I've thought about this topic often, and I bounce around on where I stand on it (unsure if I'm just being pedantic or something).
I'm currently of the mind that infotainment like (early) ted talks, a large subset of conference talks, and all "Smarter Every Day"-like Youtube channels are overall no better than general trash entertainment. With general entertainment, you know what it is and self-limit, whereas the former present themselves as a valuable use of your time, and often make you _feel_ like your doing something "good" (I'm learning!), but the actual take away is often at best a factiod that you still couldn't even talk about in any depth.
That's all well, but let's don't forget the opportunity cost.
One can enjoy anything, e.g. food, but then they get to 300 lbs and they look back, and say wtf did I let this happen?
So enjoyment alone is not a safe criterion...
>I have wasted a lot of time being busy (reading non-fiction, TED talks etc) that did not translate into any noticeable self improvement or progress in my life. I have feeling a lot of people makes that mistake too.
That's a valid point though. There's even a name for it "productivity porn".
The easiest example is that the opportunity cost of going to university is 4 years of steady income. But students believe its worth it because the future income they'd receive instead is hopefully more than worth the opportunity cost.
Thanks, I know what opportunity cost is, I just digressed when I gave the example into a "too much of a good thing" case instead of "what else you could be doing in that time" case.
I'm not sure that I agree that it is a 'mistake' to read non-fiction even if it doesn't explicitly translate into self-improvement or progress. If you enjoy reading non-fiction, then why can't it be an end in itself just like watching movies can be? (I don't like TED talks, so I won't comment on those, but I would make the same argument if you do.)
1. The good guys win, the bad guys lose
2. Going along with (1) there's the morality message
3. The events in the book serve the purpose of the plot
4. Lots of books are formulaic, i.e. the author found a formula that sells.
5. There's got to be a beginning, middle, and end.
6. Many novels are written as a series of cliffhangers. Crichton would do that, as would the Outlander series, etc.
Real life is much more messy and unpredictable, hence more interesting.
Civil War heroes are goats today, even having their memorials removed.
Edison has gone from hero to goat. He'll be a hero again in a few decades.
It's the job of a professional historian to try and discern the truth from all this. But whatever truth there is in fiction is impossible to determine if you know nothing about history.
Fictional universes evolve into 'canon', where certain explanations are correct and others are dismissed. Star Trek, Star Wars, etc., famously have 'canon'. People get wrapped around the axle arguing canon. This is ridiculous, as it's all made up nonsense.
Another is "Reach for the Sky" by Bader. Chuck Yeager's biography is also a treat.
Then watch that absurd "Flyboys" Hollywood fiction. What a piece of trash in comparison.
I go to meetups to listen to talks for fun.
My fun is:
- something really funny ( new different angle or more complex. I actually find lots of old/pref liked comedians no longer funny) - something which is between easy and hard. A lot of stuff becomes easier and easier after a while.
And as the sibling comment said, nothing wrong with a good movie. Enjoy your life.
What you've done with this comment is refreshing: you've overcome the enormous pressure to be the best version of yourself online. Well done!
1: https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(17)30016-8/ful...
I've been getting better, though, and I don't mean getting better by reading more technical literature, listening to more podcasts, and doing more programming in my free time.
Instead I mean accepting the fact that I simply don't enjoy those things and the way forward is to let go of the shame I feel for not liking them. There are plenty of things I do want to do in my free time, and I'm going to do those things. Every once in a while that thing is reading something technical or writing a program. In fact, I find that I enjoy those things more often when I'm not trying to force myself to do them.
I used to have quite a large stack of technical books I bought and then never read. Now the local Goodwill has them. Hopefully the next owner is someone who actually enjoys them.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282328265_Fiction_a...
Low oxygen environments are not a place for brainwork.
Savour it. Value it.
Or write the next mad max. You could do that too
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepr...
1. The Great Game - by Peter Hopkirk 2. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples - by Winston Churchill
The Ultimate Game Boy Talk https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8029-the_ultimate_game_boy_talk
The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9064-the_ultimate_apollo_guidanc...
The Ultimate Atari 2600 Talk https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4711-en-the_atari_2600_video_com...
More here:(Commodore 64, Amiga 500, etc.) https://media.ccc.de/search/?q=ultimate
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk&list=PLLzGzdSNup...
I think they're a good way to learn about physics without a ton of background. I also find they're nice to read when studying for my physics exams, just because of Feynman's unique approach to teaching.
Then this huge series of lectures on western philosophy introduces to a lot of ideas about everything. Can listen anytime. Arthur Holmes: A History of Philosophy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9GwT4_YRZdBf9nIUHs0z...
