Comment Re:Thanks, you made me spit tea through my nose. (Score 1) 305
Mechatronics
Fortune 100, it's my job title.
Mechatronics
Fortune 100, it's my job title.
What used to happen is that something was academic, then it became a trade, then it became ubiquitous.
With computers being relatively new everyone still thinks you need a 4+ year education to do some of the stuff when it would be better of as a skilled trade. Not everyone is built for college/university. There are a lot of qualified intelligent individuals that, at the age of 13-14 should have gone into an apprenticeship program for the local IT workers 1010010101.
As technology progresses people dive deeper and deeper into various fields stuff shifts down the educational chain. First it's highly academic R&D and only a few PhDs know about it. Then it moves into the area where a masters degree is sufficient, then BS, then Trade, then it becomes unskilled labor.
The problem with STEM the last ~40 years is people are still convinced that you HAVE to go to college for some of these things and it's no true, we need to have people start specializing around 13-14 like we have always done. It's how Germany operates its educational model. There needs to be a good apprenticeship programs setup.
60 years ago no one had a camera, now kids are walking around taking photos. Everything bumps but CS and IT, for some reason, have refused to do that. You see it all the time on Slashdot "Well back in my day you had to take 4 classes on structures before you were allowed near..." and that's not the case any more. There are children building mobile apps. Sure they aren't always great but the point is that the younger you expose kids to this stuff the more ubiquitous it becomes for humanity. Pushing students that are 'interested in computers' towards an IT trade path at 14 would allow them to then learn enough by time they graduated highschool to then specialize in some realm of IT.
It's already going that way in Engineering. Mechanical Engineering is going to undergo a Mitosis in the next decade because there just isn't enough room for everything in the curriculum. Freshmen level Engineering courses need to be moved down to 16 year olds and then let them decide if they'd rather study fluid dynamics engineering or thermodynamics engineering. There is enough material in both realms to warrant a full degree in both. And if there is cross over there is always double/twin majors like Mechatronics is now (Between ME/EE).
Split CS and IT into 10 different majors each. Teach basic CS stuff to 15-16 year olds and those that are more hands on will just go into it as a trade, those that want to learn more can go to college.
> The reason it exploded wasn't because it was a superior discussion system- nerds made better ones at the dawn of the net, and they are still here.
They did make some incremental improvements. I love Markdown now. I stopped writing HTML ages ago for my own blog. Reddit is much easier to use in terms of adding formatting to text.
Coming back to Slashdot I realized how tedious doing full mark up was just to add some emphasis or a URL. I also like that with RES you can view images inline. I wish that there was a script to automatically show the first paragraph of a wiki article if you hovered over a complex term.
And where Reddit does work is in smaller groups. There's a threshold for a subreddit where everything just goes to shit. My wife loves hanging out on
I'll restate the same thing I've been stating for a few months: I want a new *protocol*, not a new site. A RFC that outlines comment moderation, story submission, etc. I want a C/C++ stack that I can deploy on my own server to roll my own Slashdot or Reddit. NNTP was good for its time but had its flaws (moderation). I want a stand alone app (then again I still use Thunderbird over a webmail) for discussion. I want it to be decentralized
Reddit's system is awful by design, because their goal isn't to make for conversation, it's to make for clicks and fights and play off that end of the emotional spectrum.
Reddit figured out fanning flame wars was more profitable. Twitter too.
When Brianna Wu tried to get her echo chamber to ask her the questions she wanted to answer in her Interview it didn't work.
Most people here have been isolated from "GamerGate" attributing it to "Reddit/Twitter Drama" but it's now been spilling over to Slashdot (because it's profitable for Dice) and even to the FreeBSD project (Because of Randi Harper). However people have found out that it's also profitable to be a professional victim which is why you're seeing it everywhere now, they need a bigger audience to fund their patreons
- https://www.patreon.com/freebs...
- https://www.patreon.com/user?u...
I wish Grace Hopper was still alive to tell this new group to STFU and GBTW.
What is stupid is deducing that the solution involves creating new incentives for young women to go into computer science.
All you need to do is ask a 8-12 year old girl what she wants to do and figure out how to get software to help her do that. "Programming" is just a means to an end to let lazy us lazy people take over the world. Find something, anything, repetitive and boring and figure out how to automate it. That's what software does for me. Software, for me and thousands of others, isn't the end game it's a tool to allow me to be lazy. If a 10 year old girl is tired of having to do _________ on the computer teach her how Python (or Perl) can do that for her. That's how you get girls into programming.
I personally use Python to mail out daily photos of my son. I've automated my Facebook picture posting. I really want to get a Ramp/Soak arduino built so that I can use it to bake the perfect cake. If that is what girls are interested in, then help them get there. If they have other interests foster their interests with STEM / code.
