I learned next-level defensive driving by bicycle commuting to work 5.5 miles each way on busy roads in rush hour traffic. On a bicycle you're invisible, and if you expect any less, you're going to get hurt. As it was, I had some very very close calls- at least one of them had the potential to be fatal. Ironically, the only time I ever crashed was my own fault.
But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.
The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many celebrities who die at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles.
I had the same thing for Slashdot.org for many, many years. Both the reflex and the browser autocomplete. I still miss the old /. It was like HN + Hackaday + Usenet.
Yep, have been on constant "pager duty" for 2+ years, although I have more help now and I get paged 1-3 times a week instead of per night. Still, carry my lappy everywhere I go. Bought an ARM Windows laptop to get that 20hr battery life so I could worry less during my travels. You know, fancy things like going get food or going grocery shopping.
Rough shift, my worst was every other week and my boss prior to hiring me was 24/7 just like you. I just carry a backpack with a few batteries + my work laptop, fortunately only a few really bad stories but hooooo boy me and that backpack have seen some fun times.
Yes but are they printed with PLA or PETG, or even ABS? Or are they using material designed exactly for their use case, and tested thoroughly before being certified for flight?
Or do they get their parts from some vendor at a swap meet who spends most of his time fiddling with his Ender 3?
Neither of those is suitable for this application. Ultem or PEEK. Anything else would be a very bad idea, and even for those two you would want to do a lot of testing.
LLM's follow the old adage of "Garbage In, Garbage Out". LLM's work great for things that are well documented and understood.
If you use LLM's to understand things that are poorly understood in general, you're going to get poor information because the source was poor. Garbage in, Garbage out.
They are also terrible at understanding context unless you specify everything quite explicitly. In the tech support world, we get people arguing about a recommended course of action because ChatGPT said it should be something else. And it should, in the context for which the answer was originally given. But in proprietary systems that are largely undocumented (publicly) they fall apart fast.
You’re going to get poor information presented with equal certainty as good information, though. And when you ask it to correct it, more bad information with a cheery, worthless apology.
Exactly. I left high school over abuse. Another student spent the whole period sitting next to me staring at me muttering about how he was going to tie me up in the middle of the desert, and all the things he was going to shove up my ass, serious serial killer vibes, and the teacher just acted helpless, despite seeing everything. When they started stalking me after school, and it started getting physical, and the school did nothing, I left.
Thankfully that level of toxicity did not follow into the workplace, but I did have a car vandalized by a coworker.
Truth be told I was a bit of a punk, and had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. We all have our flaws, but nobody deserved what I went through. I'm a man now, not the insecure boy who tried to act like he was better than others to compensate, and I reject toxicity immediately. No room for it. Hard lessons to learn when you grew up with abuse.
Math is amazing, and I'm becoming interested in it after being out of school for over 30 years. But, my own incompetence with numbers meant gravitating away from them, for me. I am not dyslexic, but I think my ADHD does with numbers what dyslexia does to words and letters.
Dyscalculia means that you should probably avoid situations that require you to do your own arithmetic, but there's way more to math than arithmetic, and most professional mathematicians aren't that great at arithmetic either.
Wow. I have never heard of this. Thank you. I just Googled it and while not all of the symptoms fit, a good number of them do. It's rather interesting, I know how to use numbers- I've done several types of analyses over the years, professionally. And my own budget/savings is done in my own self-designed spreadsheet, calculated/balanced down to the cent.
I want to disagree with 2, but OTOH it's also so easy to do that I've just accidentally done it my whole life.
20 year programming career and I've never engaged with math beyond approximately Algebra II, in the real world. Hell, I go years at a time not needing anything trickier than Algebra I.
Nearly all of the math I actually use I learned in the 6th grade or earlier, overwhelmingly elementary school arithmetic—mostly the "bad" kind I got from memorization-based practice that mathematicians seem to hate even though it's a contender for the best bang-for-buck of almost my entire educational career, plus a lot of fractions-related stuff (so, so very many people are terrible at this, can't even do basic things, IME it's where an awful lot of people permanently fall off the math-train, way back in like 3rd grade), basic arithmetic, and pre-algebra-tier simple variable substitution.
Every now and then I get a bug up my ass to try to expand my math abilities, but 1) I'm so goddamn rusty at this point because I never use any of it that I have to start back at brushing up on high school stuff, which is discouraging, and 2) I'm not even really sure what I'm going to do with it (long experience suggests: nothing) so the motivation fades fast.
I do agree high level math isn't as useful for dev work. I have a masters in math and started working as a data analyst. I moved to programming years ago and I basically never really need to use the math stuff I know anymore.
