insane college assignment has me comparing the cost of 100mbps lan vs 1000mbps after describing what CSMA/CD is and whether or not I should buy ethernet hubs instead of switches

I didn’t know we traveled back to 1990

@puppygirlhornypost2 Daaaang....

sorry 1995-1999 is more historically accurate

what’s next? do i have to talk about the address space of a class C network?

@puppygirlhornypost2 what even is the difference between a hub and a switch

no-one ever taught me

@puppygirlhornypost2 glad some people get to learn modern technology

@puppygirlhornypost2 we had Another Technical Mistake circlejerking for 2 months

there’s only one thing i learned from this and that was about the successor CSMA/CA and how it is used in wireless networks. everything else is literally just regurgitated junk

@puppygirlhornypost2 does anyone actually use csma/cd in wired busses anymore? even the one bus ethernet standard, 10BASE-T1S, operates like token ring since random delays would be awful for automotive.

how much did they actually talk about OFDMA, CDMA, and MU-MIMO? if it's so old i'm not sure if they would talk about anything other than TDD/FDD

@puppygirlhornypost2 In 1990 almost nobody had a hub - they ran 10base2 RG58 from computer to computer (of in older builds they had 10base5 and a 15 pin cable to the coax in the ceiling). Hubs existed, but you almost always just put another interface in your server (or router) instead since collisions were too much of a problem by then.

In the mid 1990s 10baseT was just starting to take over and everyone used a hub there for a few years - I don't remember when switches become affordable and everyone switched, but I'm guessing early 2000s. I know my first switch was 10/100.

@bluGill yeah i had a reply that was like “1995-1999” because i realized 1990 was a wee bit too early

in 2026 i think that it’s an accurate assessment to state that pure ethernet hubs & networking hardware that supports only 100mbps is most definitely going to be harder to obtain and more expensive compared to gigabit networking equipment.

@puppygirlhornypost2 eh, I feel like you can find a cheap bad hub on AliExpress but that’s about the only place

@0x4d6165 yeah but the chances are that it’s a mistranslation of “ethernet hub”/“ethernet switch” and isn’t actually a proper hub…

@puppygirlhornypost2 my networking prof went on a rant about how much he hates hubs when that part of the comptia curriculum came up. it was really funny and like he’s right hubs suck

@ielenia okay so back in the day…

you’d have this thing called a “frame collision” because instead of having multiple ethernet connections, it was like you just spliced them all together. say you have a 100mbps nic right, you have another workstation with another 100mbps nic. these are connected to a hub and that hub is connected to your router.

when workstation A sends a packet workstation B also receives this and is unable to transmit on the line…

a switch literally just makes 1:1 connections ie, you are not sharing a single fucking line. instead you have an individual ethernet connection between workstation A, the switch, and the router. the workstation sending a packet is not going to collide with the switch sending a packet to the router

@ielenia CSMA/CD is the very very ancient protocol that would go “Okay, so there’s a transmission on this line. I will wait until it is done” or “I can hear my own transmission, it’s gargled as hell. I am assuming there is a collision and I will wait until the transmission is done”

@ielenia the alternative to this system is called token ring. essentially you’d hand a token to a device when it is allowed to transmit. if you are a device without said token you cannot transmit.

@ielenia but everyone uses ethernet switches instead because switch chips are piss cheap and it makes no sense to splice the lines together like an analog phone network

@ielenia I forgot to mention, sometimes people refer to switches as “switch hubs” or “hubs”. Even though real hubs have not been used in 30 years

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia
2 years ago, when we moved our offices to the newly rented building with late 80's/early 90's flair: *opens the floor box to connect the power and ethernet cable* "Holy fuck... BNC-network... I haven't seen that in almost 25 years"
... followed by an explanation what token-ring and stuff was for my colleague that was half my age...

@ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 a switch has additional logic (usually implemented in hardware) which tries to send packets only down the path that the thing they're for is on. a hub sends packets down every path.

but it's irrelevant because switching hardware got cheap and everything is a switch now.

@nyanpasu64 @ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 right, see, we unironically think that remarks like that engage with the material in a way that's necessary to building actual understanding. you're having fun with it and finding self expression.

@ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2

a hub is basically just wires connected together, every device can see frames from all other devices on the network, and if more than 1 frame is sent at the same time, they destroy each other

a switch will instead only forward a frame to the port the target is on, that means that if two devices send at the same time both of them can be delivered

you only see hubs in extremely old networks because the price for network switches became so much cheaper

@ireneista @ielenia yeah and we get into L3 switches too

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia sigh our sympathies

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ireneista @ielenia at the mit flea someone was giving away free juniper 48p l3 poe switches because they were only sfp and not sfp+

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ireneista @ielenia the one i got even had random optics left in 3 of the ports

@ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 fundamentally this sort of thing is why we dislike certifications as a concept so much. they kill knowledge, by disassembling it into such tiny pieces that it can no longer participate in the dance of creation and discovery. the things people memorize for certs are isolated facts, with no narrative thread connecting them, so they don't change in response to reality.

@ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 but Irenes, we hear a hypothetical person saying, it's not realistic to think everyone can understand things in the real way! we need to make these topics simpler into something everyone can get!

@ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2
to that we say, well no, first off, it is realistic to teach everyone who wants to learn if we were to prioritize that; the reason we don't is twofold: the goal is to teach everyone who pays; and the focus is not on producing understanding but on measuring and ranking students.

@ireneista @ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 From the very earliest moments of a child’s schooling all the way through college, students are graded on compliance, not comprehension.

Homework, attendance, early hours, extra credit, advanced placement… they’ll simply throw someone away if they aren’t demonstrating the good capitalist drone behavior before one can even have a cigarette to take the edge off.

That’s why these certifications require retaking whole courses and you can’t just take the test last I checked, even though I had CCNA and A+ decades ago.

@raeve @ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 yes. when we were just entering elementary school, we basically no-sold the entire concept and treated it as adults trying to hurt us for no reason. at the time, administrators and parents punished us heavily (mostly with starvation, and also with forced isolation), and we wound up feeling some shame about it. with hindsight, though, we're proud of that.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve it’s really depressing when you’re taught about people like Galileo and how he was treated by the people of his times… they usually act like this is something in isolation “look at how horrible people were back in the day at changing their mind or looking at new perspective” while convieniently leaving out the part where that continues to happen to marginalized folks such as queers, people of color, women and anyone who goes against the status quo.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve for the longest time I was led to believe that there was a fundamental shift at some time where new ideas & understanding became free to express, but in reality, I realize that the ones I had heard were already “normalized” and they took decades to centuries to become mainstream.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve right, absolutely. if anything, the education system we grew up in works hard to filter out any sort of creative thinking, love of learning, or genuine engagement with the material being taught.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve also side tangent to the current side tangent, it really annoys me to see how this is portrayed in media. Take something like idk Alan Turing, I recently watched the movie The Imitation Game, and it sorta glosses over the part where homophobia and the reluctance to accept that there might be better ways continue on. Like, it just treats it as though this is a solved issue, everyone learned from doubting Turing, instead of how, in reality, the sentiment was that this was sort of like a once-off event.

I don’t blame The Intimation game for this, I found it to be a pretty good movie. I blame the fact that we just often see these issues as “old” and “resolved”. There’s no connection to how these things play out in the modern world vs how they did back then.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve right, yes :(

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ireneista @ielenia “The Imitation Game”, the real one, was actually about his friends passing as women.

Fully buried and ignored. Tgirls were involved with compsci from the absolute beginning.

@raeve @ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 ahhhhh wow, yes of course. that makes perfect sense, we're surprised we didn't realize.

@raeve @ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 we often contemplate how Turing was sentenced to undergo hormone treatments which, for him, were torture, but for us would have been our wildest dream. it's ... we just like to sit with it.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve Yeah when I read “chemical castration” I thought of some horrific shit that makes your balls fall off, but when I found out it was literally just estrogen, I laughed a bit

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve yes. basically pseudoscience.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve and now I’m curious if Alan Turing had noticeable breast developement

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve And of course the ethical question of “Is induced gender dysphoria better or worse than chemical castration”

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve yes. it was mentioned in "Breaking the Code", which was slightly fictionalized but we have no reason to doubt this detail, that he noticed breast development and nobody was able to tell him whether they'd go away when the treatment ended.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve we'd have to say worse personally, but we're biased......

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve Obviously I don’t believe in either as a punishment… but… I have to wonder if you’d get gender dysphoria from that

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve I remember being mocked by my peers for asking too much. Hell, even the teacher would disengage and be like “That’s not really important at all. we need to move on”. It really gets you set up to just accept information given to you and regurgitate it back perfectly. Anything else is forbidden.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve An example - Solving algebraic expressions

3x-4=14

There are so many ways to solve for this.

