those who haven't seen it, the parent is (I think) referring to this very amusing video.
John Oliver delivered an excellent treatment of this topic that is both informative and entertaining (and maddening). It's worth a watch.
...they were so bitterly reticent about it.
Are you sure about that? Single-window mode was the top "new feature" that the GIMP team highlighted in the version 2.8 release notes. It seemed like it was a feature they were excited to have, not something they were trying to quietly implement without anyone noticing.
When you open GIMP, it throws up so many Windows that I just get totally confused
This complaint has cropped up several times on this thread already. That is somewhat incredible, because GIMP has supported a single-window interface for years. Select "Single-Window Mode" from the "Windows" menu, and the "so many windows" will become one window.
The day GIMP started trying to force people to save in its own proprietary format (to the great unhappiness of a large portion of its user base) rather than the format the file was OPENED in pretty much marks its death.
Have you even used GIMP recently? If you open a file in GIMP that is not in GIMP's native XCF format, there is an "Overwrite image_file_name" option in the "File" menu that does exactly what you want (i.e., does exactly what the "Save" option used to do).
Excellent post. To make matters worse: Even though most of the time, other commenters eventually call out those early, garbage +5 "informative/insightful" posts, it often happens late enough in the thread that moderators have moved on and the corrections never bubble up in visibility as they should.
I assume this means that a new Discovery Channel/Animal Planet "reality" show is just around the corner. "Underwater Gold", "Robot Miners", or something like that. It will be a nice complement to "Bering Sea Gold", "Bering Sea Gold: Under the Ice", "Ice Cold Gold", "Prospectors", "The Gold Rush", "Jungle Gold", "Yukon Gold", etc. (Yes, those are all real television shows. And yes, that is how stupid Discovery Channel and Animal Planet have gotten.)
You are asking us to believe that they actually care about this cause?
I'm not sure I understand your question. I am suggesting that they might be primarily motivated by increasing their own profits, and that creating an excess supply of coders is a means to that end. What "cause" are you referring to?
not a cynic, a conspiracy theorist.
I don't think you understand what those terms mean. It is a fact that wealthy tech business leaders (Gates, Zuckerberg, etc.) are funding and lobbying for "everyone needs to code" initiatives. There is no question of whether or not those people are "conspiring" to push these initiatives; it is a well-publicized fact that they are. They only question is what their motivation might be. A cynical viewpoint is that their primary motivation is to flood the market with a glut of "coders" in an effort to drive down wages and increase profits (as many other slashdotters have also speculated), hence my original comment.
To review: "Conspiracy theorists" question which individuals or groups are behind a series of events. Cynics question the motives behind peoples' actions and usually believe that they are motivated by greed.
Well said. I wish I could mod up your comment.
Well said. I wish I could mod your comment up.
Then you have depressed pricing for the labor of people who earned a degree.
The cynic in me wonders if that was the intent from the very beginning: Create a narrative that "everyone needs to go to college", create loan programs so that just about anyone can go (and rack up massive debt in the process), then sit back and watch as the value of having a college degree, and the wages of workers with degrees, both decline. At the very least, that is surely not a disappointing outcome for wealthy business owners, CEOs, etc.
A cynic might also wonder if that is the intention of all of the recent "everyone needs to learn how to code" initiatives, too.
The invention was quite interesting, too -- a mechanical implementation of spread spectrum that was based on player piano technology.
In case it was not clear to everyone reading TFS, "GPS Always Overstimates Distances" is incorrect. The point of TFA is that, on average, distances are overestimated. GPS distance estimates are subject to random error, and the random error is biased. So more often than not, the estimate will be too large, but not "always". A better headline would have been, "GPS Usually Overestimates Distances". Less sensational, but more accurate.
As others have pointed out here before, constructive conflict/disagreement in the workplace does not require acting like an asshole. If you read any of Sarah Sharp's comments on this matter, it is very clear that she had no problem at all with technical criticism or disagreement. Her problem was with unproductive and demeaning personal attacks. The summary seems to just lump all of this together, suggesting that Linus telling people that they are worthless and should kill themselves is an example of productively harnessing "conflict in the workplace".
