atomicnature

Thanks for sharing your experience and wisdom. The dribble figma course sounds interesting, will check it out!

Yes that makes. The problem is how does one raise the bar within teams and orgs? There, I think principles do help. Also, for teaching others, it is best if we have a baseline of principles.

One can always break the principles once advanced enough

Seems like a gem of a resource; took a look at the blog, and already found a great principle ("rule of locality; place button where the data is") which I had violated just today. Thanks for the recommendation.

Your first point is the truth, although I've found that there are very few takers for this truth :)

In HN itself, I've argued with people numerous times on how challenge is a necessity for advancing in learning, but I've met with stiff resistance to this point often.

So just want to say, glad to see a practicing teacher state the obvious (to practicing teachers) in HN.

Woah, that's a long list of resources, thanks. I've read a few of those ((1), (2), (7)).

(3) is new to me. Will give it a read for sure.

Looks like they have lots of examples; will give this a try!

Love the sharp focus on css, looks interesting. Thanks for the rec.

I'd be interested in something that can automatically schedule (and re-schedule) calls, texts, etc to help me keep in touch with people. I don't want to spend too much time on scheduling except giving it an approximate frequency on which I wish to followup with somebody.

Maybe like a personal CRM. I do think such things exist, but I felt the friction to get started was a bit too much.

I often felt more connected to many books/authors/historical figures, than live people whom I interacted with on a day to day basis.

I realised company/loneliness is not merely about the physical, but it is about a sort of connection that happens at a subtler mental level.

Not sure whether others have had similar experiences.

Either way, if there is any truth to my experience, then you may have to think deeper about what is connection about and how to make it happen more often.

Another pattern I've noticed, natural communities emerging from hobbies/topics, such as in Discord and Youtube.

100% my experience as well. Expo dependencies and build troubles never seem to end.

My thinking on this: Avoid React Native if at all possible.

You want a primarily information-oriented software, without lots of manipulation/interaction, then go with Webview based solutions (capacitor + react).

You want performant manipulation/interactive software, go native.

You can use the React + (Browser, Capacitor, Electron) stack to do this. I'd recommend against React Native. OP's suggestion is superior IMHO.

I would recommend Capacitor JS for mobile, responsive CSS (or CSS utility libs such as PrimeCSS, PrimeFlex, or tailwind), and any JS state based library (React, Preact, etc).

Many people underestimate the power of webview based tech in mobile. For most usecases, webview based tech does just fine.

Whatever you pick for the backend, on the frontend, I'd recommend sticking mainly to pure web technologies. You can get a decent phone version through capacitor or other webview-based solutions. Many eCommerce and such sites do just fine with webview based apps. It is so much easier when you can have just a single code base with some responsive CSS mixed-in to manage, rather than 2-3 codebases, with constantly diverging feature set.

Love this perspective. It is all about the "mental environment" we carry, and one figures out how much polluted the "mental space" gets when one consumes ~1h+ on the screen scrolling everyday.

This. Horrendous names with good execution end up doing just fine. But there's no hope to an initiative with great "branding" but subar delivery. Focus on things that matter (especially in the beginning/early days).

First, try to make taking on challenges and self-improvement part of group culture.

You can introduce your team to various books/videos/articles around people overcoming all sorts of challenges on a day to day basis.

Such an environment motivates everyone to take on challenges: fitness, intellectual, social, and so on.

It is important not to single out anyone on a particular dimension. Acknowledge that we are all lacking in one area or the other - so make it a general team thing, something super normal within your group to work on enhancing both strengths/weaknesses.

As a practical step - share your own shortcomings, and how you have/are overcoming them. This sort of personal struggle, and your efforts to overcome will motivate others to share their own struggles and overcome them.

Your writing is nice and coherent. Maybe put more effort/energy into writing more, polish your skills further, increase depth, and develop some reputation around that. People may come to value your expertise and inputs. Of course, it may take a while before you can find the right niche/medium for it to be a foundation for a "stable career".

In RNN, hidden states are to be sequential; in transformers with attention mechanism, we break free of the sequential requirement. Transformers are more amenable to parallelism, and make use of GPUs the most (within the context axis, and outside).

Transformers tend to be trained in parallel. BERT = 512 tokens per context, in parallel. GPT too is trained while feeding in multiple words in parallel. This enables us to build larger models. Older models, such as RNNs couldn't be trained this way, limiting their power/quality.

