There’s an old joke about two mathematicians in a cafe. They’re arguing about whether ordinary people understand basic mathematics. The first mathematician says yes, of course they do! And the second disagrees.
The second mathematician goes to the toilet, and the first calls over their blonde waitress. He says to her, "in a minute my friend is going to come back from the toilet, and I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to reply, “one third x cubed.'”
“One ther desque,” she repeats.
“One third x cubed,” the mathematician tries again.
“One thir dek scubed.”
“That’ll do,” he says, and she heads off. The second mathematician returns from the toilet and the first lays him a challenge. “I’ll prove it. I’ll call over that blonde waitress and ask her a simple integration question, and see if she can answer.” The second mathematician agrees, and they call her over.
“My friend and I have a question,” the first mathematician asks the waitress. “Do you know what is the integral of x squared?”
“One thir dek scubed,” she answers and the second mathematician is impressed and concedes the point.
And as she walks away, the waitress calls over her shoulder,
“Plus a constant.”
I would not consider integration to be basic maths, honestly. Basic maths is addition and multiplication, and maybe vector geometry.
You probably wouldn’t consider x86 opcodes to be basic computer literacy either ;-)
One of the most useful concepts ever:
the Curse of Knowledge.
Explaining something to someone? Zoom out. Back up. What if that person were an alien, how much more context would you need to explain?
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with others, assumes that others have information that is only available to themselves, assuming they all share a background and understanding. This bias is also called by some authors the curse of expertise.
My friend really needs to learn about this. He works for Intel and does some really involved stuff, I on the other hand am a moronic jackass factory worker.
No friend, I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re trying to tell me you did if you keep using technical terms.
If you said something like “if I were a marketing intern…” or “if I were a college freshman majoring in English, how would you explain it?”
…would he not know how to clearly communicate still? :)
Maybe get him with the “is this a curse of knowledge situation?” (along with a link to Wikipedia) heh
Problem is, even if they are capable of explaining it, it’s basically our job to learn things 8 hours a day. Trying to catch someone up on that, who doesn’t have that same job, that’s nearly impossible. Well, and you still want to rant/tell about your day for social interaction purposes.
Like, my mum would also sometimes ask what my (programmer) workday was like and I’d start telling that we had to deploy onto a really old Linux system. Wait hang on, Linux is an operating system. And an operating system is the software that makes computers go. Do you know what “software” is? Hmm, it’s like…
…And yeah, basically one computer science lecture later, I still haven’t told anything about my workday.Sometimes, I can try to leave out such words, like “we had to roll out our software onto a really old computer”, but then I can practically only say “that was really annoying”. To actually explain how I slayed the beast, I do need to explain the scene.
basically one computer science lecture later, I still haven’t told anything about my workday.
ahaha
I can try to leave out such words, like “we had to roll out our software onto a really old computer”, but then I can practically only say “that was really annoying”.
Tough. Try my best with analogies, tailored if possible, but still tough.
“We had to try to translate our app into a language this ancient computer could understand. It was as easy as suddenly switching to Shakespearean English halfway through this conversation. Or like if you drove your car to a mechanic who’d been cryogenically frozen for the last hundred years. He doth protest much, methinks.
Overall, it was like putting together a thousand-piece puzzle, except the box came with a million pieces and most of them were useless!”
Good thing your mom was surely impressed with you all the same 😉
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One of the things I look for in employees is the ability to distill complex topics into the important elements and explain it to someone unfamiliar. Some people are just naturally good at it, and it’s a really important skill for moving up a leadership chain.
Me talking to my dad (who last held the position of professional programmer 30 years ago) about the programming problem I’m working on and vastly overestimating how much he knows about modern software development parlance
But then you’re Mansplaining.
Even if we have the Patriarchy app4oved mind scanning kits out instructions are to not use them so…I’d hate to accidentally not Mansplain something.
Frustrating!!
Since there’s no way to fix the incorrect assumptions (a t-shirt proclaiming “I explain granularly to men too!!”?), best bet is probably to get ahead of the assumption with a disclaimer & offer to be receptive to feedback.
Someone could still be upset I guess but can’t please everyone!
Discussed a bit below.
