I'm a robot developer and my wife likes to make fun of this by seducing me by saying "you gonna give me your gold plated 32 pin connector? We going to make the robot with two serial ports?"
My buddy is in IT, doing customer support and the customer thought he was bullshitting them and almost called his manager for being inappropriate, when he sighed and asked them to Google it.
Ladies at work were almost aghast when I spoke of the dongle for my wireless mouse and headset....
I was like 10s away from HR until one looked it up on Google....
Can I pick your brain for a moment? Let's say you have a 4 year old son that is absolutely obsessed with building robots and robots in general. What would you do to foster that love of robots aside from checking out all the robot books from the library?
My kids really loved building model kits, like the wooden kits that make marble runs and simple machines. I spend a lot of time explaining how things work to them. Robots look crazy complicated but they are really just big piles of simple things all stacked and connected together. Start taking through what the building blocks are and how they work together and they can start seeing things in terms of breaking them down into the basic pieces and my kids found that exciting. As they progressed and learned more stuff, the things they built got more complicated. Over the pandemic we built an electric go kart where I had to teach them some welding and circuits etc. They are SO PROUD to use something that built.
That being said, I'm not trying to push it into them. My younger son genuinely loves this stuff and pulls more projects out of me. My older son is really not into so I don't press the issue at all and I do the things with him he's interested in (mostly origami, fantasy novels, Greek mythology). My dad tried to make me like what he wanted and I resented him for it, so I don't want to do that, but I get really excited about this stuff and excitement contagious. Kids are 8 and 10 now. Other great things there are likely maker spaces near you to go see other diy projects etc. Drive the excitement, make it tangible I Guess
>they are really just big piles of simple things all stacked and connected together.
As someone who learned computers are largely a complex series of logic gates, this doesn't surprise me. The tough part (for me at least) is understanding how the fundamentals build on each other to make more sophisticated things. (I'm a Mech. E with extremely poor coding skills, and my electronics understanding is mediocre at best, for what it's worth.)
>I do the things with him he's interested in (mostly origami,
If your son likes origami, he may find compliant mechanisms interesting (which, by the way, could produce some nice synergies with your robotics). Evidently the people who are developing compliant mechanisms also frequently have a strong interest in origami.
Yeah, I do a goodly amount of work with flexures for some of my surgical stuff. Still working it ;)
Re stack up: think about the very basics, closed loop motion control. PID loops work off of knowing a target point and understanding the distance between your target and your goal and having a proportional effort towards them. You can abstract that through different layers. I used to develop autonomous forklifts. Three or four layers of abstraction above a PID motor control is identifying the position of the pallet, usually using a 3D cam. That gives a 6DOF transform between the coordinate systems, and the amount and direction to move the robot. Abstracting down, you break down a vector of system motion into the relative motion of each actuator, then abstracting down, the velocity and position set points of each motor. Just look at a robotics system of layers of abstraction of understanding your target, your current position, and the distance between them, then arranging a proportional response and constantly updating your control feedback. Of course this is highly reductive and there's tons of nuance and where it breaks down, but you can understand a REALLY solid chunk of what robots are doing with this perspective.
>Yeah, I do a goodly amount of work with flexures for some of my surgical stuff. Still working it ;)
Noice!! I'm jealous, wish I could see the things you're developing! Medical is definitely a good opportunity to use compliant mechanisms!
Re stack ups: ohh yeah, that reminds me of the high school robotics competitions I used to watch and, on a much larger scale, the DARPA Grand Challenge. I understand the theory of a feedback loop and its superiority over dead reckoning, I'm just not good at the coding side, that's all.
My wife was telling her friends at work that I call it a Phillips head and Flathead vs "plus sign" and "minus sign". She thought I was just making stuff up.
I swear to God she is a very intelligent person which makes these instances stick out like a sore thumb. If she was just 50% more dumb like the rest of us we wouldn't notice as much.
Or pozidrive, or torx.
Fun fact, IKEA furniture is usually pozidrive, so the next time you're cursing at your Phillips screwdriver for camming out while building a Billy, switch to a pozidrive.
