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I had this issue with my first software job right out of college. I was unproductive for weeks, just due to culture shock and (shamefully) malaise. The procrastination snowballed. Luckily a fellow engineer eventually noticed, sat down with me, and recognized exactly what was going on. In the kindest way possible, he sat down behind me and basically made me finally start my next project. He stayed there with me for the rest of the day, answering and asking questions to keep my progress going. It had quite an impact on me. Having another person involved and actively care about my work went a long way.

Agreed. Ideally both parties want to form a symbiotic relationship.

Yeah, it's not commonly necessary for real world engineering, but it's certainly good to know, at least as a mental exercise. There's a nice free algorithms textbook used at UC Berkeley that covers the concept pretty well: http://algorithmics.lsi.upc.edu/docs/Dasgupta-Papadimitriou-...

I kind of agree, in that a good candidate should probably already be thinking "what data structure should I use here" no matter what the problem is. Just always think about what data structure to use. Every problem requires one.

More in the vein of what you're getting at though, I think helping a nervous candidate by asking obvious questions like this can be helpful: "What data structure would you recommend using for this problem?", or "What programming paradigm do you think would fit this problem best?". It's a bit of an ice breaker, and can lead to more interesting conversation than the candidate just sitting there, quietly thinking (admittedly, possibly not a good sign for a candidate if they do this, but interviews should be built around making it a good experience for the candidate as well).

I think this is on the right track. The best interviews I've been a part of involve the interviewer asking a question they don't fully know the answer to. Then the interview turns into a conversation where both parties are trying to work together to formulate an answer. The candidate should be scored based on how constructive that conversation is.

I understand the sentiment about honesty and finding a legitimate good fit. Neither interviewers or candidates are perfect. But there's something off about this, isn't there? If you ask a candidate a question, and they answer it well, they've done what is asked of them. Why should they put themselves in a position of vulnerability just because they're well prepared?

If you had honest experience with the question at hand, it seems a little weird, to go into an interview, and basically say "I already know I can answer that one. Give me a new one."

I guess I should have emphasized that the operative phrase was

> getting a feel for how it's naturally being used.

It's also interesting how with most visual illusions, you can sort of convince your mind to interpret it one way or another if you try hard enough. I think the simplest example is the necker cube, where you can convince your brain it's either pointing towards you to the left or towards you to to the right [1], seemingly just by visualizing those orientations. In case I'm not the only one who interprets it this way, I'm wondering, is there a name or academic description for that phenomena?

The wikipedia article mentions:

> There is evidence that by focusing on different parts of the figure, one can force a more stable perception of the cube.

Which is pretty interesting by itself, but I think it implies the need to physically move your eyes. What I'm curious about is the ability to alter your perception without moving your eyes physically. It seems like evidence for or against that could lead to some interesting conclusions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necker_cube

Very cool. I looked back at the 2020 finalists, and the first video from that list truly boggled me: https://youtu.be/5DYeAkx2IBo. At around 16s in, my vision of the stair case suddenly and completely changes to being upside-down to rightside-up. I know what's going on physically, but it feels like my brain is doing these behind-the-scene calculations and at a certain moment feeds my conscious mind a brand new image. Pretty neat how some optical illusions can put you at odds with your own brain.

quick edit: It doesn't always happen for me when I let the video continue to play, but if I pause it at 16s, then as soon as I hit the pause button, the image completely flips for me. Pretty wild. I think it's probably because I let my eyes drift away from the staircase for a brief moment, and when they return the image is sort of reinterpreted.

I get what you're saying, and agree. When I was in middle school I'd shamelessly use MS Word to replace words in my reports with fancy sounding synonyms that I had never heard of before. I kind of cringe at the memory. But on the other hand, that's also kind of how I got them to be in my vocabulary. I feel like once you commit to a new word in your own writing, you start seeing it everywhere and getting a feel for how it's naturally being used.

> Notice, too, how much less certain the Webster definition seems about itself, even though it’s more complete — as if to remind you that the word came first, that the word isn’t defined by its definition here

I like this. A dictionary with an opinion, rather than a definition.

D'oh. Seems obvious in the morning. The perils of late-night posting.

Thanks. I wasn't quite sure what "pick a random vertex of the triangle and find its midpoint with p" meant. What's the midpoint of a vertex?

Yeah, honestly this makes me think that the warez scene may be increasingly important in the future.

I guess I assumed the operative word was "good". The term "random number generator" almost always refers to a generator that intends to produce a uniform distribution.

Out of curiosity, why do you think having a good random number generator is problematic? It seems like it's easy enough to access one in most situations.

