Never put Minecraft pocket edition on a kidâ(TM)s tablet and let them play unsupervised. Theyâ(TM)ll play until it makes them sick. Itâ(TM)s a sandbox game that has some achievements and bosses to appeal to casual users. But the hardcore users will continue building on multiplayer servers for years and years. I love the game. But as an adult with a job and family, I have to strictly limit my time.

I'm betting some cat knocked it there.

I rarely see it on my Windows PC or my Linux Laptop. I do see it all the bloody time on my iPad and Android Phone.

And it's not just that trick. I go to a site on my iPad and start reading an article and all of a sudden there's an ad taking up the entire screen and not giving me an option to close the ad short of closing the browser.

I'd have to say that fully 2/3rds of the articles I want to read don't get read by me since I'm denied access to them thanks to the ads.

And I'm just loving (sarcasm dripping) the fact that so many sites out there nag you about the fact that we're using an ad blocker. Well gee, if the ads were what they used to be, banner ads on the top and sides without pulling all sorts of fuckery, maybe we'd not use them.

Cases in point. The banner ad that forms in the middle of the screen and blocks what you're there to read. The ads that can't load at the same damn time and jump the text back to the beginning of the article so you have to scroll to find your place...only to have ANOTHER ONE pulling the same bullshit. Or there are the ads that change the position of the screen in random directions so when you are trying to click on a link, it jumps to making you click on the ad instead.

There are companies that I stopped using their products because they've annoyed me to no end as a result of their shenanigans. After one night of TV watching and listening to my Google Home looking up information on the Whopper over and over and over again...I've given up on using the damn thing and stopped giving BK my patronage.

I know they want to be creative in how they market their product, but with me and many other people...they're going to find that they'll face a backlash where people avoid them.

Well maybe not *every* time but this is nothing new. I remember multiple major iPhone OS updates in the past that caused battery drain that had to be fixed in a point release. Surprising they didn't catch it in testing, but who knows what weird combos of apps or weird file corruption people have.

BTW, why is it that clearing your history and cache is a common solution to browser problems? If a web browser is behaving poorly with bad data files, isn't it a but that it doesn't just realise the data is bad and ignore it? It's 2017; by now trusting that files are in the right format and not some kind of security exploit seems dumb. But then again there's Equifax.

Whatever, dude. :)

Wow. Not good on the reading comprehension, eh? I'm biased towards them as a *result* of all the experiences I've had. I just described some of those experiences. Or are you going to back-pedal and then make some comment about "correlation not being causation"?

Consider the three girls in my machine learning class whose answers were *consistently* superior, and my TA (who was also male) and I both agreed about this. It's not like we just blindly accepted their answers. We always checked them. They were just consistently excellent. We didn't have some a priori assumption that they would be, and of course, it was only three of them. I also knew several of the men in that class already and had hired them to do research because they seriously kicked ass. If anything, I had expected THEM to produce the best work if only because I had seen excellent work from them in the past. Plus, there were lots of girls in this class. It was just three in particular that stood out, and this experience isn't much different from other courses I've taught.

When I was in industry, I didn't think a lot about it. I worked with women, and most were good at their jobs; some weren't, but they did well enough. But when I started teaching and observed that (especially among the undergrads), the performance among the females was distinctively towards the top of the spectrum, I talked to the graduate and undergraduate program directors, and they explained to me the self-selection bias. You can also find this with a little googling. Freshmen in the CS program could be all over the place, with men and women who are anywhere from very good to just terrible. As they progress through the semesters, students learn good study habits, and there's some attrition to other majors and dropping out. Well, more girls leave, and they tend to be the weakest ones.

I don't know. Maybe treating woman with respect as human beings is a good way to motivate them to work hard? I can say that both men and women seemed to try especially hard for me because I was nice to them and became someone they didn't want to disappoint. There have been multiple instances where students and subordinates have performed better for me than others "warned" me they would do. Indeed, there was more than one guy I hired for research whom I was told by the undergrad director was "lazy," but I didn't see it; I gave high-level instructions and answered questions, and then they would come back regularly with excellent work. What can I say? There was this one guy in the machine learning class who's a genius, and he's in a doctoral program at Stanford now. He did almost as well as the girls but was having some senior-itis. His answers were correct and easy to grade, and his code was good. If those three girls had not been there, he probably would have been one of the ones we used as reference. But when questions and coding projects are open-ended, you see a lot of individual variation. Those three girls also wrote code that was better-commented and easier to read.

This does make me wonder. Am I biased towards women because (as I generally believe) I have observed very good school and engineering results from them? Or have I observed good results from women because my bias towards them somehow motivated them to work harder? If it's the latter, why is it that I got the same from the top men I worked with as well? Another option is that I tend to subconsciously assume the best about people, men AND women, and any extra assessment I *think* I need to do about the men isn't something that I necessarily show or do in practice. I honestly don't know. What goes on in my head and what I actually do may be two different things -- whatever it is, I seem to work well with others and inspire them to work hard.

