had a dream last night that my alarm was connected to twitter and everytime i hit snooze it publicly tweeted it with a disparaging little message along the lines of “filthy horrible boy has slapped the screen again, and slumbers on” so that your followers could shame you and i was deeply, DEEPLY humiliated but that did not stop me from hitting snooze upwards of 14 times

hey op! i couldnt sleep until i built this! you motherfucker!

just gotta “borrow” my sister’s alarm clock

get that twitter api, write the bot in some python bc god is dead n slap together some fuckin UI with legos

your idiot self wants to sleep in???? hit that snooze button a couple times???? (maybe 4 times in a row)?? disgusting.

twitter knows! bc it posts how many times youve hit it. fuck you

the next step is NOT profit. noone profits. everybody loses. go home.

OH MY GOD?????????

see look I love programmers because they just do shit like this for fun and because it haunts them in their sleep if they don't

The tendency of programmers (probably even all science folks) to say "I played around with the [insert deadly serious piece of science or technology]"

At least with programming, the worst you'll usually do is fry a computer or send the government running after your family

But this is doubly true of chemists. Like that one time my dad brought a can of liquid nitrogen home and said "hey kids! Ya wanna make ice cream with this?!"

About programming, I keep thinking about this:

Robert Tappan Morris created the Morris worm, the first ever worm on the internet in 1988, and he literally did it just to see if it could be done (and of course, as a bonus he tried to blame it on MIT) and it fucked things up so bad that they now have a copy of the floppy disk containing the worm's source code in the Computer History Museum in California, sitting under a glass case (which I find very funny because it's almost like they're worried it'll escape and start fucking up the internet again)

There it is!

The best part was, this dude's dad was a cryptographer working at the NSA at the time.

I personally always hated standardized tests because I never got the opportunity to go out and explore my dreams because we spent half the year studying for the test.

Also very abelist to expect a kid to sit at a desk all day focusing on a test.

But apparently it's racist to.

-fae

A lot of similar "gate" tests were designed for exactly this purpose: gatekeeping. I was reading a while ago about aptitude tests. Back during the war days and up to the 1960s, women dominated the fields of computer science (both in operating them and in writing the punch card programs and logic to run them) and it was a field that, for the lack of a better word, was 'brainy' (someone give me a better term). Dudes wanted to do it, but it was a 'women's field' because it was dominated by women and they didn't want to be associated with that. Voila, enter the aptitude test! All of a sudden, they began claiming maths and aptitude were the best ways to tell if someone was prepared for the job. From here on, there are multiple factors that together made programming this exclusive thing: for one, it was often boys who in schools were pushed towards taking the sort of maths classes that would prepare them for doing well on aptitude tests. Then there were other things: a test that was designed to test "vocational interest" in programming... a test that was tested with a predominantly male group, and so ultimately found that men matched the profile far more often than women (aside: one of the traits that the test found to gauge this vocational interest was "disinterest in humanity" and a "lack of empathy"? That's so messed up...)

Of course, naturally, when the men moved into computer science and the women moved out, the job stopped being undervalued, and definitely stopped being underpaid :O)))

(Bonus: the women back when who programmed these machines often did them without ever having seen the machines, or being able to test them. From history.com: "In the beginning, they weren’t even allowed into the ENIAC room because they didn’t yet have the security clearance. Instead, they were expected to code the machine using only paper diagrams of it. These diagrams didn’t come with any instructions—they had to figure it out themselves without any programming languages or manuals, because none existed.")

I apologise that I actually didn't cover the racial aspect of this, I'm sure that too feeds into who matches their models but I didn't have the sources for it so I didn't want to extrapolate myself, but yes, aptitude tests, standardised tests, personality tests, they're often built along racialised, sexualised, ableist criteria that were designed less to find the perfect candidate and more to exclude 'unwanted' candidates.