rbrogan

#17 Rest before you are tired

Time really is a constraint. It does not make much sense to try to work all the time in order to achieve your goals. As programmers, we really ought to get that there are constraints and trade offs to things.

I would add to the list -- "Don't go it alone. Get other people involved, even if you don't have to."

Journalism ought to strive for compact, quality pieces that can be read at a fast pace. Many articles posted are much longer than they need to be, and their information density is not that great. It's not that it is never good, but rather that it is nowhere near the limits of what humans are capable of as far as communication goes.

I wonder what happens if you take away the reward. Neurons firing is related to energy. The reward has an associated amount of energy. Can it be something as simple as just distributing energy over time?

But is the BS intentional and is it always necessarily false? Or can it be something that is hard to communicate? "The Way that can be spoken of is not the eternal Way." Is this bullshit? If so, how is this information able to propagate over the course of centuries?

Seems to me that one has to separate out what the speaker is trying to imply or impress versus what they are saying. Statistics can be true, but they can also be presented with the intention of impressing the audience with a view that is not true. That is being misleading. It is different from lack of rigor and loose communications.

The article gives some interesting perspective. It talks about security vs. stress. What will be interesting is security vs. motivation. Wondering to what extent the author is motivated by his goals vs. a sense of obligation to his patrons, and how that compares to the motivation generated by insecurity.

Space is hard to get. So much of software involves spaces of some kind and yet we do not seem to think about it very well. Notions of space within software are so often either very rigid and jam-packed or infinite and formless.

Personally, I have enjoyed working in Qt. For anyone looking to get going, I recommend practicing by transcribing the example code and then try tweaking it a little (and more so for Qt / GUI development than with other technologies). It takes a bit of boot time, but once you get going you will find you naturally start to "get it".

You could start by writing comments. There is little chance of any bugs coming from that. If there are any tests available then you could work on understanding the tests and then step through the code in the debugger. Hope that helps.

Here is the argument in a nutshell (if I read it right): (1) The economy not really working that great even though it is working as intended. So it cannot be fixed, because it is not broken (2) For businesses to create new value, they need money. It used to be that they could make their own money, get moving themselves, but now things are dominated by bank lending. (3) Bank lending relies on continual economic expansion to work. (4) But economic growth is going to plateau, due to lack of new things to exploit (i.e. situation similar to lack of new countries for the Roman Empire to expand into). (5) There are alternative money systems that let people create things without bank domination. (6) The political Left is not savvy to this. If you want change you should push for support for alternative money and vote for such candidates.

It is hard to get what people are on about when it comes to anti-bank sentiment. But then again, one could say the same about free software. Seems like the kind of thing where one has to do a bit of their own research and their own thinking.

Life is short, art long. If you cannot escape the bullshit, you might at least make an art of bullshitting. ;)

If I am reading this right, the argument goes something like this: (1) Nietzsche was anti-academic and did his best work independently. (2) He was against academia being used as a means to nation-state ends, and he disliked how that undermined independent, critical thought. (3) There are similar problems today in academia where it goes against independent thinking. (4) The best independent thinking comes through not in high culture, but mainstream culture and it better explores issues than academia.

IMO, the problem is communication. If you read academic writing (especially in the humanities) it can seem like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and the person writing it is not really trying to communicate anything intelligent, but is just trying to sound impressive. I believe this is mostly not true. Rather, the problem is the same with technical documentation that is high in rigor and detail, but low in learnability; the problem is that it is difficult to communicate. The person writing will usually (IMO) have something in them they are sincerely trying to express.

The goal of entertainment is to entertain, but it also has to appeal at least somewhat to the passions of the creators and the intellects of the viewers. So thinking finds its way through that medium and can reach a mass audience. It is not that academia has no potential to do the same, it is just that there is not a dynamic set up which brings it out very well.

Would anyone, personally, take something like this as an opportunity to do open source work and/or research projects? Or do you feel like you want/need money as a motivator to be your most productive and a way to keep score in the game?

While it is possible to disagree and argue that life really is like chess in different ways, the article still does a nice job of comparing and contrasting two different metaphors for the same (nebulous) thing.

Another nice thing about Tetris is how it is possible to make a misplay, but then stick with playing and recover from it.

Motivation to innovate is going to based on the desire to produce value. That value is going to be based on the enduring value of whatever it replaces. So, to do good at innovation, one ought to have an appreciation of what came before, both its positives and its negatives. Young people do this intuitively by forming negative critiques, but also by finding what is good and adhering to that. Older people do less of this, even though they have the ability, because they often feel like they must be in agreement with others.

How does this compare to, say, a Q&A site where one gets positive feedback for answering random questions? Is the reason why people leave because they cannot do the work that they want (time used up in collaboration) or is it because they are not being given credit for the work they are doing?