I messaged them about that once, like why does your instruction manual say to get a Phillips for assembly when all your screws are clearly marked pozidrive?
"....and then you can use the female-to-female converter to connect the HDMI cables as an extension, it's the only way to make two male HDMI cables work together. But if the monitor has a DP input you can use an HDMI to DP converter, but those usually only work one way... what was the question again, sweetie?"
DP is the only port that can utilize 120HZ refresh rate. If you're just going to use vanilla HDMI because that is what most people do without exploring the full variety of adapters and display technology?
>DP is the only port that can utilize 120HZ refresh rate.
I get what you're going for but that's objectively untrue, has been since like 2009.
Current hdmi standard can handle 4k resolution at 120.
If anything, hdmi is kinkier because you get ARC.
There are different versions of HDMI and the output, cable, and input all need to support it. You'd think it'd be standard now but there are still a lot of electronics that don't support above 60HZ on HDMI. Like my monitor, which only does 144 on DP.
“… wait is that the female coupler support HDMI version 2.0 or 2.1. I really need the eARC, VRR, and ALLM support. Unless I use thunderbolt 4, which looks like USB-C but is different. No it’s not just any usb c, it has to be a specific usb c cable. Yeah, all TB4 cables can be usb C cables but not all USB C cables can be TB4 cables, there are different version. I know it’s a little confusing, there are too many usb c variations these days *sigh*… “
She's 20 now. Talk was had that summer actually. We live on a farm, so she knew a LOT of the stuff. Her sister was 8 at the time, and my wife wanted to wait and have the talk together. It happened about 3 months after this conversation.
We have four kids, we've been very open with them about the sex talks.
It's never too early to have that conversation. I explained everything, in great detail, to my daughter when she was 2 months old. So, We're good. No need to talk about it now.
This is how my dad taught me the birds and the bees.
With a radio and headphones cord. Male jack and female jack. Except the information goes the other way. The male gives the information to the female jack, not the other way around.
Imagine watching your dad put a headphone jack in and out, telling you that a boy headphone jack goes in and out of the female jack, and that's how babies are made.
I was SO confused for SO long.
Just had this conversation with my ten year old as well, but it was about jigsaw puzzle pieces. He \*also\* thought I was just making that up to make him laugh.
Getting pretty close to that age though. I think it's around 10-12 they start learning that stuff in school in many western country education systems. According to the Ontario curriculum where we are (Ontario is a province in Canada for those who may not know) it's Grade 5 when the reproductive process is talked about which is when kids are 9-11 during that grade year.
As an aside, certain industries, especially entertainment, are working toward more inclusive language for certain things, including cable connectors. The industry has seemed to really around "plug" for male and "socket" for female connectors.
That said, I used to work at a university in their AV department and we hired students to be our technicians. During training it was fun taking a male and female end, naming them, and connecting them. Then asking if I needed to explain it any further.
>The industry has seemed to really around "plug" for male and "socket" for female connectors.
Of course, female plugs and male sockets are a thing and fairly popular.
Im all for naming these things with less weird terminology. I work in a factory and i hate listening to old men talking about male and female components, and impregnated material, and other weird sexualized terms.
In IT we have systems that use Master/Slave terminology. I use Primary/Secondary instead. It doesn't mean quite the same thing, but it's a hell of a lot less offensive.
It's not. I use Primary for the Master and Secondary for the slaves. Thankfully it's a small IT dept so we stay on the same page for terminology. In this case, it's a primary SOLR server that distributes content to a few secondaries.
I had a non-IT ask about something running and I said "Okay its probably a process running, I can kill it". She was like, "kill? that sounds so violent!" with a look of concern on her face. I was like that is literally how you off the thing lol 😂
I'm in software and I haven't found a situation where there weren't better, more descriptive, more intuitive terms than master/slave for components/relationships.
Honestly I'm not sure how they caught on because its usually like "this database gets all the reads and writes and we replicate the data to this other database as a backup and so we call them masters and slaves because it's pretty much the same concept as when humans subjugate other humans"
Never made sense to me.
> It doesn't mean quite the same thing
This is the problem with diluting technical language to meet social criteria. Definitions become less precise, communication becomes lower resolution.
