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 😉
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
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
That’s ludicrous.
It obviously stands for cryptography in general, not just TLS.
I saw that thread, I think. Or the same person in another thread talking about the same thing.
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:
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.
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.
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?”
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
I feel attacked.
I feel like I skipped right over this comment.
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.
I’m missing the joke… would anyone be so kind to help me understand?
The people in the picture are so used to working with assembly language, that even though they know the average person doesn’t know much about assembly, they assume the average person knows a little, which is already way more than the average person actually knows.
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
Someone told me every processor used 0xEA
Not sure if this is a riff on the joke or not.
Back in the day I dabbled in 6510 code, and up until today hadn’t even bothered to look at a chart of opcodes for any of its contemporaries. Today I learned that Z80 uses $00 for NOP.
Loth as I am to admit it, that actually makes sense. Maybe more sense than 65xx which acts more like a divide-by-zero has happened.
The rest of the opcode table was full of alien looking mnemonics though, and no undocumented single byte opcodes? Freaky, man.
But the point is that not even Z80 used $EA. If the someone was real they probably meant every 65xx processor.
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.
deleted by creator
With the ubiquity of C64 emulators, that’s easy enough to demonstrate by experiment
I mean I’m only missing int3
I didn’t even know they released int2
You guys have int?
