Name: Anonymous 2017-07-04 7:16
is there any area in the CS or IT that hasn't been infected by bullshit? I went into security straight out of college - it seemed natural because I used to be a teenage *chan script kiddy when I was younger. years later, I feel that those script kiddies which used to be mocked in the security community have more of the hacker spirit than the community today. nowadays, if you told those 'hackers' to do some basic gray-hat stuff, a third of them would stay in the sidelines to make sure that you don't use offensive language, another third would get butthurt and talk about maturity, responsibility etc. and those who were left would get into a dick measuring and attention whoring contest.
the thing is - I'm monitoring other programming-related communities and it seems that it's the same everywhere. there are always SJWs, there are always mindless corporate drones and there are always self-proclaimed 'rockstars' with a superiority complex. anything that has to do with 'the web' is even worse on the first and third front. anything that has to do with 'enterprise' is worse on the second. I do amateur gamedev in my spare time but the politics of that became so intensely witch-hunty that I don't even think of doing it professionally (I'm not too extreme but it doesn't matter - just ask that french guy who had to make a public apology on E3). I was thinking of academia but it seems that it's mostly just more pretentious version of attention whoring bloggers fighting about which one of them is the cleverest.
is AI research the answer or is it completely dominated by smug googlers? is it embedded systems, or did 'maker' movement going mainstream turn it into hipster central?
is there a place when I can find the kind of oldschool spergery that made me interested in computers in the first place? the atmosphere of old LUGs? the playful experimentation that was associated with the hacker (either in the security or in the MIT sense) ethos? the raw awesomeness of interacting with huge, powerful machines - or just the opposite, the struggle of random basement dwellers trying to get out as many processor cycles as they can from their shitty BASIC interpreter on some ancient home computer? did such thing even exist or is it just a mixture of exaggerated stories and half-remembered nostalgia?
I don't want politics (either ideological or corporate), I don't want popularity contents, I don't want to argue who's the smartest. I just want to do interesting things with computers again.
the thing is - I'm monitoring other programming-related communities and it seems that it's the same everywhere. there are always SJWs, there are always mindless corporate drones and there are always self-proclaimed 'rockstars' with a superiority complex. anything that has to do with 'the web' is even worse on the first and third front. anything that has to do with 'enterprise' is worse on the second. I do amateur gamedev in my spare time but the politics of that became so intensely witch-hunty that I don't even think of doing it professionally (I'm not too extreme but it doesn't matter - just ask that french guy who had to make a public apology on E3). I was thinking of academia but it seems that it's mostly just more pretentious version of attention whoring bloggers fighting about which one of them is the cleverest.
is AI research the answer or is it completely dominated by smug googlers? is it embedded systems, or did 'maker' movement going mainstream turn it into hipster central?
is there a place when I can find the kind of oldschool spergery that made me interested in computers in the first place? the atmosphere of old LUGs? the playful experimentation that was associated with the hacker (either in the security or in the MIT sense) ethos? the raw awesomeness of interacting with huge, powerful machines - or just the opposite, the struggle of random basement dwellers trying to get out as many processor cycles as they can from their shitty BASIC interpreter on some ancient home computer? did such thing even exist or is it just a mixture of exaggerated stories and half-remembered nostalgia?
I don't want politics (either ideological or corporate), I don't want popularity contents, I don't want to argue who's the smartest. I just want to do interesting things with computers again.