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[UPDATE 20191112_223013 UTC: Per original author's request, I hereby note this is an edited excerpt and not an exact quote from the blog post linked below. --martyb]
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Three of the Hundred Falsehoods CS Students Believe
Jan Schauma recently posted a list of one hundred Falsehoods CS Students (Still) Believe Upon Graduating. There is much good fun here, especially for a prof who tries to help CS students get ready for the world, and a fair amount of truth, too. I will limit my brief comments to three items that have been on my mind recently even before reading this list.
18. 'Email' and 'Gmail' are synonymous.
CS grads are users, too, and their use of Gmail, and systems modeled after it, contributes to the truths of modern email: top posting all the time, with never a thought of trimming anything. Two-line messages sitting atop icebergs of text which will never be read again, only stored in the seemingly infinite space given us for free.
38. Employers care about which courses they took.
It's the time of year when students register for spring semester courses, so I've been meeting with a lot of students. (Twice as many as usual, covering for a colleague on sabbatical.) It's interesting to encounter students on both ends of the continuum between not caring at all what courses they take and caring a bit too much. The former are so incurious I wonder how they fell into the major at all. The latter are often more curious but sometimes are captive to the idea that they must, must, must take a specific course, even if it meets at a time they can't attend or is full by the time they register.
90. Two people with a CS degree will have a very similar background and shared experience/knowledge.
This falsehood operates in a similar space to #38, but at the global level I reached at the end of my previous paragraph. Even students who take most of the same courses together will usually end their four years in the program with very different knowledge and experiences.
The complete list is available at www.netmeister.org.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:40PM (3 children)
Even though I've upmodded you, I disagree. Computers *ARE* overrated. People pay more attention to devices than to what they do. Not that they don't *use* what they do, but they don't think about it.
I *think* I'm different about this, but who knows. Consider "facial recognition". What's important is not what the technology is, but how it's used and who controls it. Or computerized selection of job applicants.
It's not the computer that's important, it's how it's getting used. And who's controlling the results, and what selection criteria they use.
Computers are an enabling tool. As long as the "only follow orders" that's all they are, even if the orders are several layers removed from observation. And what's important is what those orders are, and what coercive force is behind them. Until the computers are self directed, it's not the computers that are important.
That said, I'm not a political animal, I'm a technologist. I can control my computer (to an extent). And I can choose to buy a newer, fancier, one. And that's where my attention naturally lives. But I *know* that that's not what's socially important, and pretending that it is, is a mistake.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:28PM
Thanks for the upmod, and fair point. I think there were several points in that post I reacted to.
This is the part which got a proverbial bee in my bonnet, and it was the primary point of my response. I strongly disagree with it. If the poster had said "no big innovations in the past 2 years," and had said it in 2015 I may have agreed... but things have changed a TON in recent years, let alone the past 40 years.
I think this is what you were reacting to, and to a large degree I agree. However, saying something is "just a tool" is both literally true, and I think misrepresentative of the reality of the situation. I could likewise say fire, electricity, steam engines, currency, elections, pacemakers, and gunpowder are all "just tools." You are right that on their own they do nothing (case in point: Chinese people invented gunpowder... and only used it for ceremonial purposes until a westerner had the clever idea to use it to project objects into enemies in combat). Steel beams are "just a tool," but imagine trying to build a skyscraper without them. Computers are "just a tool" much like humans are "just some hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and a few other trace elements."
I will agree with your general point, though, that it's not the tool or its strength that matters, it's how it is used. (e.g. the dotcom bust of the early 2000s, where things like pets.com flopped... just being "on the internet" isn't good enough.)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:44AM (1 child)
Don't forget the infrastructure for databases matching human faces to names, collecting the data which is scanned for faces, and of course, being able to act on it.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:31PM
I included that in "how it's used an who controls it".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.