As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)
One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
Thanks for sharing this. It is so sad! Sorry that there are people like that. The only thing we can do now, is be better people than those horrible teachers.
Oh god, what’s the deal with horrendous people becoming teachers? Lately, I’ve been, uh, “reminiscing” about how terrible adults were to kids when I was a kid (I’m gen X.)
It’s no wonder I turned my interest to the computer - it was only ever a jerk if I programmed it like that.
Same (GP). Schools were really unsafe places for children back then. It always strikes me of you see movies about schools in that period, that the story is often that children get horribly bullied and are called ugly, etc. I am glad my children grow up in better times.
Low barrier to entry and hard to get fired once you're in.
Rotten people put on a good face in the interview and then spread their misery around for decades to some of our most vulnerable. It happens in pretty much every unelected position in the public sector in my experience.
One of the things that got me in to "coding" when I was 9 years old was building tic tac toe in Excel, locking the window size to 3x3 cells and then implementing clicks as links to the next board state, with the "computer" having already played the next move. The whole sheet had every possible board state written out by hand.
Douglas Crockford nearly got cancelled because he qualified JavaScript as "promiscuous". People not knowing what the word means plus having a sense of urgency about sensitivity can be a dangerous combination.
> You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist.
I agree with the article and recognize the fatigue, but I have never experienced that the industry is "aggressively pretending it does not exist". It feels like a straw man, but maybe you have examples of this happening.
His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the prediction of surveillance itself.
Asimov missed the idea of the panopticon here, whereby control is self-enforced by the fear of being caught because you can be watched at any time, not all the time
Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially his later works).
The main thing is that Asimov was more of a bright person(mensa member and professor) and good at making conjectures about development based on technology and it's impact on humans, rather than a great writer per-se (there's some famous interview from the 70s that makes a fair bit of things that weren't obvious at the time).
Like how he immediately goes to the feasibility of non-human total surveillance when concluding that the total surveillance of a population on the level of 1984 by humans is infeasible.
So this review is to large parts to be taken as an post-fact analysis about 1984 both from a standpoint of the predictions of it's conjectured future and an attempt to see _why_ conjectures failed (much of it, being attributed to Orwells need to expose his hatred for how infighting perverts socialistic causes).
> Asimov's sci-fi has both hard and soft parts (especially his later works).
Yeah I know Asimov. I actually really like his writings, which is why I am a bit surprised because this review is short-sighted and mean, and I think, misses the point.
> Like how he immediately goes to the feasibility of non-human total surveillance when concluding that the total surveillance of a population on the level of 1984 by humans is infeasible.
Right, but he still misses the point. As a physicist I can think about a dozen reasons why positronic brains make little sense. I accept this as some of the disbelief I have to suspend to get to the actual substance of the books. It’s no different. Me being a nerd does not mean that I have to be a jerk just because someone writes something I find implausible.
About feasibility, did Asimov even read the book properly? I remember quite well that telescreens were not permanently watched, but that wasn't necessary because the consequences of getting caught with "wrongthink" were terrible.
Near the end of the book Winston finds out that he was watched much more thoroughly than he thought. They read his private diary and carefully put the same mote of dust on top of the cover so that Winston wouldn't notice it had been opened.
The writeup does not mention Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow founder) trying to convince Gruber to standardize markdown. Atwood approached him publicly in a series of blog posts, but Gruber kept silent, and if I remember correctly finally declined stating that he didn't want to spend time jumping through other persons' hoops. Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized, I still see this as an inspiring example of a person just doing what he wants to do.
It happened a bit differently; Atwood and friends simply came out with a standard document and called it "standard markdown", which Gruber then refused to endorse. Eventually after the series of blog posts and some back and forth they renamed the project "CommonMark", which it is still called today.
I am not sure (of course), but I think Atwood simply thought standardizing this format was so obviously valuable that he didn't consider Gruber might not want to work with him. In retrospect it's kind of nice that it didn't happen, it really keeps everyone incentivized to keep the format simple.
The linked post contains three cases of Markdown syntax (underscores) leaking into the text, where actual italics were likely intended. This is the most basic Markdown syntax element failing to work. The problem CommonMark is trying to solve is not adding new features (the only one they added to Gruber Markdown is fenced code blocks), but rather specifying how to interpret edge cases to ensure the same Markdown code produces the same HTML everywhere.
I understand the goal of the spec. In my experience once some spec document gets adapted widely enough, there's a strong incentive to add new features to it, which renderers would then be compelled to implement. Before you know it, MD is a complicated spec that doesn't serve its original purpose.
In this case a few minor edge cases is really not a big deal compared to that (in my opinion).
Another take on that is that Gruber is unable to sabotage a markdown standard from coming to exist, no matter how much of a tantrum he wants to have. I have no interest in listening to him about the topic, he's just in the way of the community and everyone is routing around the damage.
What Gruber has done is forced the spec to be called CommonMark, but as far as everyone except Gruber is concerned CommonMark is the markdown spec.
There are flavors that predate it like GFM, and extensions, but IMHO going forward it's CommonMark + possibly your extensions or it's not really Markdown.
I used to host an SSH server at home at port 443, for the same reason! The sysadmin of my employer was so strict that 'solutions' like this were the way of the least resistance. Security gets worse when policies get stricter.