In learning and performance, context is often underrated. A significant portion of learning is non-mathematical, non-verbal, and challenging to represent in symbols. An obsession with abstraction and abstracted thinking is not necessarily beneficial at all times.

In my experience, the majority of the time, it is more profitable to pay attention to the context and situation in which you are operating, rather than trying to over-intellectualize too early.

To put it more positively and concretely: "Focus on your personal conduct, accumulate and apply wisdom to your situations, and observe more of your situation, keep adjusting/improving rather than floating in abstract theories."

In more striking terms: "You can't learn to swim by reading a textbook; it is only possible to jump in and 'figure it out' in real-time."

Also, university doesn't prepare you for life mostly, as it teaches over-intellectualization (bad default). Sometimes, I feel university gives you some really bad habits to unlearn as you progress further in life.

Practice, reflect, improve. Put it in a loop. That's life.

You are not even engaging with my argument, let alone "scrutinize" it :)

To meaningfully engage, you must study the history of education systems, how it evolved, what was the situation of scholars in the past and now. If you study those things a bit more, then my argument may make more sense to you.

When it comes to experiencing things, complexity is good. Good music, beautiful nature, complex story, that's all nice.

When it comes to getting things to work, to make things happen, to understanding things... our major bottleneck is the "size of human skull", your cognitive limits.

Descartes gives the example of visualizing a chain made up of many links... at any point, you can only look at say, maximum 4-5 links, you can never see all the links at the same time. That is, in fact, it is impossible for a human to "see a whole chain"! You are "making it up", even with such a simple operation as "see". Therefore, due to such horrendous limits to cognition, you are forced to implement some sort of simplification mechanism.

So the context of discussion is (2) not (1). The people interested in making things happen in the world, to obtain correct/useful/functional/practical viewpoints, tend to gravitate towards simplicity by necessity. There is no other option.

I'm merely commenting on the output. Maybe a good number of people in academia do care about simplicity. Or it is simply that society is falsely incentivizing people to enter into these territories, when they should be doing something else.

Consider this argument: what % of people are in "academia" these days vs the previous centuries out of their own volition? Right now, there is an incentive to go into college, and it so happens that all sorts of people participate in the knowledge-creation process. And a bulk of the people participating in academia - are they really there for the sake of curiosity, to the pursuit of truth, etc? I'd bet that an individual in the past had less societal incentives to come into intellectual/theoretical areas and hash needless theories. So my argument is definitely not baseless (although - it is debatable)

The principle of responsibility and individual initiative - applies even today. The challenge is in different form today, there are new immature fields, but that doesn't make having simpler organising concepts outdated.

Top modern researchers/practitioners do seem to value simplicity heavily, but can't say the same for most. The propensity for misuse of abstraction/models/data/theories is pretty high from what I've seen. That's my view. You are free to disagree!

PS: It is always better to rely on older sources for illustrations, because they have lived their life fully and you have documentation of their lives + effects of their efforts. It is not a good idea to rely on living people to illustrate principles.

What about Rickover? He was implementing nuclear energy to practical applications. You read Rickover's doing a job (https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm), he emphasizes simpler concepts such as responsibility and individual initiative to drive complex technical projects.

I've shown these ideas to many so-called well-educated college graduates, and they don't warm up to it. They say "processes" > "individual initiative". This is too old-school, too simple, blah, blah.

I think people will learn only when you put them in charge of a complex undertaking to appreciate what simplicity means in leadership of complex projects.

Yes, that is not untrue. However, when you talk implementation, a major part of operations is - "what can people understand and act upon in a coherent way". Your bottleneck to most system implementations is the processing capability of the people. Therefore, in practice, less accurate but simpler models end up performing better.

Re: Newton - I am not denying complexity. I am simply saying recognising basic truths, honoring them to the extent to which they deserve, making them the foundation for all further activities/undertaking. For ex - Rickover dealt with super complicated projects, but how he dealt with them is based on utterly simple principles; so simple that people would outright reject them, until they see the results he achieved. One could say the same regarding Lee Kuan Yew's work.

Although an obsession/compulsion with the results, veers your mind off of the process needed to acquire great results. Especially for complex/long-range efforts, I'd argue that "quality of efforts" > "quality of results". Without such an orientation, it becomes difficult keep up with a challenging course of action.