yeah because I have a real job (retail) not whispering to the lightning through the haunted frame like yall
Damn apparently you’re a poet too
“Shopkeeper” would be a pretty damn good job title too compared to retail.
‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.
I don’t think the people in the 1700s would care
Working in a shop is a skill as old as civilization.
i’m teaching silicon rocks how to think
I’m a peasant just like you.
I barely try to explain my job to people today, particularly family.
I try to make rocks think with electricity and then cry when it doesn’t think the way I want it to (software engineer)
What’s electricity?
I spent about 30 seconds staring at this question, followed by 3 minutes pondering how to explain the phenomenon of electricity to someone unfamiliar with it, but nothing came to mind. Then, I went online and found that, while we have some understanding of how to detect and manipulate electricity, fundamentally, it’s just how our universe works and we don’t know exactly what it is.
It’s just little tiny things wiggling around in wires. They’re always there, and if you wiggle them just right you can make rocks think!
I was moreso pointing to the fact that it wasn’t discovered until after 1700, not the fact that it could have been explained to someone in 1700. It’s still wild how we don’t know why it happens.
I probably should have just said lightning instead
have you tried using Bauxite?
Mostly because the rocks are very stupid and will misunderstand your instructions at first opportunity. Kinda like Amelia Bedilia.
I (programmer and team leader) get requests from the king (management and project manager) and pass them to the peasants (code monkeys), clean after their shit (QA and code review). I get peanuts in return while the king keep most of the loot.
Bob: “why can’t the king just ask the peasants directly?”
I’M A PEOPLE PERSON!!!
I’M A PEASANT PERSON, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU NOBLES, WHY CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT
The project manager is your peer, not your king.
It all depends on the project and the team. On some, you work with and along the PM and all is good, and other times you get dictated unconnected requests that you need to fight or ignore.
Thankfully I’ve only ever worked in the first environment.
Lucky, my first 2 dev jobs had PMs that were right out of college business majors with zero web development experience. They were just direct unfiltered conduits between the clients and devs, but with a layer of telephone game and almost no ability to day no to the clients.
It was a fucking nightmare. By the time I did get a good PM, I was pretty much burned out and started my own consultancy (since I’d been managing a small team and doing both dev and PM’s job by then anyway).
Ah, so you’re the
grand viziercourt jester.That definitely define my everyday job experience.
I get peanuts in return while the king keep most of the loot.
Well, at least this part hasn’t changed.
I’m a literal wizard. I spend hours writing in an esoteric language known only by those who study it in order to bend the world to my will and make things happen as I wish it.
The structure of my magic spells determine what the outcomes will be, and things can get really strange if you mess up the syntax.
I (a software engineer) am a high magician who fixes the spells other high magicians put into the magic box ages ago because the king wants them to do something other than whay they were originally designed to do.
I’d avoid magic on that one, since modern ideas about how magic works are pretty influenced by technology now. I suspect this would be gibberish to them.
How about “we have machines so complicated that it’s hard to set them, and my job is to try to change the settings on them and usually fail”?
Not sure if the concept of “settings” would be something they can relate to.
I was wondering about that too. I think they had adjustable tools in common use, but I could be wrong. They might have also used a different word when changing the depth “setting” of their horse-drawn plow, although “to set” has got to be a pretty old verb.
We got this sand and tought it to do math. I give the math sand very specific instructions to do a task. There are many people like me, and a good chunk of them are giving the sand instructions to show silly cat pictures.
I wonder if it would be better to go with sand, or a new metal, given that the average person in 1700 would know the process of smelting ore better than most of the people here. Either way they’re not going to see the point without some explanation, because they’d think it’s easy enough just to draw a cat yourself.
I’d go by ‘mechanical devices’, there were hardly any machines in our understanding back then.
Well, they did have clocks, even some early portable ones, and “automata” which were a bit like modern animatronics. Power applications like mills, too. I don’t know what word would work best, though.
I’m guessing they’d picture OP running around a giant room filled with clockwork, going at things with a pry bar and wedges. That is a bit like how computers worked in their first decade, albeit electrically rather than mechanically. Later in the 18th century they invented the punchcard loom, so that would be a good point of reference, but we’re all the way back in 1700.
Worth noting that the 1700s are, in fact, the 18th century. The first century was the years from 1-100, the second century from 101-200, etc.
But, yes. It was invented later in the 18th century than our audience came from.
