Windows 11 made that computer my last MS purchase.
I’m only looking at computers that natively ship Linux from now on — that OS was a disaster, that doesn’t even support basic functionality and was shipped without support docs or training their support staff.
The problem is that “software” is as broad as “aerospace” or “construction”.
Some aerospace things are highly engineered — airplane, rocket ships, etc; some things aren’t — kites, paper airplanes, etc; and some things are in-between, like gliders or hot air balloons.
You get the same in buildings — which range from sheds to houses to skyscrapers.
Also, the end of [0] and your discussion of your usage of routine abstractions to solve problems makes me wonder if you consider your own job to be (b)-type engineering.
I do not consider what I do now to be engineering. I'm responsible for a product used by my whole studio and I try to be very careful and produce a high quality deliverable, but I do not think of it as engineering.
>> You get incredibly less review at the publication stage — and your idea “experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet is hilariously wrong.
I'm glad to hear you're amused by my comment. Where did I express the idea that '“experts in one’s field” don’t also use the internet'? Can you please show me?
You talk about young people as if in their own world able to act autonomously away from the rest of society. Young people have parents. And they frequently rely on them into their mid-twenties. Many young people lost one or both of their parents from this (and other people they loved dearly). As has been repeated elsewhere, dying isn’t the only thing their parents and loved ones have to worry about having had COVID. The purpose of the lockdowns was to try to prevent this.
And so I can ask the same question, why are you disregarding the harm done to them (them being the young people)?
Yea, it would have caused more deaths from lack of treatment from additional surgeries, heart attacks and cancers which would have been left untreated. It would have put an absolutely devastating consequence on social care that would have a long lasting impact.
It would have also prevented scaling of health systems due to a distinct and dramatic shortage in staffing and long term backlog.
The decision above was purely economic. You would have to be really stupid to think the people in charge would shut down trillion dollar industries because the parents of some children died.
None of that is what could be derived or implied from your statement you condescending prick. If that is what you were implying, maybe you should get a better grasp of English so that your point could come across clearer.
I apologize for adding unnecessary flame to the conversation. I shouldn't have responded the way I did and should have instead clarified my position. I'm a little tired of reading COVID anecdotes and brought that into my response to you. That's on me.
>The decision above was purely economic.
I think it's hyperbolic to say that it was purely economic. Everything we do has some connection to the economy. Everyone in this thread, including myself, is basically making an economic argument facaded by an emotional one. But to say it's purely economic forgets the connection we have with people and the reason why we want the hospitals to be open for people who need care. A real sort of "collapse" happened for some rural family members. They don't have a hospital for their whole county and have to rely on another county's hospital. After they ran out of beds, the people in that town just had to wait and hope whatever ailment they had could be resolved elsewhere.
Back to the economy, obviously bad mental health has long lasting effects and that has secondary effects on the economy. I'm not so sure the alternative, the one where everything is kept open, would have worked. The "hospitals will collapse" scare tactic was only one aspect of what would have been a much larger collapse. Not just economic, but societal.
>You would have to be really stupid to think the people in charge would shut down trillion dollar industries because the parents of some children died.
You mean the hospitals? With a health system collapse, they just wouldn't be able to handle a lot of cases like you said. It wouldn't shut down in the sense that it would be 100% ineffective, just that
The only reason we locked down initially was to "flatten the curve". This doesn't mean eliminate the virus, it meant slow it down long enough for the hospital system and government agencies to catch up in preparation. But even then, it was understood that this virus was going to be endemic and that elimination was never a possibility.
> Young people are part of society so they are obligated to protect it.
The point is that the part of society being protected is largely confined to older parts of the population, while much of the costs of doing so are disproportionately coming down on younger people. It's easy to say "do your part to protect society", but when the part of society being protected is the mental, social, and emotional development and well being of young people, as well as technical skills and future job prospects, older people seemingly have no problem casting it aside for what benefits them the most.
You're not the same person I was replying too or is it an alt account?
Either way, I didn't say anything about eliminating the virus. Hospital systems are still at risk of being overwhelmed... that's why restrictions are still in place.
You're acting like younger people are the only people affected by the restrictions.
I’m not an alt account, I just agree with them and disagree with you.
> You're acting like younger people are the only people affected by the restrictions.
I’m not, but I’m saying the calculus of restrictions only makes sense for the older parts of society. Younger people are getting a raw deal. They are far less financially secure, established in their careers, their education, their social lives, and even in their personal development. Immense damage is being done in all of these areas to protect society from a disease that isn’t actually a threat to the young in any large degree. Older generations are sacrificing less due to the restrictions, but are reaping all of the benefits. This is especially galling considering the availability of effective vaccines that prevent severe disease and death, meaning that whatever risk does exist for these older generations is largely mitigated for them except for those who refuse vaccination.