Keep in mind that just because I'm biased towards women doesn't mean I'm biased against men. Don't make this out to be some kind of dichotomy. Of course, the alt-right likes to do that a lot (as do the alt-left -- what is it with these alt people and their polarized ways of thinking?). If anything, I'm biased in favor of the better universities, and I can have a little more confidence that the relatively few women coming out of these institutions know their shit, compared to the men, because performance among the men is more gaussian.

Anyhow, if you're going to make any kind of valid point, you're going to have to work a lot harder. I give your essay a solid C. Your grammar and punctuation are okay at least, but your logic is iffy, mostly because your reading comprehension is so poor.

I'm not sure how "getting right answers" and "writing good code that works" constitutes "gaming the system." In what way are those things as cheaty as you seem to be implying?

In the CS department where I work, we admit generally equal numbers of males and females. They are admitted because they have excellent SAT and GPAs and other assessment scores. By time they are senior, women are in the minority.

Why? Self selection bias. The CS program is tough. The less capable males are trained to be confident so they are more likely to stick around. Females are more self critical, so the less capable ones are more likely to change majors.

The result is that only the top notch females stick around to graduate. When I taught machine learning I got only juniors, seniors, and grad students. My TA and I quickly realized that we didn't need to bother writing answer keys in advance. We'd just take the answers from these three girls (two domestic, one from china), check them for correctness, and pick the best for each one. These gave us exemplary answers that were used to judge what would get maximum points.

Compared to them, the top males produced answers that were no less correct. But these girls especially wrote answers that were more concise, clearer, and easier to evaluate.

Teaching other topics to grads and undergrads, I've generally seen similar patterns. Teaching computer architecture, my best student was a girl in more than one semester, and the girls tended to work harder, with the majority of them in the top half of the class. And once again, I saw similar patterns among engineers while I worked in industry.

I work at a good school but there are lots of higher ranked schools. Google should be careful hiring me into a management, because if a female engineer graduated from a decent school I'm going to assume she is like the ones I have taught first hand and not be prepared to think less unless I see undeniable poor performance that can't be explained by things beyond her control. Most of the males are also amazing I'm sure but my experiences have taught me that less capable ones manage to graduate and get hired, so each one would have to prove himself to me individually before I'm willing to take some of the same risks with their work assignments.

If you want to bitch and moan about how women get an unfair disadvantage or advantage, all of y'all can kiss my ass unless you have had years of experience managing and teaching. Everyone else is by definition speaking from ignorance.

Today, the PhD is what a bachelors degree was 50 years ago. People who can't get jobs go back to school. Academia is also flooded with new applicants like it never was before. Peer review venues are also swamped with absurd numbers of papers submitted by students needing to graduate and faculty needing tenure, and the competition is absurd. It's very hard now for people to distinguish themselves.

It should come as no surprise that with increased numbers of scientists in completition with each other that the average scientific output per scientist would decline.

True unless they're google in which case they don't hire older people for not being "googly" enough.

I *thing* I know what this "googly" thing is. Younger geniuses will externalize all the alternative solutions they think of and the steps to get to ends. Older brilliant engineers will think through things quickly in their heads, automatically skip through the bad ideas, and jump straight to the end. The mostly 20 something's doing the evaluation can't understand it and reject it. It is not intentional discrimination. Just ignorance.

I am an expert and well accomplished in software engineering, digital circuit design, computer graphics, CPU architecture, and several other things. One time I had a recruiter tell me I should write one software and one hardware resume because companies won't believe that I could be good at both. Even after I'd had like 15 years of experience. It just shows you how cookie cutter hiring practices usually are.

On the other hand after I had been working as a professor for a while, these combos came in handy to get side work as an expert witness. I guess it's okay after your reach some level or amount of experience.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that men and women do have different interests that may account for gender disparity in tech. (Even if you only look at research cited by Damore, plenty of research has shown that more fundamental gender differences can only account for PART of the disparity, but let’s put that aside for a moment.)

Question 1: Let’s say that, all OTHER things being equal, we’d still have fewer women in tech jobs. This would just be a statistical bias. What women are interested in, on average, is not really relevant to the individual women who decide to go into tech, despite perhaps a majority of other women not wanting to do the same. *How could this have any impact on recruiting women into tech?* What could possibly be wrong with encouraging women to get into these professions (even aggressively)? I’m not talking about biased hiring or career advancement, just going out there and making it not difficult for women who ARE interested in tech to apply for those jobs and demonstrate their competence.

Question 2: Based on Damore’s memo and things he cites, I infer that workspaces have evolved to suit the needs of MEN. (And based on some other recent discussions about ageism at Google, they have evolved to better accommodate YOUNG men.) *But what could possibly be wrong with giving employees the ability to adapt their work environments to better match the needs of WOMEN?* Ideas in the memo touch on things like making the environment more social, and pairing people up to do coding together instead of always giving people isolated cubes or offices. Not only might this benefit women, but I know plenty of very social men (such as myself) who might enjoy doing pair-coding and other kinds of more cooperative approaches to engineering. Ultimately, it may be best to approach workspaces in a way that facilitates *anyone* adapting the space to their needs, and the fact that current work environments are statistically less suited to women is only a vehicle to highlight a more general problem with cookie-cutter workspaces. (At the same time, we should not try to generalize women out of the discussion. Men have dominated for a very very very long time. It’s about time women got the chance to make some demands and mold things to their tastes.)

