@Knight Sorry for the delayed response -- busy day at work today. Your clarification makes it clear that perhaps you didn't mean the exact way it came across, but you still intended to insult ACM. We can't allow people to direct insults at anybody or use ad hominem attacks on our site, which includes all chat rooms. That's true when discussing mods, as well as regular users.
So some general advice for better ways to handle this moving forward -- if you feel somebody has been rude or something towards you, it's okay to try and address it with them directly. There's a lot of great ways to express that you're upset with somebody's actions, without attacking the person. If you want some help on how to do that, I think any of the mods would be happy to give examples of good and bad ways to have that conversation
If that doesn't work, it's okay to walk away and/or flag the interaction for the mods to look at (or the community management team if needed). But try to take the high road and don't resort to insulting people or being rude to them, even if you feel they did it first.
@ICCQBE Also looks fine to me (also, if you're not aware, people can see your real name at that link, or at least the one you use for your Google account)
No worries -- just a suggestion. I will switch into that just to upload an image, then switch back. If the image was worth the effort to do all that :)
@tpg2114 I think addressing the actions not the person is something that is hard to overstate. And in that vein, I think it's helpful to take a step back when you feel insulted and see if the comments are being directed at you personally, or if you are taking comments about actions personally when that isn't the intention.
@JMac Great points -- and it's also useful to step away and collect your thoughts before trying to have a conversation if one goes that route. Drafting and re-drafting the issues to raise makes it much easier to have a productive conversation than winging it and mis-speaking.
I have to do that frequently and it sometimes takes me awhile to hash out how to address the problem in a constructive way
@tpg2114 I debated with myself for a solid hour before I even responded to that "Good People" chat room a month or so ago. I didn't really want to stir the pot, so I was reluctant to say anything; but I decided in that case not addressing the perceived rudeness wouldn't help the situation either.
@AaronStevens Yeah, I don't want to get too into it, because I was pretty pissed at the time; but it was about 'hypothetical' high rep users and their poor behaviour. This didn't name anyone; but they did post 3 reputation numbers that happened to match you, emilio's, and my reputation at the time.
@AaronStevens That's what really bugged me about the situation. I only became aware of it when I stumbled on that chat on my own. But when I called them out on it they denied that they were even referring to me, so it kinda killed any attempt at really working it out even after I was aware.
@EmilioPisanty I definitely remember a webcomic (smbc?) about "God's patch notes" that included an item like "Fixed: Human existence included unintentional difficulty spikes" but for the life of me I can't find it again
@tpg2114 Yeah I'm not a fan of being salty. It's a pretty crappy feeling. Thankfully it passes quickly almost always. I think my talent with procrastination pays off in that sense, since you can just procrastinate the saltyness indefinitely; given it's lack of deadlines.
"This program is supposed to help me make decisions. Every time I run it, it just tells me to drink another beer. I've been very impressed with the results so far."
I keep telling myself I need to screw around with coding again and I never do. Closest I've gotten is the Zachtronics video games in the past like 5 years.
It was a really cool tool to play around with, especially with some of the add-ons. Actually getting an accurate looking plot of the heat distribution in a 2D object was so satisfying, even though it was fairly trivial.
So at GT, Matlab was the engineer's intro programming class -- all non-engineering majors took Python.
But I think that changed and now everybody takes Python
MathWorks does a fantastic job of brainwashing people to learn how to program using Matlab, so when they get to the workplace their employer has to pay $20k+ for licenses
@ACuriousMind We solved the question by considering the system is non-damped/natural harmonic oscillator. But if we consider that thr system is a damped harmonic oscillator, the things would change, right?
The simulink on matlab was pretty friggin cool for systems. I think at one point we even had it hooked up to data collection, simulated a control system with simulink, and the outputted the results to the physical system again. That was really entertaining.
@AaronStevens Meh -- that hard part to programming is learning how to translate something like "Go get a drink from the fridge" that seems like a single instruction to humans into the 10000 serial things a computer would need to do to execute it. Once you wrap your head around that, picking up new languages is pretty easy
@JMac I think Simulink is the only part of Matlab that is uniquely useful, but even then it's very narrowly focused on controls
Everything else can be found in much cheaper, faster, more general tools or languages
@tpg2114 Yeah, I was about to say it does have other uses; but it's probably far from the best tool for the job in most cases. It wasn't too bad for me since one of my friends gave me a pirated copy for home use.
Even if you have to pay for it as a student, it was like $100 for the academic copy when I got it. I've been getting quotes for fluid solvers recently, it's astounding how expensive these things are
Like... highway robbery expensive.
Single-seats that can't run on more than 4 processors are like $60,000/year
@ICCQBE Well, everything works as before, you just have an undetermined $\zeta$ in your results until you've determined it from the decay of the amplitude in the second table of data.
@tpg2114 $100 is a lot to a student though :P But yeah I imagine something like a fluid solver is quite a bit of a different beast. Even just thinking about AutoCAD licenses and stuff, the prices for "professional" software like that are insane.
@tpg2114 A guy at my work got us in trouble with AutoCAD because he used a pirated copy on a laptop to try to open a model or something and they called us out on it like the very next day.
@ICCQBE Probably, yeah (also ideal, not natural - arguably the damped ones are the natural ones as you'll rarely find a completely undamped oscillator in nature ;) )
I believe it. But if I were AutoDesk, I would let students steal copies so it ends up being the only tool they know how to use. So when they get to a company to work, I could charge them basically anything
@tpg2114 That's the genius of it. I don't think they give a crap about students with it. I think my friends had copies in university. But as soon as it touched a company CAD file they were on us right away.
Because they probably know they aren't going to get anything going after the students anyways.