Then this category theory keeps popping up everywhere, completly incomprehensible, seems like mathematicians are gone mad. I found that this lectures help like no others to catch up to them. Category theory for programmers by Bartosz Milewski https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbgaMIhjbmEnaH_LTkxLI...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRVdut2KPAguz3xcd22i_...
My favourite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zinZmE3Ogk
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17460060
[1]: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/
[3]: https://ffmpeg.org/
Ding! Ladies and gentlemen...
What agony?
>you watch as you get closer closer to escaping your hellish existence in a tin can at 30k feet
Might as well bring some paint, to watch it dry...
That sounds no different from my regular day at the office -- except that even cross-atlantic flights are shorter.
You need something engaging but not too mentally taxing while under the influence of jet lag.
What could be better than the righteous grist of King Fu movies involving good guys and bad guys duking it out?
https://www.dw.com/en/lufthansa-investigates-the-science-of-...
https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/airlines-airpor...
I would never buy tomato juice at home, but I drink a lot of it on planes. If you have never tried it on a plane maybe you should!
Bonus, if you like bloody mary mixer. That, on ice is wonderfully complex, and contrasts nicely with the bland airplane atmosphere.
This is really about the ethics and responsibilities that come with managing social spaces or infrastructure that people use to interact socially (which necessarily includes the problems that humans always have). The MMOs (and the MUDs/etc before 0them) have been working on these problems for decades. That doesn't mean they have the solution, but that experience does include a lot of lessons about what not to do; far too many projects are choosing to learn those lessons the hard way.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024060/Still-Logged-In-What-AR
For unaware readers: he was the lead designer for Ultima Online.
Most of my writings are on that site as well.
I just recently put out a new book including postmortem material on Ultima Online and other games. Should be front page on the blog.
- Videos related to whatever technology will be pertinent at the meeting I'm flying in for.
- Distraction movies: Bourne Identity, etc.
- Anime I'm currently binge-watching.
- Games on my phone.
- Printed technical articles I've been procrastinating about reading.
Honestly, how virtuous/edifying my in-flight activities are depends on how much sleep I got the night before. This is one reason I dislike early-morning flights - they leav me zonked and unable to make good use of my in-flight solitude.
Side note: On Android, I just discovered "Movies Anywhere". It was a great tool for downloading DRM's movies/shows for my last trip.
Check my submission history. I keep trying to show people this work. Sadly, it never seems to take to a wide audience.
As a consequence, selective joins across 2 fields are also linear time.
I mean, if that's all you want Radix sort and American Flag sort are wikipedia fodder.
As for the "typing goo" is, uh, fairly important for how it's derived and what it does. A lot of advanced CS work uses it now, because it's quite powerful. A huge amount of pure-CS research is done in that world.
I guess we don't see this work in more contexts because it's just very very difficult to get it right. Edward Kmett, who is globally recognized for his talent in the field, did a haskell implementation which we all use and love, but it's pretty excruciating to implement it outside of a functional and generic language (and it is genuinely hard to do it in a language without general side effects, so you get difficulty from both sides).
I think a lot of folks in industry just don't think it matters. Certainly when I talk to my peers they suggest it doesn't matter to their work at all.
As for "6 years", they author has continued to push the work. It's also been used in a variety of applications. You can cite search the original paper. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f425/7af9221ca7fe21dc84a049...
https://scholar.google.dk/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=180821...
One particularly interesting work was computing specific types relational algebras producing products in linear time, which is pretty cool: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1706372 (btw, sorry, ACM is down tonight they're showing us their cloudflare).
This is not new stuff in the world of graduate CS, anymore than succinct data structures or wavelet trees. It's seldom applied in industry, but many of these techniques and sorts are taught as upper division courses in recent, algorithm-and-theory intensive CS programs. That stuff just doesn't make it out of academia very fast these days. Academics face a lot of pushback from industry now with disruptive findings. Look at how Emin Gun Sirer has been blackballed by the cryptocurrency community, for example. Look at how steadfastly folks have stood by JWT despite Lentczner's team's work on a better alternative in Macaroons.
I'm pretty sure a worst-case linear sorting algorithm would have multiple NYT articles about it.
EDIT: The edits to the parent since I made this comment make it look a bit silly. It made more sense in the context I was initially responding to.
EDIT 2: Thanks for linking the paper. From there:
> As Proposition 1.1 and the corresponding well-known combinatorial lower bound of Ω(n log n) (Knuth 1998, Section 5.3.1) for comparison-based sorting show, we cannot accomplish efficient generic partitioning and linear-time sorting by using black-box binary comparison functions as specifications of equivalence or ordering relations. Instead, we show how to construct efficient discriminators by structural recursion on specifications defined compositionally in an expressive domain-specific language for denoting equivalence and ordering relations.
