5,940 karma · joined January 30, 2014
Always-on-screen scrollbars are only useless if you think that indication is useless. Many people find it quite valuable.
(Caveat: I've always been interviewing for members of a small team who I might very literally be sitting next to every day and communicating constantly with. BigCo interviewing is different.)
That said: do not abuse benzos. They will fuck you up.
I was prescribed temazepam for insomnia. It was the only sleep medication that worked, and it was the best sleep I've had in my life. It stopped being effective after around 30 days (or maybe 60, I forget). That was the end of that. I could have argued for a higher dose or a refill or whatever, but... you don't fuck with benzos.
(And congratulations on breaking the cycle. It's not easy.)
The simple act of forcing a roundtrip through your brain and muscles might seem like a small barrier, but I think it's actually a big step in terms of forcing you to interact with the text and take ownership. It's also not practical to do for large blocks of text, and likely will find you putting your stamp on and slightly rewriting even medium-length passages. Both of which are features of the definition.
To give a concrete example, suppose you are doing some image processing and you need to write out something like a BMP image file from the pixel data in memory. Suppose, also, that it's dynamic-ish and you can't really precompute the header and just copy it around. This is a horrifying nightmare to do in an FPGA, generally involving writing a custom state machine and populating different bits of the structure on each clock and so on and so on. (This is not an arbitrary example, sadly; I've had to do almost exactly this.) You can do it but it's just plain hard.
On a CPU you're done in five minutes, for a BMP file.
Now imagine you want to write out a JPEG or PNG. On a CPU this is hard enough that you'll probably grab a library... and then still be done in about five minutes. Maybe thirty if something's unusual or you're being extra careful. Maybe a day or two if you decide to write it yourself (don't do this).
On an FPGA? Holy hell you're in pain. You're either going to spend $$$ licensing something or you're going to be there for weeks.
That is why there are jobs that FPGAs don't do. They're not technically impossible, they're infeasibly impossible.
If it is your core business, yes, great, do them. But you'd never decide to stop making wasteful unoptimized BMP files on an FPGA "just because". It's a major chunk of work. But on a CPU, five minutes.
The point I was trying to make is that the CPU is a general-purpose creature and doesn't really care what you want it to do. If you had a CPU that could handle 1.2Tbps of Ethernet packets at 1Gpps, it could do a whole lot of other things involving 1.2Tbps of data flow too, very easily, if someone wrote the software. And more. (But you're probably not getting 2.4Tbps out of it, no matter what you do.)
An FPGA can not. There's plenty of things that those XCVU13Ps just can't do, or would do worse than a $1 microcontroller. (Setting aside for a moment implementing a CPU inside the FPGA... which does actually happen in just about every large-enough FPGA design, which is its own discussion....)
You get an FPGA for timing. They're less capable, but (in many common design architectures), they output their results once per clock, every clock, on time, every time. If you can hit a fabric clock of say 100MHz, clocking all the weird logic you can stuff in there, it gives 100 million outputs per second, never skipping a single one for any reason (short of total failure). The penalty is that making a small change to your desired "program" can be very expensive, and many things won't be realistically possible at all. Or at least won't fit into a part that you can buy. But things like audio, video, and high-frequency trading love being able to guarantee timing.
(Of course there are other ways to write your FPGA HDL, but that's one of the more common ones. And you do see DDR-style clocking, and similar, every now and then.)
Francis isn't the first Nobel Prize winner I've crossed paths with. But I think he's the only one I'd call a "decent human being". (When I use it, that phrase has a meaning roughly comparable to "nontrivial", so, saying it is nontrivial.) He was well enough liked by faculty and students during my time at UW-Madison.
It's important to note that he's not getting the prize for "conceiving of IceCube" like some people are saying. It's for "conceiving of IceCube and somehow actually making it happen". The latter is the achievement.
Congratulations.
I wonder how stable this thing is, or if it can even be all that reliably purified out (if anyone wanted to). I've heard from reliable-ish sources that when tritium is introduced to the body it diffuses throughout quite rapidly, so I'm guessing it might be impossible to get rid of this with any reasonable level of effort.
(Which in no way excuses their utter evil.)
You do them because they benefit you.
Not going to benefit you? There's lots of ways to say no to a back-channel request. Not a back-channel request? Then I guess it's not someone else's job!
It's useful.
And then there's times like getting to charge your client $300/hour to drop stuff off at FedEx. Because you can do that and you're here and you'll get it done right -- no one needs to explain the idiosyncracies of this particular deadline or package contents; you've got it.
Even if that's not normally a senior consultant's job.
In too much of the world, nobody with any kind of power cares. (My own country included.) It's the prisoner's dilemma yet again: why should any of us who might care cooperate, when everyone else is cheating?
We hit that point a long, long time ago.
The situation isn't hopeless, I think, but this talk of "point of no return" doesn't work because it doesn't acknowledge the reality that, as ever, it's political and some people actively do not want to address it.
But my point about electrocution risk is that 240V is not twice as dangerous as 120V. It's actually much, much worse. And 480V is worse still. We used to say that screwing up 120V will hurt you, 240V will kill you, and 480V will kill you, start your corpse on fire, and blind everyone around you. So the design requirements for all 240V class plugs are much more important.
