I worked on the space shuttle program, and I found Armageddon almost unwatchable. I mean, those things go up with the big solid rockets and an external tank full of hydrogen and oxygen, all of which get jettisoned during launch, then then come down as a glider. But in the movie they’re landing on asteroids and taking off again, smashing into things and still flying, etc. (remember how Columbia blew up because of a crack in the leading edge of one wing?). Plus the whole premise of it being easier to teach oil drillers how to be astronauts than to teach astronauts how to be oil drillers is a joke. Every astronaut I’ve met has been an amazing capable person - many are great pilots with multiple advanced degrees.

Title question first: yes, you absolutely can be too dumb to program.

But as others have mentioned, being bad at math isn’t necessarily a deal breaker, especially if you’re taking about the actual arithmetic part of math.

What turns out to be key to programming is breaking down a problem into steps and figuring out the logic to do what you want to do. The computer is going to do the actual arithmetic, but you’ll need to tell it what you want to do step by step.

I do think with most people who never develop that, it’s because that part was never exercised growing up. It’s like a muscle: if you don’t use it it won’t develop. There are probably people who have brain defects that are incapable of developing a moral compass, but it’s rare. That friend of mine is a really smart guy - aerospace software engineer - but for him, morality is 100% tired to the (strict) Christian religion he was raised with.

Exactly. And though there are protected classes at the federal level, there are also some at the state level and they vary. I’m in California, and we have more than most. If you’re a business owner or manager, you have to know what they are where you are or it can be really bad.

Yeah, based on books that were popular, then got really popular with the show

Not necessarily true, but 100% discrimination based on genetics, which is a protected class.

Bad things, but not illegal

I believe it’s legal in the US to pass someone over for promotion because they’re too young. The only protected class related to age is being over 40 (potentially different in some states).

I doubt it - your age isn’t determined by your genetics. The family medical history part is so that someone doesn’t fire you (or not hire you) for things like your mom having a kind of cancer that is hereditary. As a manager, if one of my employees tells me their mom has cancer, I’m not allowed to ask what kind.

I agree, it’s scary. I attribute it to parents who tell their kids they shouldn’t do something “because God said so,” and never any other reason. They never try to reason out what’s moral or not, they just memorize the list.

I have a friend who’s the nicest guy ever. He’s also 6’5" and completely ripped. A lot of years ago, I was telling him about my transition from devout Catholic to atheist, and at one point I told him I realized if you could prove to me there was a god, I wouldn’t live my life differently than if you could prove there was; I have beliefs of what’s right and what’s wrong, and I try to behave accordingly, regardless of any deity. That confused him and I didn’t understand his confusion. I finally said, okay, if I proved to you there wasn’t a god, what would you go differently? He thought for a minute, then said, “Well, I might kill someone.”

There are few times in my life that I’ve been speechless, but that was one. I didn’t know how to move forward from there. I just hope his faith is never shaken.

Yep, true enough. The first part I don’t care to much about - if your club has rules you don’t like, leave the club. The second part is problematic because some clubs think even non-members should follow their rules.

Oh, completely agree. My statement was just trying to constrain how much we should care as a society. It shouldn’t mean more than that.

Okay, whatever.

Let’s say I create a club (I’m picturing Calvin’s “Girl Haters” club). I can make whatever rules I want for my club. I can define ceremonies and rituals, and I can kick anyone out who doesn’t follow my rules. What I can’t do is tell anyone else what they can do.

So the Pope can say whatever he wants about what it means to be Catholic, but only Catholics should care.

Necromancer is going to be the faster read of those for sure - if it were me, I’d probably do that one first.

Looking forward to hearing what you think of them!

Hmmm, well, I’d put the two Weir books and the Teixcalaan books in different categories, but I liked all of those as well.

I’m guessing you’d very much like the Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie, the first of which is Ancillary Justice. You should for sure give it a try.

Of the books you have on your shelf, I’ve read them all except children of time. I didn’t really care for 3 body, but it was very popular. All the others are all top notch and among my favorite books. Like Wier, Kim Stanley Robinson is a hard SF author (that is, his science is well anchored). His Mars series has lots of characters and politics, but also good science. Necromancer is on my short list of all time favorite books - one of the first cyberpunk novels. Really, all of those are excellent.

You would probably also like the series that The Expanse show on Prime was based on - the first is called Leviathan Wakes. I’m reading that one now, almost done with it, and I think it would check your boxes. Very well anchored science with three dimensional characters - really good.

I don’t want to oversaturate, so I’ll stop there, but if those recommendations work out for you and you’re looking for more, let me know!

Not the same, but this one is similar.

Oh, I’m well aware of what they are and what they’re not. My guess is that at least a large part of these recommendations comes from the myriad discussions about these books that the LLM was trained on.

I’m a software engineering manager and I’ve let my folks know that they should not ever use code that was generated by one - it can look pretty good but it’s harder to catch a bug in code that you didn’t right and looks reasonable.

But there’s not much risk in using one for something like book recommendations.

Probably not realistically. Weaving fiber into thread relies on those fibers being long enough to hold onto eachother. Dust particles are too small for that. Even dryer lint doesn’t work well - anything you made would pull apart much too easily.

Just because the pins matched didn’t mean the tubes were the same. Also, remember that the whole point was to take all the tubes out and take them to the store where this tester was to figure out which tube was bad. So if you didn’t know where a tube went, swapping with another set (if you happened to have one) wasn’t helpful because if was more likely to be a good tube.

The worst part was when the little stickers you put on the tubes to remember which went where fell off.