251–260 of 434 posts
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Ironically there was a time when a coding error could lead to physical damage to the screen, even the CPU or other electronics. Also ironically, breaking things is not only half the fun it's maybe 75% of the learning.
Read the VLC story. That time hasn't passed.
I'm torn. I think she makes some really good points -- particularly about discouraging young girls and the futility of shoving adult humans into foreign social situations -- but I also think she might be rather narrowly defining the personality type of a "hacker", and dismissing behaviors that she doesn't find valuable (in her words: "ephemera -- popularity, beauty and fitting in" ). Maybe it's possible that there ar…
Also the ephemera are gateways to something less ephemeral: social contacts and human capital. I don't think this can be understated. Most women are social to a degree that most men will never be, and this is ok because being social is being powerful in every way that matters in day to day life.
The thing is, I am not sure one can really be technical and social in the same moment. These are very different thought processes. Social context is fluid and changing, and it can't be directly measured. So these are different.
It's funny. I suspect that my grandmother (who introduced me to computers and punchcards(!) would agree with everything in this article. Of course she mostly programmed in Fortran relating to her work in astrophysics (a field she entered in 1964).
> it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and friendships?
I do think that brain cycles are finite, and while I am male I tend to find that if the very things that make me good at solving certain sets of technical problems can make me socially out of touch at times.
> Last year, his school offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the girls will be too scared to try. And that's why we can't use sexism to fight sexism (or mistakenly enforce the same composition of the general population on self-selected subsets).
I disagree. As a high schooler, I know many intelligent and creative young women who don't want to do robotics or programming because of the people in those fields. High school boys in tech are much more likely to be misogynistic and socially inept than other high schoolers are. They make girls uncomfortable (they make me uncomfortable too, and I'm not event the subject of their creepiness), and this discourages girl…
Even if this is true, which I kind of doubt, do you think it will make them less misogynistic and socially inept to keep them as isolated as possible from women?
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When I became a teenager, I got wind that it wasn't something "cool" and got spooked. For someone as insecure as I was, having a hobby that I couldn't really "explain" to normal people was embarrassing. When I was a teenager, coding or being technical in general wasn't cool either, and most of the people who were involved were or at least seemed insecure and embarrassed. Perhaps the climate in middle / high schools h…
Hard to say for sure, when I was in school I felt like I was banking on technology becoming cooler over time which does seem to be the case. There's also less pressure on men to settle down early. A man can more easily think "fuck it, I won't start dating until I'm 25 by which time I'll be successful, drive a nice car and be an eligible bachelor". With the whole biological clock issue women are often hoping to be mar…
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I don't agree. Having unlimited access to technological resources is great, I don't think anybody is denying that. But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc... I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving…
When I was young, probably 12 or 13 I think, I saw a series of images of a spider bite on a mans thumb causing the thumb to swell, split open, go necrotic, and eventually require amputation. Did this damage me? No, I'm fine. I gagged when I saw the images, then I scrolled down and looked at some more. Lasting effects? Well today as an adult, I smash spiders when I see them. Not a big deal.
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I think the crux is that you were "morbidly curious". Being denied access through one medium isn't going to deter someone curious enough. Sure the internet is a HUGE medium, and it's a lot easier to get access to that material using the internet, but that content's been around for almost as long as we've had photography. Why exactly do you regret it?
I was morbidly curious to the extent that if somebody put a nasty link in front of me, I would have followed it. But I didn't actively seek those things out. To some extent, it was a test of macho-ness: can I handle this gore? What about this birth defect? I think a lot of kids are like that. I regret it because I feel it's shaped my personality, lessened my sense of empathy, and put a bunch of disgusting images in m…
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Hard to say for sure, when I was in school I felt like I was banking on technology becoming cooler over time which does seem to be the case. There's also less pressure on men to settle down early. A man can more easily think "fuck it, I won't start dating until I'm 25 by which time I'll be successful, drive a nice car and be an eligible bachelor". With the whole biological clock issue women are often hoping to be mar…
Is 25 really when most women are hoping to starting a family by?
Mean age at first birth: 25.6
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I've wanted to mention this for a while but the topic hadn't come up. My engineering faculty tried many things to get more girls in the program, including having girls-only events with the female dean. Of course, all students got these emails, and many of us guys were left wondering why we never had the chance to meet the dean in events like these. Excluding sometimes seems worse than the biases these programs aim to…
Excluding the more privileged sometimes seems worse than the bias which excludes the less privileged? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.