Question 3: Finally let’s put gender bias back into the discussion. We’re not denying it exists. It’s just that people like Damore are tired of feeling accused of having unconscious biases and being made to feel bad about them. But what Damore’s memo does is cast doubt upon the extent to which bias is a factor in disparity relative to other factors. Ok, so there are lots of factors besides bias. *Nevertheless bias exists, so what could possibly be wrong with working to eliminate the bias?* Even if it were only 25% of the problem, it still sucks!

There is a lot about gender differences known to biologists, anthropologists, and other sciences. And that’s great, and we should avail ourselves of that knowledge.

This is something Damore DID NOT DO. (I did read the manifesto, BTW.) He *speculated* about the impact of fundamental differences, without citing any evidence, and then like some fucking propagandist, he *assumed* his speculations and went on to make groundless recommendations. This is bullshit of the highest order, and it’s a TRICK that is actively used by people trying to mislead others. I don’t think Damore is smart enough to be doing this intentionally, though. He’s just stupid, but it still pisses me off when people use tactics like this (intentionally or otherwise). His recommendations are based on more unsupported assuptions than that. All these training programs and efforts to maximize deversity, *might* make Google inefficient, but the extent to which Google would be inefficient was also left entirely vacuous, even if you were to make the mistake of taking his speculations as fact.

There was no scientific debate here. NONE. Because there was no science. Indeed, something conveniently left out here is any evidence *against* biological differences being a significant contributor to gender disparity. A simple google search reveals plenty. How about "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270278/“? You don’t want me to spam you with all the publications I’ve found on this topic that contain ACTUAL EVIDENCE. No. We don’t have scientific debate here. Just some moron looking for an excuse to not have to show women respect equal to men or silence the people talking about diversity, which apparently offends him. Damore feels offended because his point of view is being disparaged, but people who believe in a flat earth will feel similarly, and they should not be given equal voice either.

Maybe there are some differences between men and women that, all other things being equal, might make fewer of them enter tech professions. The problem is that all other things are not equal. Not even by a long shot. The inequalities imposed by society may be improved compared to what they were 60 years ago, but we still have a long way to go before half the population (women included) subconsciously question a woman’s qualifications more than a man’s. Or a black person’s more than a white person’s. We’re just not that far removed from the civil rights revolution, and the civil rights revolution has not reached everyone. Biological gender differences *plausibly* have some impact on the disparities. But only plausibly, in that we have not totally ruled it out, and for sure there is no evidence in favor of this postulate that isn’t drowned out by other factors.

Even if you disagree with me there, it’s also not the role of HR employees and hiring managers to make decisions on the basis of gender differences. They do not research these things, they are not educated in them, and it’s really not their job to know them anyway. Their job is to facilitate evaluation of potential employees based exclusively on skills relevant to the jobs, by evaluating resumes, checking references, and collecting feedback from interviewers. (There are very few other reasonable criteria, with the exception of maybe a few things like criminal background and the relevance of that to the specific position being applied for, and even that has to be handled carefully.)

Once people are hired, the next thing we need to so is foster a comfortable work environment. If Damore were do damn concerned about “efficiency,” he would consider the impact of sexism (regardless of biological differences) on women working at Google and the impact of that on their work productivity. People who actually give a shit about the feelings of others besides themselves don’t feel “oppressed” when they have to curb their behaviors and language a little in order to get along well with others.

It’s only when self-centered assholes like Damore come along that we end up with truely oppressive work environments. Or didn’t you notice that his manifesto is all about how everyone else is wrong and how everyone else should change, but based only on his unsubstantiated opinions.

“Threadripper” is obviously a compound word. I know what a “dripper” is, but what is a “threa”?

It is important that we all have the right to hold ideas that are inaccurate and also state them as being our beliefs. If not, we would have to condemn scientists who held to theories that got updated when new discoveries were made. So the court case will primarily test whether or not he should have been allowed to publish what he wrote without being punished by his employer AND whether or not an employer should be allowed to fire someone over beliefs they don’t want their employees to express.

Damore’s attorneys will argue that he is being discriminated against for exercising his constitutional rights, but that will fail because employment is at-will and it wasn’t some protected thing like race or religion that resulted in him being fired but instead his on-the-job “behavior." Google’s attorneys will attempt to argue that his ideas are harmful on the basis of their scientific merits, but that will fail since, there is no crime in expressing incorrect ideas. Damore’s manifesto also did not enter into the realm of hate speech, since he did not recommend harm against anyone, only that Google scale back “inefficient” programs that promote ideas of equality that Damore believes are not scientifically supported.

So it’s going to fall upon the journalists to pick apart the ideas he expressed. It will be educational for the rest of us to have some of these ideas about “genetic differences” retested. It’s not that we haven’t tested them before many times, but many people do not learn history and could benefit from a refresher.