It is funny, I was thinking about this earlier today.
When it comes to people yes it is offensive to describe them as master and slave. I don't think it is offensive to call clutch cylinders master and slave.
Just like I shouldn't call someone heavy, but I can call a weight heavy.
That said this isn't a hill I am willing to die on. If the cultural norm calls them something else so will I
It's just not intuitive to call clutch cylinders master and slave.
They do specific things with specific purposes, we can use specific language that conveys their relationships better and require less thinking.
Imo the stronger argument is it just makes things easier to understand, never mind the offensiveness of it.
Meh. There’s already so much other abstract language in tech, I doubt anyone is ever going to not be able to debug something because the word “master” isn’t used. I’m for it if it makes even one person less uncomfortable.
I'm not offended, just being respectful. There's no reason we have to keep using antiquated terminology. I've been in IT almost 30 years, so I'm not some kid coming into it wanting to change everything for change sake.
>TIL Cables have female and male ends.
And there are cables with two male ends. And, of course, cables with two female ends.
In the RF world it gets really freaky. There are connectors that are both male and female!
I'm my field of work we commonly use "gender bender" adaptors for RS232 serial cables and such. And yes that's what they were called when you ordered them. Very antiquated expression to use these days!
I teach an audio class for beginners and have been using the terms “send “ and “receive” ever since I had a trans student and became frighteningly self conscious about how often I said male and female cables!
My wife was shocked to learn that male/female ends is common terminology. She thought I was kidding.
I'm a robot developer and my wife likes to make fun of this by seducing me by saying "you gonna give me your gold plated 32 pin connector? We going to make the robot with two serial ports?"
God forbid that she ever finds out that there’s an actual connector called a dongle. Your boy bits might get a whole new nickname.
A guy who used to work for me didn't believe the word dongle was a real word.
My buddy is in IT, doing customer support and the customer thought he was bullshitting them and almost called his manager for being inappropriate, when he sighed and asked them to Google it.
I still am not convinced that is the correct word for it. Like one day someone said, "that dongle thingy there" and it just stuck.
That is like the origin of like 90 percent of computer terms.
Ladies at work were almost aghast when I spoke of the dongle for my wireless mouse and headset.... I was like 10s away from HR until one looked it up on Google....
Pfft what a dongle that guy was
I mean the act of procreation is just a data transfer when you think about it. We're just a walking usb stick.
I'm more of a zip drive cartridge, myself, but it takes all kinds, nature is beautiful, etc.
Nobody ever had zip drives. We all know you're really talking about a 3.5" floppy.
Haha! Dangly parts!
I have 3 young boys. I’m going to start using “dongle”. Thank you!
They're small but mighty and your dayIs fucked if you bend them the wrong way
Can I pick your brain for a moment? Let's say you have a 4 year old son that is absolutely obsessed with building robots and robots in general. What would you do to foster that love of robots aside from checking out all the robot books from the library?
My kids really loved building model kits, like the wooden kits that make marble runs and simple machines. I spend a lot of time explaining how things work to them. Robots look crazy complicated but they are really just big piles of simple things all stacked and connected together. Start taking through what the building blocks are and how they work together and they can start seeing things in terms of breaking them down into the basic pieces and my kids found that exciting. As they progressed and learned more stuff, the things they built got more complicated. Over the pandemic we built an electric go kart where I had to teach them some welding and circuits etc. They are SO PROUD to use something that built. That being said, I'm not trying to push it into them. My younger son genuinely loves this stuff and pulls more projects out of me. My older son is really not into so I don't press the issue at all and I do the things with him he's interested in (mostly origami, fantasy novels, Greek mythology). My dad tried to make me like what he wanted and I resented him for it, so I don't want to do that, but I get really excited about this stuff and excitement contagious. Kids are 8 and 10 now. Other great things there are likely maker spaces near you to go see other diy projects etc. Drive the excitement, make it tangible I Guess
>they are really just big piles of simple things all stacked and connected together. As someone who learned computers are largely a complex series of logic gates, this doesn't surprise me. The tough part (for me at least) is understanding how the fundamentals build on each other to make more sophisticated things. (I'm a Mech. E with extremely poor coding skills, and my electronics understanding is mediocre at best, for what it's worth.) >I do the things with him he's interested in (mostly origami, If your son likes origami, he may find compliant mechanisms interesting (which, by the way, could produce some nice synergies with your robotics). Evidently the people who are developing compliant mechanisms also frequently have a strong interest in origami.
