nathan_douglas

I wouldn't've laughed at you. I view bonsai as a representation of steadfastness, endurance, determination, effort, (and self-mastery?) in the face of tremendous hardship, challenge, and deprivation. That said, I've never been particularly good at any of those things.

IDK if I would've taken you all that seriously either, though. Six months until you move and it's left behind on the curb. Or a year and a half until your cat knocks it off the windowsill. Or three years until some blight infects it and it dies off despite your best efforts. Eight years until, for whatever reason, it just succumbs to some kind of vegetative ennui. Nine years until your significant other overwaters it one too many times and the roots rot.

That's not meant disrespectfully. I just tend to view uncertainty and complexity as opportunities for shit to go sideways. Especially in this case, where it's unlikely you'll wake up to find your tree has spontaneously cloned itself, or has eaten a 1-UP mushroom. Disasters happen all the time, and miracles don't.

I suppose I'm just having a bit of a spiritual crisis right now. But thank you for your comment. It gives me a lot to think about, in a positive sense.

mood

Reaching out to People Ops to see if I can spend a bit above my professional development limit, just this once.

But I feel like whenever I come back, the language is better than I left it. I really appreciate that there's one thing in the world that seems to be getting unambiguously better. I appreciate things like this that let me know that the Rust Team still sees the gaps between the real and the ideal and are working to address them.

Thank you <3 from a very intermittent rustacean.

So I had the initial call with the hiring person, and she posed a sort of dilemma: essentially, do you want to work with Haskell so you can ship frequently, or so you can create beautiful and elegant code that you can reason about?

And I said "both." The purity and power of Haskell appeals to me for deep, almost spiritual reasons, but I have encountered friction in my ability to be as effective with it as Python or Rust or TypeScript. Perhaps that's a personal deficiency, in which case I'd like to address it and be a better engineer. Perhaps it's a weakness of the language, in which case perhaps I can address it and move the world ahead in some small way.

She was not satisfied with that answer. I got the feeling that Haskell was a quirky choice, t3h penguin of doom holding a spork. All that really mattered at the end of the day was shipping, because after all, that was what paid people's salaries.

So I decided they were not a serious company.

But yeah, I tend to blame the same underlying phenomenon identified here: that ZIRP enabled companies to make the same mistakes that, previously, only a senior engineer could make. And I think ZIRP also contributed to a lot of title inflation, ensuring that senior engineers could make mistakes that, previously, only a junior engineer would make. Combine the two and we have companies picking languages based on vibes.

I'm dogfooding it heavily. The bugs at this point tend to be in card formatting. I ended up delaying the introduction of TeX/MathJax until I had quite a few cards written, and man oh man, it's tedious to go back and fix that formatting in hundreds of cards.

The real question: does it work? I _think_ so. I'm learning, and I feel like I'm retaining more, and I think the general structure counteracts or compensates for most of my issues as a learner. I think the science is pretty solid, but I'm also experimenting in a few areas, so... eh, we'll see.

If anyone is interested in trying it out, you can use it for quite some time (several months, maybe a few years) without needing to provide an email address or sign up.

[1] https://bit-wit.com/

> I wanted to try and see if we could bypass the door entirely, and that’s where the canned air comes in. If you turn a can of compressed air upside down, it starts “boiling off cold gases.” These are not harmful in open spaces, and their temperature is well below freezing point even when gaseous. This can trigger a sensor that checks for temperature increases: First it sees a drop to -50C, thinks “Baby, it’s cold outside.” Then, the temperature starts rising again, and the sensor thinks “Oh, temperature going up?! Must be a human!” and opens the door. If this works, I will update my Mastodon. If it doesn’t, well I can still walk in after someone, so it’s a finding nonetheless.

I enjoyed it a lot.

I suppose that I agree to a certain extent - I feel less exhausted at the end of each day, I think, because a lot of the tedium of dealing with boilerplate and implementation details can be smoothed away with AI. I do enjoy my current position more than I have ever before.

But I don't know if I'm optimistic about the future. I think software engineers are still essential, or at least that the skill of software engineering is still essential, but I don't know if the market will have fully internalized that knowledge soon enough.

