Not Feminism 101

Gad, what a stupid comment. Creativity is universal. That way of thinking is good for both the arts and STEM and they complement each other.

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You know what the saddest thing is?
I wanted to be an architect.
Or you know: art with math.
Why on earth could they not think of that? Bonkers!

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Math is very creative. It’s just taught in a stultifyingly uncreative way.

At levels beyond the plug-and-chug formula stuff, math is definitely as much of an art as it is a science.

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Well, not all of us! :grin:

Actually, I think my best work was in my last few years before I retired. But I think that was partly circumstance. Now it’s all funneling into hobbies. When I’m not having a doctor’s appointments that is.
:roll_eyes:

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True story: a couple of my millennial coworkers were leaning against one of the tables when the wheel came off. Everyone was shocked when I got down to check out the extent of the damage, then a GenX coworker and I cleared the table and he helped me flip it over so that we could determine that it had just become unscrewed and could be put back together. Boomers just muttered how it needed to be replaced (as if that would ever happen) and millenials just had no clue what to do other than “don’t touch it”.

I think what it more shows is that Boomers have gotten cemented in thinking things are like they used to be when people thought stuff mattered (it’s broke, order another), and millenials haven’t had time to get the experience. Us X’ers have learned to cope along the lines of “no one gives a shit” which has made us remarkably flexible at figuring things out. Plus, we’re cynical as fuck, so, no, we ain’t gonna reinvent the wheel, but we’ll give you something that works even if it’s not what you expected. After all, the entire world isn’t the one we were told to expect, and we just got told “deal with it. I got mine, fuck you.”

Personally, I have more hope for millenials than boomers. Millenials need to learn, but boomers think they already know, despite the fact that they fucked up everything.

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Yeah, it’s constant learning. We were told that basically the half-life of scientific knowledge is five years. I imagine in computer science it’s even shorter.

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True, definitely not all.

But it’s hard to work for a big faceless company 30-40 years and not feel like said company chewed you up and pooped you out.

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I first learned about this in an electronic music course – they had a set of analog to digital/digital to analog converters for a computer to talk to the synthesizers. A few years later I got to use one in the lab. Now that’s Art and STEM interacting.

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Haha sounds about right.
We have a Dell networked printer. It does not play well with Adobe Acrobat, but ONLY from Apple devices, works fine with PCs. If you try to print a .pdf from a Mac it will blue screen my printer. This is a “known issue” - aka: nothing can be done but buy a new printer, which I just refused to accept.
I found a work-around. Its called “don’t use acrobat”. So I went around and set everyone’s default for .pdfs to Preview instead of Acrobat. The younger people looked at me like I’m talking greek and the older ones kept saying “just buy a new one”. Its been a year, works great! :wink: Go team GenX!

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A few widely-used computer languages were invented after I graduated college. Yet I still managed to learn them, because the theory behind Object-Oriented Programming hasn’t changed much, it’s just that the idiosyncrasies of each language take a little getting used to. Besides, if you learn in C++ like I did, everything else is easy by comparison.

The various types of ADCs/DACs are only a small part of DAQ design.

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Yeah, I only learned about the existence of them then, and vaguely how to use them (less vaguely later on). The circuitry is lost on me, as is a some of the ideas about how many bits to use etc. Really useful tool though.

Edit: I am getting way off topic here! Whoops.

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Chinese people get all GenX on us and discover androgyny - this hot Boy Band is all girls!

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Do you think GenXers and Millennials understand open source better than Boomers? With open source stuff, everything takes a lot of effort to set up because there are a lot of knobs and twiddly bits, and a lot of packages to sudo apt-get. It won’t work out of the box, and if it does, it won’t do everything you want it to do.

I remember configuring a simulation environment that was made up of a few different open source tools, and a few hours into it my supervisor told me to “call tech support”* because it didn’t work out of the box.

Although if it helps break the generational stereotyping any, this supervisor was a GenXer.