> not falling out of walls ... is up to the manufacturer
This one is a real problem in the US because there is a standard, it is a good standard, parts are made and tested to the standard, and standards-compliant parts work very well. But few people require the damn standard. If you want good receptacles in the US, get stuff that's marked "Federal Specification W-C-596 rated" (aka "Fed Spec"; "Spec Grade" is self-certified to... something... which is... not the same thing... but in practice the manufacturers seem not to abuse that term too much; often lower-volume part numbers seem only to be available as "Spec Grade" presumably due to testing cost). It will perform well.
The US plug (NEMA 1-15P is the 2-prong version, or 5-15P for the most common 3-prong grounded) is actually pretty decent. They stay in sockets pretty well if the sockets aren't bottom-of-the-barrel garbage products which, sadly, many things in the US are in general.
What many people miss when comparing US and EU plugs are that they're actually doing fairly different jobs. The 120V mains in the US is significantly less trouble than the 240V in Europe, so you can get away with a lot less mechanically on the plug. The US NEMA 6-15P plug design (the 240V version of the standard plug) is, accordingly, kind of shit. But at least it's rare enough that receptacles tend to be of decent quality, which mitigates a lot. The locking versions (L5-15R etc) are actually quite good, and should almost always be used when possible and appropriate. They're good to 480V and even a bit beyond -- not just working but actually good -- and you can't say that about most EU plug designs. You guys have those horribly bulky pin-and-sleeve disasters and we get nice NEMA locking plugs for our three-phase.
One of the other things that European plugs have to deal with, and US plugs don't, is that European electricians have no idea how to separate hot and neutral wires and basically wire them up randomly. This has major consequences in a lot of product design and is really really annoying when you're trying to build something safe. (Namely: in the US you're often (but not always) not allowed to fuse neutral wires. That makes sense, for safety reasons. You have to fuse hot... but in Europe you don't know which one is hot, so you have to fuse them both. Which means you just fused neutral. Design conflict!) That shows up in the plugs, too; with no idea where hot is, you have to be more careful and can't use neutral to help you out.
The one at the beginning was far more interesting.
Please don't do this. It's not helpful.
That makes it a lot easier to deal with things like the bad AI transcriptions going around. Get burned by AI that can't hear what you're saying? It's in your file, what it heard and then what it screwed up. Providers don't like everything being on the record like that? Maybe they shouldn't be trusting that tool.
Want to know what the useless AI saw when it sent you to group therapy for acute mania? It's in your file. Providers don't like everything being on the record like that? Maybe they shouldn't be trusting that tool.
I think this is more relevant than people give it credit for. While bipolar depression and unipolar (major) depression might generally be functionally indistinguishable from the outside, they seem to have genuinely different origins within the body and brain.
And the drugs seem to be far more powerful for people with bipolar.
That's both good and bad. Good, because between mood stabilizers and very careful use of antidepressants, many people with bipolar can genuinely achieve complete treatment, or close enough to pass as complete. Which is wonderful! Bad because antidepressants and (hypo)mania are a dangerous combination, and the antidepressants can have more kick than one would normally expect. They'll often cause a patient's first manic episode, which can be very bad on its own but might get things on the right treatment course. (Of course, they often still do nothing much at all.
I think the tapering may be related as well. I was eventually diagnosed with bipolar II and I've never really had to taper off anything that didn't have a black-box warning about tapers (either intrinsically or due to blood-pressure effects, which are worth taking seriously). I've stopped some things cold which one really shouldn't stop cold. I didn't really notice much other than the bad side effects causing the stop going away.
> I do have "extra money" and am able to pay extremely qualified and expensive doctors
I don't really have "extra money" but I still do this anyway. My psychiatrist is $500 an hour, out of pocket, no insurance accepted period. He actually listens. It's worth it.
Because, man, some years really were just that good.
As you said it can be kind of surprising!
So that wasn't really a consideration for me.
The "why this not that, even when it looks like that would do just fine" style of differential analysis is an exquisitely powerful analytical tool. Asking this question is probably the single most powerful method I know of to generate deep thought, in absolutely any aspect of life. If you haven't tried it... go for it!
(Sample question: why'd I choose the word "exquisitely" in the above sentence?)
> In the short term, thinness prevails. ... The real question is not “which of these things looks nicer when you look at them for two seconds?” but “which of these things will stand the test of time?”
That tracks with another thing I've noticed I approach differently. I've recently joined a book club and everyone loves to talk about how many "stars" they gave a book. I've never really been able to rank things like that. Aside from there being no such thing as a total ordering of books (or movies or ...), who's to say what five stars from you means, compared to five stars from me? Instead I've started thinking about books in terms of "book of the month", "book of the year", "book of the decade", "book of the century", et cetera. Is this going to be the best thing I read all month or all decade? Am I going to remember this for a year or forget most of it next week? Is everyone still going to be talking about this one in 80 years? I think that's a much better scale than "one to five stars (but actually three to five stars)", and much more interesting. It also bakes in both the inherent subjectivity and inherent fuzziness really well.
(Yes, some things... plenty of things... are thin enough to be candidates for "book of the day" or "book of the hour". Few things are forgettable enough to go below that, though there have been some attempts; mostly at that level things underflow and you get in to Mystery Science Theater 3000 territory, which is its own special kind of thing.)