It's amazing how helpful it can be to have a sounding board. This is a very nice gesture.

Ideally, countries would just not do this. “Everybody does it” is not a convincing argument to move the conversation elsewhere and let it slide. FB/twitter is trying to mitigate this to some extent, but it’s a weird notion that companies are expected to regulate governments now. When an actor abuses a platform, the blame should be focused on the actor.

Thanks so much for that analogy and explanation! It certainly made things a bit clearer.

edit: I'm still a bit unclear on what it means to form a field. Texts around this topic seem pretty dense and encyclopedic. Is there a straightforward explanation of what an algebraic field is?

"Field" is a term I've heard come up again and again since college, in engineering-adjacent math. Over the years, I've occasionally looked it up and tried to understand the importance, but I've never found any literature that made much sense to my admittedly short-sighted mind. I'm putting this bluntly (and sincerely), but this seems like a decent time to ask a question I should have asked long ago during college: What is a field and why do we care?

I appreciate you're able to see the quandary. I think the crux of what you said is in your first sentence:

> "Quantum theory based on real numbers" means a specific thing -- quantum mechanics with real amplitudes (and real anything-else-that-would-follow-from-that)

I'm familiar with complex math as far as remedial DSP and electrical engineering goes, so this may be over my head. I'm not sure what a real amplitude is, since generally when I hear "complex number", my head thinks "compact way to represent a frequency, amplitude and phase", all of which are real. It seems like I was reeled in with familiar-sounding terminology that may in fact have a deeper meaning in this context.

This was my first thought on seeing the title. Complex numbers are just vectors with special behavior for some operations, right?

I haven't read through the paper, but this statement from the abstract confuses me:

> Here we investigate whether complex numbers are actually needed in the quantum formalism. We show this to be case by proving that real and complex Hilbert-space formulations of quantum theory make different predictions in network scenarios comprising independent states and measurements.

Maybe I'm interpreting "real numbers" and "need" differently than the authors, since in my head complex numbers are basically just a structure containing two real numbers and some modified behavior.

> If so, then you logically also must agree with this (which equates): "I don’t agree with condemning the research because it involves myself"

It certainly does not equate. I think the point you're getting at is that it is wrong to experiment on animals. I personally don't agree, as I think there's a large gradient within experiments, ranging from "making the animals really suffer", to harmlessly "measuring the size of the animal each day". I'm not being especially brave when I say that I don't advocate for making animals suffer needlessly. Nobody wants that. But the reason for the concept of "model organisms" is that it would often be unethical to perform those same experiments on humans, so we need a proxy.

The choices seem to be (and honestly, please correct me if I'm missing an option here. I can be pretty dull on occasion.):

1. Don't perform the experiments

2. Use a human

3. Use a proxy

I personally would not choose 1 or 2 (depending on the experiment of course). The best proxy right now seems to be other living organisms. I'd rather that wasn't the case, but well... it is.

And for what it's worth, I wouldn't advocate for people experimenting on you either. I adore animals (especially mammals!), but I just empathize with humans much more.

I don’t agree with condemning the research because it involves animals, but you don’t even need to assume they’ll be involved in experiments. That’s what this article is about right?

The voice of the latest podcast sounds much nicer. It's a fairly convincing nonsense podcast.

Just anecdotally, I had a pet rat as a kid. They're pretty friendly creatures who seem to enjoy company and playtime. Not sure what constitutes "bad for the rats", but I personally think a situation where they're getting food, safety and stimulation would not fit into that category.

Reading the article, it seems like this was exactly their situation. It seemed like it was in the author's best interest to keep them comfortable and friendly since this was an operant conditioning task. He also mentions the only negative reinforcement considered was a puff of air, but he opted not to use it.

To folks saying this is heartless, I'd urge you to scroll down to the "Experiment" section of the article:

> I received three 8-week-old male Long Evans rats, Romero, Carmack and Tom. Romero was fearless (more like thrill-seeking) and loved grapes. Carmack was a real architect building around its home keeping it tidy; he was fond of bananas. Tom began shy, but held the most surprises in learning performance.

> I spent around 6 weeks with them during their (and my) night cycle, ~1 hour with each daily. It took two weeks to habituate them to me — this process could be accelerated, I was just a little slow with them. One week to teach them to stay put while I was dressing them; I also tested multiple harnesses and their combinations during this time.

It seems to me from this that the rats were well-cared for and the author formed a bond with them, considering how he seems to fondly recount their personality quirks.

Yeah seems like this would be a simple workaround if companies did start adopting this practice