arandr0x

I'm not in games but my industry is adjacent and I have the same gripes with c++. (Which the author characterized very well.) Although build and debug times definitely are an issue regardless of the performance of the hardware.

I find reading C++ "standards" papers onerous and feel like they're written in a way that's deliberately inaccessible. I don't much like the idea of going to CppCon -- even if my company funded it, which maybe they would, I feel like I'd be marginalized for not using template metaprogramming, not knowing the new hotness by heart, and generally being a proponent of C-with-classes. I just feel like so much of the C++ "standards" work feels like it's led by academics who think the concerns of working programmers like me are beneath them.

Is there a way I can "get involved" and does my voice have any value?

Quebec does have a huge problem with birth rate, so yes, they are. (They do take on immigrants but not at anything near the rate similar socialist economies with similar demographic factors do.)

There's a cultural aspect. IMO Quebecers are more feminist than people from other places I've lived or visited. This probably gives better political support to the program, although it is not the economic reason for its existence.

But it's not inexpensive, we do have taxes to pay for it! As a working age person, I not only contribute a significant share of my salary to taxes that fund this program and others for parents, I also have to save up funds for when I am myself a parent. Yes the program and others in this vein make life generally easier for the more at-risk share of the population, but single moms in Quebec still have it pretty hard and if you're middle class you still have quite a bit to lose by having children (especially more than one).

I also live in Quebec and I've been told by people that the education system (meaning primary and secondary education) has changed quite a bit, not for the best, since 1997. In addition, one of the measures in the study is hyperactivity and anxiety in school age children, and what I've heard relative to that is there are more diagnoses because before children were not being detected that young.

I would have liked the study to try harder at controlling the effect, for example by comparing cohorts in regions where use of the government funded childcare is more/less common. Quebec has plenty of remote regions where people are more likely to rely on extended family for care.

The comparison group for the crime rate effect is the rest of Canada -- what the data essentially says is, at the time of data collection, you were more likely to be a criminal as a Quebec teen vs a teen in the rest of Canada if you were born in 1998-2000, instead of 1993. The authors interpret this as "exposure to child care", but the more appropriate meaning is probably that younger teens are more likely to commit crimes in Quebec. It would be difficult to see why -- except there are also more high school dropouts in Quebec and the school system means 17 year olds are a lot more likely to have the kind of freedom that lets one commit crimes in Quebec. IDK, on this one, I buy the correlation but not the causation. (They break up crime by type and they're not overwhelmingly drug crimes though. So whichever is the cause for this effect, it's not solely drug related.)

I don't know if I'd call that talented though? I mean, I also got the right number in the IQ and motivation lottery, but not only is that like 80% biochemistry, it's not a differentiator in the sense of doing qualitatively different things. I do all the same things as everybody else, just faster and without guidance.

But I work with people who are extreme specialists. (I don't mean in React. I mean in computer vision or non linear optimization, that kind of thing.) There is an entire class of problems that only those people can address properly; I could learn to but it would take me a couple years and the output from these years would be significantly below state of the art. In general they're skilled, not just talented, but they also work with mental models that require some amount of essential ability to grasp and that plenty of people will never be able to fully understand.

Although, the most successful developers I know (of) are both generalists and extremely talented. Their special talent is "people understanding"!

It's a bit hard to answer, because the most talented I know became more talented as they aged (so I'm tempted to answer their current age which is 30s or 40s because of my own age range) but they were definitely noticeably more talented than their peers when young, too. They would have been decent hires at 17 for those who were coding then -- not better than the best experienced people, but decent, definitely leagues above other first year students.

Some of them weren't coding until 25 or so but in that case same applies -- they were noticeably very competent at 25, and better at 35 than they were at 25.

Obviously motivation, desire to stay in tech, specific technology stack, etc, varies.

I gave it up for 2019 -- I'm a social drinker, nothing bad, but I was liking my post-drinking sleep less and less. (It seems to have side effects on me in the aftermath even when I don't drink enough to actually get drunk... or I'm getting old... whichever...)

Several of my coworkers are either completely abstinent or the "don't like it will sip 5ml of this beer" type and I've seen firsthand it can be rough socially. I'm going to just ignore the haters mostly.

Stay at home spouse would work, if you're flexible about the solitude. Some kind of religious order, if you're flexible about the "own projects" (there will be community service and other people's projects).

In most places you can be a full time artist if you literally only have a room (in a shared apartment) by means of teaching classes, busking, applying to every government program in sight, etc. That's only most places. You may need to move to a larger city.

