johnnujler

“Exploiting” is the keyword here. You need to exploit the niche. A better example would be someone like 3Blue1Brown. You have to keep at it long enough and keep improving. Go check Grant’s first video and the latest video, the difference is just night and day. On the contrary, although decent in terms of the content, Ben hasn’t improved in ways measureable. When you use these mediums, you are trying to communicate while being engaging. If Ben indeed is providing engaging content that is deep and valuable, and you’re not just extrapolating from n=1(because you learn something from those videos), it should’ve worked out for him , no?

As much as extrapolating what characteristics should a job of the future satisfy, based on your past experiences/knowledge, is a reasonable idea. It is also reasonable to assume that certain future jobs won’t look like the past jobs, or for that matter satisfy the criteria of path dependency as witnessed in the past. Leveraging privileges have had surprising outcomes in the past(including creating an industry like Hollywood). There is no one right way.

Never said it was named after antariksha. Merely pointed out the possibility of a connection. Are we considering word formation and origin retracing a settled matter?

Also just realised that I am replying to a sock puppet account. Thanks anyway.

Not sure if it would be wise to dismiss the possibility so easily.

We clearly do not know all the causal elements involved, plus I wouldn't be surprised if the name of the island itself had something to do with "antariksha".

What do you mean by we know the source? At best, you can track the functional(mri) and structural(pet) aspects your brain if you take the neuroscience route, and the behavioural(cbt) aspect when you take the route of psychology. It seems to me that the unique experience i.e., the unwelt is out of reach without some form of mindful confrontation/adaptation.

I think this is an issue of interpretation.OP does say that mindfulness/exercise/stoicism are helpful and also talks about the sleep-stress deadlock. I think what they are saying is that although these activities help, you need your mind to be in a decent shape to sustain these practices, which can only be achieved through quality sleep. This is to say that even if you have a good meditation practice or an exercise routine, if you don’t focus on getting your sleep back on track, you’ll never be able to handle stress in the long run.

All technology is political. All politics is not political. Politics is a social technology.

Sleep well, Eliminate stress from life, get a decent job that allows you to explore things you want to do on side, spend time with family and lead a happy life. Note that this is a very ambitious route to follow, most people never understand this or get to live like this. But if you are super ambitious and have a domain that you are interested in, go create a product, become an entrepreneur. There is nothing as rewarding. Please don't stress and burn yourself out for a job.

I wouldn't say everything, but I have encountered such people too. Extremely knowledgeable and always curious. It feels as if these guys somehow have more energy to expend than most of us. On the contra, I get burnt-out pretty quickly when I try to push myself beyond an arbitrary threshold which I have never been able to measure.

If it just about learning chip design then there are two ways you can go about it:

1. Get a job in a VLSI/EDA company(Qualcomm, Synopsys, Cadence, Intel etc) as a software engineer and slowly switch teams and learn.

2. Get a basic understanding through courses like Nand to Tetris, or any other VLSI course; then buy an FPGA and tinker with it until you are reasonably confident.

Silicon Ronin is at it again. This time to revolutionize the startup world and shake up the hold of big players.

Every thing about life is so fascinating. I have always wondered how viruses have persisted for so long if they need a host to survive and it took us millions of years to go from single celled to multicellular. I wish there was a way to know everything and become good at everything. :/

If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis.

Things have to get ugly before they get better. Here’s to the greater good.

Never thought I would ever see this during my lifetime. Really well done. Has the quirky feel of Comic Sans, but with the flavor of fixed space mono fonts.

Ah! That makes sense. I realise that talking about complex concepts in terms of analogy can be misleading, but is it like the fabric is elastic and long enough and is only getting stretched? Is there a way to reconcile this with the (3 dimensional) inside and outside aspect of our experiences.

Forgive my ignorance here. What do we mean when we say the universe is expanding, expanding into what. My untrained brain is trying to look at it like the inflation of a balloon that takes up more space when it is inflated, but if the universe is all the space there is, what would it even mean for it to expand. Is there space outside our universe that is like unfilled or something?

