Do the kids even use the term poser anymore? I’m not sure that they do… These damn kids…[quote=“ethicalcannibal, post:59, topic:83911”]
I work for “The Man” with serious capital letters now, so I guess I’m a sell out. 
[/quote]
Isn’t that most of us? 
I don’t know if poser is a term these days. I’m old and out of touch.
I work for a huge federal government agency, so I really do work for The Man.
Me too… I don’t think it’s a term the kids use (at least the ones I know from the years I was teaching at my uni). That’s interesting, as I think that term was in common usage for quite a long time. I think it reached it’s height in the late 80s/90s, but I think you can find it in vogue as far back as the 60s counterculture. I’ve been wondering about if we can even think of a youth-centric, counterculture as being a thing anymore, since it seems to be more about distinct subcultures and politics (however you want to define that) is something separate from the consumption of culture. I’ve been wrestling with this in my dissertation a bit…
That is The Man… but maybe that’s been redefined, too, thanks to neo-liberalism and privatization creep? I don’t know… I wonder about using terms like this to think about what’s happening to day and I’m not sure if it helps or hides things…
I think you might have something with that. The subcultures I belong to now are not as age distinct as they once were. Gamers seem to cross generations. As an old grown up gutter punk, I talk to kids I could have fathered about music as well as other crusty old people. I think that’s the internet for you. Everyone has access now, not just age specific cohorts.
Oh, I work for The Man. I don’t know if the term applies, but I work for the military industrial complex. You can literally not get anymore “The Man” than that. My 16 year old self would love my new tattoos and music, and hate me for being a total sell out for trying to pay off my student loans this way.
Yeah, I t hink the internet is certainly part of the dynamic (as well as an artifact of the military industrial complex!)… but I think other factors are at play too. Rebellion is sort of mainstream now, yeah? Everyone sees themselves as outside the system and a rebel in America - even (and maybe especially) those who benefit the most. It’s a weird kind of dynamic that comes along with the popularization of countercultural… er, culture, I think.
We’re all doing what we can to get by, right. Students loans are an incredible burden. It seems like getting to do exactly what one wants is a rare privilege now a days.
It was a specific type of '70s hold-over thing, especially in the computer geek world, where a lot of men’s personal appearance and sense of style froze at whatever age they entered college.
There was a very specific moustache + full beard lumberjack kind of look (with or without long hair), the kind of mountain-man guy thing that would go with wearing hiking boots everywhere. The latter was one of the traits identified/mocked in the “Real Programmers” list, another one of those old bits of long-circulated xeroxed computer geek humor:
That one was everywhere in the early '80s, because every computer geek knew somebody to whom it applied. (It doesn’t mention the beards though; maybe that cut too close to home.)
Anyway, this is surely why old Unix geeks are generically “neckbeards”.
Greybeards? ‘Neckbeard’ has different connotations, at least nowadays.
But yeah, there were definitely beards and mustaches in the south in the 80’s.
[quote=“ethicalcannibal, post:64, topic:83911”]
The subcultures I belong to now are not as age distinct as they once were. Gamers seem to cross generations. As an old grown up gutter punk, I talk to kids I could have fathered about music as well as other crusty old people. I think that’s the internet for you.[/quote]
This is true, but it was also true (to a lesser degree) during the BBS years in the late 80’s/early 90’s before the internet took off. The same debate over real names vs aliases was alive and well back then, and the boards that used aliases were a great place to avoid discrimination, since no one knew your age, color, gender, religion, etc., unless you told them. The big difference I see now is that a generation of people has grown up with that, so now it’s much more noticeable offline in the real world.
Also, some of the old rebels have worked their way up into power but not lost their spirit. Conversation that made me laugh: saw a new hire ask their boss about the company’s piercings and tattoos policy. His response was that they had one, but they’d have to fire a lot of managers, including himself, if they enforced it. That’s a big difference from a few decades ago.
I grew up living next to a programmer/hardware geek who made millions from carbon fiber development.
No beard, no hiking boots. Just tennis shoes and a lot of “plumber’s crack” resulting from his perpetually hunched-over sitting style from what I remember.
I’m certainly not saying all '70s or '80s computer geeks were like that; I’ve never had a beard myself, though I found “waffle stomper” hiking boots purely practical in Chicago winters. I’m just saying it was a definite type; I knew people like that, and they were common enough to be labeled in programmer humor.
Re tennis shoes: in the late '80s, I remember another programmer angrily accusing me of having obvious ambitions for management, because I was wearing black sneakers.
I watched the pilot last night.
My first impression is that it looks like Starbuck’s origin story, and I’m wondering when the PC clone is going to become sentient?
Late edit:
OK I’m 5 eps into season 1.
I’m enjoying it, despite it’s many flaws. It’s a little clunky but it’s an interesting story, indeed topical at the moment, and the opening credit music is awesome.
Even though I’m not familiar with the technical material, I can still see that @LurkingGrue probably has a point, it does rely on a lot of tech set pieces that have a slightly dopey “training montage” feel to them, and there is a sense that they went for drama over accuracy in a misguided attempt to engage people like myself.
I’d imagine hackers would store their intermediates anywhere within the file system just to confuse sniffers, bots, and other hackers.
I remember something like:
Yeah, but while I’m not really a Linux geek (BSD for me!) /proc especially doesn’t work that way - procfs is a directory-like representation of the properties of running processes - and if I remember correctly on Linux /dev doesn’t work that way either - it’s another “magic” file system, devfs, used to interface to devices.
(On a classic Unix of course /dev itself is just a hierarchy in a regular file system and it’s just a convention to put the magic device inodes there, so you could in principle put arbitrary files there. Urrgh, just writing this I’m realizing how rusty I’m getting on Unix work these days.)
Sort of like this.
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