Wasn’t even the wildest. Before compsci I was doing mechanical engineering.
We had an assignment to design a railcar layout for transporting livestock. It gave the minimal parameters for the animals, established client driven acceptable losses for the livestock, etc…
We all cracked away at it. After we handed them all in, the profs were like “nowhere in the spec was the actual animals named, was no one curious?”
Silence.
They had given us a literal Nazi RFP discovered post WWII. It was for moving people to fucking concentration camps.
“You’re smart people. People are going to ask you to do bad things. They’re going to try and hide thier intentions. Don’t collaborate with Nazis. Don’t ever use what I teach you to hurt people.”
Those sound like bad-ass professors!
I would love to have a copy of this assignment! That reveal must have been a real gutpunch. Something that may have actually stuck with most students.
Programming?
scoffs
Woke.
I’m Antigramming like a true Patriot.
Using arabic numerals to code? I thought this was merica!!!
I wouldn’t want to be a CS teacher at this decade, more than half the code will be AI generated. Would just suck the life force out of you seeing how little students care about actually learning the stuff.
When I was a TA, I’m pretty sure 1/3 if the students plagiarized their programming assignments. Copy/pasting suspect snippets into Google would often bring up near-verbatim results, and a similarity tool would often reveal 3 students that either worked together or copied from the same source.
What is the saying? Something about people who learn about how technology works begin to shun technology?
The absolute worst thing about how STEM is taught in my country is how entirely devoid curriculums are of critical theory. You take inputs, outputs, energies and production as-is, and you get a crop of drones who think such discussions are irrelevant. Then they graduate, start working and earning good money – and suddenly they support capitalist production structures because they’re “rational” and “objective”. Some then become the biggest chuds ever known to man.
I remember that I discussed gentrification with a civil engineer who happened to be my boss, a very renowned and talented person in our branch. He didn’t know what gentrification was…
civil engineer […] didn’t know what gentrification was…
Sweet jebus on ice-skates. The guy was potentially a literal if not figurative architect in service of one of the most profound mechanisms of gentrification and hadn’t heard of it?! That’s like designing cars and being unaware of traffic jams and induced demand.
What do you mean with critical theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory
There are different forms but it’s basically getting woke to class struggle between people who own shit and rent it out and people who get paid a bit to use the shit, but never actually get to own real shit or control what shit they decide to do.
I’m putting it pretty bluntly and pretty woke…ly, and a lil but Marxly. It’s also about analyzing systems we use to organise ourselves and what they do to us. Basically how to get people to actually wake up to how and why things are how they are and maybe how they could be different / better.
In the context of STEM students who focus on inputs, outputs, and engines at the expense of considering societal impacts (or simply telling themselves it’s the job of poor humanities students to get elected and pass laws to constrain the most egregious negative externalities of technology) it’s asking who an efficiency is for. Efficiency cannot exist in a moral vacuum. As Kim Stanley Robinson summarized in The Ministry for the Future (2020):
… there is good efficiency and bad efficiency, good inefficiency and bad inefficiency. … preventative health care saves enormous amounts in medical costs later, and is a good efficiency. Eating your extra children (this is Swift’s character’s “modest proposal”) would be a bad efficiency. Any harm to people for profit is likewise bad, no matter how efficient. Using an over-sized vehicle to get from point A to point B is a bad inefficiency, and there are many more like it; but oxbows in a river, defining a large flood plain, is a good inefficiency
Isn’t it funny how people who “have things” are less likely to be all that interested in leftism. And those who don’t have “things” look at them, want more leftism because they want want the “things” the people who have “things” and they don’t have.
And neither side understands the other.
What do you want to say, exactly?
That leftism is a product of ressentiment from people who don’t have “things” against people who have “things”, I guess. ContraPoints-level take tbh.
I hate billionaires, not because I want to be a miserable sociopath with too much money, but because they are largely the reason that any kind of improvement to our planet and species is being blocked. I support socialized healthcare, not because I envy those who have the money to pay for life-saving healthcare, but because I don’t want to fucking die, etc. etc.
There certainly are people like BadEmpanada, who oppose unions and welfare so that “first-worlders can suffer”, but they definitely don’t reflect what leftism is in general.
