bernardino

I wonder how startups like Sofi (https://www.sofi.com) and Sixup (https://sixup.com) play into this. Are they better options than what the school offers in terms of loans, etc?

I think it's okay for people to go into certain fields primarily for money. I also think they will end up as well as everyone else. I have friends who majored in a field they were eager about but ended up realizing there was no high demand in that field. Some went on to do technological (data science, web development, etc) bootcamps and most of them like what they are doing now. Most of them, on their free time, even still partake in that thing they majored in.

There is a high school class dedicated to applying to college, with the “final project” being that you applied somewhere?

For my particular high school, the class was called Avid (https://www.avid.org). It's a college-preparatory class you may take all four years, with junior year being the year the class focuses on, amongst other things, studying for the SAT/ACT, applying to colleges, etc. My high school's Avid program mostly consisted of low-income, first-generation Hispanic students.

Going on a tangent, it's interesting to think about. Today, I came across an old friend from the same high school, same graduation, and from that same program working at Target full-time. He's Hispanic, low-income, and first-generation. He mentioned school ended not working out for him. I have another old but closer friend from the same high school and same graduation year but not from that program - he's American, middle-class, and not a first-generation student. He graduated from UC Berkeley last December and just started working at a finance company in San Francisco making roughly 85k/year. It's interesting in a way where I'm thinking about what heavily affected their lives to lead to both their different outcomes and the possible ways there are to bridge that gap, at least from the perspective of the old friend working at Target.

The program's site states the success rate of the program itself is high but from mere observation of old friends from that program, I unfortunately don't think that's the case. But above all, it reminds of this note written by and from Jordan Peterson's new book where he talks about lobsters in the first chapter: "to those who have everything more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away." It seems to me then that if one wants to get out of, say of a generational low-income family, that person must be do something drastic: deliberate practice, a shift in perspective, etc. But first, they must be aware of this and that's the tough part, I think.

No, I have not. But that's definitely something to think about. It would certainly be nice. You ever hear about how it's better to study at a library rather than at home? That's certainly a good case with work but may also be a good case with using the internet - you know, do everything we have to do internet-related elsewhere (like at a dedicated WeWork desk). Then our home is more like an actual home, I think. If that's what you were trying to get at. Otherwise, I would definitely love to hear why you have been thinking about doing so.

No, I definitely resort back to entertainment every once in a while. I wouldn't go as far to call it a problem though. I suppose entertainment in low doses is fine but entertainment as the main staple of our diet is no good. In terms of deep work, I think it's important to see the side of spectrum of how entertainment only exists to stimulate a neurological response. For instance, think about always refreshing a site we are particularly fond of when we know implicitly that we should not be doing that and we should be doing something else. But hey, it's increasingly hard do so, especially now when technology is growing exponentially. There's no doubt it's difficult, we know that. It takes real mental fortitude. But this is where doing away with the nonessentials comes into play - when you do so, what's left is us, face to face with what we have to do. If anything above makes sense.

All this talk about entertainment reminds me of David Foster Wallace on Entertainment Culture: https://tonyreinke.com/2018/03/05/david-foster-wallace-on-en...

A few good bits:

"It just, I guess my point is, right now and I think the next 15 or 20 years are going to be a very scary and sort of very exciting time when we have to sort of reevaluate our relationship to fun and pleasure and entertainment because it’s going to get so good, and so high pressure, that we’re going to have to forge some kind of attitude toward it that lets us live."

"what it’s going to be like and what sort of resources we’re going to have to cultivate in ourselves and in our citizenry to keep from sort of dying on couches. I mean, maybe that sounds silly, but the stuff’s going to get better and better and better and better and it’s not clear to me that we, as a culture, are teaching ourselves or our children what we’re going to say “yes” and “no” to."

What helped me get down to deep work was doing away with the nonessentials, i.e. a lot of physical material things, all forms of entertainment, the internet especially, inner clutter like comparing myself to others, etc. Seneca once noted in his Moral letters to Lucilius, “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.” I found this was applicable to nearly everything: my digital life (think Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism), my physical life (think Henry David Thoreau's Walden), my inner life (think Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet), etc. In short: Getting down to my bare self, helped me get down to deep work.

The only recollection I have on the Amish is from Family Guy - I'm not close to that. On a serious note, what I was trying to argue, in short, was: 1. Anything in excess is not good. 2. Try to think and be aware of the effects of things like the internet have on you, people, culture, etc.

Definitely a tool or at least, mostly a tool - I continue to learn a lot from the site, largely from the comments but also from the links to articles, etc. I suppose it's important to define tool and entertainment. As I see it: A tool is something that helps you grow, create, learn, etc. Entertainment, on the other hand, is something with no intention of helping you, it's only for gratification purposes.

