the_greyd

That's Cory's whole schtick - he critiques big corps. I follow him a bit and most times his analysis is good and other times he dismisses things that don't fit in his ideological viewpoint.

As someone from India, "tor-toys" is what you would hear from most Indians. For most words of the kind, in india they would be pronounced in exactly the way that would make you remember the spelling of the word (since you are graded on that). I would bet that's the case with most non native speakers.

Overall I like yuval noah harrari's point about our systems, that liberal democracies and free market are based on the assumption that we have rational individuals making decisions in their self-interest. Which is not true at all, in today's day and age where misinformation and propaganda run rampant. You cannot rely on individual judgement to get us out of a pandemic. Same can be stated about climate change. I would say it's more alarming with climate change, since the consequences of our actions are stretched out in the far future (atleast when compared to covid). How the heck are we going to get people/companies/govt to get in line with what's needed for the survival of our species?

You make a good point. In a state of pandemic, the population IS in some sense similar to livestock, bodies to be managed, since the virus has weaponized our bodies. Wouldn't you say?

College sounds fun! Do it!

Anyone interested in declining birth rates, just take a look at the statistics in South Korea. 42% of the women in their 30s are unmarried (https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pxotg9/over_42_o...). That's almost half! Our infinite growth systems will collapse, unless countries make it easier for women to raise a family.

Now that you can sit in inside spaces without a mask, I feel libraries and cafes are a real alternative for me! And this is me typing from a desk at a public library 10 minutes from my apartment. Can't express the amount of relief and joy I feel right now

Kudos to the team, they've done an amazing job with the elementary ecosystem, considering they are just a handful of people!

I don't think those are the defining factors of why they got famous or successful out of all the highly intelligent and hard working people out there. The fact that they got famous brings light to their ideas, which makes you think there's something special about them.

You'd be surprised to find many many many highly intelligent people out there with clever way of doing things, and I'd argue no less intelligent than elon musk or jobs or any other famous person. Our culture right now worships successfuly entrepreneurs as Gods with amazing brains who cracked the problem, but really it's more of luck and being at the right place at the right time.

If I understand, we are talking about a very narrow definition of success and failure here, professional success which is recognition, fame and riches? That seems to be a rare product of being lucky; where what you like doing and what you have an aptitude for, is exactly what's needed by the society in the field you're working in. Then you need to know the right people and be in the right place to get the recognition for it. All these things need to align, so it doesn't surprise me that these are rare events. And if you do happen to be one of the successful people it often deludes you to think it had something to do with YOU, rather than it mostly being a product of all the circumstantial things beyond you.

I'm surprised, personally I would put software engineer akin to a new-age factory worker, but worse for multiple reasons. This is taking into account how many new software engineers are joining and where the field is going in general, sure some are doing novel work but most are definitely not.

Cool project! Love the autocomplete feature. Just my 2 cents about the custom commands, hiding the complexity of git commands is not something I'd like personally (not accounting for alias, aliases are cool). In most cases you'd much rather know which exact git command did/does what to debug/fix, so it's better to invest that time learning early on..

Drawing a parallel to Nassim Taleb's "don't hide the risk" (or atleast what I understood from his talks), working for a big corp hides risk (and reward). If you or the team do a shitty job, the feedback and the results are often not immediate, and absorbed by the bigness of the corp. I have seen fair share of disinterest and mediocrity in my place of work and I think it's a leadership problem partly, where they've pretty much failed to motivate or incentivize people to improve/move around the company and you have people working for years in the same role and project doing the same work, creating very little new value.

Also great point that it might be a characteristic of somebody choosing to work for a big corp vs something else. In today's climate that seems a very safe decision for a new grad. Ultimately it's a job that you do to earn money, it's naive to think everybody wants the same thing from their job.

Was expecting visuals but all I got was a bunch of paragraphs..

I get the sense of "relax", but I'm trying to get the essence of it. Is it to be more mindful, stop obsessing/stressing about the thing that you are doing while still putting action in? I still struggle sometime because the only way I think I can do something is to focus fully on it, I'm in my head tracking all of the different perspectives, and tasks that can offshoot from the current thing I am doing. Also another thing, is if you primarily "think" for a living (any knowledge work) won't you get into a habit of overanalyzing/overthinking? I've found exercise and doing something physical as the best way to get out of your head.

