141–150 of 182 posts
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Perhaps out of place but why are you consistently calling Woz "they"? I'm not a native speaker and it sounds very weird.
As I'm not aware of what pronouns they personally prefer, I fall back to using the singular, gender-neutral, "they/them/their". It's a fairly new usage in colloquial English but I find it to be common enough so as to not impair understanding.
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If you have a free afternoon I would recommend booking a "discovery flight" at a flight school. You go up, with a certified instructor, and learn the fundamental controls in a relatively safe environment. It can be an interesting experience, even if you have no desire to become a licensed pilot.
I checked that and around here (in Ireland) it's about €200 for a short flight. How is that in the US?
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« One reason to do so may be to explicitly normalise the usage so it doesn't imply a value judgement » That’s some scary sentence here. so gender is now a « judgment ». Like, there’s no reason to assume because steve wozniak has all the physical characteristics of a male, and has always been called « mister », using « he » (which is the grammatically correct way of designing a male human in the english language by de…
You completely failed to understand what I was saying, which is that currently, when you say "they", some portion tends to jump to the conclusion that you're trying to make a point about the person you're talking about. But some people use "they" just as a default when they're not sure. Using it as a default all of the time then serves to remove the consideration of whether or not it is done to try to send some sort…
Remember one of the goal of a language is also to convey meaning, and if possible in the most precise way (which is already hard enough even without taking moral issues into consideration).
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I'm not native english, so it could be possible that i overestimate the change to the english language using "they" as a default pronoun implies. I'm extremely sensitive to ideology wanting to change a language to better reflect its theory. It's the first step to totalitarism, and it's almost always done with perfectly good intentions (until we start to see the damaging side effects).
Singular 'they' has been in use for hundreds of years. See e.g. this article that I linked to elsewhere in the thread: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/everything-yo... Note that many of the historical examples involve contexts where gender would not even have been in doubt (e.g. all students at Cambridge would have been men).
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Lots of people were scary good at these things early on. Not everyone was as good as Woz, of course. When you can fit the entire architecture into your head, all the way down to the chips and board layout, you'll find that you're capable of quite a lot on that platform. A human with a skillet that has scaled up as much as computing hardware has scaled up is going to be virtually impossible to find, if not actually im…
"A human with a skillet" -- oh, I'm guessing skillset is what you meant to say. I was feeling old and thinking I was ignorant of some new slang there for a few seconds. :-D
Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online. I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.) I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s. Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a compl…
I wonder why rich people have such a high urge to fly small airplanes. It seems to expose you to a lot of risk, which you could easily avoid (I’ve lived a considerable number of years without facing a single situation where I was likely to fly an airplane).
In case you are interested, that book is a post-apocalyptic novel and the protagonist has a great relationship with his dog. Usually having a dog in the story is all it takes to keep me interested, but I loved everything about this book.
When I turned 16 and started driving, my life changed overnight in a very good way. I imagine learning to fly would give me that feeling again. I could go where I want and not be limited by going where the roads are. It's very appealing.
As a senior Java / CPP developer, reading what Wozniak had written, it might have been some incantation in a forgotten language. I really wish I had done more embedded and assembly at school. I can't understand it or appreciate it. Maybe SW and HW shouldn't mix, bar a few visionaries who bridge both worlds?
Why should SW and HW not mix?
While I think Woz sets a good example, they're human - and I'm sure they've done and/or said things that are less than one might expect and which one probably wouldn't approve of or condone - or perhaps which one might even condemn. I'd caution against canonising people - it sets too high a standard; which no one real can meet.
Perhaps out of place but why are you consistently calling Woz "they"? I'm not a native speaker and it sounds very weird.
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A 16-bit realmode DOS Hello World is also very simple, being less than 2 dozen bytes (8 bytes of actual machine instructions, and 15 bytes of message...) and something you can enter into DEBUG and run immediately if you have a 32-bit Windows system; on a 64-bit one, DOSBox or similar emulators will work well too: mov ah, 9 mov dx, 108 int 21 ret db "Hello world!" 0D 0A "$"
And if you don't have a 32-bit Windows system, you could always just run Windows 95 on your browser https://win95.ajf.me/win95.html
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Singular 'they' has been in use for hundreds of years. See e.g. this article that I linked to elsewhere in the thread: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/everything-yo... Note that many of the historical examples involve contexts where gender would not even have been in doubt (e.g. all students at Cambridge would have been men).
Thanks for link. So am i dreaming when i think using this term is (re)appearing recently following the whole gender neutral pronoun discussions ? Has it already been as common but i just didn’t happen to notice it ?
The use of singular 'they' has been common for (at least) several decades, long before any substantial number of people were worried about trans issues.