Tbh, It might just be me, but I am starting to feel that the vanity of Material Design is also starting to fade away. People are moving towards other options. In fact, with so many people in the design space doing great work I think users are starting to realise that the initial craze around the precise/scientific design that Google claimed Material Design to be is not really it. Things can be better than material design, and we are seeing it.

Recently with blueprintjs, notion, fluent design, and whatnot things I think have started to change for better. And then there is always apple doing its thing.

I think the original comment was directed at the seemingly pretentious nature of the essay. How do you quantify earnestness? Being sincere? I get the “we like demo over slides”, “2 founder over 1 founder” kinda thing, but talking about virtue and moral character seems like PG is struggling to find things to do after retirement. Philosophical musings are almost always due to too much time on hand and assumed profundity of one’s own thought process. Hence the post hoc rationalisation? Maybe?

Plus as it is said by someone in the other comment, success(especially in entrepreneurial ventures) is so much more like playing a game of roulette than it is like running a race. Luck! Lots of Luck! And chance does not fit well with assumed observations. It is a measurement bias that is being masked as concrete conclusions.

Love the idea here. Would love to see how perishable items like current affairs do when posted anachronistically.

Definitely, may be not directly, but it lies at the heart of software engineering(or more appropriately computer science). It helps with thinking differently, for example I don’t know if ndergrad courses teach distributed search algorithms using eigen vectors and values, but it helps to understand invariants and transformations better.

Although the degree of difficulty w.r.t a question may differ, I think being proficient in these concepts can get you a job. It’s just that most of us struggle with solving problems(in an interview). I think these concepts cover pretty much everything a SRE would need to know.

I would wager around a year at max. Most materials related to Distributed Systems are information heavy(requiring you to read and remember) as opposed to being math heavy(with the possible exception of graph theory, which usually none of the fundamental texts expect the readers to know). Even many popular papers like raft, paxos, chubby, BitTorrent, gfs etc do not require much mathematical knowledge beyond basic arithmetic. You can read them like a non-fiction and understand most of the things.

Not saying that Distributed Systems is easy, doing research in Distributed Systems is very challenging, but I don’t think reading and understanding these materials should be that difficult for an average software engineer.

What’s up with the gate keeping dude? Philip is an experimental musician, avant-garde has an experimental aspect to it, so people like calling him that. Why fuss over a word?

And fwiw, things change, language is emergent, words acquire and lose meaning based on how people use it, not the other way around.

This culture eludes me. You don’t have to practice made up questions of varying difficulty for 5 months before looking for a job, there are great companies out there that are not Facebook or Google, and that will give you job satisfaction and a decent salary without grilling you, look for those:

1. Office friendships that last a lifetime are never to be seen anymore, all people seem to want these days is sh*t load of money. 2. What about contentment? No I need more, which eventually becomes a cause of restlessness, anxiety.

If employment is Organized slavery, interview is basically blackmailing.

Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang. It’s meh. Don’t mean it as a dig at the author, but I think the sci-fi stories lose their value over time, maybe I was just too late to the party.

I think Marvel and Disney would be very disappointed if this trend continues across the board. At least if we go by Marvel’s last decade results.

Okay, that was a roller-coaster, from judging them based on their clientele to laughing out loud after reading about their past products. Bad Unicorn Indeed.

I don’t about these new build tools, but I’ve usually found ninja to be faster than make in most situations at least.

Also curious to know, is there no work done in the realm of developer productivity inside the FPGA world?

Not sure what I was expecting. It gave me back the first line of the abstract as response. (For anyone wondering, the paper I tried was: "A Heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets" by Warren S. McCulloch.)

Have you by chance tried learning more analytical things like algorithms/mathematical ideas using SRS? I have been trying to automate my interview preparation process using SRS, but it is just mind-blowingly difficult to cardify these things; and cloze deletion doesn’t work well on large algorithms with many pieces.

Note: Please note that I am not advocating that people do it blindly, in fact I myself have been trying to use it as a way to retain once I’ve understood the algos.