+1 I'd also recommend sending the author a note to take their ebook elsewhere in the future.

Well said! I agree and I'll say there's a whole world of difference when moving from programming to software engg. IMO working an average software engineering job, things are messy and the problem domain is not exact. In my experience things are mostly guided by instincts of people involved rather than rigorous modeling. The requirements often change, the stakeholders rarely give you a straight answer and ultimately the acceptance criteria (what you need to build) is generally negotiable. All these extra skills is what makes the job un-automatable.

Systems thinking as a general concept might be what you're looking for, pair it up with mental models.

Speaking as a young, single and lives in an apartment person. As an introvert I've often relied on being present among people to kind of substitute for my social life. With that not being present, it really puts focus on the presence or lack of social network. I'm actually grateful in a way that it has forced me to reach out to people in my network, that I otherwise wouldn't have..

Google Plus Meet? Huh. Did somebody tell Raed667 our plan? We are supposed to be a secret until we kill the normal Google Meet and release our superior chat product Google Plus Meet.

That makes sense since we all have exactly 12 friends, that's the official friend cap for the year 2020.

I would have loved some actual questions. I've been reading some of Google's Project Rework "What makes effective teams", and it revolves around psychological safety. It is very accurate in terms of my experience as well as a software engineer. If I feel empowered to ask questions like "what's the goal of the project?" to upper management without sounding impudent, that seems like a great culture to be in.

https://www.notion.so/Fundraising-c5092becfe074069b8252fb866... <- tl;dr it's a startup teaching stuff to other people/companies/startups.

My code editor does a fair job of finding things for me, I know I won't use ripgrep/fzf that often :shrug: On the other hand I would recommend fish shell (replacement for bash) with z plugin and http (replacement for curl).

Thank you for sharing that. Your dessert analogy perfectly captures my personal experiences. I've been a loner most of my life. I recognize the bad experience I had in my childhood and the coping strategies I developed during my teenage years. I have a tendency to isolate myself. Sometimes I felt it was too late to go back to connect with people I've stopped talking to, but that was not at all the case. People are very forgiving and they were happy to have me back.

Self-reflection when taken to the extreme becomes ruminating and dwelling on the past. I'd say bound your self-reflection time as well. And part of the mindset I guess is that you are imperfect and it's okay making mistakes. From my experience, the unbounded self-reflection mindset often becomes the always self-critical mindset. I've often found myself in a self-improvement loop where I'm so focused on improving that I'm not kind to myself. I had to consciously recognize and break that, and then go read some about self-compassion :)

I don't think everybody has the capacity to be reckless. I think we are bounded by our temperament (nature + nurture). Some of us have exact perfectionist tendencies, and some of us have creative tendencies, and more. This is very much an oversimplification, but you can think of a Scientist as trying to get to the exact truth (in the realm of theory) and science as a field that aims for perfection. Engineers on the other hand are used to working with constraints and imperfect conditions (in the realm of practice), and the motto seems to be "get shit done" (a kind of pragmatism). And so sometimes you have to be a scientist and sometimes you have to be an engineer.

I've never really understood "Go with your gut", because my gut is still my brain.. I would be curious if individuals have a process for thinking. A kind of structured thinking, instead of all abstract. I've noticed that it's really important giving my abstract thoughts a solid form, either by writing them down or speaking in a conversation (even to myself). Helps a lot in refining them, and figuring out what exactly am I aiming towards.

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing. It reminds me of Sylvia Plath's fig tree - [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7511-i-saw-my-life-branchin...] which I always think about. I've observed that it's useful to think of the one future that you would sacrifice all other futures for. Which would be what exactly do you value?

On regrets and mistakes, Jordan Peterson talks about this sort of thing in a beautiful way as the idea of "redemptive mistakes", and that "people are a lot more unhappy when they look back in their lives about the things they didn't do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things" - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGDnSWmqhM]. It has stuck with me as I try to be more permissive of myself making mistakes and being imperfect.

Such a crummy headline. In all honesty, Google has been an extremely competent organization. Don't hate them just because they are at the top. "Rich get richer, poor get poorer" rings true for a reason, they had the first mover advantage in a lot of things. Monopolies are always a danger, like a once competent ruler turning into a tyrant. Having structures in place to deal with them is a must.