kirkules

The back of the envelope computations are shockingly shallow and meaningless.

(20 Questions, from the intro) Trying to think of a thing for the game is not a search over a set of known things. Just saying the possibility set has size 2^N doesn't mean that choosing something in the set consists of processing the set. But even if that were the case, and if you do consider each of 2^N options, the consideration process itself is not trivial and probably varies wildly.

(English typing) Touch typists do not (only) simply convert an existing/known string to a sequence of hand actions by mapping character to action. There are whole words and sequences that become units/tokens from the standpoint of muscle memory and processing (this will be relevant to the rubik's cube topic as well). When i type, there's a sort of planning and queueing of actions, but also there's monitoring of actions that allows fast error correction with pressing delete a number of times or holding it and costly determining when the error has been reached, and resuming afterward. Of course the process likely varies from person to person, but there's such a host of other things going on that should count as part of the information processed in this simple behavior that the example and numbers used in the paper for it are utterly useless even as estimates.

(Rubik's cube blind speed solving) Again we see reference to the entire possibility space (from the perspective of possible configurations of the puzzle). But solvers do not identify the configuration they encounter with reference to the space, nor do they search the space for it. They look for patterns and ignore what they cannot use for the strategy they have practiced. The cuber often does not commit to memory the whole configuration, but will often convert it to a custom and bespoke mnemonic. It's just utter nonsense to refer to the number of possible configurations, it has nothing directly to do with what the human is doing.

If I memorize a 30 word passage, i have not "processed the set of possible 30 word passages".

I was a TA and instructor for several programming classes, usually in Java, with which I was moderately experienced but not an expert.

My students would frequently ask how to accomplish something, how syntax or keywords worked on q deeper level, whether there was a stl class for a purpose, or what caused an error, etc, that I didn't know about already. I didn't hide my ignorance even a little bit, but Idid help them find an answer. In lecture settings, if it wasn't too much of a digression, I'd demonstrate finding the answer. In one on one help, or one on group help, I'd lead them through finding the answer themselves. My students had a lot of respect for me as an authority on the language and still listened to my advice and came to me with questions frequently.

This is kinda important across all fields, but especially in programming, you don't need to know the right answer by rote so much as you need to be able to seek and identify the right answer with some independence using existing resources.

I'm reminded of a high school programming class where a project partner named variables with the most crude and lewd words he could imagine. Not that I was prudish, but he unsurprisingly never remembered what "butts" was for and somehow never figured out why he kept getting confused by his own code.

Agree, looking for the multi upvote button

I mean can't you just have the input signal to the light be a disjunction of signals? So it's on if the camera is on OR if some programmatic signal says turn it on?

I don't see why they should be mutually exclusive

I'm thinking you misinterpreted the comment you responded to? I read it as saying that you don't necessarily have to have employment linked healthcare just because you have at-will employment.

The "inexplicably" being a commentary on the wisdom/sanity/compassion of linking healthcare to employment, rather than a claim that the parent comment had made an inexplicable leap of logic

I can remember a number of instances of having to dive into design docs to ascertain how a few systems interacted with each other.

I bet a lot of the time it might be good enough to just have a "here's the set of options we went with" version of a design proposal/doc as documentation

Do you have, offhand, any names or references to point me toward why you think fish and lizards can make rapid common sense deductions about man made objects they couldn't have seen in their evolutionary histories?

Also, separately, I'm only assuming but it seems the reason you think these deductions are different from hard wired answers if that their evolutionary lineage can't have had to make similar deductions. If that's your reasoning, it makes me wonder if you're using a systematic description of decisions and of the requisite data and reasoning systems to make those decisions, which would be interesting to me.

Some adjectives stack, like "terribly".

Though maybe there's some kind of strong enough diminishing effect on emphasis value such that any number of "terribly"s still has bounded effect XD

It's weird to me for "ease factor" to be an intrinsic property of a card/thing to learn at all. I study things like Chinese characters with Anki and it's not but just rote memorization, there are systems and structures of knowledge for each card's content to be integrated into. For Chinese characters (as with many other things) there's history, etymology, deconstruction into components, personal mnemonics and associations, literary context and references, etc., all of which affects how easy it is for me to learn any one card's content. Usually i do not initially know much for a given card, but other cards and external learning will make any given card easier over time than it initially was.

And the set of external factors for any card is not fixed; there's no "true ease factor" for a card, because the set of external factors i will probably encounter is not a fixed (determinism aside) property of a card. It depends on me and my changing state.

You're imagining something you think is what it's like to be a crab, or what you think it's like to have more legs, etc., but why do you have any confidence that's what it actually is like?