Which sounds like the advantage I speculated on in the grandchild below. I understand, now, and it's a nice result. Thanks for pointing it out.
Which, by the way, contains boatloads of novel work. It uses internal parallel execution to work around some of the problems with discrimination passes between two groups. Cutting edge stuff.
It's haskell. People like you have chips on their shoulder about "typing goo." I'm sure one day someone will write a golang implementation then go to some inventor-centric conference and be hailed as a genius tho, as per usual.
But, did you not know about Radix sort or American Flag sort? Counting sort is a common stupid silicon valley interview question, and has been in the ruby code katas since like 2003. So as keen as I am to see this work widely distributed, it's not totally unprecedented the way you make it out to be.
Hey, want to know another surprising one? With a proper pre-encoding you can compress an (extremely long) binary value and answer questions about how many bits in a given range have occured (a popcount) in constant time. You can also, by extension, figure out the offset of the Nth hot bit appears, in O(1) time. Pretty surprising, huh? Especially when you realize that the entire space of 32 bit integers is only 512mb as a fully realized bitfield, 32x smaller than actually storing one instance of every integer.
See here: http://alexbowe.com/rrr/
Oh, is it that the types somehow mandate roughly evenly-sized ordered partitions at any sample size? If so, I get it, now. Thanks.
Anyways, thanks for posting the links, although I'm not sure I will get anything out of it :-)
Can you get linear time even on Haskell's arbitrary-precision `Integer`s?
If you want to know for the general case, you need to adapt your machine model and redo the analysis. Operations will likely be not constant-time but something like log(x) where x is the size of the integer at hand. But of course, that's up to you and what you want to do and how you build your machine.
What's cool about Discrimination sort is that it does, in fact, can give these linearity guarantees for most kinds of data a computer can represent, including things like strings which have variable length or structs. There are some caveats there, but they're easy enough to work with that nearly every default structure in haskell as seen here: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/discrimination-0.3/docs/D...
Note particularly the instance for [a], and that you can extend it to something like Data.Text's codepoints (and this would work out of the box with something like ByteString's chunked form).
Further suggesting a lack of credibility by suggesting press coverage should be in place is confrontational.
I lost my temper after you did these things a few times. I apologize.
And yes, it can get O(n) performance with Arbitrary length integers. These analysis exclude underlying comparison times.
> suggesting a lack of credibility by suggesting press coverage should be in place is confrontational.
You edited out the context I was responding to, there. As I recall, you were originally explaining the "six years" in terms of it just being hard to get academic results into the mainstream. That seemed extremely unlikely for such a well-known result.
I'm not bothered by your invective or personal attacks, but editing your comments so that my responses are out of context is pretty disturbing.
The literal and figurative content weren't changed. I just removed duplication and improve the flow of the post.
The title threw me off, but it's a very interesting and grounded talk about the different approaches to scaling fusion energy.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h_x0Y3FqkEI
I also enjoyed the documentary Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, which can be found on torrent sites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Power_Mixtape_1967...
And this channel did a great compilation that introduces to all Chomsky's works. Table of contents is in the video description. Topics are: War, State Power, and American Exceptionalism. Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and Corporate Propaganda. Anarchism, Libertarian Socialism, and Classical Liberalism. Science, Philosophy, and Language. Noam Chomsky - The Essentials https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1umiaNjOinE
I recommend the full 2 hour version, with all the secrets: https://youtu.be/ZUvGfuLlZus
My second favourite talk: You spent all that money and your still got owned: https://youtu.be/tJsNu0VRKYY
I even watch these again and again.
Podcasts are better for flying. You can close your eyes, and if you don't stay awake, all the better.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...
https://archive.org/details/PsychedeliaRawArchivesOfTerenceM...
Being a bigger guy, unless I get the upgrade I can’t do anything with a keyboard so doing much productive is out of the question.
Recent highlights have been Sour Grapes and the Rotten series on Netflix, and Ray Dalits Principles on Audible.
My two go-tos are:
1) Noisli - white noise app to help me sleep.
2) BBC's Sherlock - the slickness of the production values keeps me engaged.
I find I'm more productive when I land if I don't try too hard to be productive on the flight.
It's in the genre of "two dudes talking" podcasts, but technology and futurology are some of the topics they touch on often.
[1] by Robert C. Martin (aka "uncle Bob")
For long flights, I buy magazines in the airport shop (Wired and Scientific American). I also have my music collection on Spotify on my phone with wireless Bose headphones to listen to. Also, several books on Kindle on my phone (now reading "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind"). Don't forget a spare battery. Or, sometimes I check the plane's movie list for a new release I haven't seen and watch that.
How I built this
Masters of scale
Akimbo
Software engineering daily