jazzyb

Learning language is like learning poetry. Your appreciation of the thing grows proportionally with the practice. Which means you don't need to learn to fluency to appreciate Arabic. Even modest practice, just learning to write the alphabet, will increase your appreciation for the language if that's what you'd like to do.

Yeah, saying "I don't daydream" sounds like "I don't have thoughts" to me. Am I always daydreaming, or have I never daydreamed?

That sounds like the CCIE.

Stephen King said something similar (but I'm sure I'm misquoting): Every writer begins with one million terrible words inside them. The sooner you get those words out, the sooner you get to the good stuff.

That is so different than I expected. Thank you for the link.

How many developers are using VSCode? How does that number compare with Emacs/Vim?

Perhaps I'm in some sort of "TUI bubble", but I'd bet good money that Emacs/Vim users outnumber VSCode users by an order of magnitude. But maybe I'm just surrounded by *nix devs.

My biggest concern with AI is that I'm not sure how a software engineer can build up this sort of high-level intuition:

I still have to deeply think about every important aspect of what I want to build. The architecture, the trade offs, the product decisions, the edge cases that will bite you at 3am.

Without a significant development period of this:

What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.

A professional mathematician should use every computer aid at their disposal if it's appropriate. But a freshman math major who isn't spending most of their time with just a notebook or chalk board is probably getting in the way of their own progress.

Granted, this was already an issue, to a lesser extent, with the frameworks that the author scorns. It's orders of magnitude worse with generative AI.

I recommend Paul Kingsnorth.

Insightful analysis of the modern world and the Christian response to it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3hMSZqatHI

He also has a new book out, Against the Machine, which has good reviews, but I haven't read yet.

But it's not Google or TikTok that did this: it's the content consumers.

Given the intentionally addictive algorithms and psychological manipulation used by the big tech companies, I think at least some of the blame can be placed on them.

Granted: If you live in America, depending on your situation, you may need wealth or a good job to have access to decent healthcare.

But, "They will never have a family... hobbies, or respect from their community." This is completely out of touch. Plenty of Americans in flyover country accomplish all of these on an average salary. Source: They're my neighbors.

As always, the Germans have a word for this feeling: Sontagsleere.

You might be interested in reading Socrates (Plato):

https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...

I think you mean _Bowling Alone_.

Women shouldn't speak in church: https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/14-34.htm

Homosexuality is unnatural: https://www.biblestudytools.com/romans/1-27.html

In addittion to The Fire Next Time, my personal favorites are a series of essays he wrote from the South during desegregation:

A Fly in the Buttermilk

Nobody Knows My Name

Faulkner and Desegregation

My sentiments exactly. From "Nobody Knows My Name":

Now, I talked to many Southern liberals who were doing their best to bring integration about in the South, but met scarcely a single Southerner who did not weep for the passing of the old order. They were perfectly sincere, too, and within their limits, they were right. They pointed out how Negroes and whites in the South had loved each other, they recounted to me tales of devotion and heroism which the old order had produced, and which, now, would never come again. But the old black men I looked at down there – those same black men that the Southern liberal had loved […] they were not weeping.

(IANAL. As I understand it,) Precedent is generally followed unless there is a difference of circumstance, which could include changing cultural mores.

The most recent U.S. Supreme Court nominee briefly talks about some of the nuances related to precedent here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlchBfW036s

The (old) British legal scholar William Blackstone dives into it in his work "Commentaries of the Laws of England" (Introduction - Section 3) if you want a more thorough understanding of the foundation of precedent in common law.

I don't understand how the author is judging complexity. The top one, Huli, is a base-15 number system but looks quite regular otherwise. French, on the other hand, switches from a base-10 to a base-20 at 80 and then switches things up at 97.

According to the listing, Welsh sits somewhere between these two but it has separate numbering systems for {20s, 40s, 60s, 80s}, {30s, 70s, 90s}, and {50s}. That seems much more complicated than either Huli or French.