*meaning, the open-source tools’ tech support :roll_eyes:

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This is why I don’t use a lot of open source stuff, because I have neither the knowledge or the time to gain it. OTOH, I have managed to avoid the trap of “because I don’t know how, it can’t be done.” I (like your colleague) assume someone must know and try to determine who that someone is.

After I try poking a few obvious things first.

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From what I see GenX are the only ones that will peek inside the box so to speak.
I’ve had our IT people tell me, more than once, that I should come and work for them, cuz I find solutions instead of just saying “its a known issue”. We’re not afraid to tinker. (I remember deleting .dll files and fucking up my computer so bad OMG!) Older gens want us to “call IT” and younger gens don’t realize that machines aren’t magic and actually need humans to set them up. We’re the only ones left that will “fix” things.

I keep coming back to that article @mindysan33 - seriously its stayed with me all day.

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Yeah, if we had an IT team dedicated to that sort of thing, I’d let them have at it first.

Then again, there were a few different moving parts to this simulation environment, and I wasn’t even sure at first what we needed. So, I needed to install the main piece, test it to make sure it’s okay, poke around a little, see what kind of results I got, reconfigure if needed, and then see if I needed to install anything else. Then repeat for the little pieces I needed to install. Because I was testing as I went along, I was probably the right person for the task. If I was working from a set of instructions, I would probably give those instructions to the people responsible for installing software, if we had such people.

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Cloud computing is not client/server, and the way that things like Tandem computers achieved high uptime is rather different from the cloud approach. But we are off topic.

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True, but there were architectures besides client-server even going back to the 1970s. Remote Job Entry from the 1960s was the granddaddy of cloud computing.

/hijack

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That’s a really good question, and I think it depends on what you mean. In my field (biology), I don’t know anyone my own age (Millennial) who doesn’t at least look for a FOSS before committing to a non-open source project. Most people are generally aware of how to read a paper, become interested in a piece of software and get it from GitHub or CRAN or Pip/conda or whatever. But I still observe a general problem of low awareness of how to evaluate software or treat it as anything but a black box.

I think something that is interesting in my generation, even relative to people Gen X, is the awareness of the labor politics of FOSS maintenance. How do we reward programming effort, making a useful widget that can’t necessarily be a stand-alone paper, etc. And I think that’s to some extent a reaction to seeing our Boomer and Gen X mentors, who might have been the first coders we ever had exposure to, work so hard to balance doing good FOSS with getting tenure.

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Boomer here. I will take apart anything and attempt either a permanent fix or a jury rig that will keep things running until I research a replacement. (I started to give some examples, but never mind. Just take my word for it. :grin:) I do my own plumbing and electrical work.

A number of factors, however, affect how I approach a problem:

  1. As I age, and time is more precious than money, I’m more inclined to buy a replacement part than cut/grind/drill/tap one out of the scrap metal and plastic I hoard obsessively. And now that parts for almost everything can be found online and shipped to my door in a day or two, DIY from scratch makes less sense.

  2. Many consumer items these days are not made to repair and it’s a waste of time to try (not that I haven’t tried, and occasionally foiled Big Appliance). One advantage of years of experience is that I am fairly good at assessing what’s worth doing.

  3. Sometimes what’s available on the market now is just better than the old stuff, like my new multi-temperature kettle that is better quality and faster than the old one that I repaired more than once.

All these considerations, more than just helplessness, may be influencing the boomers you encounter.

My daughter, a millennial, can change a tire, use power tools, cook, knit, and much more. She once complained that she couldn’t take the boys she dated seriously because “none of them can do anything”, but she has since found a young man, also a millennial, who meets her standards.

My point? I am really tired of hearing boomers this, millennials that. I’ve seen competent and incompetent individuals of all ages, and many who looked incompetent but just hadn’t lived long enough yet. There aren’t really generations, but there are different stages in anyone’s life.

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