Just yesterday I ran into some chucklehead here on Lemmy that had convinced themselves that the average person would interpret “crypto” to mean SSL rather than cryptocurrency.
I had one last week here on claiming the average person could feed themselves for years by growing cherry tomatoes from 6 tiny plants. Bro is supposed to be a big-time agricultural bigwig
Makes sense. Human beings don’t actually need proteins or fats.
At least dead ones dont
Proteins and fats are for the weak. ARE YOU A FUCKING WEAK LOOSER?? No? THEN WHATS STOPPING YOU???
Cherry tomatoes are the things you put in a salad at a restaurant to feel healthy, then pick them out once you get back to the table.
What? Cherry tomatoes are good
For compost, yeah
Look I’m not saying you’re wrong or anything just that I really don’t appreciate you stalking me.
Wut? Are we talking about one of those “salads” with mayo, eggs, bacon strips, croutons, sugary dressing and whatnot?
Because if not, then cherry tomatoes are going to be pretty much the sweetest thing you’ll find for your salad. I’d definitely still call them healthy, but not more so than the other ingredients of a salad…
Yep, that’s pretty much the standard salad where I live. Most people understand that’s not really healthy, but it still feels healthier than bread sticks and butter. The cherry tomatoes are the extra convincing we need to actually call it “healthy”
That seems like the opposite problem
As a small time backyard gardener I can say from experience that 4 plants made more cherry tomatoes than I could reasonably eat. I was giving ziplock bags of cherry tomatoes away to people at work for a couple months. They probably did produce a year’s worth of cherry tomatoes, but they don’t refrigerate or freeze particularly well and they’re not a great choice for making tomato sauce because of their liquid/pulp/skin ratio.
Similarly I’ve found that I can grow a year’s supply of red pepper flakes with a whopping two cayenne plants. The rate at which I consume red pepper flakes, I’m about out by the time this year’s peppers start ripening.
I’m able, in my tiny little garden, to grow more of single kinds of foods than I can reasonably eat. I cannot grow enough to sustain my entire diet; I’d need more land than I own to grow grain.
I saw that thread, I think. Or the same person in another thread talking about the same thing.
You mean things like Bigfoot?
That’s ludicrous.
It obviously stands for cryptography in general, not just TLS.
Holy shit that was weird.
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That’s the one
You know, I think I agree with the spirit of that assertion but not the letter of that assertion.
There are people who are kind of at their limit knowing that on your phone there’s a Facebook app, but you have to use your browser and go to the website on a computer. These folks will hear dial tones and TV static in their heads if you say “secure socket layer” to them. These folks have probably also sat through NordVPN ads and heard words like “secure” and “encrypted” used together, and will probably make understandable mistakes like “how’d someone steal bitcoins? I thought it was encrypted?”
All the code I know is stackoverflow search results.
Things said by Github copilot.
Isn’t there a version about mineralogy?
Oh, OP got me fooled, I thought this is original xkcd, well done on photoshop.
“So this here is a rock”
“Uhh, in english please?”“Oy! Guv! This here’s a rock, innit?”
It’s insane how close that handwriting is to randall’s, did he make multiple versions of this comic or was this written by a professional forger?
For context, here’s the original comic:
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Their format and style makes them highly meme-able.
Holy shit. I remembered the original comic, but didn’t remember what the subject matter of it was. So if you hadn’t left this comment, I would have just gone on believing that the OP’s version was Randall’s version.
Yeah, I’ve seen people riff on xkcd comics before but they usually do a bad job of matching the handwriting/font (I don’t know if Randall hand-letters these or if he types in a handwritey font). It’s often a deliberately bad job, because indicating that they are changing the original is a part of the message/artistic expression. Like when a word is covered with a black bar with white letters in it in a different font, an obvious revision, it’s like hearing a different voice interrupt.
Why does it not surprise me at all that this exists?
Wait, that’s actually a great font
There was that one comic that Randall did (Lorenz) where you could choose one of several paths and write your own text in the last panel. In order to implement that Randall had to create a font of his own handwriting. I wouldn’t be surprised if OP just ripped the .woff file or similar.