BE
I agree, and I’d add it’s not even a specifically left wing impulse either. The Roman Republic of all institutions was deeply concerned with the idea that republics shouldn’t have private princes as well as kings. The fact the Roman Republic failed to contain its oligarchy to the point of fundamental destabilisation into arbitrary power is evidence people ought to pay attention to left wingers when they say the same thing about billionaires and the concentration of wealth.
BE on twitter and BE while actually speaking seriously are like two different people. He seems to have an unhealthy addiction to creating twitter ragebate. I would not take it literally.
I understood that tbh. I just wanted the person to say it in their own words…
They don’t understand either side.
deleted by creator
That’s a different person you’re replying to
That’s embarrassing … 🤓
I missed it
Isn’t it funny how people who “have food” are less likely to be all that interested in leftism. And those who don’t have “food” look at them, want more leftism because they want want the “food” the people who have “food” and they don’t have.
It’s still garbled, but makes a better point.
Your edit makes a good insinuation “they’re just things” people think objects are frivolous things that tie you down because they’ve never experienced genuine lack.
Not like lack of toys, but the bear necessities of survival.
The basic necessities should just be provided, by that I mean food and shelter and basic medical care. If people want to live luxuriously that’s fantatic, going and toiling, innovating or improving their situation in someway should be encouraged; but no one should ever be shelterless and hungry.
Yup! You get it
Leftists aren’t jealous of rich people. Slanderous and incorrect
I just want to be able to live life as carefree as they can without regards to money. It’s a bit of jealousy but it’s not the overriding reason for it.
I have plenty of things, and still support pretty left wing ideas (except for the violence that some people here seem think is required to be considered left).
Ayn Rand has entered the chat.
What do you mean?
I have more things than I could ever want.
I want more agency.
It’s not even that “hardcore” of ideology honestly. It depends a lot on the lens you view it through your society. If it’s far right, then saying “water is a human right!” is going to seem extreme leftism.
I feel like this isn’t super new. You haven’t been able to do things like talk academically about network security or cryptography without being incredibly critical of government for decades.
My professors sure were. I felt really bad for them, honestly. They were the driving force to make philosophy and ethics courses mandatory at my university in order to recieve a comp sci degree.
“If you work in these areas long enough, at a high enough level, you WILL be asked to compromise something for the benefit of a state actor, and you might not even realize it’s happening. The person asking you to do it might not even realize what is really happening.” Was what our prof told a packed lecture hall.
We definitely had to take intro philosophy and then one philosophy elective for our engineering program. In addition to that we had like these engineering meta courses, like “Engineering History” and “Engineering Cultures”
This is pretty much my inspiration for self hosting. A three letter agency needs to infiltrate my network or show up to my house with a warrant. I’m not going to be able to stop them, but at least they’ll have to work for it. I’d love a CSI Miami’s episode level of effort for them to discover that I’m just a fucking nerd sharing Linux ISOs.
This made me image an exchange like
Agent 1: OK McNulty, you have finished your forensic scan of that scumbag’s computer. I can’t wait to hear whether we are taking this monster down for espionage, stealing classified information, or even just another copyright infringement case. What is really in that folder of “Linux ISOs?”
Agent 2: You are not gonna believe this…
When I was at Uni, we had a mandatory Ethics class for Comp Sci/Comp Eng. I think it was for all majors under the Sciences banner.
I want to hear that lecture!
Not sure what the discussion was, but, I recall they changed terms like Master/slave a few years back (maybe in the linux kernel), to make things nicer. I have no problem with this (not a big deal).
I think changing “slave” is a good idea, but “master” isn’t a problematic term; however I still prefer main because it makes more sense to me and it’s already a common programming term.
All that being said, we clearly should’ve changed it to “The Mistress branch” instead.
Actually… Found the discussion: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/master-slave-and-the-fight-over-offensive-terms-in-computing-kate-conger-new-york-times-april-13-2021
It was the Internet Engineering Task Force. But not sure if this is what is being referred to in this case
I am still shaking my head about this. Were it framed like “ahem, we don’t like those words anymore and think that these are better”, I would have no issues at all. But no, they just had to drag history of black people (for those about to be offended: I come from a place were “black” and even “removed” do not have any negative connotations whatsoever) into fucking programming. That is idiotic
Lool. Really?
