darethas

Yeah the MLB media team really knows what they are doing. The MLB has long had the best tech out of the big 5 sports leagues in the US

This doesn't really seem that innovative to me -- even the postal service can send you an email of what is in your mailbox.

To take your comment a little deeper despite me knowing you are being facetious, I think that's exactly it: the algorithms cannot communicate to facilitate these types of advantages. They cannot, in essence, be human.

In a world ran and dominated by humans, there will always be an inherent advantage to being part of the race that creates the game. If algorithms perfect a system in such a way that there stands no gain to be made by those at the top, people will simply create a new game to play.

This is awesome, and something I was doing as well for fun! Go's image package has some pretty nice primitives. One thing I think would make this even simpler is you could simply sequence the individual sprites using image.NewRGBA and simply setting the Pix slice to the values to draw the appropriate images, then you can avoid going to the os at all!

I just use a text editor with plugins.

Yep. I primarily use Go, so you are often forced down this way because it uses a simpler regex engine. I used to complain but in hindsight I realized it was a blessing in disguise. Particularly in Go's case, it has excellent character set library support, especially unicode, so those really tricky corner cases with unicode characters are non-existent now as well. I will be happy if I never see a regex with a unicode range again.

It's more likely that technological advances in mining techniques allow us to extract the millions of tons of gold closer to the upper mantle.

Within my own self, I have a dichotomy. When I am on the piano and reading from sheet music, I feel "classical." I am a bit more deliberate and I stumble a few times. When I am on my guitar, I mostly play by ear and feel. I throw on a backing track and just improvise the entire time. Anything accidental slips I have get incorporated into what I am playing.

I have tried to reverse the two (play classical guitar, and improve piano) and I simply cannot, or I look like an absolute beginner.

Correct my understanding here where I am wrong - In my mind, if a leaf of a tree or any vegetation photosynthesizes, it is pulling in air (dirty air by your account which is why those leaves are brown) By the very virtue of that fact, it would be pulling in those small particles as well. The paper I referenced states that this happens to an extent, which is why trees during the leafy season are more effective at reducing PM2.5 than when they are bare.

Follow up, can you define much here? I am just interested in this, I read this paper as a primer to my own question, and it seems that with proper city and road planning combined with the effect trees have locally on the air quality it seems we could have noticeable improvement, especially during the leafy seasons.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223101...

This may sound like a naive question, but how does this compare to say, trees?

May I suggest a crazy idea? Ditch it and just see what happens.

We are a large organization, and had an end of year crunch so naturally when you need to pinch the absolute most productivity out of your workers, typically process is the first thing that goes.

We just had our most productive 2 week sprint in over a year, by a mile. Instead of Jira, we busted out the dusty whiteboard, and used this amazing technology called an expo marker to write down what we were working on and who was working on what. It had amazing visibility too -- our manager could stop by at any time and see with his own eyes what we were working on -- all without having to log in! The best part? We got to ditch the meeting to plan the planning, the planning to plan the week, and the retro to go over the week to start of the next week's meeting to plan the planning. We got back like two entire days, and we didn't have any 9:00 AM context switches when most of us were in the zone already having to give a benign update that could have just been communicated via slack!

Some of this is sarcasm and I do understand why managers and leaders reach for Jira, but seriously: Why did we stop using the whiteboard. If you need visibility into this crap, hire someone to do that. You have analysts for your business, why not have an analyst for your tech? It doesn't make us more productive.

This is the norm in more industries than you would expect. A primary example is food service. You have a main job function, but you do whatever is required of you. Dishwasher busted in the middle of the shift? Grab a bus boy and have him help out washing by hand. Late night surge because some concert let out that you didn't know about or plan for and they all decided your food sounded good? Well sometimes the manager rolls up their sleeves and hops behind the line to help cook. Not enough hostesses? Waiters are stepping in to help greet and seat customers.

Target is portrayed in the book "Naked Statistics" as having some pretty advanced data collection and modeling techniques -- they could figure out which of their shoppers were pregnant and adjust their weekly ads sent to those particular households depending on that information. This was in fact too good because the pregnant woman ended up being a teenager, and had an angry father calling demanding to speak to a manager.

What any of this means to me is if they have capabilities like that I am sure they made an informed decision based on where they see the market heading and decided this would be a purchase that would increase the bottom line, not grasping for straws as you say.

Is there a world of software architecture that exists outside the "OOP" patterns we have seen in the last 2 decades? A quarter of the way through my career and I have already grown weary of OOP. It's promises are never realized. It is full of zealots who can argue with you for ages but don't deliver very much on real world, performant software.

Most of the recent psychologists who study expert performers all tend to agree that "genius level" just like "innate talent" is a cognitive distortion and discredits the amount of actual effort, practice, and honing of their craft these individuals put into it.

We are all born with the same brain* (edit: see the ted talk on the "After 83,000 brain scans"). Some of us just aren't born in the right environment to curate it and never learn the best ways to use it ("learning how to learn") given the current dominant socio-economic factors. It gets harder as you get older not because of age but because your anxieties, fears, and distortions become more reinforced, so breaking down those thought patterns becomes harder

*: I mean this more or less, not literal. To clarify, I am speaking more specifically to neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Maybe some things come easier for other people out of the gate, but this wasn't because of some "innate" talent, but rather some factor of their development, both internal and external, provided the acuity and propensity towards excelling that specific thing, but if you molded another brain from scratch this same way, you would more or less get the same result.

edit: With the TED video,I was again referring to the take away: "You are not stuck with the brain you have, you can make it better." So if you were "never born with the ability to be good at math" this is a distortion, just as much as "I am only mediocre at math and will never be great at math" is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esPRsT-lmw8&t=599s

Last time I looked at the source for Java's dual pivot quicksort implementation, it used exactly this for 7 elements or fewer

I also recommend taking up computer graphics for honing your skills in linear algebra. Graphics are essentially applied linear algebra.