So yes, it is enormously selfish for our society to throw young people under the bus to protect the most selfish portion of older, more well-to-do generations who refuse to protect themselves.
> The logic follows that we should have let the original and more deadly variants rip through society?
I participate in two communities - one that completely ignores COVID (except for a couple months at the very very beginning). They don't test, they don't care if someone is positive. Lots of people are vaccinated, but lots aren't (they all had COVID, they can't think of any reason to get vaccinated since they already are immnune).
And another one that is freaked out about COVID, mask wearing, vaccine or you are excluded from everything, social distancing, keep everything closed.
Somehow the longterm death rate is the same in both - except for those first few months. But the mental health in the open community is far better.
It's over. COVID is over. It's time to stop closing everything. Take the vaccine (or don't if that's the risk you chose to take), and stop this meaningless theater.
Anecdotes are useless. And my experience has been the opposite of yours. Nil deaths, one infection, same mental health for the cares-about-COVID community. The community that doesn’t has had 3 deaths, dozens of infections, and worsened mental health from the deaths of loved ones.
So why am I supposed to give more of a shit about your anecdote than my experience again?
>It's over. COVID is over. It's time to stop closing everything.
Uh we know. We’re talking about what happened in the past. Everyone has been using past tense verbs.
Democrats are using the shameful legacy of slavery to commit further shameful acts - racist takings from people who did nothing wrong, because of the crime of having a particular skin color.
This is no different than 80 years ago how we were told the Japanese were a dire threat — so people could take their farms in California and upwards along the coast.
Nothing good will come of Democrats embracing institutional racism.
Isn’t this why there’s a correlation between Asperger’s and engineers?
The same kind of logical, exacting thinking necessary for mastery of physical systems is in tension with the kinds of thinking used in social games. Some brains are better at one than the other — and we have disorders at both extremes.
I’ve always wondered if autism and dyscalclia are something of “polar opposites”.
>I’ve always wondered if autism and dyscalclia are something of “polar opposites”.
I don't think they are. Plenty of autistic people are bad at maths (you just don't meet these people in engineering circles!), and plenty of "social butterflies" are good at it.
Probably also related to a lot of other factors, like probablems with social interaction making people with aspergers more likely to for example spend evenings nerding out in their own room.
Yes hi, "aspergers" is an unfortunate nomenclature and many autistic folks (myself included) strongly resent it. It was named after a Nazi doctor (Hans Asperger) and used to classify autistic folks into "useful" and "non-useful" people -- as Nazis and Eugenicists are known to do. When you think of it, if you could refer to folks on the spectrum as such, without referencing the outdated nomenclature (the DSM-5 replaced it for diagnostics, now everything falls under the Autism Spectrum, rather than viewing the "higher functioning" folks as having a distinct diagnosis)
I invite everyone here who has stood up against a murderous totalitarian dictatorship at the likely cost of their life to tell us how Asperger should have done better.
> now everything falls under the Autism Spectrum
This is only true in the US. And people who were previously diagnosed as Aspergers retain that diagnosis, even in the US.
I want to strongly second this. Asperger was a complicated person with a complicated story in a brutal context, but ultimately a sympathetic and insightful man. His story is told in "Neurotribes" which is a thorough history of autism, and highly recommended.
What information do you feel can be communicated and understood with that moniker that is not served by Autism Spectrum? And why do you feel those distinctions (if any) merit a wholly distinct diagnosis?
"Autism Spectrum" is a deliberately vague term that has been created and stretched to bring a variety of minor social and emotional functional differences under the general label of "autism". As far as I can tell, in the US the major purpose of this has been to divert special education funding from severely impaired children to less-impaired children from higher socioeconomic strata, and it has been very effective in doing so.
So to directly answer your questions, "Asperger's" (or whatever substitute term you find acceptable -- I'm perfectly fine with a substitute) is very useful to distinguish people with minor social and emotional functional differences -- those people who are, for example, able to hold down a tech job and post about autistic politics to Hacker News -- from highly impaired people such as my daughter who will never hold a job and whose verbal skills are at a three year old level.
These distinctions are vitally important to ensure that appropriate funding goes to these highly impaired children rather than being siphoned away to children of well-connected or politically savvy parents who are fully capable of succeeding in the mainstream educational system without aid.
> I'm perfectly fine with a substitute) is very useful to distinguish people with minor social and emotional functional differences -- those people who are, for example, able to hold down a tech job and post about autistic politics to Hacker News -- from highly impaired people such as my daughter who will never hold a job and whose verbal skills are at a three year old level.