All of these "STEM STEM STEM" "CS CS CS" initiatives fail to do the most basic question of "What would you like to do". Why has no one just asked 8-12 year old girls what they want and then trying to figure out where programming fits into it. Not the other way around.
If girls aren't interested in gaming, why pink wash a Barbie game? Why throw money at getting them into programming for Windows Core if that's what they're not interested in at 12, 15, 18 or 20?
As a stay at home father I'm getting sick of the 77% number. It's bull shit and here's why....
A year ago I quit my job. I had been in industry for all of ~9 years. That means by this year I would have been in industry for 10 years. If I had been paid the exact same amount of money the entire time I would immediately be at making 90% of income as my peers. But start to weight my starting salary vs bonuses and raises and that number slips.
Additionally I'm 1 year removed from what has happened in industry. I've a 1 year gap on my resume (thankfully filled with GitHub commits). I've 1 year that I haven't been networking.
By this time next year that will be 2 years. Then 3. There are 3-4 women I went to university with that did the same thing. I was just in a position where my wife's job earned us more income and I wanted to stay at home and take care of the homefront, contribute to OSS, and raise our son.
This is a situation that everyone that becomes a parent and it's statistically the woman that makes the decision to stay home. Especially when you consider that STEM majors usually marry other STEM majors (at least all my friends did).
If you want to get women into industry you need to take an approach like IBM is doing: http://www.tonikal.com/ibm-hel... I showed that article to my wife and she said she would be pissed if she had to pump and dump for an entire week.
The internet and technology is another way to address this gap. You need to do exactly the opposite thing that Yahoo and Reddit did and let people work at home. There are still other Engineers that I went to school with that will be doing a finite element analysis on their laptop while breast feeding. For 90% of my job there was absolutely no reason to be at the office. Apple has launched their "Home Advisor" program where they're starting to insource all their call centers. Everyone I know of that talks to an Apple tech says they love it. Meanwhile I have to argue with someone in India any time I contact Comcast. (And not that there is a problem with someone in India, but there was a language barrier especially between "reccomends" and "requires" a professional install when getting my Cable Card)
My company before I left started doing the same with their IT support staff. You would call someone sitting at their home, and a lot of times they were women married to our engineers. They gave them a VOIP box, a head set and they sat at home and fielded IT questions.
Reddit is a social site first and then a news and information site second. To leave moderation in the hands of a few select people takes most of the social aspects away from people.
They're trying to be both. I would much prefer my Slashdot news over Reddit. Reddit, by virtue of being truly demographic (with an authoritarian police) will have multiple articles posted in multiple places. I liked that I had one central site to discuss the latest Tech article and that the comments within were voted mostly on their own merit and not by who made them or bandwagoning.
That's why I think there needs to be a moderation RFC with everything we've learned about moderation of internet discussion over the last 40 years.
When discussing some social things everyone should get to moderate. However when discussing science, math, technology.
I also think there should be some sort of statistical regression like Slashdot had with meta moderation.
Voat just looks like a rehash of Reddit with some incremental improvements but not things I would like to see.
And there is still a component of randomness.
I've had 'excellent' Karma for years but it would still be months before I had points and then some times I would be awash in them.
That can be mitigated with 2 things:
Reddit needs an "Anonymous Coward" account so that people don't have to create throwaways for every single thing they don't want to post under their main account.
Reddit needs to limit moderation rights. The problem with Reddit is everyone gets a vote. With Slashdot mod points are distributed based on Karma. (And it actually meant something), you can also not vote and comment in the same thread.
Anonymous cowards always start at +0. Registered accounts always start at +1. But just because you register a dozen Slashdot accounts doesn't mean you get to moderate what other people get to say on a new thread.
The thing with Reddit is there is just a +/- system. There is no taxonomy in why you moderate someone + or -.Everyone also gets an equal vote, which for some types of discussion, is best.
With Slashdot points are randomly distributed and you can't both moderate and comment, which is appropriate for other types of discussion.. In that way Slashdot got a lot of things right.
The problem neither site is a one size fits all solution for moderation. For actual tech discussion I want Slashdot's moderation. For pictures of Cats I want Reddit's.
Slashdot's moderation and "Anonymous Coward" account also prevented bandwagoning on the Brianna Wu Interview despite her trying to get her twitter followers to do exactly that. They didn't have the same power that they did on Reddit or Twitter so they really didn't affect the conversation.
Usenet just needed a good moderation system built on top of it.
Personally I wouldn't be opposed to 3 separate types of 'moderation' that can be enabled/disabled.
- No moderation. 4Chan, Usenet
- Everyone gets to moderation Reddit
- Not everyone gets to moderate. Slashdot. Mod points are handed out at random.
Each have their advantages or disadvantages. The "inline sharing" is something that should be done client side anyway. After using reddit for a few years and coming back to Slashdot I realize how much more I like markdown for just doing forum posts. Not that I have a problem with HTML but it takes a bit longer to type out the same content. Add a web front end and call it a day.