-4=14/3x
3x=18
3x-18=0
[…]

I was never taught why we try to avoid having negatives. When I asked it was always “Well I’ve always seen it done this way, I’m used to it and you should do it this way because of that”. It took me a bit in life to realize that it was easier for me because I tend to switch signs up in my head. There was no discussion on like, how it doesn’t actually matter or any deeper understanding.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve ouch. yes indeed :(

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve ahhh! right, absolutely.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve Or like. Long and synthetic division. Sure we were told that there were cases for both but most of my worksheets ended up being “Long division section:” or “Synthetic division section” there was no doing long division on synthetic problems (or vice versa) to understand limitations or what they’re useful for. Just “One is easy, the other is hard”

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve yepppppp sigh

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve which kinda fucked with my entire understanding of algebra and trigonometry for me especially when it comes to trig identities. i had to unlearn a bunch of my early algebra class because you know, sometimes there isn’t a correct order on what trigonometric identity to use or which side you should start with.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve ....... and we've come to realize that there are political actors for whom that's the policy objective. not necessarily the majority or anything, but they're the only group who have an ideological motive rather than a practical one, so they're motivated to pursue long-term strategies in ways that their opposition isn't. so, they win :(

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve yes. denying that something is happening and muddying the waters with “what ifs” or “contrarian takes” is certainly one used by politicians. Good example: Climate change and the bikeshedding regarding the title “Global warming”

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve well uh LIBERALS the CLIMATE is getting COOLER in some AREAS so it’s clearly not ALL Bad and Global Warming isn’t REAL

only exists to prolong the fossil fuel industry and its political lobbying/donations. if you can’t get rid of a problem entirely you can always claim that there’s “more to learn” or “alternative explanations” and we just need to wait until the timer has run out to do something about it. of course by then, there will be nothing to do so there is no problem to solve.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve and you can get into the dissection of the social consequences (people not worrying about the environment because they’re told it’s good, not having to change their patterns or behavior to make things more sustainable, not admitting your culpability…)

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve anyway, so we turn this back into education, and academic institutions are forced to display these two points as equal, despite one of them being full of logical fallacies and complete utter nonsense.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve one might see the train coming, hear its horns, see the tracks they’re standing on… or one might dismiss it as glare and wind, stating nothing is going to happen and we should stay on the tracks.both of which are equally of value apparently

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve if you ask “how fast is that train going?” you are reminded that there very well might not be a train and not to entertain yourself with such ideas.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve absolutely

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve we think you're focusing mostly on political strategies which succeed by leveraging bad thinking habits, which is definitely part of the same problem but we should clarify that we were trying to call attention to politicians who seek to destroy education as their primary objective

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve Yeah that’s a fair assessment.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve It’s just hard to focus on a single way of destroying education because there’s the bad thinking habits, there’s straight up cutting funding for public institutions, and the whole playbook of dirty tricks.

@ireneista @ielenia @raeve I guess it’s just a combination of all of this that makes me sick of “academia” because if you take it at face value, it’s supposed to be the source of facts. There is not supposed to be political tension, feelings, or any other disruption. It is framed as indisputable fact. Then you look at who is signing the paychecks and realize that perhaps it can be influenced

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve very true. also, the means and the ends each reinforce the other, as you've detailed.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @ielenia @raeve understandable

@ireneista @ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 they should invent colleges that are good

@0x4d6165 @ielenia @puppygirlhornypost2 yes, we'd like that. sigh

@ireneista @ielenia @0x4d6165 insert rant about modern academia, the way that it talks about power structures as something from the past despite being one of the more outrageous examples, how “prestige” and rich people buying degrees degrades the very value that they are supposed to provide […]

@ireneista @ielenia @0x4d6165 I genuinely hate academia with a passion despite loving being informed and educated. I know there are good people in academia who aren’t what I envision. I also know that it’s mostly made up of those people I envision, and my entire experience has been being punched down by people who didn’t think I was “good enough” or that I could do better so it’s time to teach me a lesson by making me go on another side quest for 3+ years.

@puppygirlhornypost2 yeah the CCNA materials still have that shit