IDE drives
In a similar position although after years of pure CS and a couple of years away from it, this new module is on programmable electronics (bad module name, not my pick) but basically programming with a microcontroller focus.
It is a hell of a time to be trying to develop a programming class. Gen-AI obviously and my attempts to control the impact of that is in-class testing where they have to write mm code without AI (unit tested then and there) and allowing Gen-AI in the other assignment but requiring VC, upping the task difficulty, and leaning on the microcontroller IO aspects. But C/C++ is also actively legislated against now for SC contexts but the alternatives really aren’t at a suitable level for us yet to switch to.
This may shock you, but if you think like this, you might be a hardcore leftist.
Also, I’m reminded of the Ghostbusters (1984) quote:
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve WORKED in the private sector. They expect results.
The quote is the least believable thing in this move about ghost blowjobs
Yup. I’ve been in academia and in private business. Academia pays terribly and expects a fuck-ton more work. I’m sure there’s places where you can just sleaze by without doing much, but I never saw them. (Which isn’t to say that all academic work is good work. I saw people who got far doing poor research, but they were also working very hard at it.)
Republicans have never forgiven Alan Turing, and much prefer the contributions of IBM during the same period.
I’m sure these topics become relevant at some point, but I’m doubtful that it’s absolutely necessary to address them in an intro course. how does leftist ideology help kids understand what a while loop does
like, literacy can do all of these things too, that doesn’t mean you have to introduce those concepts at the same time as the abc’s
The distinction here is programming vs computer science. You’re correct that it’s not strictly necessary, but it really depends on the area of study. Please allow me a small rant about the distinction - this isn’t directed at you.
Programming, honestly, could be taught like a trade. It’s a skillset and a craft, with best practices and even regulations in some industries. But one doesn’t need to know anything about how we got here or the fundamentals that make a computer work electronically, in order to write code.
Computer Science necessarily tracks back through the history of computing, in order to provide a grounding in how all this stuff ticks. You can’t talk about Babbage without Ada Lovelace, you can’t talk about Alan Turing without what the government did to him, and you can’t bring up ARPANET or the internet without talking about Berkley techno-hippies. Every step of the way are people taking capitalist and government interest and subverting it to meet more worldly and socialized goals. Everyone in this story has an agenda and, shocker, the smartest people tend to dominate in this field and reliably don’t fuck with conservative nonsense.
Hooooo boy, this person is going to make a terrible and incomprehensible intro class full of irrelevant infodumping lol.
I’ve had the same approach from the other side of the aisle and let me tell you, talking about open source and liberal ideals in programming would be a lot less hostile than some fundie rant.
Chapter 41: how to open your IDE
Chapter 42: why VIM is the best IDE
Chapter 43: So you’re trapped in your IDE
basket = [] for pos in billionaires: if pos not in basket: - basket += guillotine(b) + basket += guillotine(pos) # Corrected iterable namingbasket = [ guillotine(billionaire) for billionaire in population ]Almost. You just committed genocide.
Nah he’ll get a TypeError.Not seeing why, honestly…Unless you consider the merciless and systematic execution of all billionaires to be genocide…which I guess is technically fair…but it’s for a good cause! (…said every genocidist ever…)
Of course, I changed the name of the iterable…
And we’re talking about intro to compsci…getting a bit ahead of ourselves going right from loops to comprehension.
basket = [ guillotine(human) for human in population if is_billionaire(human) ]There, now you’re not killing everyone on Earth
This is why we don’t test in prod.
He just called everyone in the population a billionaire and executed them without actually checking if they are in fact billionaires. Somewhat too close to reality in some scenarios for my taste…
Nope, billionaire is a designator, not a discriminator. They’re iterating over population and decapitating everyone regardless of wealth. ;)
It’s missing an
if <someOtherDesignatorForPopulatioMember> in billionairesin the comprehension.
Haha, that’s either horrible if you don’t know what you just did there or brilliant parody if you did.
in my first semester of compsci we learned about chomsky hierarchy pretty much on day one, while we learned about while loops like a month later.
Yeah, that comment is just way over the top
maybe post the notes for critique? this is bait
Would have saved us a lot of trouble if it had been this whole damn while.
