gerbilly

> who is going to interpret an ambiguous problem so as to make more work for themselves?

I did.

In fact I always tried to find a unique or novel solution to my problem sets, ambiguous or not. (If the problem set contained a hint I tried mightily to not use the hint, I'd always try to replace a proof by contradiction with a constructive proof etc...)

My marks suffered for it. I even almost failed a first year exam cos I didn't want to perform a grody 4x4 matrix multiplication. Later the prof said: "Your exam was crap, but you came up with a better answer for problem four than I'd thought of."

It's still one of my most cherished memories from undergrad.

I always hated the: "Will this be on the test" type of attitude. Are you there to learn and break new ground or to just get marks? I had crappy marks but my work spoke for itself.

Students should put more effort into creating their own body of work. If they spent half the energy they put into finding tricks and gaming the system, they'd be much better off for it.

One of the first types of communication that develops in infants is communication via gaze. Basically a kid looks at an item he wants to draw attention to it.

Even animals use this form of communication with us. I had a cat once look at his empty plate then look at me in the eyes. The message was clear: My plate is empty, fill it!

> The universe does not owe you anything. You do not owe the universe anything.

Being grateful for how we have been taken care of , by our parents, our teachers our friends, by the biosphere, and figuring out what we 'owe' them in return seem to me what life is really about.

Je trouve ça comique qu'une discussion qui traite de l'apprentissage du Français ne contienne pas un seul commentaire écrit en Français.

J'avoue que je ne les ai pas _tous_ lus, mais....

Winter surfing taught me to tolerate the cold.

That movie endless summer has it backwards. Surfing almost everywhere is better in the winter. It's just that winter in Hawaii is pretty warm.

Where I live we surf in the great lakes in late winter, starting about now actually till end of April.

While you're in the water with a wetsuit, it's not too bad. Water can't get too far below 0ºC but the air temperatures are often way below freezing, and the windchill can be brutal, because lake surfing is dependent on wind.

Getting out of my 5mm wet-suit in a parking lot in February taught me what it really means to be cold.

Since then, conditions I would have thought of as cold are much more tolerable.

Now if I have to take out the trash in the winter and there's fresh clean snow on the ground, instead of wrestling with winter boots I just go barefoot.

The secret to not feeling cold is that when you're cold, just let yourself be cold through and through. Don't fight it.

Yeah, the article. :-)

> Speaking slowly and loudly in english at someone in a small french village asking for the bakery isn't something that we should mourn losing.

So don't shout then, and god forbid, maybe learn some French?

English isn't my fist language, and yet here I am talking to you.

I've been following this thread and I have to agree with noduerme.

Despite the truisms that each generation tends to think things are going to hell, this time they really are going to hell.

A life unmediated by machines is qualitatively different from one that is. Books, TV, video games were self limiting compared to the modern internet—especially social media—delivered via smartphones. Why?

1. Because they change the way we acquire knowledge. Anyone who has taken trips to foreign countries before smartphones and GPS would have been forced to talk to _people_. We had paper maps and guidebooks (Lonely Planet, my ass it's today's planet that seems lonely), but when those didn't match the reality on the ground, we were forced to ask people. Now we can all go along in our own little bubbles with our phones and experience things without talking to people.

2. It is reducing our connection to our bodies and bringing us up into our heads even more. To live a full life means to be in contact with the physical world, and to act within it.

3. As has been said above, the incentives of the makers of smartphone apps are almost always at odds with living a meaningful life. The apps almost always will try to increase your engagement with your phone, and because time isn't infinite, this means decreasing your engagement with life.

4. Because of the portability, smartphones are omnipresent. Some people even check them while they sleep.

And the sad thing is that, yes, it takes people who have lived almost their entire lives outside of the 'app' ecosystem to tell younger people this.

The apps and the phone and the habit of using them all the time have changed you developmentally. You can't see the water your swimming in, but there are some of us who still can.

> the mess

The mess is because it was raided in ancient times, then hastily cleaned up and re-sealed.

While I don't think that consensus can bend the laws of physics, I believe that humans largely construct their social reality.

Buddhists often refer to things which are 'conditioned', i.e. dependent on conditions for their continued existence. Many so called truths humans believe in are conditioned, and also require maintenance (continued belief, and communication of the idea, embedding into institutions and laws etc...) to keep the alive.

See: https://www.amazon.com/Social-Construction-Reality-Sociology...

Yeah sure, if you say so. How about this. Let's restrict it to the Pacific islands only and see what's been happening in reggae since the 80s.

There's a thriving scene in Hawaii with great music coming out to this day.

This one features two amazing vocalists, Irie Love and Fiji (George Veikoso)

It is wut it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZVF7QWjs44

Then there's New Zealand:

Katchafire: Way Beyond https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjKLocagFPw

I could have picked dozens of other great songs.