NOP sled gang rise up
0x900x900x900x900x900x900x900x900x900x90
IDS will catch that. You need a logical sled that does effectively nothing but isn’t actually composed of NOPs.
well easy, it adds up to zero ! hah ! checkmate, inverters
NOP is $EA, of course, and… um…
…sorry, I’m just a Commodore 64 scrub, I don’t know nothing about this high and mighty Intel 8086 nonsense.
[looking up]
…it’s 0x90 on IA-32? WHAT? Someone told me every processor used 0xEA because that was commonly agreed and readily apparent. …guess I was wrong
My daughter told me the other day, “I bet I could figure out a Commodore 64 if I had one.”
Good luck figuring out LOAD “*”,8,1 by yourself, kid.
With the ubiquity of C64 emulators, that’s easy enough to demonstrate by experiment
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She meant she could figure it out just playing around with it, not reading a manual or asking around. I told her she’d have to read a manual.
Erm I might be showing my inexperience here.
Is there no equivalent to
man LOADin the commodore world? Or even justhelp?That thing had 16K of ROM. Every byte was sacred. Only manual was on paper.
Not that I remember.
I can’t tell if you’re joking and deliberately invoking the original comic above
I feel attacked.
I feel like I skipped right over this comment.
JMPed
I’m more in a JNZ mood.
I mean who hasnt watched “Assembly Language in 100 seconds” by Fireship
Just looked this up and subscribed to the channel.
It still confuses what basic computer skills the average person lacks. Like, how are you even supposed to troubleshoot your computer, if you don’t know the basics about your computer?
Everyone has a limited time on this earth. Some of us don’t mind or actively enjoy spending that time learning about the technology we use. Others, not so much. I think this comic is really spot on because it’s hard to understand as a tech literate person just how little other people may know. “What browser are you using?” “What’s a browser?”
The foundational knowledge is not that tough, but when you’re just interested in getting the damn thing to work so you can get on with your life, it’s easy to get frustrated by having to take a crash course on what the hell a BIOS is before you can try to fix it. And when you learn all that just for it to still be broken, patience quickly runs out.
As long as people have the general understanding that power cycling will solve a good 75% of issues, I’m happy. I hope people give me the same grace when I pay a someone to fix my car or replace my phone screen (I love building computers, but god I hate working on phones).
For the phone bit, I started off with really old smartphones like a Galaxy S1, but basically any old old phones are really built like mini laptops and are usually pretty modular as they weren’t often water resistant or actively anti-repair
However I fully get your point and fall into the same boat with cars
Dude I’m the same with my car.
I mean, cars can be demystified the same way computers can: By building and maintaining it yourself. Everyone is afraid to build their first computer, because it seems way too complicated and delicate. Then you actually build your first one, and go “oh hey this actually isn’t so bad after all.”
Yes, cars (especially modern cars) have a lot more difficult-to-build parts. But modern cars are also a lot like computers in the sense that you don’t need to know every single component on an GPU to be able to install one. You don’t need to be able to build a car part from scratch. The same way you can slot a GPU into a motherboard, you can just buy the entire car part preassembled and bolt it into place. The important part is learning what the different components do, so you can troubleshoot them.
Problem is I have zero interest in cars. If I could I’d live car free.
you don’t you just call the most technical person you know and ask them to do it
You got a point there. I also regularly forget that you don’t have to know shit about PCs do use windows/Mac.
I mean I’m only missing int3
I didn’t even know they released int2
You guys have int?
I rolled a 14, so I have a +2 modifier.
It’s one of my six dump stats.
Bro missing the wis gains
I’ve got intelligible but that’s about it
I think it is 0xCC, or in long form 0xCD03
I recently took a class on ARM assembly, and yet I don’t even know half of these x86 instructions.
‘I recently took a french class, and yet I don’t even know half of these german words’
I had 5 years of Latin classes and I still know lipke 19 Latin words.
Lupus vorat agnum = my tailor is rich
there’s your rosetta stoned
Ubi est Quintus? Quintus in Hortus est. Quinte, Quinte, Caecilia clamat. - where is Quintus? Quintus is in the garden. Quintus Quintus shouts Caecilia.
Those were the First three sentences from my first Latin Book. I still know them.
of course nods along
I’m pretty sure I’ve had this exact conversation. Took me a minute to understand what the point was.
NOP