Also a good point. It’s dumb that we’ve zero-indexed centuries and then given them one-indexed names, but that is the standard.
Well, it’s just how math and numbers in English work.
Cardinal numbers, the number of things you have, start with zero because you can have none of something (or less with negatives, but that’s neither here nor there).
Original numbers, Numbers that show which things were in what order (first, second, etc) start at one, because you can’t really have a zeroth something because then it would really be the first one.
So year 1 is 1 because it’s the first year, and it starts the first century. It would have been entirely possible for English to make the names a little nicer, but given that it isn’t, the math means the first set of one hundred years are the years before the one-hundredth year and cetera.
I mean, zeroth would still be zeroth; it’s just based on the cardinal the moment before it arrived rather than after, assuming you start with nothing and add objects. Unfortunately that’s not conventional, probably in any language, and so you get a situation where a positional notation clashes with how we want to talk about the larger divisions of it casually. This sort of thing is exactly why computer science does use zero indexing.
Relatedly, there was also no year 0; it goes straight from 1 BC to 1 AD.
It is a thinking engine. No further questions.
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Even better: “our clocks in the future are very complex and it’s my job to keep them working”.
Yeah, something like “We have machines with thousands of switches that can do complicated things depending on how you set the switches. My job is flipping those switches so the machine performs the desired task as best as possible”…?
“what is this ‘switch’ of which thou speakest?”
A lever that influenced the workings of the machine, sir.
I was trying to figure out a way to describe the interface to 1700’s people, given that all the machines they have require very up-close manipulation of the mechanisms to alter. My best guess is as a table covered in triggers like on a crossbow, but that reset themselves. You can tell what they’re doing with a sort of scroll that comes out with stamps on it. That’s still more like a 1970’s dumb terminal than a laptop, but I don’t want to try and describe screens or cursors before I can make sure they understand the concept that not all machines have to be mechanical, which I don’t think would be clear to them automatically.
I’m guessing at that point it sounds weird and alienating to them, and they might actually think their job as a peasant seems less depressing, especially if I bring up punctuality requirements compared to the 1700’s, where meetings would wait days for someone. White-collar work is better once you can understand what’s happening abstractly, or at least is for me, but no hard deadlines for anything does indeed sound great. They also may have gotten winters off, depending on latitude.
Folks in 1700 understood what an engineer was. I’d just tell them I design really complicated looms.
Can you get it to draw bewbs? Asking for a friend
That’s the point they burn you at the stake for being a witch.
Well, if they weigh the same as a duck
Silicon techno wizard.
I make rocks solve repetitive problems faster than humans, and they can talk to each other anywhere in the world and group up to solve even more complex problems.
I get paid in pictures of cats.
I take food from the baker and carry it to people’s homes directly in exchange for custom. We call it “being a delivery girl”. The amazing part is what the baker makes, it’s called “pizza”
I’m a chemist, so I’d just tell them that I’m an alchemist.
Ooh, good idea. I’m an alprogrammer. Or is it alware algineer?
So close, yet so very wrong.
Apothecary might be better.
To be honest you might get away with moving the term chemistry forward a couple of decades
Beginning around 1720, a rigid distinction began to be drawn for the first time between “alchemy” and “chemistry”.[104][105] By the 1740s, “alchemy” was now restricted to the realm of gold making, leading to the popular belief that alchemists were charlatans, and the tradition itself nothing more than a fraud.[102][105]
Farmer. I operate big metal things that weigh as much as your village that sucks down every plant over an area the size of Lichtenstein, then produces enough grain to feed 1700s England for a decade.
I steer gigantic metal birds pulled by armies of horses carrying dozens of people, to the antipodes… in less than one day… using dead animal juice.
Half these comments wildly overcomplicate their job.
‘Imagine an entire city could see a bard perform!’ You run a theater, calm down. They’re old as rocks.
‘I’m an erotic cosplayer, so I don’t know if they’d follow.’ Honey, people in the 18th century knew about sex work.
Everyone in software has to hand-wave some magic. Your new peasant buddy can probably grasp… printing.
If someone working in semiconductor manufacturing were to answer this question they would probably have to say “I make sand think” and just walk away.
“You know how we dug out that trench to let some of the river through for irrigation, and then we fill it in for winter? Yeah I do that, but much smaller, and much faster, on sand. Got a shovel?”
Not much different than weirder than meat thinking.
For the uninitiated: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html
