Microblog Memes

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."

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.

What is the saying? Something about people who learn about how technology works begin to shun technology?

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.

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...

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.

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 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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzC1Dgh17A

maybe post the notes for critique? this is bait