> Finally, am I the only sick of these stereotypical images of 'native indigenous cultures living in simple harmony with nature' a la Avatar?

This is a valid criticism of the depiction of aboriginal cultures.

But I've come to believe that there is a subtle racism in not accepting that aboriginals intentionally chose to develop cultures which were durable and in 'harmony with nature.'

They are the same homo sapiens with the same intelligence and nature as the homo sapiens of Europe or from other more 'advanced' societies. They could have chosen to develop their culture in such a way that led to being 'out of harmony' just as easily as some other peoples did.

Aboriginals in say, Australia, had plenty of time to develop a more advanced society (some estimates say they've been there 40k years). When western people depict them as living close to the land, I smell a whiff of the subtext 'because they couldn't do any better'. Yeah they could have done otherwise, but they chose not to!

I work with a group of engineers and lately because of attending a conference, we have started to talk a lot about climate change. Some of the ideas our group initially came up with are really ridiculous, like some kind of machine to extract carbon from the atmosphere and to sequester it.

It's called a tree, they are everywhere, and they do it for free. They will propagate by themselves if we just had the patience to let them do so.

Preach it brother!

Also, you should consider renting out space on your cube.

You could even design APIs around the internet protocols so they can create their own DNS records, mailboxes. Wait...

> being on the cloud means downtime is correlated with downtime of other services. That's usually a good thing.

A long time ago, I used to circulate snarky little emails at work.

One of them was responding to this very concept.

My managers were throwing out our working and mature UNIX servers (implementing DNS, Mail, and other services) in favour of NT.

The new system crashed a lot, we had some security breaches, but at least it was 'industry standard.'

Managements' response was that with the UNIX stuff we had no one to pin our outages on. Now we could blame Microsoft, and call their support line.

I circulated an email making fun of this justification, which promoted a fictional product called 'Blame Studio' which would help you map out the blame path for any of your products or services.

It would help to make sure that none of the blame ever landed on you, but rather was always redirected onto some other company.

I'm not moving anything, just augmenting my point. Reread my comment and do s/serverless/cloud/ if you want, I still stand behind it either way.

The whole thing reminds me of the early nineties.

There was a whole mature infrastructure built around UNIX and open standards at the time.

We were told to scrap that and replace it with Windows NT and its descendants.

While UNIX wasn't perfect¹, Windows was an order of magnitude worse.

Compared to our UNIX machines, those systems got the internet protocols wrong, were full of security holes and crashed all the time. Objectively worse performance and security was tolerated for a decade or more, just because we all convinced each other that this was the way things were going.

It took Microsoft maybe ten fifteen years to work their problems out. And now there's a Linux env built into Windows.

This cloud thing isn't the end of computing history, just like Windows on the server wasn't the end of history.

Cloud isn't better than on prem. It's just popular right now.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

False dichotomy, if you say so.

I haven't found it too helpful when dealing with AWS and the serverless trend, whose popularity is really just based on price and economics, not technical superiority.

Serverless turns every simple system into a distributed system with the number of failure modes now multiplied by ten.

That sounds like fun.

I do know how to use serverless for the record, I just think it's an overhyped, overpriced waste of time.

Well at least you said please, however:

I have built and run my own infrastructure from the ground up, and I've been made to transition to the cloud.

The experience hasn't been great. It may simply be sour 'grapes' because, after all the expertise a whole generation has built up learning UNIX, and all the internet protocols (DNS, ARP, Email, reading RFCs, networking, routing) we get told that all that old stuff is just 'legacy,' and that we should retool around amazon's proprietary services instead.

Some of us old timers argued against this only to be shouted down by people who don't even understand TCP/IP.

The current generation couldn't invent the internet. You know why, cos they would never have the patience to spec it out like the old timers did. Go read a few RFCs and try to imagine a scrum team today putting as much thought into an up front design.

Today we'd just cruft together an MVP, solve only the interesting parts (or more likely the easy parts) and then move on, letting dashboards which lie to cover it up.

Many of us have been taking shots at those 'big boys' since the start of this trend.

Now that because of recent events and we have a chance to be heard you're telling us to be quiet. Why?What are you afraid of?

He's probably just thinking of openness to experience."

Glad you liked it.

Also just to add one point. When you are an employee you will never get to be more than a sharecropper, growing your crops on someone else's land.

I find it's best to always remain clear about this. Do good work sure, but remember it's never yours, really. Corollary: it's not worth investing too much ego in it.

If you want to work on something you love, then start a side project.

I think that the success of the 'British invasion' groups in America is that it provided a safe way for mainstream Americans to listen to black musical genres.

The British musicians—who weren't as queasy about it—took R&B, Rock and Blues and played it back to the Americans from a safe distance.

I'm not going to tell you to 'learn your place' like other commenters, or even suggest you change your attitude.

Employment implies a power gradient between you and the employer.

