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ncfausti

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SWE @ Google CIS @ Penn Engineering Antler SG16

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MacBook Neo 5 months ago

This is exactly what's needed to get general users off of Windows.

Anecdotal, but whenever my friends/family are looking for a basic laptop I almost always suggest a Lenovo for the price/performance/quality they're looking for in the $400-600 range, even though I myself would never get anything besides a MBP.

I would recommend this to them instead every single time. The build quality of macs are unmatched and now in everyone's price range.

I think that’s why the author put “vector” in quotes. I kind of imagine it as an ephemeral, infinite list where for some real, when we use that real value as an index into our “vector”/function, we get the output value as the item in this infinite, ephemeral list.

I think the only thing that matters is that the indices have an ordering (which the reals obviously do) and they aren’t irrational (i.e. they have a finite precision).

Imagine you have a real number, say, e.g. 2.4. What stops us from using that as an index into an infinite, infinitely resizable list? 2.4^2 = 5.76. Depending on how fine-grained your application requires you could say 2.41 (=5.8081) is the next index OR 2.5 (=6.25) is the next index we look at or care about.

I could be misunderstanding it, though.

Benzene at 200 1 year ago

This.

When an alarming number of friends (all under 40 years old) from the same small neighborhood in my hometown were diagnosed with leukemia I started to look into the superfund site nearby. The pond that is connected to the stream that supplies the municipal wells in the area was still disgusting (with visible oily residue on the surface) nearly 15 years after the company, Congoleum, stopped operations and the plant was demolished. Soil testing some years earlier revealed benzene, which has been linked to AML.

This reminds me of a time when I was meditating in my dimly lit office after work some years ago. For context, I had been meditating daily for 20-30 minutes quite consistently at the time.

During this session, about 15 minutes in I had the sensation of "seeing with my eyes closed". I could see very clearly my workspace, desk, monitors, keyboard, etc. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

I am wondering now if this was related to a sudden lapse in aphantasia (which it seems like I have), a closed eye hallucination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-eye_hallucination), both, or something else?

Interesting – I was just looking into visiting/living in Svalbard for a couple of months for the unique experience of it. Unfortunately, I could only find one apartment building [1] and the price for an apartment was $6,000 USD.

I've read that most of the apartments are owned by companies, and you have to work for the company to have access to the apartment. Does anyone know of any other alternatives for a short stay there?

[1] https://en.visitsvalbard.com/where-to-stay/svalbard-hotell-l...

I have ADHD-I and I'm feeling almost exactly the same way, right up to a falling out with a company I had significant ownership in/was part of the founding team.

How are your daily routines? Are you taking breaks and pursuing the things you actually enjoy doing? Have you thought much about the kind of experiences that have brought you the most joy/satisfaction in life (both at work and outside of work)?

Maybe watch this video and see if it resonates with you. It's a talk by Dr. Russell Barkley on ADHD and it's what made me finally schedule a full analysis (after literally decades of putting it off).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tpB-B8BXk0

If you'd like to talk I'm here to listen.

To me, it means understanding the basics of data structures and algorithms, and knowing when and how to apply them to solve problems.

A couple of examples:

Seeing a sorted list of items and knowing how to find an item in that list most efficiently (binary search) [0].

Looking at a map of cities and the roads connecting them (including distances between cities) and knowing that you can use a graph to represent the cities and use Dijkstra's algorithm [1] to find the shortest path between any two cities.

Essentially, being able to look at a problem and see how that problem can be mapped to (and solved by) a specific type of algorithm, then being able to implement that algorithm to solve the problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_search_algorithm

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm

This article just kind of did that for me. Loved that they likened Lisp to Lego blocks a few paragraphs after I had the exact same thought (when they mention that "everything is an expression").

Even after having read Hackers and Painters and some of Clojure for the Brave and True, this is the article that makes the power of Lisp click the most for me.

I agree. Hooks are an awful hack / offer poor user (developer) experience imho.

Whenever you need to have warnings and rules for using things (that require linter verification to make sure developers aren't shooting themselves in the foot with common/regular usage) it's an anti-pattern.

They are far too easy to mess up, especially for something that is meant to be a fundamental part of the library.

If this post resonated with anyone, you might want to check out Deep Work by Cal Newport. Similar idea—in our distracted world, the ability to sit and focus on one thing is becoming increasingly important, and rare. I enjoyed it a lot.

Actually, next time, why not try focusing on the pain? I do this sometimes when I run. Instead of trying to ignore the pain, really focus on it, and sense what it is about it that’s discomforting, and when you realize that it’s not going to harm you in any significant way, it kind of loses its power over you and you sort of accept it and keep going.