they freaked out about fucking BARCODES YO

How did they miss this one!?

    • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      That also has a heavy dose of untreated mental illness to consider too.

      I know a few very religious engineers, its weird. One of them cried on the phone with his mom when gay marriage was legalized.

      Outside of that, he's an amazing engineer and a ton of fun to bullshit with about random topics but he's essentially pro any government program and thinks PRISM was good. So i just keep it surface level.

      • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        oh yeah, that guy that made Temple OS was on another plane of reality. Dude probably needed some care and attention.

        engineers can be a really mixed bag for whatever reason. perhaps the relative pragmatism of how it's taught and the general employability of the profession. probably the chuddiest STEM field. lot of like catholic and mormon energy in engineering.

        • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          In practice I've met a lot more Bernie esque dem-socs than chuds. The chuds are usually unbearable in their specificity of chud opinions. IE only drinking Pepsi because Coke stopped selling in Israel to keep the business of the rest of the middle east.

          The really annoying libertarian types are clowned on by other engineers in my experience too. But generally the pragmatism is shown in the dem-soc way. They understand universal healthcare and bodily autonomy are logical steps to improve society but they can't think past pragmatic voting.

          • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Oh yeah so much so that too. I'm friends with a guy that's very much a dem soc type, but also literally works at a naval research lab.

            • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Its a trap because the most interesting work is always defense related. Everything else in the tech industry is either optimizing ad delivery or has been outsourced to the third world because all the boilerplate has become so standardized.

              If you go to school for engineering because you genuinely love solving problems and building things, guess what? Missiles or you're writing some enterprise c# and winforms or some web dev that is basically the same thing over and over.

              The people who are motivated by the love of the game end up just going defense because the job security is 10x better than silicon valley and they pay well, as long as you ignore what "the mission" is.

              The tech field is so fucked up. The other option is getting paid absolute peanuts for research type work where your funding can dry up randomly and leave you late on rent.

              We're at a point in society and technological advancement where we have a glut of computing that doesn't make anyone's lives better, it just makes it easier to scam people out of money. Any real futuristic advancement is going to come out of materials research and computers are more than powerful to operate the control systems that keep them steady. Anything that is seriously making an advancement is so forward thinking that no private entity wants to fund it because of quarterly profits so its all left to the government who hopes they can make a weapon out of it one day to really stick it to [current boogyman].

              Can you tell I'm mad because all I want to do its build neat things with other nerds who get a rush out of building neat things?

              • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
                ·
                2 years ago

                the thing that gets me is that we essentially have solved the technological requirements to build a post-scarcity society, but capitalism is incapable of organizing towards that at all. the inefficiency of the overproduction is the point. probably the next big real innovation i would expect to see would be feasible room-temperature superconductors. from what i've seen, that's pretty much a matter of time.

                i also would like to build neat things with other nerds :deeper-sadness:

          • wwiehtnioj [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            vaguely dem soc engineers boycotting coke because they murdered union leaders :solidarity: chud engineers mad about coke not selling to Israel

            no ethical consumption under capitalism means do whatever you feel like :solidarity: that's ok I'll still keep drinking that garbage