This is interesting. Literally the one thing that prevents me from using social networks is the real names database. I refuse to give my real name so I don't get the full experience other users do. I would never use facebook, but I would be interested in an anonymous distributed 1:1 social network (like email, without servers). Currently I do use email and minimize my exposure by changing addresses from time to time, however, I'd prefer a full control version. Running an email server is too hard.

Back in the old days I was on IRC. I loved IRC. It was anonymous and everyone could have their own server and you could have individual chat and direct file share instead of broadcasting to everyone. But it's not asynchronous. I would do this thing where I would send my IP and a passcode to my IRC friends and with the IP and credentials they would have access to a specific folder on my home server. I put occasionally a diary or some photos on there and they could leave me messages. (OK it was a very crude solution. I was very young.) I liked it because it did not commit me to having the stuff up all the time but at the same time it wasn't gone forever if I didn't get to it right then.

I realize I am something of an anti-market and nobody would find my dream social network viable. Maybe I should make one for myself. I only have a dozen people I talk to really so there's no "all my friends are here" effect to consider for me.

* Have a goal to the encounter (the goal can be laughter, good feelings, learning whether the conference buffet is any good...)

* end conversations when they've ended. If you're at a networking event it's OK to have 5min conversations with people about what they do, if you don't think you can entertain them further.

* Try to notice when you're repeating yourself. To do that have group conversations with friends and ask them if they thought you insist too much on a particular issue generally. * When people are having fun they talk louder, faster, kind of lean into you. Optimize for that.

* The converse is also true. If you laugh, smile, and generally talk like you're having fun, it makes people feel more comfortable.

* When people are talking about a subject and they're suddenly talking a little faster, nod and ask questions.

* When people are talking about a subject but don't look too engaged (look around, fidget, move between ideas), build on what they say but switch to a subject you may be able to talk about in some detail.

* if it feels too challenging in specific situations, try to convert the situation to a group conversation. Ask dates to board games meetups, go to networking events with another professional, join conversations of existing groups, etc. It's easier to sustain conversations in groups.

Most cities you can get a job working on interesting problems as an barely competent undergrad student through the trifecta of showing up, accepting minimum wage and not requiring your office to let you have a nerf gun. Or you know, the same work conditions as 90% of people in other disciplines. It's just we're kind of spoiled as younger devs when it comes to work conditions and often pick an incremental improvement in salary or free breakfast over challenging work.

I would like to agree with you from the opposite direction. I work with a team of basically all PhDs and write several patents a year. We have a regular scientific paper reading list. (I work developing commercial software, not in research.) My job requires some understanding of at least some graduate-level math.

Every year since my first year, I wrote on my self-evaluation form "I really need to learn more about (GPU computing/differential geometry/hyperparameter optimization)". And every year, I got told "be nicer to people, show your work, thoroughly explain your algorithms, double-check". (Well, different things every year, but all in that list.)

The fact is, intellectually challenging work doesn't exempt people from, well, doing work. Keeping records, using processes, talking to people. There's no market for heroes who only want to pull the sword from the rock but not get any blood on their shirt.

It's not mentioned in the post, but if you have suicidal ideation, consult a doctor.

Otherwise, it's probably normal (and to be fair since something like 20% of the US population will have depression at some point, even long and/or severe episodes seem to be fairly normal).

People on Twitter are lying. Sometimes, only by omission. But often, straight-up lying. Second-guess your media a little more.

I find the lows more creative personally. The art type of creative. It's a better mood for seeing the world as it really is, which is a prerequisite to rendering it. Take up an art like painting or writing and get in the habit of truly looking at things. It will help you see these times as unique.

Some people find journaling helpful. I've never been able to stick to it but if you're a list-making, organized type journaling may help. If you do it large scale enough you can look back and notice that you did achieve things over a long enough period.

Same, when out to dinner with friends, if I pay for everyone I will nag them to order the steak and every extra they might want, and if someone is paying for me I will try to pick something worth less than what they would have picked for themselves. I'm pretty sure they used to make menus with no prices for people like me. (It is common for my friends to also be generous and constantly try to get people to order more when they're the one paying. So I don't think this is a case of me being a Christlike figure of self-denial and the world being full of sharks. Economists just may not know enough good people.)

It's not that I actually think the company will go bankrupt. It's just I am more concerned about how others will think of my spending, than my own comfort. There are plenty of cultures where this is the case, and people feel uncomfortable indulging in luxury, especially when other people (fellow employees in my case) are not.