The thing that sucks is that income is tied to employment for most of us, and it's OK to express the fact that this sucks.

How do we go beyond this? This is a problem I've found difficult to resolve myself.

For people who are creative, and good at what they do (as you seem to be) it's always going to be a struggle to fit into a structure like that.

Because I am a freelancer, I've worked at a lot of different companies.¹

What I've noticed is that sometimes they love you and praise you, and other times the hate you and blame you. In one situation you are a hero, in another a pain in the ass. Sometimes both even happened in the same company/team.

All the time I'm the exact same person. We all have a mix of personality traits that we bring to our work. Some traits the employer will like, some they won't. But what I've learned is that they all come together. They are a package deal.

So despite the posts below that encourage you to change who you are, I am suggesting you should just be more conscious of the interplay between the qualities you have in your 'bundle' and how to best deploy them in each situation.

I've also learned to take blame and even praise from employers with a grain of salt.² They are just trying to shape your behaviour, and will probably change their opinion of you next month.

So in the end it's a relationship. In some cultures they don't look for soulmates, they just marry a decent person and move on, saying to themselves, most [husbands|wives] are pretty much the same.

I think they are onto something. Find a 'good enough' employer, and stop looking for your 'soulmate job.' Do decent work, then go home. And find some hobbies!

1: Lots of short contracts, by mutual agreement. Also a handful of full time jobs.

2: A quote from the Buddha on this:

    Just as solid rock is not shaken by the wind,

    Even so the Wise are unmoved by blame or by praise.

Yeah exactly what I was going to say, you have to consider the chord voicing, the strum pattern, and whether the sequence of chords makes sense for a human to comfortably play.

Someone above mentioned: "Here comes the sun", which is a great example.

First gotcha, it sort of sounds finger picked, but it's not it's flat picked. Another unusual thing about that song is that it's played w/ a capo on 7th fret.

Now I'm sure some software could figure out the individual notes, but I wouldn't be surprised if it transcribed it as nonsense sequence of notes all over on the g, b and e strings, instead of arpeggiated chords as it really is played.

Ultimately, your argument is a troll because you are trying to tell people what they should value in a programming language.

I wasn't really focused so much on where in the brain the two types of attention were located. It may be as he describes it in the video, or it may not.

For meditation, however, I feel strongly that the goal is to achieve a balanced state of mind, and the balance is as I understand it, is between these two types of attention.

I think you're right. There seems to be two sorts of attention in the mind, narrowly focused attention and broad diffuse attention.

I see the goal of meditation not so much as alternating between the two modes but rather like balancing them and running them both in parallel.

This entire video is really excellent, but see particularly this bit here, where Iain McGilchrist describes the concept.

https://youtu.be/dFs9WO2B8uI?t=88

Introversion may also appear on Myers-Briggs, but it also one of the 'Big Five' personality factors, one of the most robust findings in psychology.

I read your comment last night and it bothered me enough that I had to google it to find it this morning.

tl;dr: Look for things that spark joy and double down on them. Forget about success, focus on fun in the moment.

I beleive you have an unmet need which is causing you suffering, it just may not be what you seem to think it is.

I also started feeling the same way lately. I work with a bunch of PhDs. To me it seems like they are constantly running marathons, writing papers, giving talks etc. Me I'm just a programmer working amongst them, hopefully helping them write better code.

Added to that, I also felt just meh about the work I do, another server deployment, another backend service to deploy etc... Objectively I know it helps the scientists I work with, but it just doesn't feel that way.

Honestly I thought I didn't like programming anymore till I happened upon something that sparked the same joy I used to feel when I was 13 hacking on my Apple ][. It happened to be the Rust programming language (I had been mostly doing Java server side work recently).

I would say that the fact that you are even feeling like this, that you are even asking these questions suggests that you have a divergent mind. Don't stop looking, except don't use 'success' as your criteria, look for the things that give you joy, and when you find one just keep coming back to it.

Note that the joy may not leap out at you right away. It can be that we have gotten out of the habit of recognising fun when we see it, so you might have to make yourself quiet enough to hear it.

Edit: To add a final point. For me I figured that one of my unmet needs was to have my own thing that I could master completely. My side project in Rust became that for me. In that project I was not forced into any compromise, and I understand each and every line in there. Rust actually made this easier for me, because I found that their documentation is aimed at allowing you to reach full understanding¹, which after years of trial and error server side programming with frameworks felt just simply awesome to me.

1: http://web.mit.edu/rust-lang_v1.25/arch/amd64_ubuntu1404/sha...

Well lambdas are also cheaper than virtual servers.

(Cheaper that is if you don't value your employees time, which most large companies don't.)

> serverless hype didn't mean that programmers would only write business logic

Yeah, I've found that when we recently tried serverless, we ended up wasting tons of time bikeshedding multiple CI/CD pipelines.