Time for something interesting , dating apps.

kpedersen said:
This one made me chuckle about Ginny's visit to the IBM offices.

IBM memo to staff: Our CEO Ginni is visiting so please 'act normally!'

Leaked missive insists 'no selfies, no bathroom run-ins or elevator pitches' with Rometty
www.theregister.com www.theregister.com
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True anecdote about the visit of the CEO of one of those giant computer companies to our office: Our research project was (unfortunately) the centerpiece of the technology demonstration when the east coast CEO came to visit our Silicon Valley office. In reality, he was coming to play golf in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, but to justify taking the corporate jet, he spent an hour at our research lab. Weeks before he arrived, the facilities group started making the place look neat: Cleanup everywhere, hallways were repainted, researchers were told to not put trash bins in the hallway (where we always kept them to make it easier for the trash to be emptied), all staffers were supposed to sit in their office, nicely dressed, with the door open, while the CEO and his entourage of about 10 personal attendants walk by. The day before the visit, all the carpets were shampooed and windows cleaned.

EXCEPT: The visit was supposed to be in our lab, where we had a prototype of the world's first heterogeneous cluster file system (in 3 racks worth of servers). But the lab was filthy, coffee stains everywhere, dust bunnies in the corner. We (meaning a group of a dozen PhDs) got rid of the obvious trash like piles of old documentation and empty coffee cups. Then we called facilities, asking them to vacuum the lab and clean the carpet. Answer: "Can't do, labs are off limits to janitors." Our reply: "Must do, the CEO will be in here in 3 hours." Facilities: "F*** you, not our problem." So our manager called the head of facilities, and said: "I'm going to Target or K-Mart, and buying a vacuum cleaner and a bucket and cleaning supplies for $100, doing the work ourselves!". Answer: "If you do that, you will get fired, for an unauthorized purchase, since only the facilities department is allowed to buy cleaning supplies." Really, they were willing to fire our research manager over a purchase of $100 of cleaning supplies.

The question was escalated to the lab director (an IBM VP, famous computer scientist, and ACM fellow), who somehow managed to get janitors into the lab to clean up.

And this is why corporate CEOs are (unwittingly and unintentionally) the most evil people on the planet. And to complete the circle to the topic of this thread: There was no romance or sex in this whole story.
 
eternal_noob said:
Poor Alain. He just wants to get laid and we're taking about billionaires who destroy society.
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To connect this to the original topic, those tech bros made social media the cess pool it is, full of illusions of what exists and what is available. See the tinder swipe statistics for that. You know, 80% of males are sub-par...

ralphbsz I also have a story about a visiting CEO. That guy visited a Dependance, and when the Tross arrived one small guy in wrinkled coat at the end went into the machine shop and asked a mechanic what the problems were. It turned out later that that was the CEO. Local management did not like what happened. A year later the same guy came, walked into the same workshop and asked the same mechanic what had happened. Two weeks of change, then back to usual. After that there were empty seats in the local management. That guy was certified evil, but he knew how to steer a company. Some may know the name Zwick.
 
Simple question: do you see any woman here on the forum? No? Me neither. Then, why is that so?

Apparently, there are now areas of interest where there are just no women.
Then, in order to meet women, you have to go to some other area, for the sole purpose of meeting women.
This is probably not the natural thing.

The natural thing was, one would need a partnership anyway, because one was just not able to run the farm alone. Choice was probably limited, but nevertheless it seems to have almost always worked out.
 
PMc said:
Simple question: do you see any woman here on the forum? No? Me neither. Then, why is that so?
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To be fair, I don't see many of us declaring that we are men either.

Yes, my miserable, awkward and argumentative nature strongly suggests I am male but anyone joining a tech community and explicitly stating "I am a woman" would raise some red flags (and probably also be very likely to be male too).

In short, A UNIX forum probably has no place for gender.
 
kpedersen said:
To be fair, I don't see many of us declaring that we are men either.

Yes, my miserable, awkward and argumentative nature strongly suggests I am male but anyone joining a tech community and explicitly stating "I am a woman" would raise some red flags (and probably also be very likely to be male too).

In short, A UNIX forum probably has no place for gender.
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🤣
Jokes apart, didn't we have Dru Lavigne on the forums? :)
 
kpedersen said:
To be fair, I don't see many of us declaring that we are men either.

Yes, my miserable,
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Nononono. Stop, scrollback. This is not what I mean. And modern gender dissolution is of no interest to me, anyway.

There is usually no need to declare yourself whatever. Some of us have christian names, some have a photo, some have an email that carries a full name, etc.etc. Also one can meet at a convention, in real life.
And the phenomenon is not new. As a youngster I was interested in electronics, and there were no women in that field. When I once happened to have a job, I did business consulting, moving corporations from their mainframes to client-server infra - and there were almost no women in that field. This phenomenon is not easily watered down by "we just cannot know ..."

kpedersen said:
but anyone joining a tech community and explicitly stating "I am a woman" would raise some red flags (and probably also be very likely to be male too).
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I don't think so. Why should that be? Oh, btw, if I remember correctly, there actually was a woman here occasionally. She seems to write for some magazine that does really exist, and most probably she also does really exist.
 
kpedersen said:
Strangely I actually see a higher ratio of female engineers in the industry and at work than online.

Perhaps women just aren't as inclined to sit on operating system forums in their free time as much as men. I certainly can't understand that ;)
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That might depend on where You are located. Europe, the former communist part, they had female engineers. Really good engineers.
Also, you find more women doing DBA than Unix. And, it seems they mainly do it "as a job", for a purpose - and not at all out of personal obsession (i.e. like me who most-of-the-time needed to cut down food in order to run a computer).
 