I was thinking of a reimbursement policy where there is no per diem, and they'll reimburse all meals and alcohol "within reason" (meaning so long as you indulge less than the VPs), but I just thought about it, and if I had a per diem I would also keep costs low. When others are paying, and you keep costs low, it's kind of signaling that you value them paying enough that you are willing to do the job of picking the most efficient resource allocation, just like they would do for themselves. I think of it as showing goodwill and that you are on the same side. I was raised in a business culture that is more relationship oriented than the US.

I'm not sure what it says about me or Friedman, but if I'm choosing to buy someone a gift I don't care about the cost but I will attempt to make it something they like, and refrain from gift-giving if I don't think I can do that. (Or give money, I suppose.)

On the other hand, when spending other people's money on myself, for example lunches for business travel, I am incredibly cost conscious. I've skipped dinner a couple times because I felt the airport meals were too expensive. (The same was true when I was a child and spending my parents' money.)

Clearly they should put me in charge of governement budgets.

Pick a report with lots of numerical columns that your company is currently having accounting or the CFO "interpret" into a go-no go decision. Implement logistic regression.

There may be a way you can do some computer vision tasks for quality control in some parts of your business -- most businesses that deal in physical goods have quality control by visual inspection and in most of those you can end up with a CNN that provides a quick enough, good enough solution. However, sometimes for regulatory reasons it's not practical, or it's something that is not a critical part of the chain, and so on. But you could ask operations staff about whether they sometimes do that kind of task, and whether it takes up a lot of their day. It's not like you have to find the good idea alone.

I've been a software engineer 10 years. There is in fact no correlation between age started programming and programming aptitude, if taken for granted that the person can code at all in adulthood. (There is a great correlation between never coding as a child and never coding as an adult). I'll admit that I'm talking about people who are over 30 today, so that when they learned as children, it would have been of the calculator project and lighting DELs in basic variety, and maybe kids today can learn some of the higher level more directly work-relevant frameworks like React.

But still. Some of the best people I know when it comes to making up algorithms for cutting edge problems, had definitely reached their adult height when they first learned what a compiler was.

(I will grant I don't know any really good programmer who started coding at e.g., 40. But there are relatively few people who change careers at 40, so my sample size is very small. )

My husband reviews papers. He works a 40h/wk industry job; he reviews papers on Saturday mornings when I talk to other people or do personal projects, pretty much out of the goodness of his heart. There is no way he would ever have time to download the required third party libraries for the average paper in his field, let alone figure out how to build and run it. We're not talking about a highly in demand reviewer here -- he's an average expert with a PhD.

That system essentially can't work unless 1) you make 1st-year grad students do the review and 2) you somehow make people OK with publication delays being extended by months.

There will always be women (and men) who want a single partner and don't really care about value or whatever it is you're on about.

It's just that, like me, by 25 they're married. If you're 35 these people are pretty much permanently unavailable to you unless you have very auspicious financial or cultural circumstances.

It's super common for women in your age range to be somewhat lonely (although usually they have kids, but they will be grown kids who are off feeling invincible). Do you date at all? Even if it doesn't work out with some it could be a way to meet potential friends?

Currently, I have a friend (and in addition family & romantic relationships, a small number, maybe a total of 5 people I really care about). These "inner circle" relationships are the best use of my time I have ever found. However I have basically no interest in the "get to know you" small talk people engage in at parties or hobby groups. I don't like pretending or seeing other people pretend, so I never manage to actually make friends the normal way. All my platonic friends have come to me during a time of crisis where they were somewhat vulnerable and I was somewhat restless and it causes a sort of break where all kinds of things not normally allowed by polite society become possible, and that makes them interesting to me and they become my friend. (This is not a problem with family relationships because all families have dysfunction, and it's not a problem with romantic relationships because sex is great at generating intimacy and letting people off their masks.)

Is there a way to meet people (that doesn't involve sex, drugs or joining the army) where you can find out essential things about what they fear, want, etc in 1-5 encounters or do you have to put up with months of pointless lying if you want friends?

I would like to see the statistics. I eat a high carb low protein low calorie diet because I like to fit my grocery bill in $15 a week. I would wager the opposite is true actually; if you're eating 1000 to 1400 calories a day and they're not mostly carbs, you're probably feeling terrible hunger pangs.

