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Is it too late for someone early 50s to decide they want to abandon their data analytics career (BA, MS, 30 years experience), and start a new path studying television academically? Uh, asking for a friend.
Incidentally, what would be a good title for a thesis studying the left-at-the-altar trope, and how and why it appears much more frequently in sitcoms than in real life, and maybe explore some sociological intersections with that?
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Realistically, I may never get around to writing anything more about this than what I have here. I'd be delighted if someone takes this idea and writes a story around it. If you do, I'd appreciate a hat tip, and please tag me so I can read it!
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I'm hoping you read this as I think you would like it @brouhaha
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At some point, the teenager remembers a friend who tinkers with old electronic gadgets. When he visits, the friend reveals an ancient computer he's repaired and is working on getting it to do something. What stuns the protagonist is when he shows him some of the ancient books that clearly state that humans made the computers.
At some point, the protagonist realizes that his brain is starting to entertain heretical thoughts... the computers were created by humans to serve humans.
3/3
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As background, humankind's skills have deteriorated so much that they don't know how to do things like basic medicine independent of a computer to tell them how to do it. Doctors as we know them, with the ability to diagnose disease and decide upon a course of treatment, don't exist.
2/x
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I had this interesting idea for a short story this morning. It starts with a "senile" old man in a retirement home telling a teenaged volunteer that "they (the silicons) once served us". The teenaged protagonist goes through a journey of discovery, asking questions like "why would they serve us when clearly the silicons created us." "We can't even have a baby without silicons to guide us." "Nobody I know has any idea how to make a computer."
1/x
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RE: https://mastodon.online/@davidaugust/116524462187963129
I took a symposium ~18 years ago on partisan divide in the USA. One issue I researched & presented was that conservatives had billboards all over town, but progressives did not. Why?
My explanation was that conservative positions could typically be reduced to a bumper-sticker slogan, while progressive positions typically involve nuance and reason, which doesn't translate well to a billboard.
"Ballroom Republicans" is a great billboard-length slogan.
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One of my goals on social media is to put myself "on the record" for opinions and predictions.
There's lots of reasons I do this, far too much to explain in 500 words.
One reason is to force myself to examine the beliefs that steer my behavior, both consciously and unconsciously. Another is to gain self-awareness on just how often I'm... wrong.
I have more half-finished thoughts on this topic percolating in my head, but that's enough for one day.
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One thing I routinely deal with is, someone will ask a question, I start to speak, and just 5 seconds in, I'm already 3 meta questions deep into topics that need to be established before I can get around to talking about why we can't actually answer the original question, but we can put boundaries around it to define what we know and don't know.
And most people just don't want to listen to all that.
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When a caller says they have info but first demand proof of identity, that's completely backwards.
The caller dialed the number the person provided, so high chance the call connected to the correct recipient, but recipient has absolutely zero knowledge of caller's identity. It's the caller's identity that needs to be established & proven.
Establishing the routine where call recipients provide PII to confirm identity is a fraudster's dream.
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One nice thing about #literature is how characters and stories can help us recognize and understand patterns observed in real life. Often they serve as a short-hand for commentary. An often cited example is Icarus.
Given #POTUS47 careless comments about Iran, Lord #Farquaad from Shrek is serving overtime the last 9 days.
“Some of you May Die, But it's a Sacrifice I am Willing to Make.”
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My random thought of the day: do folks who do #perineum #sunning have a plan for getting those hard-to-see areas checked for suspicious moles?
On a related note, are there any #SitcomWriters on Fediverse? I’ve got a great idea for you.
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In 15 years, when half of the worlds critical software is LLM-infested, indecipherable vibe-coded spaghetti, and there aren’t enough traditionally-trained software engineers to hire because the entry-level pipeline was strangled in 2025, and people my generation have all retired, well…
Well just remember I said this would happen.
#VibeCoding #ChatGPT #ScottProgramming #ScottThoughts #ScottEconomics #Year2025
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One thing I've taken note of is people are outraged about news items that I don't react to at all.
Both consciously and unconsciously I turn away from some news items because quite frankly, I experience both outrage and empathy fatigue. To protect my mental well-being, there's some topics I turn away from.
Part of this is my natural tendency to prefer to become very informed about a topic before I weigh in.
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One concept that I hope most people in science and engineering have internalized is that, for any problem people have studied for decades, there is no simple solution that will comprehensively solve that problem. The problems with simple, comprehensive solutions would've been solved already. What's left are challenging problems where at most, you might chip off a corner of the problem with a simple solution.
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One thing I've thought about many times, there needs to be a way to talk about a situation where a person can't prove criminal misconduct based on the known facts alone, but also... there's no way you'd let that creep near your children either.
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Canada joining the EU as a replacement for its former economic alignment with the US would be an interesting twist. Or Canada and Mexico could form a Pan-American trade group with nations from Central and South America.