What do you think?

I have a similar idea, but based around computability, complexity, information, games (math sense), etc. I think it's going really well, but yeah, question quality is a huge part of the process. Absolutely dwarfs anything else.

The reason I bring it up is because I think people are going to want to try before they subscribe. They're going to want to run through a few questions before they pay you any money, and they might even want to run through some questions - and quite a few of them - before they give you their email address. And that's reasonable. (Especially in my case, where I'm working on a spaced-repetition model)

So the fact that you have a "Start practising" button, and I click that, and it takes me to a signup form, and then that takes me to a "here's the part where you pay me" screen kinda rubs me the wrong way.

I think everything looks great. I'm interested. I was able to sign up. I received the email, and able to verify. But there's no way I'd subscribe without solid access for some nontrivial period of time to a nontrivial number of questions.

Entirely possible I misunderstood something or I'm misusing the site, though - or that these issues won't concern other potential users.

I think technical PMs are well suited to absorb this. Ideally, they're already comfortable with specifying software, communicating about requirements, recognizing and avoiding failure modes, etc. So that's one route, but not one that particularly appeals to me.

The things that I find interesting largely haven't changed. I'm interested in complex systems, distributed or not. I'm interested in organizational dynamics. I'm interested in game theory and mechanism design. I'm interested in simulations, machine learning, and GOFAI. I'm hoping that I can find a way to turn these interests into a new career. I can continue learning and growing, I can challenge myself, I can expand at whatever speed I can manage, and I can develop and deliver working software at a greater pace than I've previously been able to manage.

I'm definitely afraid. I don't know how to just create a career from a vague collection of things I like thinking about, to just go out there and make money and support my family. I don't know how to "operationalize" these ideas. But that's what I'm trying to do, FWIW.

My French language teacher at one college or other told me a story once. I might be getting some of the details wrong, so forgive me. But here goes:

In 1914 or thereabouts, his grandfather, a young French man, had just graduated from lycée or whatever and celebrated by backpacking around Europe, staying in youth hostels, riding trains, etc. He drank a lot of alcohol, made a lot of new friends, and generally had a great time.

In Germany, he wandered into a pub, encountered some friendly Germans, and joined them at a table. One drink turned into three, or five, or six, and the young Frenchman started attempting to speak the German spoken by his new friends. Perhaps he had a gift for languages, perhaps he'd picked up a little through some other means, perhaps the disinhibitory effect of alcohol helped his short-term recall for syntax and semantics.

Either way, the result was the same - the young Frenchman climbed up onto a table and made a brief, impromptu speech in German, addressed to his new friends, full of affection, extolling the virtues of modernity, goodwill and brotherhood, etc.

The rest of the pub was absolutely _alarmed_ by the young Frenchman's grasp of German. There was no way, they thought, that he could speak German so well. He must be a spy. The police were called, and he was thrown in jail.

Then the war broke out, and returning the young man to France was not anyone's concern. He spent the war locked up in Germany.

I can repeat that story, but I can't personally vouch for it. It's hearsay three or four times removed. It's a funny story, a little awful, but he's free in the end. Everything worked out.

But the awful punchline is something I do tend to believe - that his grandfather was the only survivor of all of the young men from his graduating class. Every other one died in the war.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xy0htPZZPs [2] https://genius.com/The-zombies-butchers-tale-western-front-1...

The video called me out when it mentioned that the query language might seem scary or dirty to some of us - and it does! My eyelid twitched when I saw the example on screen - but it's still really interesting to me to think about a database as the source of the OS primitives, rather than an application running within a more standard OS and using the OS's conceptual framing.

    All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (Richard Brautigan)

    I like to think (and
    the sooner the better!)
    of a cybernetic meadow
    where mammals and computers
    live together in mutually
    programming harmony
    like pure water
    touching clear sky.

    I like to think
    (right now, please!)
    of a cybernetic forest
    filled with pines and electronics
    where deer stroll peacefully
    past computers
    as if they were flowers
    with spinning blossoms.

