msluyter

https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-m...

"Consider a typical working day in the medieval period,” said Schor. “It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks."

Additionally, the medieval calendar was also one of many official Church-going holidays which were always considered mandatory. In total, leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year.

And I had/have quite mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I felt that this person was generally trying to be helpful and improve the situation around them. And feedback/advice can certainly serve that end. Who doesn't want to know how to improve their overall performance, right?

But on the other, to the extent that the power dynamic above was actually in play, unsolicited feedback of this sort only rubbed people the wrong way. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but thinking back to certain times in my past where I've been the advice giver, I do think there are occasions where my motivations were suspect, where, at the time I thought I was genuinely trying to help someone, but which in retrospect were mostly superiority displays.

I don't have any concrete conclusions to draw from this; just something the article stirred up. I welcome your feedback. ;)

I've worked around that in the past by creating empty "target files" that are created when a given target is built and which dependencies rely on, but it's not a perfect solution.

I've looked around for a make alternative, but although I like rake, I don't really use Ruby these days, and so dealing with RVM/rbenv and whatnot is sort of a pain and not worth the effort over make.

Aging my self quite a bit here, but we used to do the same via text based MUDs. ;)

Even if feedback in a single case isn't actionable, one can imagine that in aggregate it could be. If during discovery lawyers can find certain themes/patterns in the feedback offered to rejected interviewees, they might be able to use that as evidence. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but my wife's a lawyer....

Aside from that, in simple economic terms, offering feedback makes no sense. After all, if it helps rejected candidate, you're basically helping to improve someone who may end up working for your competition. And if it doesn't, you're wasting time. I'm not saying "in economic terms" is the right/only way to guide behavior, but if you want to understand the behavior of most companies, it's something to keep in mind.

What's more dangerous, IMHO, was the tendency for YouTube to queue up stuff that's increasingly dubious. So, you might start out with something that was high quality (see note below) but up next would be some weird apparently mass produced garbage with like people opening easter eggs, and it'd drift off from there. You really have to work to curate your own youtube content, and they don't make it easy.

[1] Incidentally, Super Simple Songs was our favorite. High quality, clever, instructional videos that we felt good about letter her watch.

https://www.patagonia.com/blog/2017/02/an-update-on-microfib...

    a = 17
    print("a=", a)
    print("a=" + str(a))
    print("a=%s" % a)
    print("a={}".format(a))
    print(f"a={a}") 
    # python 3.8 =>
    print(f"{a=}")

But, if it sounds like I agree with you, I actually don't. I feel that the Zen of Python has taken on an almost religious level of veneration in people's minds, and leads to all sorts of unproductive debates. One person can latch onto "there should be one obvious way to do it" and another onto "practicality beats purity" and another onto "readability counts." Who's right? All can be. Or none. All could be applied to this particular case.

The Zen of Python is just a set of rough heuristics, and no heuristic or principle in the field of software development applies 100% of the time, IMHO. <= except for this one ;)

a) Is it real people/computer voice? It's real people (seems like pretty good speakers thus far.) b) The shortened texts are well written. They don't appear to be computer generated.

I'm still not sure I'll get a paid subscription. I find it a good way to ingest certain types of information -- psychology & personal development books always seem bloated with case stores like "When Bob first visited my office he seemed anxious and depressed...." that I'm generally impatient with (just get to the point!). But after listening to several in a row, my mind starts to wander. Not sure why.

And in some cases, I find the resulting summarizations vacuous. I don't know whether that's because the underlying material was equally vacuous or whether something was lost in translation. (Obligatory reference to Monty Python's Summarize Proust Competition: http://www.montypython.net/scripts/proust.php)

Selection bias? Consider the type of person likely to be attracted to languages like Haskell or Clojure.

(Note, didn't read the original study so I don't know the selection criteria. Were code samples in different languages from the same programmers compared, or were there different sets of programmers per language? My comment really only applies to the latter case.)

Having these made it extremely easy to refactor large portions of the system quickly without needing to refactor unit tests. (I still wrote unit tests, just less of them, more focused on the stabler parts of the system.) This has loosened the grip of the "every function must have a unit test" mantra in my mind, which... I dunno, somewhere along the way sort of became simply assumed.

Some caveats to note, however. A) The code had minimal external dependencies (postgres). B) The integration tests ran very quickly against a local postgres database, only slightly slower than unit tests might, providing a quick dev feedback loop. C) While internally, the system was rather complex, the output was not. It was a simple CSV file that's trivial to parse/compare.