Low number of women in engineering and sciences (a.k.a. STEM): Definitely a fact, in many but not all countries. Particularly bad in computer-related fields, and physics. Exceptions exist. For example, my wife is a physics PhD, and active in that field. Both my two best and my worst manager ever have been women (two of the three have a PhD in CS, and interestingly the best one has only a BS, but really understands people, and the engineering process). A good sign is that the ratio of women in computing is higher among young ones than among older ones, but still nowhere near parity. Is something being done about this? Absolutely. For example, look at Anita Borg's work and eponymous foundation, the Ada Initiative (Valerie Aiken's work), and so on. By the way, Val was instrumental in creating ZFS, which keeps many of us here on this forum.
 
ralphbsz said:
You are absolutely correct. Maybe I should have written: "Have been observed in the past to be evil, leading to an expectation that they are, and will be evil."
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No problem, it was just irritating. I had to check, and at least the-man-who-fell-to-earth seems not to be dead, and neither evil, btw (which is also irritating, because the actual man-who-fell-to-earth sadly is indeed dead, for a few years already).
 
For some reason that reminds me of the Steve Martin routine, where, in a French accent, he talks about how he has spent his life learning about women. He is wearing his jacket on his shoulders. He adds lines like, as I have spent my life learning about women I have not learned certain things. I cannot put my arms in my sleeves, I cannot read or write. But I know all about women. (Much funnier if you watch him do it).

To Alain, it was hard back in the 80's and 90's too. I remember begging friends to introduce me to someone. I was doing karate, so started doing ballet, telling myself that I was doing it to get flexible but let's face it, I realized that 95% of the class were women and that was a big factor. (Indirectly, it led to me meeting my wife, a Japanese friend in New York who'd been a policeman in Japan, was doing things like babysitting, and one of the kids he babysat took a ballet class with my wife, so he introduced us.)

I will just say that while you are alone, spend the time improving yourself so that when you do meet someone worthwhile, you're worthwhile too. Shucks, I only speak Engish well, and some Japanese. You're in Belgium, judging from your posts, your English is excellent and you probably speak Flemish and French (or maybe just one of them--but the few Belgians I've met speak both). That alone should give you a bit of confidence. It's hard when you're looking. Probably, once you find someone you'll soon meet others who are interested, because either that's how life works or because when we have someone, we have some subtle air of confidence. Anyway, hang in there. Probably everyone who isn't movie star handsome has gone through the "I'll never meet anyone" phase.

I'll close with a quote from Terry Pratchett, which perhaps, describes my wife and I in our early days.
I knew you two would get along like a house on fire." Screams, flames,
people running for safety...
/
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Crivens said:
Not only a waste of time and a waste of money, but also a waste of emotional energy. Many a woman on these apps have no interest in dating, they want to scratch their egos "I still got it". And when you invest time and interest into a contact that is likely to be in vain. Many want the attention, few want a relationship. So, if you are looking for a magnet for people with narcissistic trends, dating apps are a good candidate.
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Since I’m kinda old, I was around when the first dial-in dating BBS systems came out. At the time, not very many women had their own PCs, so most of the women on the dating BBS were dialing in on their boyfriend’s computer.

That struck me as starting things off with a red flag.
 
We used to have a chatbot enthusiast around these Forums, Trihex. He'd have a ball with this topic.

And now, you can have phone apps that act like imaginary friends with whom you can have steamy texts, chats, etc. You can even set your preferences and not get flack for that - hey, it's a robot, robots don't exactly have feelings, y'know...

Turing test is becoming MUCH easier to pass these days an AI can fool you into thinking there's an actual human on the other end.

Wake me up when an AI can detect sarcasm AND translate it accurately from Mandarin Chinese into Hungarian. 🥱
 
scottro said:
I will just say that while you are alone, spend the time improving yourself so that when you do meet someone worthwhile, you're worthwhile too.
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You'll never be.

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks... the work for wihich all other work is but preparation.

This is attributed to Rainer Maria Rilke - but I cannot find a german original rsp. proof-of-exixstance.

I found this in a lesbian movie - which is also a rather strange facet: in lesbian movies women tend to behave like very normal human beings (except being brainwashed by sociaty, like almost everybody in public is).

Only in real life they behave in such crazy patterns which nobody seems to really understand. And then also, anybody interested in mating, seems to consider the difficulty mainly n finding one appropriate other, and that is widely agreed upon. Rarely gets considered that the actual difficulty is not so much in finding, but rather then in living a loving relationship. Well, except in lesbian movies.

So, question: does, perchance, the usual boy-meets-girl scheme not even expect to create a loving relationship?
 
scottro said:
It's funny, in an email conversation with said Bill hating friend, I also mentioned Steve. He certainly is (was?) up there, claiming he was infertile so he wouldn't be responsible for his daughter, and that probably isn't the worst of it. But my friend is so anti MS, it's almost funny, though as he points out, I get equally defensive if say, he insults the BSDs. But he, in his 60's still writes Microsoft Turd, for example.

But hey, going back to dating, it reminds me of, again pre Internet, I was working in sales in office supplies, One of my customers and I began a phone flirtation. Eventually, I asked her her age, and she was 22 or so. She asked How about you? I said, Well, I'm in my mid 30's.. <pause for effect> But...I'm really immature.
I didn't get a date, but I got a laugh, which, once I heard how young she was, was all I was aiming for.
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My ex-wife when i met here was 17. I was 28 when we met. But i lied about my age. During the relationship i told my real age. But for here age was no longer an issue. We have been together for 11 years.
 
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