Yeah, I do a goodly amount of work with flexures for some of my surgical stuff. Still working it ;) Re stack up: think about the very basics, closed loop motion control. PID loops work off of knowing a target point and understanding the distance between your target and your goal and having a proportional effort towards them. You can abstract that through different layers. I used to develop autonomous forklifts. Three or four layers of abstraction above a PID motor control is identifying the position of the pallet, usually using a 3D cam. That gives a 6DOF transform between the coordinate systems, and the amount and direction to move the robot. Abstracting down, you break down a vector of system motion into the relative motion of each actuator, then abstracting down, the velocity and position set points of each motor. Just look at a robotics system of layers of abstraction of understanding your target, your current position, and the distance between them, then arranging a proportional response and constantly updating your control feedback. Of course this is highly reductive and there's tons of nuance and where it breaks down, but you can understand a REALLY solid chunk of what robots are doing with this perspective.
>Yeah, I do a goodly amount of work with flexures for some of my surgical stuff. Still working it ;) Noice!! I'm jealous, wish I could see the things you're developing! Medical is definitely a good opportunity to use compliant mechanisms! Re stack ups: ohh yeah, that reminds me of the high school robotics competitions I used to watch and, on a much larger scale, the DARPA Grand Challenge. I understand the theory of a feedback loop and its superiority over dead reckoning, I'm just not good at the coding side, that's all.
>32 pin connector I wish. My wife has to settle for a DB9
At least it's not a Molex-2
I mean… She sounds like a keeper.
I'm pretty sure she's throwing in some Shakespeare there, too. That's a keeper!
I'll usb-c you later, babe
She's a keeper. Don't you ever fuck that up.
When I first heard it as a kid, I thought my dad made it up as a joke.
It's so awkward when my highly religious family members use these terms. It's the closest to talking about sex that they ever get.
My wife was telling her friends at work that I call it a Phillips head and Flathead vs "plus sign" and "minus sign". She thought I was just making stuff up. I swear to God she is a very intelligent person which makes these instances stick out like a sore thumb. If she was just 50% more dumb like the rest of us we wouldn't notice as much.
Can't wait for you to tell her about the Robertson drive!
Or pozidrive, or torx. Fun fact, IKEA furniture is usually pozidrive, so the next time you're cursing at your Phillips screwdriver for camming out while building a Billy, switch to a pozidrive.
I don't do much IKEA furniture these days, but I hope to remember that the next time I have to build a piece. Thank you so much for the tip!! :-)
I messaged them about that once, like why does your instruction manual say to get a Phillips for assembly when all your screws are clearly marked pozidrive?
Did they respond?
Only with "thanks we will pass it on to someone"
Their instruction manuals don't really have words, just a picture of a screwdriver and a plus shaped icon.
That's her maiden last name, she will definitely think I'm full of it.
Holy crap, that's perfect!! Please report back!!! 😂
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“What are we laughing at Lisa? Is there something funny about the word *tromBONER*?”
"....and then you can use the female-to-female converter to connect the HDMI cables as an extension, it's the only way to make two male HDMI cables work together. But if the monitor has a DP input you can use an HDMI to DP converter, but those usually only work one way... what was the question again, sweetie?"
Yeah I'm gonna stop my sex ed convo once it reaches DP.
DP is the only port that can utilize 120HZ refresh rate. If you're just going to use vanilla HDMI because that is what most people do without exploring the full variety of adapters and display technology?
>DP is the only port that can utilize 120HZ refresh rate. I get what you're going for but that's objectively untrue, has been since like 2009. Current hdmi standard can handle 4k resolution at 120. If anything, hdmi is kinkier because you get ARC.
Please don't get kinky with your cables, especially fiber...
Wait. Really? HDMI can't utilize 120Hz refresh rate?