Thus, I wouldn't overgeneralize from the above. In cases where there are lots of external dependencies, integration tests are slow, or where evaluating the test results is more tricky (ie, you need Selenium or whatnot), this approach wouldn't be as feasible.

The middle-class families in our study had more resources and more options but felt completely overwhelmed by hectic schedules and competing demands that left little time to cook.

One strategy is batch cooking in advance on weekends and freezing meals, but for various reasons, we've been fairly poor at that.

Incidentally, if you want to get better at cooking, I highly recommend Cook's Illustrated / America's Test Kitchen, in particular, their special edition magazines. They provide recipes but also techniques and the science behind the recipes.

This one in particular is a gold mine and is almost falling apart from heavy use:

https://shop.americastestkitchen.com/special-issues/cook-s-i...

https://black.readthedocs.io/en/stable/editor_integration.ht...

I'm sort of proud to note that my salt score is -0.08, with my saltiest comment being:

The iPad and iPhone are especially dangerous when it comes to accidental downvoting. Separating or enlarging the arrows would help those of us with fat fingers.

However, (and this will apparently add to my salt score ;)), I'm curious how a comments like these get rated as expressing a negative sentiment?:

Out of curiosity, how does Metro look to color blind people?

I used to get terribly sleepy in the afternoons; sometimes I'd go out to my car and take a 15 minute nap, even in the brutal Texas summer. Then I started taking vitamin D and went on a paleo diet, and now I almost never get tired in the afternoons. Nada. It's a great relief to not always be fighting to stay awake.

But to play devil's advocate for a moment, isn't there something of a natural disincentive to level up one's employees in such a tight labor market? To follow the author's analogy, by mentoring someone, we're effectively "adding a fish" to the pond, and if someone else "catches" the fish, that effort is largely wasted. One might argue that if everyone put more fish in the pond, then we'd all be better off (true), but we have a standard collective action problem where the free riders benefit at the expense of the fish growers.

I see two (partial) ways out of this trap.

1. Pay more than everyone around you. (Obviously, not generally viable.)

2. Make the culture of your company so awesome that people will want to stay, even if you can't pay the most. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow.

I'd be curious to hear other possibilities.

Contrast that to my wife, who, despite having a degree from a top ivy league school, seems to have hated every job she's ever had and would drop it all to retire in an instant if she could afford it.

I will note that I also have had the luxury of exploring the "do what you love" career theory. Out of high school, I wanted to be an orchestral musician, and spent like 12 years pursuing that path before realizing that it wasn't going to work out. So I sort of had to reset my brain to understand that I didn't have to do this one thing to be happy. So I'm not sitting here in a cubicle thinking "if only...." because I've done the "if only." (Not having other options is actually a surprisingly effective route to happiness. (See: Stumbling on Happiness)).

Another great book related to this topic is "How to Want What You Have."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_...

"In his first book, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965), he theorized that what stimulates people to act in groups is incentive; members of large groups do not act in accordance with a common interest unless motivated by personal gain (economic, social, etc.). While small groups can act on shared objectives, large groups will not work towards shared objectives unless their individual members are sufficiently motivated.[3]

In 1982, he expanded the scope of his earlier work in an attempt to explain The Rise and Decline of Nations (1982). He argues that groups such as cotton-farmers, steel-producers, and labor unions have an incentive to form lobby groups and influence policies in their favor. These policies will tend to be protectionist, which will hurt economic growth; but because the benefits of such policies are concentrated, and their costs are diffused throughout the whole population, there will be little public resistance to them. As distributional coalitions accumulate, nations burdened by them will fall into economic decline. His work influenced the formulation of the Calmfors–Driffill hypothesis of collective bargaining.[4]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mancur_Olson

Additionally, I've found that for maximum creativity/productivity, I need periods of down time. Work on a problem, then put it down, and often the solution will pop up while you're in the shower or taking a walk. So I think explicitly building some sort of breaks ("take a couple of days to learn/rest or work on whatever you want") is a good idea. I'd advocate doing this informally when needed or when schedule permits, rather than formally scheduling 3 on, 1 off.

