I think dumb people need to hold onto the idea that smart people are a bunch of nerds with no physical fitness, coordination, game with the opposite sex, autism, allergies, and asthma to distract them from the fact that smart people are on average better people along many correlated dimensions and on others no worse than average.
I used to sell apple gear
I had to keep telling off other sales people who kept saying OSX was based on Linux, not Unix
I was writing choose your own adventure games in basic, but the 2k memory cap was challenging, and loading from audio from cassette tapes was just stupid. I’ve used pretty much every OS (within reason).
I still don’t like macs though.
What if you got started on an Atari in the 80s?
You should get your AARP card in the mail shortly
600xl Or 800xl?
130XE
I wrote a program in Basic on my Commodore 64 at 6.
I didn’t know how to save my work. I typed and manually proofread code for three hours. It worked. The program was lost when I powered it down.
Do you remember what the program did?
My brother in arms….
Our Commodore VIC20 came with a big book/manual which mostly taught you how to code. Was an awesome time.
Veronica Explains has a great video on how manuals used to actually be great resources.
Manuals still are fantastic when available.
Yeah the “OS” was essentially a basic interpreter and simple editor. I remember that book.
And trying to save your program on a cassette that would give you an error after 30 minutes.
Save? A program? What kind of magic is this?
I wrote basic on my Apple IIe.
I was all Apple/Mac until 1998 when I built a Windows gaming pc with high school graduation money. Learned to code in art school, after which I switched back to Macs when they went intel, built annoying but fun flash ads and games in AS2 (ECMAscript essentially), then when the iPhone came out I switched to hand coding HTML/CSS/JS web apps and got out of advertising.
Then learned Ruby/Sinatra/Rails/Haml/SASS and did straight web dev into the early days of both React, Angular and Vue. Then quit to do a tech startup with robots.
Now I CAD model original designs for fabrication projects, 3D printing and custom automotive designs.
So I’m pretty technically inclined, but I own 4 Macs, 3 Rpis, dozens of physical computing platforms, and a metric ton of salvaged sensors and ex-RadioShack components.
I think it was pretty common back then to have no way to save. Spectrum zx. Amstrad 464. They didn’t initially have a media to save to. Then cassette tapes could be used. Software piracy was recording the tape, like copying a song.
Yeah, my first was a little Timex Sinclair and it didn’t have any media. But each button on the keyboard had a Basic command as an alt key, so I taught myself Basic with it. Many years later I got my BS in Computer Science, so I think it was a pretty worthwhile little computer.
I knew someone who had one for a while. He got rid of it after a few months because the modular design wasn’t locking the modules well and would reboot
It’s like looking at a mirror. Only it was a Sharp HotBit (a Brazilian computer) and I was 7 or 8.
Holy crap, I did the same thing! My dad taught me the Random function (RND), which blew my mind. I tried creating a dungeon crawler text based game with random rooms. It was going to be awesome.
fk ya. it will be.
TI-99/4a for me, but after the first big loss of something that worked is when I found out there was a cassette adapter. My parents did not buy it new, it was maybe 5 or 6 years old by then, so finding a cassette adapter took some effort.
Worth it though IMO.
Heh, I was going to comment on my first being a C64 (technically a Vic 20 is the first I ever messed with, but I don’t really remember that one).
Ignoring data to prove your hypothesis is correct sounds like polling.
Good studies correct for outliers.
To correct, you have to measure them first. How else would you know how much to correct. Measure the variable to control for it is basic good practice.
God damnit.
I remember toting around a Linux textbook in 7th grade, because I had just started messing with it.
Same year I got my General and Advanced ham radio licenses.
Does this make me autistic?
7th grade in the US is about 12 years old.
I’m not a doctor, so I won’t guess, but…what’s your favorite train?
M497 Black Beetle
That’s easy, The Lionel No. 381E “State Brown” Passenger Cars are 🔥🔥🔥
I really dig futuristic ones similar to high speed rails. I do love variety between Steampunk/Solarpunk/Cyberpunk.
“Allegheny” 2-6-6-6 articulated steamer. One of the most powerful steam locos ever made, 60 of them ran regularly for 20 years. No one cares about it because it’s tractive is lower (even though it has more traction) and it’s not the Union Pacific Big Boy.
Legitimate question, no judgment. When did you first get laid? If you have yet.
Same year I got my General and Advanced ham radio licenses
Damn, you sound like you were super cool haha
Hmmm… do you struggle with understanding sarcasm and figures of speech? Do you often feel like you are manually learning social norms like a robot, rather than understanding things intuitively? Does eye contact feel awkward? Do you often communicate in a literal manner and get misinterpreted as rude or blunt?
Do you feel upset or angry when plans or routines are changed/interrupted? Do you feel like you are overly hyperfixated on any specific topics or interests that you could ramble about for hours on end? Do you have problems with reading people’s intentions or emotions? Do you feel like you are overly sensitive to touch, noise, sounds, taste, or textures?
These are actual questions to think about. I say this as someone who’s been legitimately diagnosed since 2008. If you answered yes to all or most of these questions, it might be time to visit a doctor.
figures of speech
Speech lacks a physical form and thus cannot have a ‘figure’
The most important question when it comes to adult autism diagnoses: can you afford to talk to a doctor? I’m pretty sure my wallet would burst into flames like a vampire entering sunlight if I walked into a psychologist’s office
No, but I do think all of those things are generally kind of stupid and annoying, and frankly, boring as hell.
if anything if find the predictability of people’s norms and emotional reactions to be depressing as fuck. and their intentions, to be scary in how selfish they often are.
How has getting the diagnosis helped things for you?
