The difference

Inductor@feddit.de to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 1092 points –
37

The first panel is popular media, not computer scientists.

The computer scientist would write papers about how they adapted principles of the alien technology to our stuff.

Papers that would be released 5 years after the engineer got doom to run on it.

If accepted.
Reviewer's comments:

  • While the paper is well-written overall, contributions on adaptation of alien technology as well as comparison with state-of-the-art are not made clear.
  • Authors should consider using TikZ to create the diagrams. My Kindle e-reader had difficulty scaling and displaying the diagrams.
  • The paper's tone could benefit from more technicality.
  • The terms "alien", "ET", "technology", and "stuff" have been used ambiguously throughout the paper. The authors should consider including a table of nomenclature.
  • The experimental results don't appear to provide sufficient statistical significance on how much the mankind's genitalia could be pleased using the alien apparatus. The results would be more conclusive if the application of the apparatus on extraterrestrial genitalia is studied too. This has the additional benefit of avoiding to fall for spurious relationships.

And now I'm having publication flashbacks.

They made me go back and demonstrate that stream discharge increases during a flood, and I'm the end we spent so much time and effort working on it, the whole thing changed into a comparative analysis between rainfall and peak discharge.

They critiqued us so hard we changed topics.

Peer review. We know we need it, but we hate it.

God damn big academia at it again!

Because famously you can get Doom to run on things with a screwdriver.

Well you need the screwdriver (with the smorx 5omble bit) to open the maintenance panel and access the button you hold while booting to get the unlocked bootloader, so you can install Linux and then subsequently doom.

Elementary.

He means he got doom running on that screwdriver

You joke, but the ES121 screwdriver has an open source firmware. I think it's running an STM32F10x (based on the file listings in the firmware). People have gotten Doom to run on an STM32F429, so it's not that far fetched.

I’d argue getting doom to run is a good way to demonstrate understanding of the tech.

Case in point... Doom is not invented, it's discovered!

The benevolent hyper-intelligent architect of the post-singularity simulation we all live in, John Carmack gifted humanity Doom.

The computer engineer already reverse-engineered the architecture?

I think the joke is more he figured out just enough to get it to do what he wanted it to do

Doom is also a cursed piece of software that compels people to make it run everywhere even when it should be physically impossible.

Is there an SCP for this?

I couldn't find any, but someone that's a better writer than me should definitely write one.

Doom "needs to run everywhere" otherwise cyberdemons will manage to materialize within that machine, thus making Doom 2 a prediction of what would happen if we fail

Yeah, I'm a shit horror writer, sorry.

I don't get the joke. Wouldn't you need to study the architecture of the alien CPU to see what registers it uses if any and where data goes, and what format the data is expressed in (is it even binary?) so you can write an assembly language for it? Then you would need to write a compiler and then you could get a higher level language going and port Doom. Are we assuming that the alien computer just runs our code?

The joke is that Doom, specifically, will run on anything.

In fact, for many years now, people have been trying to make Doom run on the most ridiculous things possible (printers, refrigerators, pregnancy tests . . .) just for the heck of it. There are worse hobbies.

That is one of my favorite niche subcultures online. Just a group of people dedicated to a singular purpose that isn't doing any harm to anyone. I always get excited when I see a new article that ___new device can run Doom