    I like to think
    (it has to be!)
    of a cybernetic ecology
    where we are free of our labors
    and joined back to nature,
    returned to our mammal
    brothers and sisters,
    and all watched over
    by machines of loving grace.

At least in comparison to x86 assembly, MIPS assembly seemed very elegant and rich to me at the time. I wanna say that MIP R4K had 32 integer registers and 16/32 double- or single-precision float registers, but don't quote me on that. Either way, it was an embarrassment of riches :)

I was hit by a big wave of depression last year. That crisis gave me a couple of periods of hyperfocus, and I thought I might as well use them to try to improve my mind and my ability to reason.

I haven't had good results learning certain subjects, like CS/math, with Anki or other flash card systems. The only thing that ever seemed to work for me was doing a lot of problems with pencil and paper. But without problems exercising those tools or techniques, they tended to just evaporate from my mind.

So my idea was to combine spaced repetition and problem presentation, and create a system for generating problems and validating their solutions randomly and parametrically. So successive presentations of the same card would present a different problem... and the overall effect would hopefully be that you learn the invariants that each card is trying to present, instead of memorizing some combination of variables and values. Sort of MathAcademy but for CS.

I _think_ it's feature-complete at this point, though I'm still working on validating and publishing cards (and there are a couple of things I wanna do to improve security). I'm pretty early in the dogfooding process, and I'm still the only person using it, and there are definitely bugs. But if anyone would like to try it out, I'd be delighted to hear your feedback (email in profile, also on site). Just maybe go a little easy on me right now, lol :/

The Boolean Logic and Lambda Calculus subjects are free forever, and the first topic of each other subject is also free, so if you're intrigued you can use it for quite some time (literally months) before even needing to provide an email address. No need to pay for anything.

    Location: US/Ohio
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No
    Technologies: Backend / DevOps / Infra / Platform
    Résumé/CV: https://ndouglas.github.io/resume/resume.pdf
    LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nug-doug/
    GitHub: https://github.com/ndouglas/
    Email: smooth.gift2502 AT tenesm DOT us
    

My professional work's covered in my résumé, but that's mostly boring. I've also written a NES emulator [1], an ECS-based Lisp machine/rule engine [2], a self-organizing gossip mesh that learns to play Flappy Bird [3], and ported _Zork_ to Clojure for no good reason [4]. I also started working on a Math/CS educational site late last year to combat a wave of depression [5].

I'm a bit of an odd duck and don't fit what many teams are seeking, but I'm always growing and getting better, usually in the weirdest possible way. If you're interested, I'd love to hear from you.

[1] https://github.com/ndouglas/greenstone [2] https://github.com/ndouglas/longtable [3] https://github.com/ndouglas/whispers [4] https://github.com/ndouglas/clork [5] https://bit-wit.com/

</resurgent-childhood-trauma>

It's an amazing problem! I haven't spent much time on it - maybe 20-30 hours spread out over several years - but it _is_ something I come back to from time to time. And it usually ends up with me sitting there, staring at my laptop screen, thinking, "but what if I... no, crap. Or if we... well... no..."

TBH it's one of the things that excites me, because it makes it clear how far we still have to go in terms of figuring out these planet-scale physical processes, simulating them, deriving any meaningful conclusions, etc. Still so much to learn!

My kid, mercifully, was diagnosed and received intervention in the form of tutoring, therapy, that sort of thing. He still has weapons-grade ADHD, and his handwriting is terrible (dysgraphia), but he seems to have beat the dyslexia and loves reading almost as much as his mother and I do. He's happier, healthier, and has a brighter future.

I really, really hope your friend comes to understand, somehow, that their kid needs intervention, and will benefit tremendously from it.

That said, equally often I feel like a hermit who limps into town every couple weeks, wild-eyed and twitchy, and listens to other people's conversations, smiles and nods, maybe says something friendly and innocuous, and then I notice that there's a circle of people gambling on street-fighting urchins or chanting "ass-to-ass" at some degrading sideshow, and I have to haul my ass back out to the sticks before I'm found out and my blood is ceremonially drained to inaugurate some hellish techbro kegger 'n' orgy.