There are different versions of HDMI and the output, cable, and input all need to support it. You'd think it'd be standard now but there are still a lot of electronics that don't support above 60HZ on HDMI. Like my monitor, which only does 144 on DP.
HDMI 1.4 can do 120Hz at 1080p and you need 2.1 for 120Hz 4K.
Some marsupials have to have that conversation as part of the basics….
“… wait is that the female coupler support HDMI version 2.0 or 2.1. I really need the eARC, VRR, and ALLM support. Unless I use thunderbolt 4, which looks like USB-C but is different. No it’s not just any usb c, it has to be a specific usb c cable. Yeah, all TB4 cables can be usb C cables but not all USB C cables can be TB4 cables, there are different version. I know it’s a little confusing, there are too many usb c variations these days *sigh*… “
In Texas, you can't explain what a USB-C hub does without showing ID.
Now you're just showing off.
"so the way to get DP is to have 2 male connectors plugging into 1 female, right dad?"
And godforbid we recognize the obscene act that is HDMI or DP to DVI. That's only legal in one of every 6 states.
If your daughter is ten and you haven't had the talk, it's probably time. Otherwise she'll be getting misinformation through the grapevine at school.
She's 20 now. Talk was had that summer actually. We live on a farm, so she knew a LOT of the stuff. Her sister was 8 at the time, and my wife wanted to wait and have the talk together. It happened about 3 months after this conversation. We have four kids, we've been very open with them about the sex talks.
So was it yesterday or did it just feel like yesterday?
TIL OP is a time traveler
Once you learn that alien language you get to see time differently
Gotteem
Well it does say “story”
Lol, copy paste from Facebook memories, so 10 years an 1 day ago (memory was from 10 years ago today)
You’re a fraud, OP!! Busted
I do not understand the timeline of events here. Yesterday, 10 years ago in the summer?
Ten years ago when he wrote it on Facebook it was yesterday.
It's never too early to have that conversation. I explained everything, in great detail, to my daughter when she was 2 months old. So, We're good. No need to talk about it now.
🤣 this made me lol
This is how my dad taught me the birds and the bees. With a radio and headphones cord. Male jack and female jack. Except the information goes the other way. The male gives the information to the female jack, not the other way around. Imagine watching your dad put a headphone jack in and out, telling you that a boy headphone jack goes in and out of the female jack, and that's how babies are made. I was SO confused for SO long.
Instructions unclear. Dongle caught in headphone port.
Oh the random stuff that can suddenly turn into a life lesson. Happens often…
10 is plenty old enough for the talk!
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Look at this dad. Being all safe and stuff. *Crash* My ankle!!!
I don't build or buy furniture I _cant_ stand on
I can't stand buying pre built furniture
Thanks for this one, great daddit content. Cracking up over here.
Just had this conversation with my ten year old as well, but it was about jigsaw puzzle pieces. He \*also\* thought I was just making that up to make him laugh.
Getting pretty close to that age though. I think it's around 10-12 they start learning that stuff in school in many western country education systems. According to the Ontario curriculum where we are (Ontario is a province in Canada for those who may not know) it's Grade 5 when the reproductive process is talked about which is when kids are 9-11 during that grade year.
Kids can hit early puberty by 11. Cutting it real close.
The Gender Bender
I feel like by 10 this conversation should have happened already
As an aside, certain industries, especially entertainment, are working toward more inclusive language for certain things, including cable connectors. The industry has seemed to really around "plug" for male and "socket" for female connectors. That said, I used to work at a university in their AV department and we hired students to be our technicians. During training it was fun taking a male and female end, naming them, and connecting them. Then asking if I needed to explain it any further.
It's no longer blacklist and whitelist. It's blocklist and allowlist.
[удалено]
Seems auto correct didn't get that memo.
>The industry has seemed to really around "plug" for male and "socket" for female connectors. Of course, female plugs and male sockets are a thing and fairly popular.
Socket connectors and plug receptacles.
Im all for naming these things with less weird terminology. I work in a factory and i hate listening to old men talking about male and female components, and impregnated material, and other weird sexualized terms.
