After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered • Hacker News Board

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#331

Post by Anon4Now » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

annoyingnoob wrote: post #56

I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before. I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat pris…

In my experience you just take out a toilet seat cover (aka, ass gasket), place it on the seat, and as you turn around to sit, it flushes automatically. Voila!

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#332

Post by snazz » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

NathanKP wrote: post #297

coldtea wrote: post #274

> “That’s the stupidest thing ever!,” I yelled at the TV. “Who’d want to put their greasy fingers all over a screen like that?” Apparently, everybody. Including me. An aside, but I never understood microphobics and grease-phobics... Perhaps it's part of not having grown in a 100% clinical/artificial urban environment my whole life. Yeah, you'll get some dirt on you and your things. Big deal...

I assumed that the author was thinking about screens 10 years ago, which didn't have oleophobic coatings yet. So fingerprints and smudges built up in layers really fast and made it hard to read the screen.

Yes, especially the junky plastic screens that would also get all scratched up. And plastic screen protectors that would get scratched, bubbly underneath, and had no effective oleophobic coating.

The modern Gorilla Glass screens and coatings used on iPhones and other devices are so magical in comparison to those early cheaper smartphones.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#333

Post by snazz » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #296

mikro2nd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is I am now actually incompetent to help my Windows-using family and friends. The answer is that I really can't help, no matter how much goodwill applies. I recently poked at a friend's Windows10 machine that was having networking issues (probably DNS or proxy settings)... couldn't even find the right sort of settings to paly around with. The whole thing is a mystery wrapped in an enigma to me and causes me…

What? Really? If you're being placed in front of a different OS than what you use you loose basic troubleshooting capabilities? Look, I'm not using Windows nor OSX very often, when people ask me for help, I mostly start out as helpless as them. But programmers (or generally computer literate, or whatever you wanna call it) seem to have way better searching skills, even for things they have no idea about. So yeah, hel…

Yep. I haven't used any version of Android since 6 or 7 and I can still use Google to find out where certain settings are.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#334

Post by socialdemocrat » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:02 AM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #79

annoyingnoob wrote: post #56

I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before. I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat pris…

Nowhere in the article does he ask for empathy, just describes what he is experiencing.

Exactly but I knew when reading it that your average American would complain. It is an ugly American trait that as soon as somebody commit a crime they become subhuman. All their actions must from then on be viewed as being deceptive or villainous in some way.

I just read the article as an interesting description of the US prison system and technological development.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#335

Post by Supermancho » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:06 AM UTC

I don't think technology has progressed, in a meaningful way, since 2007...much less 2009. It's still all virtualized, cloud providers, instead of servers. It's still digital advertising doing what it was doing in 2002. Myspace and Facebook were around in 2009. Twitter hashtags is a footnote. A lot of what happened is specific events, not technological leaps. I dunno, maybe I'm influenced by how it's all seemed pedestrian since the internet took over mainstream culture in the 90s and now it's just been refined to a sugary powder that's delivered through phone screens.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#336

Post by throwaway894345 » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:16 AM UTC

Supermancho wrote: post #335

I don't think technology has progressed, in a meaningful way, since 2007...much less 2009. It's still all virtualized, cloud providers, instead of servers. It's still digital advertising doing what it was doing in 2002. Myspace and Facebook were around in 2009. Twitter hashtags is a footnote. A lot of what happened is specific events, not technological leaps. I dunno, maybe I'm influenced by how it's all seemed pedes…

At least in the DevOps space, we can now develop applications without mastering process managers, log exfiltration, ssh configuration / server hardening, bin packing, configuration management, brittle infrastructure provisioning scripts, etc. This is somewhat revolutionary in that it doesn’t require specialists with decades of experience—devs can operate their own services down to the infrastructure. This affords a lot of impressive organization improvements even while the technology is nascent (lots of room for improvement in the build, infrastructure management, and orchestration spaces as well as in the “appliancification” of infrastructure or “platformization” of the cloud, depending on how you want to look at it).

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#337

Post by kungfufrog » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:27 AM UTC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UKeHbrsF94&feature=emb_logo

One of the videos that got Jesse McGraw on the FBI radar and ultimately arrested. I don't necessarily agree with the severity of his sentence or how he was treated in prison, but his behaviour was pretty reprehensible and juvenile.

It is sad he lost 10 years of his life from some pretty thoughtless actions that I'm sure had he had more life experience would not have considered undertaking.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#338

Post by akiselev » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:30 AM UTC

sincerely wrote: post #317

stronglikedan wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder. Both of those things are problematic, IMHO. As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized (profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of the humanitarian problems in one fell sw…

Only like 10% of the prisons in America are private, no?

Yes, but even state and federally owned prisons use an army of specialized contractors for much of their staffing and supplies. Since many of those companies were established specifically to service prisons it creates the same incentives to spend large amount of money lobbying for harsher sentences and other policies that grow the prison industry in general. It's not much of a concern for, say, Tyson, which is so big that prisons are a tiny part of their revenue but it's a bigger issue with other services.

The fully privatized prisons are on a whole other level of messed up.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#339

Post by anogenital » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:30 AM UTC

  I had to ask my twelve-year-
  old daughter what a hashtag 
  was.

This article is bullshit. There's no way this melodrama is real.

You're telling me he could crack open memory protection faults, by stepping through assembly, and tracing opcodes in a hex editor, but he couldn't Google "what is a hashtag?"

Listen, I get that Windows 10 sucks even more than 8 or Vista, and the UEFI partitions are an unholy annoyance, but he's not trying. Someone should also let him know that Ubuntu jumped the shark in 2011, and has been undesirable ever since.

Trends have changed, different brands hold sway over the general population, but computing itself hasn't radically changed. There's just a lot more mobile device vendor lock-out, and walled gardens ruling the roost, with server-side cloud control and platform/software/infrastructure-as-a-service lock-in via dev ops.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#340

Post by TallGuyShort » Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 12:31 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #289

TallGuyShort wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point of the conversation. I'm not excusing or justifying what he did at all. The point of this is, other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve? I'd like prison to achieve the kind of justice that yes, does provide some sense of justice to victims, but aims to reform criminals and reduce crime. Now, independent of…

> other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve? To keep a person from doing something harmful again when we don't know any other way to make them not do it and we aren't willing to risk more harm. Sure, if we could magically change the person so they would see what they did before as bad and never do it again, we wouldn't have to keep them in…

Except you're missing the point that other countries have less-horrible prisons and programs to keep inmates somewhat connected with other human beings and better prepare them to resume a normal life after their sentence.

It doesn't matter that we can't see the future when we can look at the present in other locations and see better results. We do know another way - the US prison system is just blind to it.