Solving bugs is not glamorous, but it does help with learning a code base and it gives you goals to hit and will make you feel like you are contributing.

I find that the more that you plan to do with knowledge, the easier it is to learn it (and then be able to do something with it). The simplest thing is taking notes to help pay attention in class (which you are doing). But you can work from that basic principle in other ways. For instance, you can say "let me see if I understand this right" and explain back the information. You could also make it a point to always make some kind of guess, even if it is obviously a wrong one. Finally, you may want to find people who like to talk and ask them various questions. Some engineers are impatient and do not like explaining things a second time, but others are not like that. You may be able to find what you need to know in indirect ways.

There is a lot you can do and you sound like a conscientious person, so if you make a healthy and consistent effort, then you should be fine in the long run.

""I don’t know, it looks weird. It’s the picture on the TV; it just looks … too real."

To me it often rather looks like everything is fake. Would be interested to see if there were a study that could show whether peoples brains are more stimulated by one format or another. My intuitive sense is that there is something to do with information, and more to it than just random crackles and pops evoking nostalgia.

This article covers the supply side (people stating that AI is a risk), and it is good have a counteracting force showing the lack of proof. There is also the demand side: fear. News articles that tap into fears will resonate. It is good to challenge Killer AI as a myth, but we will probably need more than expert opinions to dispel it. IMO, more should be done to figure out why it is that people fear intelligence, such that they expect it to seek to destroy others (and, if I am remembering right, there was an article posted here relating that to Machiavellian mindset), and how to address the specifics of those fears.

Nice concept. It is good to question whether what you are doing is really worth it. Seems to me one of the challenges going forward with personal management is to not only set goals, but also to set constraints. What the author is doing is setting constraints by explicitly limiting the amount they can consume. That frames up the problem as to what to consume and what is more valuable to consume.

The article is not convincing that these are natural monopolies. What happened to AOL and AIM? What happened to MySpace? There is also this recent article about Chinese innovation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10806386

Natural monopoly in the Information Age may turn out to have been natural, but it feels unnatural. There are explanations, but I, personally, do not find them to be convincing.

Adopt / make nutrition software and set up a diet where I am sure I am getting 100% RDA of each nutrient.

Came across this debate about OO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4245737

Thought the discussion was pretty good. Was frustrated with OO at the time and wanting to get away from it. Interestingly, it is currently the second result for "OO sucks" on Google.

From what I am reading, the author is saying they are effectively time slicing their week. Each day is like a "task", in the software sense, that gets to run and make progress to its goal. You have to consider all the things that you could do, but then decide which should be prioritized because it will deliver results towards the goal. This may be better for creative work, because it is easy to otherwise keep busy doing things that seem important, but if you think about it they do not really do enough to get you to your goal. (Like how easy it is to drift towards unnecessary feature work over maintenance.) At the same time, "next actions" may not quite work because the work is often non-linear (though I would not say they suck). It will be interesting to see how personal management plays out in the long, long run and how it develops against AI.

It is interesting how the designers were not themselves authoritative.

The best part of the article is the concrete image of the milk cartons. On first seeing the image, your mind is going to tend to think things ought to be one way. Then it comes out and says, "No, it is the opposite." That creates a bit of cognitive dissonance and makes one ask: "Wait, why?" This is good as far as software goes, because it is so abstract that often the brain is not fully engaged when talking about it. It is too easy to know something in the abstract, but then not know it enough to apply it in the concrete.

Whatever it is, it is only so different from your past work. It may help if you sit down and try to put together an argument either that you can or you cannot do the work. I would be skeptical and rigorous about it and try to force it into defining exactly what it is that you cannot do. Chances are it is a matter of framing up the work, and in trying to prove the work is impossible, you will probably frame it up and make it be possible.

Meditation, fasting, cleaning / organizing, exercise. Never intended to do it old school, but that is how it turned out, interestingly enough.

Personally, I try to differentiate between something that is work, something that productive, versus something that is keeping busy but not really accomplishing anything. Keeping busy will most likely be worse than being idle. It is wasting energy and occupying time. If you would not think of leaving equipment running for the sake of burning energy, why do it with people? If there is no concept of legitimate idleness or leisure, then there will be a lack of pressure to find meaningful work for people to do.

Perhaps a good approach would be to assume a format is compromised as it is, but still focus on doing the best possible job of testing students. It should be possible to gear things such that plagiarism does not really do enough to be worth it (e.g. you would still do poorly on oral presentations / interviews, exam essay questions, etc.).

Nice article. I expect that there will be more and more acceptance that we cannot always be rational, and I expect there will be more and more products that help us to leverage our finite willpower to better make rational decisions. I think there is a relation between willpower and rational decision-making. (Which may be a reason why it is good to sleep on something before making a decision.)