Weirdly my math background is actually more useful as a 'soft' skill in my current work. I am the go to person for talking to the data analysts in my company, and having a statistics background is pretty helpful for interfacing with managers or people outside the dev department.
Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.
> Every once in a while I remember an algorithm for doing something I can include in our app and feel like a God, lol.
I can distinctly remember the three times this happened for a team I was on, in my couple decades of doing this, because everyone involved kinda got a thrill out of the extreme novelty of doing something resembling actual math of even a lower-end-of-undergrad level. Lasted all of a few minutes to perhaps a few hours, but still.
You're probably using math without knowing it. Debugging through a piece of code is the same as finding a hole in a proof. "This method HAS to return the right value because C. C is always true because B. B is true because A. Ohh... but A isn't true if the record passed in is for a legacy user with no org manager. The method needs to be changed to work for inputs that don't satisfy the current assumptions."
It's not the math facts you learn so much as getting lots of practice with that kind of reasoning.
I sit here, pondering whether that type of logic is math or philosophy. Most likely, it is the intersection of the two. Of course, spending even a few minutes pondering such things tells me that I personally need to avoid the math and embrace the philosophy.
Philosophy includes the study of mathematical reasoning, but you don't get practice at it while you're studying it. It's like taking a music theory class versus learning to play an instrument.
Hm. When I was studying philosophy, we did have logic classes, and did diagram out the logic of arguments. It was a critical component for success in later courses, so I'd say we absolutely practiced it.
I own a modal logic textbook used by a course in a philosophy department, and on any given page it looks an awful lot like a math textbook except that the presentation is far friendlier and the explanations are better than are in 99% of math books.
OK, but I've never been anything but complete shit at proofs, and I'm really good at debugging. They don't feel like the same activity to me at all.
This "well actually you're doing math!" stuff feels like some kind of rhetorical trick, when the "math" I'm doing doesn't seem strongly related to or to require being any good at the math-thing it supposedly is. It's not quite the same thing nor quite so far off the mark, but it seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry. Sort-of yes, going by something like unfair riddle-logic, I guess? But in reality, no, of course they don't.
I don't see any daylight between this claim and, "diagnosing a funny noise in an engine is math," and if that's true then I think we're heading into territory where we've rendered the term "math" so broad that it's no longer useful.
> it seems at least in the same ballpark (ha, ha) as claiming that professional sports players use lots and lots of complicated trigonometry.
It's maths in the same way as when your brain hears a note at 440 hz and you go 'that's a C', i.e. while it may be practiced, the maths part of that is subconscious and its completely detached from the conscious maths anybody except mathematicians think about.
All of these are interesting analogs to each other, in that they involve a critical "thinking about" aspect paired with an intuitive, creative, active mental process.
In the case of catching a fly ball, the "thinking about" approach using trigonometry is completely unhelpful. In the case of music, the "thinking about" approach of theory can be helpful, but many people who learned informally have been brilliant musicians without ever learning a formal approach to theory. In the case of math, the critical "thinking about" aspect is vital. Pretty much everybody needs it, Ramanujan aside.
What unites all of these cases, however, is that the formal "thinking about" aspect is useless on its own. Without the productive, creative aspect, it doesn't have anything to critique and make better.
5) Yes - but even if not popular, competent people are always respected
6) I would say that there's correlation, but it's not 1.0, more something like 0.5 - 0.7; other factors matter as well.
Sometimes these do not hold true, but then you have a truly toxic organization - one that you should run from, as fast as possible
We were the last people in town to get a flat screen TV. In 2015. We still had a 27" Sony CRT TV. That thing was beautiful. It didn't bother me really until one day.
A young person about 10 years old came over "What's that thing hanging off the back of your TV?"
I got some nice parts out of that TV, and cracking the vacuum seal on the CRT was just so satisfying.
> cracking the vacuum seal on the CRT was just so satisfying.
I've totally felt this before! As a teenager we were offered an old CRT for free if we would pick it up. We spent several days trying to fix it but ended up breaking it much worse than it already was, to the point where my friend's dad (who was a programmer but also did a lot of electronics repair) basically told us to take it to the dump. We did, but not until we took it deep into the mountains and shot the vacuum tube with a .22 long rifle :-D (we did get our asses reamed because we didn't know there was mercury in there, but even after that the consensus was still "it was worth it" though we never had the guts to tell parents that). We did at least have the foresight to put it on a big drop cloth so cleanup was pretty easy, though I later became mortified at our recklessness. The only thing better than shooting that was being able to shoot an old church bell that somebody dumped in the woods.
But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.
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