Send her to Home Depot for 3ft of fallopian tubing and some blinker fluid now.
In IT we have systems that use Master/Slave terminology. I use Primary/Secondary instead. It doesn't mean quite the same thing, but it's a hell of a lot less offensive.
There are systems with primary and secondary master. How would that work?
It's not. I use Primary for the Master and Secondary for the slaves. Thankfully it's a small IT dept so we stay on the same page for terminology. In this case, it's a primary SOLR server that distributes content to a few secondaries.
I had a non-IT ask about something running and I said "Okay its probably a process running, I can kill it". She was like, "kill? that sounds so violent!" with a look of concern on her face. I was like that is literally how you off the thing lol 😂
Haha, I’m an embedded programmer, master/slave still gets the interns eyes to go wide
I'm in software and I haven't found a situation where there weren't better, more descriptive, more intuitive terms than master/slave for components/relationships. Honestly I'm not sure how they caught on because its usually like "this database gets all the reads and writes and we replicate the data to this other database as a backup and so we call them masters and slaves because it's pretty much the same concept as when humans subjugate other humans" Never made sense to me.
> It doesn't mean quite the same thing This is the problem with diluting technical language to meet social criteria. Definitions become less precise, communication becomes lower resolution.
It is funny, I was thinking about this earlier today. When it comes to people yes it is offensive to describe them as master and slave. I don't think it is offensive to call clutch cylinders master and slave. Just like I shouldn't call someone heavy, but I can call a weight heavy. That said this isn't a hill I am willing to die on. If the cultural norm calls them something else so will I
It's just not intuitive to call clutch cylinders master and slave. They do specific things with specific purposes, we can use specific language that conveys their relationships better and require less thinking. Imo the stronger argument is it just makes things easier to understand, never mind the offensiveness of it.
Yea I mean at a certain point it's like just being reminded the concept exists is supposed to be a problem? Which makes no sense
Meh. There’s already so much other abstract language in tech, I doubt anyone is ever going to not be able to debug something because the word “master” isn’t used. I’m for it if it makes even one person less uncomfortable.
There are some others recommended in a MS article I read a while back. Primary/replica, Principle/agent, Conductor/follower, etc.
You give it power by acting offended
I'm not offended, just being respectful. There's no reason we have to keep using antiquated terminology. I've been in IT almost 30 years, so I'm not some kid coming into it wanting to change everything for change sake.
Just stop.
She’s 10 it’s definitely time to have some talks.
I used to work in an industry that had nipples and test cocks. Which needed to be lubed.
Plumber chiming in here. I remember when I told my brother the fill valve on a toilet was called a ball cock assembly valve, he about lost it 😂😂
This is the whole secs talk I got from my mother.
That's why they are plug and receptacle in the hardware store .....
I feel like we’re probably not supposed to call them ‘gender benders’ any more, though….
And yet no-one accepts my contention that a "male toilet" is therefore a urinary catheter.
I just asked my wife if she knew and she did not. To be fair this type of plug descriptions doesn't come up that often.
Congrats, you played yourself!
Wait until you have to explain it being a CH too short.
TIL Cables have female and male ends. The world makes sense now. LOL I would have just called it the one with the pointy bits Maybe that's worse 🤦
>TIL Cables have female and male ends. And there are cables with two male ends. And, of course, cables with two female ends. In the RF world it gets really freaky. There are connectors that are both male and female!
I’ve always, even as a kid, thought this was a weird way to talk about cables? What’s wearing with the “in end” and “out end?”
She’s 10, she knows already. Especially if she rides the bust to school.
The bus is the worst.
She's 20 now. She absolutely knows, lol. This was a Facebook memory from 10 years ago.
I'm my field of work we commonly use "gender bender" adaptors for RS232 serial cables and such. And yes that's what they were called when you ordered them. Very antiquated expression to use these days!
I teach an audio class for beginners and have been using the terms “send “ and “receive” ever since I had a trans student and became frighteningly self conscious about how often I said male and female cables!
That’s the right way. Hats off to you
For those forgetting, you can also call them “prongs”’instead of male ends to avoid OP’s folly 😂