Also, from the summary: "...Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius." Perhaps, but it could also be because he's in charge and has more power than anyone else on the project. There are plenty of really smart people who work on the Linux kernel, but most of them probably couldn't get away with the same kind of behavior because of their position in the power hierarchy. This further emphasizes why public, personal insults directed at subordinates are decidedly not an example of "harnessing workplace conflict" for productive ends.
Three puns in one punchline - nicely done!
There's plenty of material in the rest of the article that is even less convincing. Consider this:
"...the American Midwest is an agricultural breadbasket, not a large swamp, because railroads provided the link between that farming region and the demand of the East Coast..."
Does the author actually think the midwest was "a large swamp" prior to the arrival of settlers and the conversion to agriculture? Because it most certainly was not, unless the author thinks grasslands, savannas, and deciduous forests are the same thing as "a large swamp".
TFA was filled with sweeping generalizations like this, and mostly failed to substantiate any of them with references or other evidence. I imagine that this "large swamp" example wasn't the only case of pure BS.
The headline of the Quartz article and the Slashdot summary, "An algorithm can predict human behavior better than humans", is, not surprisingly, hugely overblown.
What these researchers actually did was develop a system for automatically taking a massive data set with a huge number of variables, identifying the subset of variables or new combinations of variables that are most likely to be useful for predicting a particular response, and then formulating a predictive model. (This is an extremely simplified summary.) That is really cool, but to present it as some sort of general "algorithm for predicting human behavior" is silly. It's no more an algorithm for predicting human behavior than are automated statistical methods for building a predictive model from a massive dataset.
Why is it silly shit?
Here's why. The entire article is well worth a read, but in a nutshell: The "paleo diet", as most often defined, makes all sorts of unsupported assumptions about "paleo people", their health, how they ate, and how humans have (or have not) evolved since then. For example, studies of actual paleo cultures have revealed that there was huge variability in diets. Some cultures ate lots of meat, some ate little meat, and so on.
That's not to say that the paleo diet doesn't prescribe some eating habits that are healthier than the way most westerners (or Americans, anyway) eat, but much of the supposed rationale behind the paleo diet is pretty silly.
Prescient film, underrated in my opinion.
I agree. I think it is one of the best "hacker" movies. As you and the GP have pointed out, one of the things that makes it so good is the repeated use of low tech to defeat high tech. Another good example is the way they defeat the ultrasonic/infrared motion detectors. In most films of the genre, the solution would be to magically break into the security system and remotely disable it. In Sneakers? Put on a neoprene suit and move really slowly. That is much more satisfying.
I told them when GM introduced its new fangled hydramatic transmission...
Considering that the hydramatic transmission was introduced in 1939, and you supposedly remember the good old days before the hydramatic was on the market -- how old are you?
I would have expected a much lower user ID.
For that matter, if you were just talking to your grandpa "the other day", how old is he? He must be pushing 130 years old, at a minimum. You'd better call the Guinness World Records folks before it's too late.
Do you have any references for this story? A Google search for "Chief Ullumongo" turns up nothing.
TFA (not the linked wikipedia article) basically just asks the question, "what if an alien's sensory systems (vision and hearing) were far more acute than ours?", and then gives a rather superficial answer to that question. TFA seems to be trying to make the argument that if an alien's vision or hearing were better than ours, the alien would not be able to comprehend our electronic visual displays or sound reproductions. The argument is not convincing at all, though. After all, we have color vision, but black and white media still works quite well for us.
TFA also makes some rather silly statements, such as, "With its advanced hearing, perhaps the Oculako [TFA's name for the alien] even transmits complex data by sound." Yeah, humans already do that, every day. Human speech is pretty good tool for transmitting "complex data by sound." Or, for a technological example, how does the author think fax machines and telephone-line data modems work?
Finally, the title of the Slashdot summary is "How To Make Messages Easy For an Alien Race To Understand", but TFA doesn't even attempt to answer that question. In fact, the article ends with this: "...it’s a very difficult problem to come up with an interspecies communication mechanism. ... Given the technological advances since the 1970s how would you design this era’s golden record?" And that's it. The closest TFA comes to the question is asking the reader how he or she would solve it.