In my case, for most my teenage and short adult life I was always left "feeling positive and motivated" except I would always fall back into the same habits. I started to expect the gentleness and kindness. What I needed was a good ass whooping. If I look back at my life in hindsight, I learned the most when I was under the gun -- had to succeed, failure not an option -- not "motivated" and "positively influenced"

Maybe there is a "non-asshole" way to do that, but there needs to be a place for this in society as well. Some people respond to gentleness and nudges, some don't.

The person I think back early in my career when I was an associate and my first tech lead -- yes! he was the biggest asshole I met at that time -- but it would be remiss of me to not admit that I learned and stretched more on his team than I did the rest of my time at that company by a mile.

I'm not sure what it is

Video games are perfect, especially for people who like to tinker and are curious, which to me has been every hacker ever. That's what it is. They literally are just really damn good at what they do.

What online video games (and here I am making sure to distinguish between online, competitive type video games, versus offline because in my experience offline video games hardly ever come up in counseling, it's always your CODs, CSes, LoL and WoW's of the world) do psychologically is they provide a structure, a way to advance and progress -- with a tight feedback loop of your progress and a way to socialize with other people. Ultimately these 3 things lead to a huge sense of accomplishment and dopamine rush. Your attention is kept because you have these short spurts of quests, or "you just gotta kill 3 more mobs to get that next level and unlock your new spell tree" or you got to check your auction to get that gold to buy the new gear to do the new raid with your clan next week because you really don't want to let those guys down, etc.

The problem is, outside that virtual reality, you see depression, lack of ability to focus at work, not getting work done on time, lack of interest in tasks considered "boring". The way to success is to create these same structures in your life, but for the goals you want to accomplish. Much easier said than done, but at a high level, that's what it is all about. We escape to our virtual reality to get our virtual high and virtual feeling of belonging and virtual progress because we lack any or all of these areas in our real lives and it pains us too much to be able to face that disappointment. And for some of us, that mountain of unfinished tasks, or incomplete projects because of our thousands of hours racked up on Steam seems insurmountable, so that even when we do have free time and no games, we procrastinate -- "it's too much, I'll never get it done anyways" (Procrastination -- especially habitual procrastination is almost always a defense mechanism, and not a moral/character flaw such as "I am just lazy")

Now why we escape to the video games? Any number of factors, be it depression, ADHD, or simply never having a good role model or someone to teach you structure and discipline in your life (the latter is usually the case), but that's besides the point. The point is to recognize it, realize you will never be happy unless you achieve what you want from your life. (Why every time I have a couple hours free, I can't work on my side project as intently as I play 3 ranked matches in League of Legends?)

I could probably fill up a book with information I learned about it, but everyone is unique. I want to help, if this resonates true in your life -- reach out to me. If you just want someone to email back and forth or talk to, it's my user name at google's mail service.

I know many scoff at this (because I have this same opinion and get scoffed at) but this is so true. Video game addiction is very real. Very, very real. Just as debilitating as any other addiction. The only "advantage" I would say is you don't get as much physiological damage as you do with substance abuse, but even that can be debated: bad posture, bad blood circulation, carpel tunnel, eye strain and migraines, sleep deprivation, etc.

Obligatory Don't be afraid to ask for help! Many counselors are now specifically trained for dealing with video game addiction now! Especially if you are college it's probably free!

That is just the historical accident of UNIX taking over the industry.

There is definitely truth to that. Go has taken over the Cloud, so there might even be parallel there as well.

I still think it's why some of the world's most complex software such as our operating systems, proxies, load balancers and web servers such as HAProxy and nginx are written in C -- raw speed aside. C itself is also a minimal language.

I am not sure if it is a design school, but rather I think when you afford the ability to truly have mastery over your tool, then the humans using them can take them and create something you could have never envisioned yourself.

The popular approach seems to be these days to give them every single tool (and toolbelt), and they get lost in the chaos. (e.g "Is C++'s problem really that it needs more features?") I spent my first part of my career as a developer writing Java. I still don't feel like I know half of the language. Maybe this is because I have a feeble mind and can't grok these higher level concepts, or maybe it's because I didn't have time to learn 5 different programming paradigms under the same roof when I had work to do, I don't know the real answer. However, I have spent just under 2 writing full time Go and I feel like I have mastery over the entire language (I credit this to it's very digestible language specification).

It's the simplicity that makes it so beautiful and able to create the powerful tools. To draw a parallel in literature (a quip I read in a book recently), consider Shakespeare who wrote his masterpieces in blank verse. There were many other advanced forms of poetry, prose, and literary forms developed by then, but he chose this. Blank verse is not inherently complex, in fact it was used because of it's simplicity and ease of remembrance. Yet it was because of this simplicity and minimal structure that he was able to create some of the most beautiful artistic expressions of the english language.

Like a boat with no captain

They haven't even left the dock.

You perfectly described the 2009 USA Today comic on the Copenhagen Climate Change conference.

Street cars and trains. I don't know why we ever stopped building them.

Right, but do you hang out with people around you that tweet, Instagram, and post on Facebook? Have you ever had dinner with friends and they have an Echo/Dot/Home/"Smart" TV? They can infer where you are based on being around others that use these services.

I was a little disappointed with the Newman book because arguably the hardest thing to get right with a microservices system is what to do when things go wrong, when things fail, specifically partial failures. I also don't remember much about security in the book, so I am thankful for this article.