For instance, I think, mindlessly scrolling through reddit.com is a form of entertainment. But if you are subscribed to only certain particular subs in order, for example, to become a better writer, that would be a tool. This is a shaky example though.

You are definitely onto something. I'm going to skew this comment towards something similar. As an early twenty-something, I'm urging more friends and family to stop using the internet loosely - meaning, use the medium as a tool but not as a form of entertainment. Extensively, use it as little as possible.

I'm not saying reject the medium but rather try to be acutely aware of how it affects things: perception, mind, body, people, culture, etc. Especially, and this doesn't have to do solely with the internet, try to take an objective view of yourself and your life. In my teens, I used to play a lot of video games and surf the internet for 2/3rds of the day, every day. One late evening, I had to take out the trash to my backyard where the trash-bin was. I'm not sure if anyone has noticed but late evenings are one of the greatest times of the day - it's just honeyed indolence. Well, from outside in my backyard, I noticed my room, I saw all the light coming from my television and my computer. It was sad. That was most of my life. That room. Since then, I try to use technology less and try to be outside as much as I can. But to the point, please take notice of things.

Alas, further reading: Don DeLillo's White Noise.

For what two countries are you a dual citizen? Which one isn't worth the effort to keep up to date?

I'm a dual citizen for the United States and Mexico, and it's fairly easy to update my Mexican passport here in the United States - not sure if that's the case inversely.

In the US, kids are seen at worst a nuisance and at best a personal luxury.

Please, if you may, explain why you think this is so.

I usually say, if you have social media, follow people who create stuff and who create stuff just for the sole purpose of creating something. People who aren't interested in being richer. People who don't even have the slightest interest in their own ego. Why? One: Because they are capital-t true artists. And, if we are on social media, we should be interested in people who create for a living. People who, for heaven's sake, aren't spending their day consuming away. Two: Because we have a tendency to unconsciously consume things every day. What we unconsciously consume day in and day out has a significant impact on how we view the world and ourselves. And the way we think about ourselves and the world, that is what indicates and determines our fate. So steer away from the news, corporations, etc, and follow people, individuals or small companies, who create stuff. I.e. Vimeo is a cool platform of cool people creating stuff.

You might like Nat Eliason's summary and notes of the book: https://www.nateliason.com/lessons/12-rules-for-life-jordan-....

I read that this morning and it was incredibly intriguing, I'll definitely have to pick up the book this weekend.

Definitely! I should have started earlier in regard to training my mind to focus. Being in college, it seems I don't have the upper hand because so. It's all good though - I sort of argue that taking psycho-stimulants means you are entangled in that toxic cultural thinking of always going and being in the noise. I suppose then there's something sweet about failing a course without using psycho-stimulants.

I learned that being able to sit down on your desk and focus on a topic or problem set and learn through trial and error with no distractions for hours is what will determine if you get good grades or not, and it's becoming extremely hard to do so. Most of my friends resort to drugs to focus but for me, that does not prefer drugs because it makes me feel artificial, it's been tough - it's like strengthening muscles in your brain in order to focus for long periods of time and those muscles for me are weak.

Does anyone know of any way you can keep Night Shift on at all times on iOS or MacOS? It seems when I turn on Night Shift, it automatically turns off next morning when it's daylight time.

I think the same things applies to f.lux on MacOS. I would like for it to be at 1200K at all times but I guess that's not doable and it grinds my ears a bit because you can't do so.

You're right. It's just, from an outsider's perspective that has only worked blue-collared jobs (think meat clerk, greenskeeper), the technology industry's interview or working in technology as programmer seems a bit daunting, even especially as a minority. I'm still an undergraduate (spending a fourth year taking interesting lower division courses at my community college) but it might be a combination of imposter syndrome on my part and not feeling I know enough. I mean, again for instance, I can tell you off the top of my head how six sorting algorithms work and their respective o-notations. But if I had to write them? I would probably need the entire day and no one looking over my shoulder. I can write a fizz buzz program in ten minutes or so but I can't tell you off the top of my head how pointers work or how polymorphism works, I would have to look it up.

I just feel if I ever get a software engineering internship one of these summers, I will ask myself: what am I doing here? After all, I take a long time to write good piece of code. I'll think I'm holding my team back. If I'm building stuff on my own, in my own time, I'm fine and dandy. But otherwise, I'll be stressed and nervous.

I definitely agree. I took C first then Python. Where I took the courses, the C course was an intermediate programming course while the Python course was an introductory to programming course (I think this the case for many colleges, not entirely certain). Python, personally, seems like such a good introduction to programming language because the syntax seems so English-like. But otherwise, at my community college, after one takes the C course they usually go on to take a C++ course then a Data Structures course where the majority, if not all, the students use C++. All these courses being lower division.