Has been my experience (on good teams.) After a while, you tend to gel pretty well and don't need to spend that much time introspecting. The issues raised are either generally intractable organizational problems (that'll never get fixed), or fairly minor, and on several teams I noticed that retrospectives tended to feel pretty similar after a while (To the credit of the team, at that point we were like "we probably don't need retrospectives every sprint.")

And I found those ratings (0, .4, .7, 1.0 for hitting a stretch goal) just a sort of weird self delusion, like setting your watch 15 minutes early to ensure you'll be on time. You can fool yourself a little, but eventually it stops working, and so, for example, .7 become the de facto "real" target.

Secondarily, I found that as a team lead, to the extent that OKRs were stressed, any non-OKR related work became highly disincentivized. Refactor? Write more integration tests? Hell no, not if it doesn't directly impact OKRs. We had stories in the backlog that really should have been done because they would have helped other teams and yielded a positive return, but anything non-OKR was just dropped on the floor.

Third, they didn't really provide any value to the team that I could discern. We didn't have to look at our objectives every day to know what to do. We had typical releases/epics, etc... to do, and on a day to day basis, the OKRs just receded into the background. In theory, I assume that the OKRs are there to guide which releases/epics/stories, etc... you do, but in our case, we had a pretty clearly defined product already prior to introduction of OKRs. So the OKRs were all just sorta "OK, finish this thing we're already working on."

That said, the company was new to them and in the process of learning. Perhaps we did them wrong, or perhaps I missed the point.

And so, while we might hypothesize that a "natural/biologically driven" allocation be uneven (and I'm willing to grant), we have no idea by how much. Perhaps it's really 95/5, or who knows, perhaps it's 60/40.

The argument that where we're at now is where we should be (and thus why we shouldn't try to eliminate various obstacles to entry) is really just a form of status quo bias. It's the same argument that's been used over the years to justify why women couldn't go to college, be lawyers, etc... etc...

[1] https://capx.co/what-jordan-peterson-gets-wrong-about-the-no...

One example: I recall when Star Wars came out, a lot of my friends bought the soundtrack. It served as sort of a gateway to classical music. It's hard to measure, of course, but I'd bet that that had a larger positive impact on classical attendance than, say, Hannibal Lector killing people to Bach's Goldberg Variations had a negative one.

To your lack of visual stimuli hypothesis, I'd also add as other more likely drivers of classical's decline:

a) Live classical music is expensive and getting more so.

b) Sound quality in a concert hall is different than via digital means. It doesn't wash over you like it does when listening via your Bose headphones. It's less visceral and more distant. And you have to tune out the other sounds of coughing, people shifting in their seats, etc...

c) And finally, we have the best recordings of any work available on demand. In economic terms, that creates really cheap substitutes. Speaking for myself, I'd rather just listen to the Vienna Philharmonic on the couch for free than dress up, drive across town, find parking, and pay $100+ to hear the Austin Symphony play the same work.

DP problems represent the next rung of the ladder, are somewhat less familiar. And most importantly, satisfy an interviewer’s possibly sadistic impulses by presenting a problem that has an easy 2^n solution. ;)

Sarcasm aside, I think this is just the inevitable result of the systemisation and gaming of the whiteboard interview.

Aka Bryan Caplan’s signalling theory of education:

https://blog.press.princeton.edu/2018/01/23/bryan-caplan-on-...

Once a coworker came to me with a program that was unexpectedly failing, and it turned out that somewhere in the code there was a function that takes a callable, but instead of

    something(iterable, func)

    something(iterable, func())

Nonetheless, personally I’d take that over most other options for run of the mill progamming tasks.

Toy example: a population of 100, with one billionaire who owns their house outright and 99 people renting apartments. Take X dollars from the billionaire, distribute it to the 99. Why would the rentier, esp. if it happened to be the billionaire, not raise rents in aggregate by X?

My (perhaps naive) understanding is that rents tend to rise to a market equilibrium. Infuse the the aggregate market in an area with X dollars, and rents will rise to consume X.

I'd be curious to hear counterarguments to that point.

Don't forget about the importance of relative status. At least some -- my guess would be a large majority, but part of the problem with these discussions is that everyone's just doing WAGs without much real data -- folks will want a) better than average educations for their children, b) nicer houses in safer than average neighborhoods, c) etc... and will work quite hard for it. And since these are positional goods, UBI will have no impact on their availability.

Personally, I tend to think that UBI is untenable for mostly other reasons (extraction by rentiers, for example).