There are plenty of people who the diagnosis of Asperger's who will never hold down a job. I'd hardly consider it "minor" even if it is relative to your daughter.
Will one of you please just get to the damn point, and explain to us garbage Nazi-lovers exactly what language you'd like us to use to distinguish different levels of impairment/functioning, given that we want to discuss different levels of impairment/functioning? Or do you just not want it discussed at all? The lot of you successfully derailed this sub-thread and prevented that discussion from happening. But thank god you set us all straight on problematic etymology! Close one!
I am autistic, btw. An Autist. An Aspie. High-functioning. So's my brother. So's my father. None of us give a toss about these terms, but the subject of our traits and our getting on in society remains of interest.
I'm with you on that. That person above complaining about "Asperger's" doesn't speak for me. In the end, it's always going to be up to the individual and any sort of generalizing is going to fail unless you go about bullying people into it.
Sorry. I couldn’t decide which of these comments to respond to and did not mean to single you out or attack anybody. Obviously I find this frustrating and I feel slightly attacked myself.
I hear the phrase "high-functioning" more than "aspies". I think the distinction is useful in social contexts: just knowing Bob's son has autism is not enough info when writing party invitations or considering transferring Bob overseas.
Please ignore AussieWog93. georgestephanis is correct: autism politics are indeed messy but as an autistic person who in a different age would be classed as Asperger's, I detest the term for the same reason georgestephanis does.
A perfectly acceptable term outside some circles is, by definition, not acceptable, at least not “perfectly”.
And the (undisputed) fact that Asperger was quite the Nazi should, just by itself, disqualify the term. OPs comment linking the dual terms to the similar binary classification into useful/useless human beings goes even further by showing that usage of the term doesn’t just glorify someone who doesn’t deserve it, but shows how that practice derives from and continues the namesake’s hateful ideology.
Sorry... are you arguing for a term that separates autistic people into "productive" and "non productive" that was created by a literal Nazi?
I am autistic, pretty much all of the people I know are autistic, and even most of the people I know through my workplace are autistic (it's explicitly a neurodiverse workplace), and I've pretty much never seen anyone need to use the term "aspergers" in general conversation. As in, when talking about symptoms, when talking about diagnosis, when talking about anything to do with it, people just talk about the thing, rather than branding it as "aspergers versus autistic". I'll go further and say that, not only is it not in general parlance, but also that if you used the term "aspergers" in or around these circles, you would be lightly corrected, looked on disfavourably, or given a side-eye, at the least.
>I am autistic, pretty much all of the people I know are autistic
I'm not trying to tell you what words you should and shouldn't use; obviously in your circumstance it's a word more likely to cause a political schism and lead to misunderstandings.
Most people, though, live in a NT-dominated culture where the terms "Aspergers" and "Autism" both carry extremely different connotations.
One invokes images of an aloof professor who has misunderstandings but means well, the other invokes images of a child that screams and shits themselves.
In this instance, describing yourself as "Autistic" has real negative consequences that can be greatly ameliorated simply by making a slightly different language choice.
> invokes images of a child that screams and shits themselves
This is a generalized problem with the self-proclaimed neurodiversity/"autism rights" movement, though. They do very well at expressing the wishes of reasonably high-functioning folks with autistic traits, but don't seem to relate to the kids who can't speak intelligibly and spend their time banging their head against the wall any better than everyone else. Saying that "we shouldn't talk about low vs. high functioning autism, because it's more complex than that" feels like a cop out.
What is there to say about low vs. high functioning autism? People with low functioning autism can't be helped by social movements about recognizing human diversity, they can be helped by medical research and support for their parents. High functioning autism probably can't be helped by social movements either (what's the plan, to talk everybody out of using the subconscious screening system that makes them not like people with neurological disorders? can the discomfort that is felt when someone with MS is making jerky movements be reasoned out of people's guts?) but that's another question.
Maybe this debate is nothing more than a sink for the energies of people who honestly care but can't change anything, keeping them occupied until medical science sends the whole issue the way of dwarfism.
> they can be helped by medical research and support for their parents.
Many people in the "autism rights" movement oppose these things, often with strident rhetoric. They view any "medicalization" of the condition they happen to share with their lower-functioning fellows as inherently inhumane.
Pre-Godwinning the discussion doesn't raise discourse, it dumbs it down. Yes that's the history of the term but it was also the accepted term until after its removal from the DSM in 2013, and not everyone that grew up with that term is as plugged in as you and gotten the memo to moved over to the new term yet. It's fine to be angry at neurotypical people who use it as a slur, but you won't win many converts attacking people who aren't, especially using an anecdote about how you don't use the word as supporting evidence. Btw, the plural of anecdote is not anecdata which is not data.
