ryloric

1. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Remarkable book that gave me a coherent framework to think about life. The title simply does not do it enough justice, it's not just about the "flow" state, it's about his mental framework for how to organize your life with flow as the centerpiece of your experience.

I've used the copy on my desk so much, dipping in and out I now remember most of the chapters, sub-sections and so on. I'm starting to feel I'm using this book the same way many religious people use their Bibles, Gita etc..maybe I'll eventually memorize large parts of it.

2. Why we do what we do by Edward Deci

It's an older book about human motivation and how it works, it changed the way I think about how to get myself or other people to act meaningfully and I'd say that touched almost all aspects of my behavior.

You know, the older I get, the more the world seems upside down to me and I'm not even that fucking old.

That doesn't say anything about how ignorant you are. Read my comment again.

The top talent part is largely Untrue. That goes to USA. Canada mostly gets a lot of students and the universities they go to for the most part don't have a great reputation.

I mean, it's not Canada's fault or lack of trying. It's very hard to be attractive to top talent when you're next to USA really, especially when most of us are in the tech industry.

This is the usual American lack of any historical knowledge concerning their own actions on display.

US took Pakistan's side first, we only made the Indo-Soviet friendship deal in 71 because we had no other choice, or just accept being obliterated by US Navy while intervening in Bangladesh. We were one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned movement of third world countries and one of the leaders of that group. We did not want to be involved in cold war between the west and USSR and took no sides until we were forced to for survival.

Can you imagine that? The world's strongest and second-strongest democracies aiming their guns at the world's largest on behalf of an Islamist-Military dictatorship that was committing a genocide.

As usual, Americans forget all of this or don't even bother to read about it in the first place.

Natural allies really. But it's not all good though, there's been a hard and strangely growing anti-western sentiment for a while now. It's big enough to become a problem in the near future.

Also, western governments pay very little attention to understanding India, it's all colonial era stereotypes for the most part. Even the largest and most well known newspapers rarely send anyone with a deep understanding of the country to cover it, and they give a very shallow lopsided, uni-dimensional impressions of the country to their audience.

Is this a serious comment? You've bombed and killed several terrorists without any trial?

For someone so uninformed about the geopolitical history of India, you speak far too confidently.

This is a common tendency for many Americans, read 10 uni-dimensional articles in your favorite newspaper on some topic, do not bother to read any history on said topic, then come to strong opinions and bully people who see things differently. Maybe it is you who should put down the "propaganda pipe" and consider this issue for the complicated nuanced thing it is.

Felt the same reading this post. These people are unable to see the bigger picture of what their work has been used to do to the world.

Did you really have to say "some engineer in India"? What exactly are you trying to imply there?

AI Safety is real and very important... AI Safety financed and practiced by corps looking to make money off of AI is mostly bullshit.

I think it's important to make a distinction between the two.

Very good point. Especially true when there's no corrective pressure from the market to do something about the accumulation of the prestige-money employees.

Search revenue gives them a nearly infinite rope to keep accumulating the 'others' without having to attract 'builders' to open up new revenues. Just use blind for an hour and you'll see how bad it has gotten over the years.

It has no way of judging the quality of it's own answer, I see this trait as it's biggest hurdle to most practical uses.

Unfortunately know a couple of guys who have an eerily similar bio, it's is such a big red flag imo.

I know kids can be brutally insensitive sometimes, but this is extreme behavior even for a child no?

My 2c, I call Java a phalanx language.

Spears seems unsexy and rather limited compared to swords at an individual level, even a skilled soldier fighting with a long spear would probably lose 1v1 with a soldier who primarily fights with a sword. Put a few dozen of them in phalanx formation though, and the swordsmen don't even stand a chance.

I feel most programmers often judge tools primarily by how they function at an individual level and managers and CTOs pick based on how they perform at scale, and neither side understands the other's priorities much leading to so many debates on this aspect. So it may be unloved by individual programmers(I don't agree with most such people), but people who're responsible for delivering software absolutely love it imho.

Golang too fits in the same category, every time it comes up, half the crowd here likes shitting on it for one reason or other, but quality software is being written in golang in many places.

> 7 fucking declarations. That's how much CSS it took to turn that grotesque pile of shit into this easy-to-read masterpiece.

Such drastic difference with basic adjustments, damn

Far worse tbh..

That must be it..

You're very very young, you're not gonna die before you find a partner.

Completely missed this lmao

I call bullshit, every McD always served chicken in the southern and western India. I know a few people who work on the corporate side of things.

You can find beef too in many parts of southern India, but it will most likely to be buffalo meat. Kerala has all sorts of meats iirc.

I'm guessing the journalist made the wrong simplifying assumption. A lot of people from the brahmin caste don't eat meat, so maybe the anecdote is about a brahmin and not-a-brahmin interaction. There's plenty of people who're not dalits and eat meat.

The journalist may have attempted to "simplify" the anecdote instead of explaining all these details, but ended up screwing it up. To anyone who's Indian this comes across like it's "fake news", whatever their intention maybe.

Americans already have enough damaging stereotypes of Indians, it would be nice if reporters were careful reporting subtle problems instead of editorializing everything to fit their audience.

This feels like a nano optimization to me.

Marginal benefit of manual memory management for the extra effort to write rust code is not worth it for a lot of use cases. Who wants to think about lifetimes and not business logic when writing a web service.

Vast majority of programmers are likely to be users/customers or software written in rust rather than users of the language itself.

Underrated comment

Things were already pretty screwed up atleast a decade ago when I was there for a short while, this was around the time Google+ was being "dogfooded", so it wasn't even quarter the size it is now. I was only an intern but the other older programmers I was working with were all bored and doing minimal work, with no sense of pride or purpose, treating it like a government job with a good lunch program and free massages.

The pay is high and work relaxed, so a lot of 'local maximizers' tend to seep in, the type of people who want to do just enough and avoid any sort of extra effort or experiment with anything new. The kind of people who would choose courses based on how easy it is to get a high grade and not based on how interesting or useful it would be.

For people to innovate constantly, they need to feel a sense of pride in service to customers and a sense of purpose as to why they are doing their work. For an organization to innovate they need fear that they will go extinct if they don't. As long as the firehose of revenue that is search keeps going, they will keep sucking at everything else.

Don't forget Slang and how it's so superior to every other scripting language ever.

Just cause they made the language expecting them to use it for everything seems a bit harsh.

Unrelated, I've never seen this dude without a leather jacket on.