The existence of "The dress", which is seen by different people or the same person in different states of mind as white/gold or blue/black, and other such illusions, would seem to invalidate your perspective.

Or if that's not persuasive, just consider different software versions, different video drivers, etc. running on the same hardware.

Or consider that if you believe a tumor in your visual cortex could meaningfully change color perception in your model, then why wouldn't a difference in cortex structure have some effect too? I'm willing to bet no two humans have ever had or probably will ever have the same arrangement of visual cortex neurons and other relevant brain biology. Do you think you know enough to say any such variation is irrelevant?

Sure, an LLM based tool may happily double down on a wrong position, and articulately address a student's concerns in doing so, possibly hallucinating convincing evidence.

100% agree with this attitude. A human whose attention is directed at you who uses their eyes for input will turn their eyes to you. The eyes are not just signalers, but the person actually needs to turn them to you to direct their attention to you, in some sense, so this is a good indicator that they have done so.

No, it's the most... Hobby... Mathematician

That's not how anything works. A knowledge gap doesn't warrant any conclusion you want.

Why not say "the essence of computing is computing"? It's not like "universiality" is any more explicit or clear than "computing" itself.

What is the point of this kind of "finding the essence" exercise anyway? Definitely seems to be very subjective, to say the least.

Some positions are remote but many are hybrid, required to go in some fraction of days

Didn't read the article because i don't care to bother with the paywall, but if its title is related to any arguments within, then the comment you're responding to actually does address the main idea.

The title is an argument from authority against mandated implicit bias trainings, and GP's point attacks that authority.

Disclaimer: I have been employed by Google and my views are my own.

I can also see the value for a large organization in culturally enforcing interchangeability and replaceability of workers.

I always considered this bit of culture (and felt the message this way from coworkers) to be even more focused on on well-being of the would-be hero. It always comes alongside messages about how to deal with burnout or achieve a work-life balance that works for you. That's always been my preferred perspective on it, anyway.

Still, I'm with you in pushing back against the interpretation you quoted, which is at best a weak (and at worst toxically macho) understanding of real motivation behind this anti-"hero" sentiment. It's mildly absurd to say there's a culture of holding back hard workers in order to lighten the expectations for everyone else. Anyone who works "twice as hard as expected of them", broadly speaking, just gets recognized/rewarded/promoted until expectations and output match.

Edit: reorganized order of thoughts

No, you dohave a valid list of features you want to group together, but attaching them to a word you have not clearly defined -- especially in this incredibly fraught case -- is just confusing you. If you haven't decided on a definition, you can't agree on a definition with anyone you are conversing with, and you will just talk past everyone. That is how this topic usually goes.

There's not some objectively true definition or there that you are homing in on with your intuited features.

- tech labor cost is depressed most effectively when everyone is doing it

- everyone is doing it so it's that much easier to buck responsibility for the decision

It never ceases to amuse me how confidently "it's difficult to define" and "clearly it's this way" can appear in the same thought/sentence about the mind.

Discord has a large contingent of gamers among its users who expect to be able to use discord to communicate while gaming, so even if this isn't Discord's fault it's in their interest to look into it and facilitate a solution

It's easy to think all of the things you wanted to say were important, so you leave them in. But often they weren't so important to your eventual audience.

To put it into neutral you have to go completely expressionless, let your tongue hang out a little bit, and make sure your face is centered in front of the driver monitoring system

Omfg and car screens universally have an input lag of over 1 second, so not only do i have to take my eyes off the road to interact with it but i have to extend my interaction by several more seconds for any multi step process. Screens might even be okay if it weren't for the input lag

I'm doing it on mobile and while I could go faster, I..... don't want to? So I also got the "too slow" and along with that, got bored

I have not seen this view expressed in this way except by people who do not support it. Do you remember or know any examples I could check out?

I just want to second this suggestion.

Pick a small project that you care about.

It has to be something you care about because you will pay attention to whether the results do something meaningful, which is the key to guiding you toward actually learning what you need to learn. For me, this meant making video games. For my friend a physics educator, it might mean generating random quiz questions with meaningful or realistic numbers.

It also has to be simple. For me, I started a long time ago with a text based game where you fight a sequence of monsters by basically rolling dice with tweaks and theme that mattered to me. For my friend, it might be literally randomly generating 3 random numbers and putting them into a pre-written physics problem.

There is always a way to add on to a project you care about, so start super simple and make it work really well (just meaning, to your satisfaction). Then add on another thing and try to integrate it, and so on.

My CS students when I was TAing always learned the most from long term projects that had enough freedom for them to make it fun for themselves. This is in contrast to curated sequences of academic exercises and expository text.