This is a distinction without a difference. If someone holds Nazi beliefs and actively works with the Nazi party to achieve Nazi goals, most people would consider these people Nazis even if they didn't sign a bit of paper certifying that fact. Hans Asperger was loyal to the Nazi regime and took (horrible) actions to further the Nazi cause, and was rewarded by Nazi leadership for it.
Ok, so someone above already cited how "Aspergers" is a literal, direct reference to a Nazi. My burden of proof is covered, now you have the claim and must prove it. Go on :)
I took it to mean that workers did what was asked and no more — so productivity stayed constant.
Which was contrasted with engaged employees, who sharing in more of the profits, have an incentive to increase productivity — eg, by inventing a tooling improvement for the assembly line.
I think the overall point was employers are “penny wise, pound foolish” in that small productivity “gains” caused employees to disengage which is causing long-term slowdowns in improvements — improvements typically driven by employees stepping up and doing more.
Toyota empowers workers to stop production to fix quality issues. But they earn less than unionized workers.
Empowering line workers makes sense when there's growth and healthy margins to pursue. If the industry is mature or even shrinking then there's a heavier focus on cost cutting and metrics/Taylorism to maximize free cash flow and pay it out as dividends and stock buybacks.
It depends on the application, but CLIs can make testing GUIs easier in two ways:
- you can test the rendering layer in isolation by using the GUI to display two pieces of information manipulated by the CLI and comparing the renders, eg blank screen -> add some object.
- you can comparison test the GUI, eg pressing button X produces the same result as CLI option Y.
Properly testing a GUI requires having an internal CLI, in places I’ve worked — eg, app companies.
I was in college only ten years ago, and my English professor’s key insight to punctuation is that it’s to define framing and tempo for your sentences.
That the sequence you listed is the pause count — similar to different empty spaces in music. Punctuation is just the negative space to frame your thoughts!
Colon isn't a type of pause; at least, I only ever use it to introduce lists. I don't use it for timing or tonality.
This discussion makes it painfully clear to me that I over-punctuate. I mean, I knew I leant more towards elaborate sentence-construction than is fashionable; I've never liked txt-speak, and my thumbs are too fat and flabby for operating miniature virtual keyboards.
I try to write literate emails. That is also unfashionable, apparently, but I think it's considerate to the reader to use the expressive power of the language. In fact emails now seem to mostly be an alternative channel for sending txts. I think this is because of mobile apps that present the same UI for txts and emails.
So I send a carefully-considered email, with paragraphs and all that, and I get back a reply of the form "Yes! <emoticon> <emoticon>".
On semi-colons, I use them to append a clause with sentence structure (roughly subject, main verb, object) to the main part of a sentence, while keeping the two clauses together as a single "thought".
It also is a type of vocal intention. Are you acquainted with John Cleese playing the "Hungarian gentleman with phrase book" in the Monty Python sketch? «I will not buy this record [mounting pause, then release] it is scratched». The first part is preliminary, incomplete, it requires the second, expressed as a release after the mounting premise: the sentence is pronounced as having a colon (I cannot check the exact sample right now - that is how I remember it).
You can imagine the difference if it were pronounced as a dash, as a more emotionally neutral interpretation of the sentence, not stressing the implications of "the record being scratched", could bring. With colon you make the first part an incomplete premise that depends on the second part to finally gain meaning or informational value or completeness, reaching to conclusions; with dash with the second part you provide the detail that enrich the content of the first part. As a vocal intention, the musicality of the syllables would change (e.g., in «it is scratched», high-high-low vs. low-low-high), and the pause would become more of a mid-air jump suspension. (Unfortunately I do not have other examples to provide on the spot).
There can be correspondence between natural vocal intentions and punctuation - as is understandable, since punctuation very probably mimics the communicational relations implied in the acting of speech, and both are a consequence of the organization of thought.
It sounds as if you are saying that /colon/ is a pause, because in your Cleese reference, he pronounces a /colon/. If that's what you meant, then are you not begging the question? You assume that his pause was a /colon/, and conclude that /colon/ means a pause.
No. I have precisely stated that «It [relation between sentences] also is a type of vocal intention». This was stated on the basis that if you listen to a normal, decent speaker, you can see that the musicality in language can follow semantics, precisely different relations of sentences including modalities. Different relations are implied in different rhythms and melodies. You sing colons, dashes etc. as you speak.
There is no assumption: it is an obstension. There is no conclusion: it remains an obstension. That I mentioned of Cleese's acting, is an example.
I fail to see how you could read that pseudo-logic in that post. Do not use that poor pattern as a universal key: it is not.
I’m only looking at computers that natively ship Linux from now on — that OS was a disaster, that doesn’t even support basic functionality and was shipped without support docs or training their support staff.