The best part is if you made it a RFC people could run their own usenet circles. I would love to get a slashdot replacement going outside of corporate control. If you host nodes in a few countries it would be hard to take down. (It's how Usenet was designed).
I'm ready to jump ship from Reddit and Slashdot to somewhere else and would prefer if that somewhere else was a protocol rather than a specific site.
It's kind of come to a head now that there is nothing really left for people to just discuss stuff. Slashdot sold out to Dice. Fark and Reddit sold out to SJWs and "mainstream". Voat is just reimplementing Reddit, but poorly (IMHO).
Why isn't 'moderation' in a RFC yet? It's something that could probably be nailed out by now as we've tried multiple different methods.
I personally prefer Slashdot's style of moderation for most things. (Where its limited to -2 to +5, and you have taxonomy built in). But for some things I prefer Reddit's where everyone gets a vote. Let people write their own implementations of the RFC and let anyone incorporate it into their website. Slashdot and Reddit are open source in the same way that OpenSSL was. Technically open source but such a pain in the ass to get running & modify for most people it wasn't worth it (and we see how that turned out).
The nice thing about it being an RFC is that most of this stuff can be implemented client side. I can write my own app to discuss things. NNTP just needed distributed moderation like Slashdot.
The article had exactly the intended effect. She got to claim she was a victim on twitter. [Archive]
I read all 300 toxic questions for my @slashdot interview, here are the ones I can answer
1. Yes, I like peanut M&Ms
She got exactly what she was going for. She never intended to answer any questions. She's just run out of venues to call her out on her bullshit. She heard Slashdot used to do 'tech', probably knew someone at Dice and got it put in. I wonder what Slashdot's traffic looked like today when she actively tried to get her followers to brigade Slashdot
And it's pretty easy to tell who they are. They have no Karma, didn't even Create an account
Meanwhile some of us have been on Slashdot for 10+ years and have decent post histories to fall back on. She claims it was GamerGaters that did this but most of them are too young to have ever found Slashdot.
These people can't handle the truth/criticism.
Personally the Windows UI topped out around NT/2000. I've tried as hard as I could to make XP and Windows 7 look exactly like it. My task bar has 3 rows because that's how I work. It doesn't work for other people and I understand where Microsoft is going with the 'tabletification'. It's just a rehash of Microsoft Bob and Apple's At Ease. It's a computer interface for non computer people.
My wife loves her Windows 8 laptop. I try to use it and it's probably one of the most frustrating things I have ever used. Who decided you could only have a few apps up on a screen and they would try to take full control? How about the 'full screen' start menu.
All I want is a simple "Windows Classic" theme that makes Windows 10 look exactly like Windows 2000. That's it. Keep all the fancy kernel improvements and everything else, I just want to interact with the computer how I've found it best.
"We're a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally quesitonable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this."
-/u/Hueypriest Comment
"We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States – because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it – but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)."
-/u/yishan Gawker article + interview
There are two kinds of free speech. It's not the 1st amendment free speech, it's Voltaire's "I disagree with what you say but will defend you to the death to say it" freedom of expression.
No one is claiming that the government is stepping in to censor Reddit. What they are claiming is that Reddit attracted users on the basis of "Free Speech" anything goes. Moderators volunteer their time (Free as in beer) to moderate based on the premise that Reddit allowed Free Speech.
Comments, moderators, content is all built by the users. Users that were told "This is a free speech zone". The 1st amendment equivalent would be 'free speech zones' and then censoring what people said in them.
I disagree with FatPeopleHate, I loathed the subreddit. However I defend their right to exist. The freedom of expression exists in many other forms than just the US Government's interpretation of it.
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, states that:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
England’s Bill of Rights 1689 legally established the constitutional right of 'freedom of speech in Parliament' which is still in effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Reddit claimed it was a place for freedom of expression and then backtracked on it. And with it users such as myself will find other places.
> If you're interested in a Reddit-like site that won't arbitrarily close your subreddit and shadowban you because they don't like what you're talking about, voat.co [voat.co] is shaping up pretty nicely.
But I'm not. What I'm looking for is a Reddit style site with Slashdot's moderation and accessibility through APIs and Usenet. I love Slashdot's moderation system and wouldn't want to discuss tech any other way. It also helps to slow down brigading since only a small number of users have mod points at any given time. Even then you got a choice between modding or commenting, not both. I'm wasting my points right now because I really want to post on this.
You also put a bit more effort into writing a post because everyone else put effort into "Should I spend one of my 5 points on this post". You also had throttling of how fast you could post. Posts were longer and more developed. I still go back and read comments I made from years ago because I put effort into writing them. (And it doesn't mean that you can't still have funny discourse).
Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time. -- George Carlin