Because people are more likely to pay for the more recognized name.

That's easy for someone who's worked at many different companies. What about the applicant who's primarily worked for a single company for many years? This is much more likely to be true for an older applicant. Do you lie about how many years you worked at the company?

Regardless, it still doesn't solve the problem for foreigners who may have only worked for companies outside the US.

However, checking the past experience of the applicant -- which seems perfectly reasonable for the hiring company to do -- would still allow discrimination against older Americans and foreigners. I'm not sure how that could be fixed even with anonymity.

Relevant Mitchell and Webb Look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw

The window of comprehension is a (probably) over-generalized concept. It was first mentioned in the 1985 paper "Intelligence and personal influence in groups: Four nonlinear models" by Dean Keith Simonton with respect to "leadership". The point in question from the abstract:

Model 4, the intellectual stratification model, expands on the fact that the mean group IQ varies across different groups and, consequently, predicts a high correlation between the group mean IQ and the IQ of its most influential member, with a leader–follower gap of between 8 and 20 points, depending on the submodel.

The theory is that one's influence over others decreases as the intelligence gap between one and others increases. Simonton theorized that this is probably due to the increase in the complexity of ideas as IQ increases.

The reason I say it is probably over-generalized in this case is because I don't think influential communication necessarily counts as "meaningful communication".

I can't tell you what the opportunity will be, but there are opportunities if you participate pro-actively, even if you think of opportunities only as job opportunities.

I agree. However, I think it's worth noting that this is no different from any other community/social activity. You can make the same argument for being involved in churches, civic organizations, the local city council, etc. In fact this argument could be used to encourage people to give-up some of their time on the internet and become more involved in the aforementioned analog organizations.

you must must must find a place in the internet world that you can stay at (e.g. some FOSS 1990 style mailing list) and at least find some way to use social media (gnu social or G+ anyone?) in some reasonable way and have some kind of internet presence (e.g. a github page and some foss projects you supply commits to)

I'm curious why you would say this. I understand that most of the people here are coders and github or the like would be a good place to point to potential employers for work samples, but a "1990s style mailing list" isn't going to increase your visibility enough to get hired. It almost sounds like you think a presence on the internet at all is a good end in itself.

Politics always talks about the gap between rich and poor that gets bigger and bigger. But the same is true for the gap between people who take part in the internet and use it to their advantage, and those who ignore it. Both these gaps already overlap to some degree, and that overlap will continue to grow!

I agree in part, but there is a third category that the OP hints at which is "consumers of information who don't create". Most people use Facebook, Twitter, etc. for consuming entertainment and advertising their identities, but they are not using it for any advantage. People may be able to use them to network, but most don't, and there is nothing inherently worthwhile in using social media by itself.

Thank you for taking the time to comment.

If the key is the same length as the plaintext, wouldn't even a one-time-pad evade any adversary?

I wasn't clear from the article: Were Alice and Bob sharing any algorithm details, or was it just the secret key?

how does income affect stop-and-frisk or drug possession arrests?

It's typically poor communities that these tactics are done in. I think the tactics are reprehensible, and race probably does have something to do with it, but I've also seen cops roll up into rural trailer parks to start shit, too. What gets lost in a lot of the media narrative is how poor folk in general get taken advantage of by the authorities.

Fascinating. In Tennessee at the turn of the millennium, I knew many students who were working 6-hour shifts at fast-food joints after school and were working several nights a week. That doesn't even take into account the kids who had to work at their family's businesses (farms, stores, etc.).

This is a high school student, not a college intern.

I know. My comment was addressing high school interns like the student in the article.

during the school year there were incredibly tight restrictions on any job I could have, including limited hours per week, review and oversight by the school, and lots of extra paperwork for the company

I'm curious if we are even talking about the same thing. When/where I grew up, the school had no say in how much or where a student worked as long as it wasn't during the school day, nor did a company have to do any extra paperwork if their employee was a student.