I was a 4-year-old still only learning how to properly communicate on an age-appropriate level, so I needed specialised therapy. I had ABA therapy to teach me facial expressions, communication, and other things. I’m also legally disabled.
no, it makes you an insufferable nerd though. especially if you went around telling everyone about how cool it was.
“Especially?” That’s the only factor that makes one insufferable or not, nerd or otherwise.
Discluded? I have another hypothesis.
I have a third hypothesis to add to the mix…
Disclude is a verb that means to exclude or omit something.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/disclude_v (sorry, paywalled).
Okay, if a fucking dictionary is paywalled we have gone way beyond the red line for social recovery.
“Recovery?” Now that’s an interesting thought!
This is the correct response.
I don’t think the OED has ever been online for free. They took a different tack to Merriam-Webster and Cambridge, who figured that the ad money was lucrative.
Getting annoyed at paywalling is understandable, but we can’t demand that companies make their stuff free just because we want it to be free.
Eh dictionaries started out paywalled
Those who use the verb discluded should probably be discluded.
Even autocorrect discludes this as a valid word.
It’s perfectly cromulent
But what if OP remains intragnisent?
From the context it is clear what you mean.
Those who don’t embiggen this comment should be discluded from consideration.
Ditch OED, befriend Wiktionary
disclude (third-person singular simple present discludes, present participle discluding, simple past and past participle discluded)
(transitive)
(now nonstandard)
- To disclose, make known.
- To separate, keep apart.
- To exclude, not include; to remove from inclusion.
Wiktionary is the best
Engagement bait?
The windows kids know more because there was a possibility some stuff might work with the right sequence of rituals. The mac kids just knew not to try because nothing will work
I started on classic Mac OS and have a successful tech career. I learned to troubleshoot problems on the Mac by disabling Extensions and deleting Preferences files in the prior century. Learned to use Windows after 2000, and it has been garbage the whole time.
I wasn’t advocating for windows, they’re both trash
Counter argument: boomers who needed to type commands and swap disks to get a word processor loaded, who knew all the hotkeys required to issue commands and the alt-codes for special characters, who today cannot figure out where the file they were working on saved to.
Yeah, the first computer I remember in our house, I was 4, it was MSDOS, and my mom knew how to run everything, so she obviously had an understanding of command and all that. To this day, she’s still incredibly tech illiterate. Her current improved status is emailing me shit that looks phishy so I can figure things out for her. I still get the calls that “something is wrong,” and I need to go unfuck things a little. It’s funny.
I’m GenX but this is me. I hate modern computing and the cloud in particular. SharePoint is a close second. I think the last excellent word processor was WordPerfect 5.1. Everything since then is worse than the version before it.
I do have sympathy for people who are trying to figure out SharePoint or mobile OS file systems which just arbitrarily change the rules.
The arbitrary rule changes! I have six different folders labelled “android sucks” because different apps are like “I can’t access any directory in your filesystem that I didn’t personally create.” Motherfucker this machine belongs to me. I created that directory. If I tell an app to access a directory, it should do as I command.
When I first got Tasker, it was life changing. Now I can’t even tell it to turn off my damn Bluetooth. I hate google with every fiber of my being.
SharePoint was tolerable when I could mount library as a drive. I could use it how I wanted, and the SP people could do what they wanted. But they removed that functionality and we’re trapped in an endless cycle of where-the-fuck-is-it and how-come-i-cant-search-for-it.
those aren’t the same boomers.
All the ones in my life are.
Same. My dad worked as a call-out PC technician (among other things) and now can’t grasp cloud storage.
“I don’t want to save it somewhere else, I want to save it on my computer, but all my computers.”
I agree with your dad. Everything saved to the cloud is a privacy and usability nightmare. Many people have lost data forever because cloud services misplaced their files.
I started in 1981 at 11yo with a ZX81 writing games in BASIC. In 1984 at 14yo I was cracking games on Amstrad CPC6128, Z80 assembly. At 18 in 1988 it was on PC in DOS (8086). Yes I installed Linux 0.99 on my 486 PC in 1992 or something.
Never touched an Apple device.
Same, except for having played a bit with Apple 2s. I’ve had a windows partition on and off to run steam, but it never held any data. Nowadays it wouldn’t serve any purpose of course.
If we’re talking post-year-2k macs, you’re de-facto going to skew the results as those were less affordable than budget family windows boxes.
I can provide an anecdotal evidence of someone who started in MSX-DOS, then PC MS-DOS, went to Windows, then Unix, back to Windows, then Linux, and now is on Mac.
when you’re pansexual but with technology:
You went from Linux to Mac?
Many do, and many more use both.
I’ve used both since about 2004 each has its uses
Not parent, but this was me. I went from OSs before windows, Windows, linux, mac, and now I’m on a quest to get back to linux.
I started on mac computers in school because Apple supplied them. It was the 80’s. By time got to high school they were all PCs.
lol. Linux didn’t even exist when I was 12 I think or it was very very young
Yeah. I started with DOS. Windows existed, but I had an older used computer with no mouse and a 5 1\4 floppy and leisure suit Larry.
Yeah, I was using DOS when I couldn’t even read. My father worked in IT and made a simple script for us kids on an old machine he got from work, so we could choose games and launch them with very simple commands (stuff like the commander keens and a racing game, and that one skiing game). Then there was no talk of screen time, when people got worried about it in the 2000s my mother got scared too, but at that point it was too late as I grew up with computers lmao. Maybe surprisingly I didn’t turn out as a that huge machine nerd though, I leaned more towards books later on
I think I had windows 3.1 on my 386, but I usually lived in DOS because I needed the memory free to play games.
oh the days of 3.1. I over clocked to 33Mhz and upgraded my ram to a hefty 4 MB.
i started with a commodore 64 lol. Man, I’m so fucking decrepit.