I find it's a good skillset to have: Python for scripting, backend, and frontend with Django. C/C++ for other purposes I'm not entirely aware of, maybe if you like working with video games, browsers, operating systems, etc. Then a proficient understanding of HTML/CSS doesn't hurt, and anyways web development is pretty darn fun since designing and playing with things is cool. Those are my tools, or at least I like to think those are my tools: Python, C/C++, HTML/CSS.

Given what I mentioned above and the courses I have taken, I still don't feel like a programmer though. I mean you could give me a basic problem and I can probably write a simple, elegant solution in five hours or so but I'm going to have to look at the documentation or Google how to do some specific task. It might be that I've only taken lower division courses or only built stuff following tutorials online (Treehouse, etc), but I still don't feel competent and because of this, I've been thinking about finishing my degree in computer science but moving into product management as a professional job. I'm definitely going to try to program daily though.

Many will never use or even think about assembly again, especially on the architecture they happen to be taught, but most will use some derivative of C syntax and semantics.

This is deems true in my case. At my community college, I took a lower division Computer Architecture course, also known as Computer Organization and Assembly Language, a year or two ago and I recall little from it unfortunately. Yet, I still go back to the practices I learned from taking a course in C.

if you are eating in a calorie deficit you will not be adding muscle mass without a very carefully controlled diet that most fitness and diet novices don't have the knowledge and discipline to pull off

Do you happen to know any more resources to tackle this? I'm trying to gain muscle and lose body fat, and it's been difficult diet wise. I even think I'm not eating enough sometimes.

A lot of people feel threatened by that, so they try to push it away, lock it up, turn it off, or dismiss it.

You hit the nail right on the head.

It reminds me about how we want and need security, particularly around our beliefs. What I think is true in that regard is what Adyashanti, a spiritual teacher, once noted: "The magical part is that the more you let go, the better it feels. The more you step into insecurity, the more you notice how secure and safe it is. Where you just stepped out of was unsafe. Everyone is so miserable because they seek security in things that are limited and always moving and changing unpredictably."

Maybe it’s just semantics but what is the distinction between doing something like drugs for pleasure versus doing something like drugs for escapism? Do they overlap?

I’m now oddly reminded of Freud’s Civilisation and It’s Discontents, where he talks about the pleasure principle, etc — I should pick it up again but it felt tedious.

Out of curiosity, what domain registar do you use? With GoDaddy, I pay $14.99/yearly for .COM Domain Renewal and $9.99/yearly for Private Domain Registration Renewal. It seems a bit price-y but I'm completely unaware of other competitor's prices.

When Apple introduced Screen Time in this past keynote, I was pretty stoked about it, but not about Screen Time itself, but rather: when it seems every large corporation's product or application out there is tailored for more and more consumption (think Spotify, Snapchat, Netflix, Facebook, etc), where they disregard the mental well-being of their consumers, anything that tries to limit or stop that seems particularly grand, in my opinion.

You may also read it on Medium: https://blog.logrocket.com/math-and-front-end-context-is-so-...

I assume this where a white-board comes into place and you teach them about O-notation, etc, right?

Doesn't Windows have ads embedded w/in their OS?

I love Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain — I’ve always wanted to become a chef because of that book.

Otherwise, somehow, and I may be wrong, I think suicide might be deep rooted to our toxic: media, culture, attachments, conditioning, etc. It does sound a bit wrong to say. It might because I’m in my early twenties and still live with my parents and have lots of time to think but I’m becoming more aware of how, maybe, be of the world not in the world is so important. It seems like escapism but again, these days: I’m not reading the news as much or partaking in entertainment especially the internet, I’m spending more time alone in solitude, watching the evening sky, I’m going on walks, I’m deciding what has meaning and what does not, I’m just living but with no fuss, noise, or ego. Some may think it’s a boring way to live but it may be a true way to live, I think. It’s almost as I live in my own bubble and I’m not sure if that’s a right thing to do or not.

To the point, suicide and depression are terrible and I think, in modern day, we have to have a strong inner self to conquer it or else we get sucked in. It also reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden or Wallace’s understanding of American culture.

Yep, I really dont understand why there are Microsoft fans.

I definitely agree. Anything Microsoft-related, or even Google-related, is a no from me. Just from a product standpoint, most of there products inherently aren’t that great. And you get that feeling when using their products, a feeling of “oh, this must be a Microsoft product because it feels very corporate.” Plus, there approach to design is subpar — it’s like there’s people out there that actually like Google’s Material Design?

Like I understand if you bought an Xbox

I have an Xbox, and I just noticed advertisements on the dashboard that are non-gaming related. I also think I saw this when using a friend’s Windows-computer, they have advertisements within their operating system. It’s just bad.

Gilfoyle?