Maladroithe: When we say “tech guys need the humanities too” we’re not talking about diluting the pool of Linus Torvalds with underwater basket weavers, we’re talking about arming them with enough literacy to comprehend Sci-Fi in a way that doesn’t get them sued by Scarlett Johansson

When we say “tech guys need the humanities too” we’re not talking about diluting the pool of Linus Torvalds with underwater basket weavers, we’re talking about arming them with enough literacy to comprehend Sci-Fi in a way that doesn’t get them sued by Scarlett Johansson

HUM 104: Not Creating The Torment Nexus

This is almost literally my job.

Tech exec: "Everyone's buzzing about this torment nexus thing. I'm not sure what it is, but we should fast track getting one so we aren't left behind".

Let’s do it with AI!

But we’re also talking about getting the Linuses and Stallmans and Musks and Thiels et al into remedial social-emotional learning to bring them up from sociopathic assholes to generic assholes.

Torvalds at least is sorta okay in that regard, at least from the bits I've seen so far. The rest definitely suck

I am one of those “woke communists”: Linus Torvaldsnews.itsfoss.com Linus Torvalds, another day, another firm stance, and a mini-rant reply to someone.

A guy who responds to legit and relatively kind criticism with KYS is not even sort of okay. You can start here. But the behavior is still in evidence. www.newyorker.com/science/elem...

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Asidewww.newyorker.com The celebrated coder Linus Torvalds, known for the operating system he created and his aggressive style of communication, says he is seeking help.

yeah putting linus with the rest of that group is an... interesting choice

You’ll note that I did not call Linus a reactionary; I merely picked a gifted and visionary tech guy as an example of the legit talent some people seem afraid will get diluted by insisting that tech guys develop a baseline understanding of social sciences and arts.

yeah wasn't a criticism of you! linus is a great example

madam i saw your posts about being exhausted by tech bros and did not connect it to the (very funny) basket weavers skeet until right this second and now i would like to fight your mentions

he has the sorta idiosyncratic optimistic libertarianism common among the OS software types, but he's def not the worst you'd expect if you were to randomly draw from the tech-guy mystery box. Apparently not easy to work with, tho.

And to your literal example, my undergrad year in and out is a top 5 in having students go on to STEM PhDs and also encourages everyone to take underwater basket weaving as well

Torvalds was an absolute and unmitigated asshole for much of his career until his daughter called him on it and he took some time to go off and de-asshole himself; important to both celebrate that it can happen and remember how many people he was an asshole to in the past

… he still does it, though. I celebrate that he’s LESS abusive, but he also has not made amends, and he did poison the well for women and NB folk in open source. And that is an amend he maybe can’t make alone, because hiring/encouraging people who approved of his dickishness makes a climate of it.

yes, I ran out of space to add 'and I've not heard of him doing anything to attempt to address how his past behaviour affected people and drove them out of the community' boo if he's backsliding and not getting called on it

I've not been following the Linux community for a long time now but this thread has reminded me of Hans Reiser, and also how nasty some of it was to Telsa Gwynne.

I remain fairly confident that if SEL had been as much a thing in schools ~40 years ago as it is now, a *whole bunch* of the problems we face would just never have happened, because they're actively caused by specific dipshits who attained power without ever learning how to human.

I'd say that the US would be happier as a nation as well. Or maybe that's just me.

Indeed.

YES.

cut to: douglas adams spinning like a rotisserie chicken in his grave

If we hook him to a generator we can use it to power a crypto mining rig

when you repeat this underwater basket weaving stuff, you're playing into their hands bsky.app/profile/onei...

Also the “underwater basket weaving” thing is based in a lie told by Ronald Reagan about a course at UCSC in Indigenous basket-making practices (where the basket being in water helps make the material malleable) and there was nothing wrong with students learning about it.

Uh, the “underwater basket weaving” was actually mocking something worth studying, both from a sociology standpoint and one of material science. You have to soak reeds to make them pliable for indigenous basket construction.

The entire history of art, music, and literature isn’t enough to turn a techbro into a moral person. The rest of us learned that stealing is wrong back in kindergarten.

There is an essay that makes this point- sonething like, the arts in and of themselves aren't enough, most of the guards at Auschwitz would have been thoroughly familiar with Goethe and Beethoven. Wish I could remember the source.

Plus it’s not like all art was created by morally pure people. I wish that exposure to beautiful things cured ugly ideas. Wouldn’t that make for an incredible world?

Not so much less “can we” as a fucktonne more “should we”.

As someone who weaves and does tech, it's a fucking asset, if only to be able to use a loom which is a proto computer in a way the tech bros will never understand.

I found it interesting that Musk apparently loves Iain Bank's Culture series and has named his drone ships after the books, but he has not yet realized that they represent a utopian communist society. Maybe a better humanities literacy would have helped.

He also named his AI Grok, a thing which, so far as I can see, he has never once actually gone far enough outside his personal Universe Of Me to actually do

It's impressive that someone (especially someone who could, at leisure, clear off for a month's reading retreat) can apparently read both Banks and Heinlein and miss so much of both, and be most readily compared to a truly unpleasant villain in one of Banks' novels.

When I was younger, Grok meant you were going to die in a grass strip in front of a Florida hotel, and be turned into soup. I also wondered why the Berkeley printing presses were. underground

Elon soup would be way too toxic for human consumption at this point

I think those dorkwads should absolutely learn basket weaving, get some perspective

Tech Guy [looks up from working on blueprints of the Torment Nexus]: Thats.. not the kind of take Blade Runner would have.

I don't know if y'all have read the headlines, but Sam altman thinks that operating the easy he does will attract *trillions* of dollars in investments. There is nothing in the whole of existence that you could do that would make him give a fuck about any of the stuff you think he should

Wait...you need literacy to understand "I don't want to be the voice of your technology" means that and not "make a fake version of voice anyways for the technology"? I'm not patronizing that GitHub Ivy League dumb dumb. He knew, he thought he'd get away with it.

We need them to stop, collaborate, and listen.

Obtuse, creepy tech guy: "Why would I want that? How else am I supposed to be in the same room as her?"

Something something this guy

My son was the Humanities kid at a STEM high school and this became his mantra.

Happy Bluesky Birthday! 🎂

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