Thanks for the reminder—I often forget about Google's various less-prominent tools and services.
3,486 karma · joined May 11, 2022
If you're looking for major/important sources to read on a topic, not just a quick way to halfway-fake a works-cited section, I've found it valuable to locate some representative, recent academic book in the field and read the author's introduction and other pre-chapter-1 material. These will often include a lot of name-dropping of what are considered major works in the field. There may also be a list of abbreviations the book will use, and those often include several major works in the field that'll come up often in the body text.
That's your list of books and papers to find and read. Repeat that technique with each of those books and papers, too, if you want to keep going deeper.
Often you can get enough off an Amazon or Google preview of a book for this to work. Plus, libraries exist, and you pull that kind of information out of several books (which can be handy—anything that appears more than once deserves special attention) in less than an hour, without checking anything out. And there's always Library Genesis, which may not have every book but probably has at least one in your interest area that can be mined in this way.
Wikipedia's sort of useful for this, at least for tracking down a first work to attack with this approach, but the problem is that many articles don't cite highly-regarded or authoritative or landmark works on the topic, so much as whatever the author(s) happened to have handy or what was easiest to find online (a whole hell of a lot of great information is still not available on the Web, even in 2022, including material in very recent books, not just pre-Web ones, or is available on the Web but only in poorly- or not-indexed-by-web-search-engines under-copyright ebooks).
Becoming a parent is what finally made me realize how wise it is to tack a couple extra minutes on your poo-time.
[EDIT] Uh, so I addressed the how I organize my notes (I basically don't—the value added by organizing them is too low to be worth the effort) but as for the "what": mostly I use notes to capture ideas I don't want to forget. If I'm out and about, or pretty much any time I'm not at my desktop, that's usually some little thought that popped into my head that I'll forget if I don't get it down now (so, that's why I end up back in Notes when I try notebooks or whatever instead—I always have my phone, but sometimes forget a notebook, so I end up with notes both places, at which point it's better to just drop the notebook).
At my workstation, I tend to take notes on things like complex command-line invocations, or else use them as a kind of archive for my paste buffer (for things I may want to copy-paste again in a few days, or months, that may not end up in the shell history where I happen to need them, or weren't anything shell-related to begin with). I will sometimes sketch out e.g. system designs in a notebook, but those get turned into real digital documents before long, if they matter (they don't go in my notes).
That's... a new one for me. Ah, they're all over Etsy—if anyone else was thrown by that, they're exactly what your first guess would be based on the name: a big round pin with your preferred pronouns printed on it. Interesting.
> > In the world I want to live in, we don’t have to set negative rules like “don’t harass people.” Instead, we could get by with positive guidelines like “be welcoming” and “be kind” and use our giant human brains to figure out how to apply those values to novel situations. When I get the chance, I try to create those spaces. When I have the energy, I try to educate and inform instead of correct. But I still keep this simple phrase in my back pocket as a tool for ending and defusing situations when other approaches don’t work.
The author did put it at the end, but it's definitely there.
A show of power expressed through "low", indirect language. Might not be sending the intended message. "That doesn't work for me", in particular, reads as "parochial middle manager" to me.
"Well, no, because now we know you'll actually use what we say we provide, and we don't really want to provide what we're offering—that part's a lie."
It'd be different if they'd responded by discontinuing that kind of plan entirely.
This seems pretty straightforward to me.
I'm already grossed-out enough when I happen to catch a glimpse of myself using a normal computer (faces of people immersed in a computer screen look a bit disturbing, kinda slack and dead, and it's much worse when the face is your own)
I'm with you, it's too weird for now. I'll probably give in when they've got AR/VR combo glasses that you can toggle from one to the other, which I assume is the endgame for all this. By then I'll probably need it to talk to my grandkids or whatever anyway. The march of "progress".
That means a lie was told.
The reason for not continuing the service means they lied. That it doesn't violate their ToS is beside the point—they offered something that they did not intend to let people actually use. The evidence is precisely the fact that they'll stop doing business with you if you actually use what they sold you (and don't agree to pay them more money).
Interviews are very different from working together collaboratively. They're very different from presenting work to or working with a client or stakeholder, too, and even very different from a sales presentation. The space of things that might come up is effectively unbound, how you're being judged is wildly uncertain, you are being judged, and you know almost nothing about the people you're "working with". As practiced in software, they're closer to being called in to give a thesis defense without knowing in advance which thesis you'll be defending—and also everyone in the room is a stranger, and also you have no clue which aspects of your performance are being judged or by what criteria, and even know for a fact that some of the people conducting these have completely opposite opinions about which behaviors are desirable and which are "red flags".
It's not that big a deal. People lie tons. It's not murder. But it's still a lie.
Raises hand
The fact that these kinds of lies are normal doesn't make them OK. Instead, just... don't lie.
But tons of non-microtransaction games are coming out all the time. I game lots and don't see any impending shortage of that kind of game. They're coming out at a higher rate than ever, as far as I can tell, and I've been PC gaming and console gaming since something like 1990. I can't keep up with 5% of them, total—as in, I don't think I'm even aware of the existence of a solid 95% of what's coming out, but I can see enough that I'm certain I'm missing a ton—and can't even manage to try all the AAA titles of that kind at the rate they come out, let alone the vast ocean of indie and hobbyist games.
If the whole pie's growing, it doesn't follow that growth of microtransaction games are cutting into the availability of non-microtransaction games. Both could be growing. If non-microtransaction games are dying, it sure looks like they decided to flourish to a degree they never have before, just before they die (which must still be some point in the future).
Whatever the truth of the rest of what you're pushing, this part doesn't pass the smell test, at all.
I've been doing some serious innovation in plumbing lately. Cut the drain pipe of an upstairs toilet so now it just drains into the room under it. If you hadn't been paying attention to letting-toilets-drain-into-occupied-rooms, you might not think there's much innovation going on in plumbing.
Like, there's the trope of the kid being called to the blackboard and not being able to solve some trivial problem even though they're not an idiot—and it's based in reality. IDK why we assume that reaction must be rare among adults.
[0] In certain kinds of tech interviews, to be specific. Somehow most of the rest of the white-collar and professional world gets by just fine without these kinds of hazing rituals.
And no, it's not smartphones' faults. Most people just don't "get" desktop OS paradigms, or how web pages work, or any of that, and they don't really care to.
It can be jarring to hear in otherwise tame movies, now that we're conditioned to shun the word, but I'm pretty sure that conditioning is something that only a minority of people in the US have been exposed to, even today. Mostly those of us who are online too much, probably. Outside that sort of bubble I'm not sure how "problematic" it's actually considered to be, by the average person.
Problems I personally have almost never pass the point on the cost/benefit curve for which it's worth firing up a text editor, and when they do the "solution" is usually a few lines of shell or something similarly trivial. I used to get excited about personal projects, years and years ago, but that was mostly because I didn't realize what solutions already existed so was reinventing the wheel a lot. Plus I just had a whole lot more free time.
I also don't do a lot of plumbing or wiring or wall-framing or drywalling for their own sake. Though I do find a lot more good reasons to do those things in my personal life, than I find good reasons for writing code.
I don't think that, but it's just as reasonable a position with about as much grounding in reality.
Says something about how Facebook sees itself, I guess.
"Modern standards", ha! Hasn't changed a bit.
(and—sigh—no, I'm not pro-Russian when it comes to the invasion of Ukraine, or much else for that matter)