Most vegetables are carbs, milk and yogourt have tons of carbs (in the form of lactose), lentils are carbs, beans? still carbs, etc. I'm not sure how you can have a cheap low-carb diet (lots of eggs and ham? dissolving multivitamin and whey protein into avocado puree?).

Was going to say this, most office offsites have alcohol. Drink coffee with it if it makes you sleepy. Don't have more than one drink with each course. Don't drink while actually in the office (!), if you socialize enough at the offsites and smile at people, they won't care that you don't small talk at the coffee machine.

You're exactly right, although cities have to an extent always tried to entice people to move there. It's just back in the day there were fewer self-employed people.

As a city dweller though, I think my city(not Tulsa, no worries) doesn't need more single 20-something Internet-or-other remote working desk jockeys. My city needs mothers with young children to use its parks and waiters to staff its restaurants. Also artists to give people better things to do with their leisure time than "hang out at bars". Initiatives like this essentially show our cities have stopped being about local culture, community, and people from different origins choosing to share a way of life and are now just places where people who live in the Internet can look for sex partners and pizza delivery. It's incredibly sad.

No, definitely not (at least on the latter two; my school did say take home assignments had to be done independently, if graded. People did get help on the ungraded assignments, though I didn't).

I wondered if bootcamps/online were more like in the adult world (where it's basically always OK to get help) or like traditional degrees (where everything graded has to be done on your own unless a team project). You are saying it is more the former, I suppose.

I just wanted to know if everyone did it. Like are most people in bootcamps friends or spouses or children of working programmers? or are there also people doing this "out of nowhere" like at community college?

I work in CAD and my experience is similar to the guy who works in the games industry. I invent new algorithms pretty much all the time. It's a more conservative environment culture-wise. "Science programming" (when all your clients have PhDs and work in academia and you do models of something or other or interpretation of experimental results) is also very intellectually challenging and the CS skills are a HUGE differentiator. It's not for everybody though as in those jobs you rarely work with other programmers or have good code to learn from.

I'm curious, is it the norm for people who do online courses or bootcamps to get help from their spouses? Is it not unfair for those students that are unpaired? I was in university (and thus not really in the pairing off mindset) last time I seriously studied a brand new field but I never got a romantic partner or even a friend to help me directly with my assignments, it would have felt like cheating in a way... but since online courses are targeted to adults maybe it's expected and they see it less academically?

Do you have advice on learning rhythm for the piano? (Aside from "use a metronome", I do do that.) Are there exercises? I also have trouble recognizing how long a note is "in the wild" without a metronome or having a good idea what the tempo is for a song I like, so I suppose there's a listening component to this as well. Making sure to hit the notes at the right times if you haven't memorized the song just from looking at the sheet music I mean.

Caveat, I'm an adult.

I just bought scores... traditional/folk tunes tend to have easy melodies, then they have books of sheet music for beginner/intermediate levels at most stores that sell music books. Sightreading books once you get to that level -- I found playing "new stuff" motivating and there are beginner ones.

There's software (like Synthesia) but I didn't find it that useful. If you get a digital keyboard they sometimes have tutorial modes that include interfaces to show you what to play -- didn't find that super useful either once I could read sheet music, which was very fast. Yousician is an alternative which does present sheet music and it's super gamified. However, in my experience, it was hard to translate the game to playing independently; I had no memory of any of the notes I played, and I would play them fast, but it would be hard to rewind and redo a section if I made a mistake. Fun game though.

You'd need to play scales and chords every day -- probably a motivation app can help with that. One thing I do is mix it with improvisation -- I practice 4-5 scales and chords in them and afterwards it gives me new ideas to improvise. I don't know if your teacher encourages improvisation since it's not targeted practice though. I don't have a teacher and I'm not planning to ever play at a concert level, but do want to get better composing, so for me it's more important. If for a child, place the piano or keyboard someplace in the house the child can just sit and play, and never, ever tell them they are making too much noise (or buy them headphones).

There are ear training apps, they actually work, and I think ear training is pretty much always useful, so it could be a 5min "workout" in between practices. I don't do it myself I just listen to music I like and try to reproduce sounds without the sheet music, but I do listen to a lot of piano music for fun, so the app may be easier for directed practice.

I wouldn't use these questions but they're usually coming from interviewers who are trying to have a sense of you as a person/get you out of your shell. (Except the "Where do you see yourself in 10 years" question. That's used to figure out if you want to be management. I have never given a fully honest answer to this question my whole career, and the right answer usually can be found in the job ad.)

Talk about something that you can sound excited/relatable talking about. Friends, family, volunteer work, that all works.