frankie_t

I've recently started a mini-project in OCaml, having some Haskell background.

The worst thing so far is that you have to declare and define functions before using them. This results in unimportant utility functions being at the top, and the most important functions being at the bottom of a file.

I haven't had much issue with let bindings, however that might be because my functions are fairly simple for now.

Do we know the percentage of the total devices used by Hezbollah that got attacked? I guess even if all of them were destroyed, it hardly does any dismantling. But I would expect this operation to open a window of possibility to do some other actions.

I guess it could still be considered the same one, just the continuation of it. I was kind of expecting a ground invasion after such havoc in communications has been wrecked. I guess if the "electronic" attack is still going on, maybe something else will still proceed...

I think he's referring to Python, just like other made up names probably refer to Java, Js, C++ and OCaml.

Wanted to say the same. He straight up conjured a good looking code in CrabML as an example of similar level of "ugliness", while it has about three times less syntax noise.

To my taste, it looks worse than HoMM3 and has a distinct mobile game vibe.

Do you maybe know some good resources for self-learning these areas?

Learning some Haskell and Spanish. No use for any of these skills, just fun. Trying to escape reality: war, uncertainty, etc.

It really depends on your goals. Why would someone want to become a better software engineer? To me, the things you listed aren't fun, so I wouldn't do them in my spare time unless I see the benefit in it.

If we are talking making more money at a job, I'd say that for most people I worked with and me included there are more important things to concentrate on. Like, soft skills, communicating clearly, understanding politics at work.

Myself, I'm okay with learning things you listed from more senior colleagues, on the job, and just having fun in my spare time.

I can't recommend something I haven't read myself, but Mircea Eliade's "History of religion" looks good, but it's quite bulky. I was considering it myself, for the same reasons as yours. Maybe someone who read it can elaborate. I'm reading his other work about yoga, and it is quite interesting.

I you look for basic basic understanding, maybe "The religions book" could be of help. I'm occasionally reading "The philosophy book" from this series, and while it very brief, I find the format (brisk to the point summaries, graphics) quite good for what it's trying to achieve.

I've had similar thoughts, this development is completely disenheartening to me. I love computer science, self studying and the programming-as-solving-a-puzzle kind of occupation.

It looks like the most interesting part of programming (for me) has been automated, while the parts I hate remain (at least for now?): gathering requirements, talking to people, understanding business, etc.

I hoped to earn enough money through commercial programming to live off it, and switch to programming languages/compilers and work in that area for small money but big fun.

It seems neither of these things are going to happen, and for technology/logic aligned people that are mediocre in their performance, and don't like working with people, the only place to go is trades. Maybe I'll still have a "programming" job, as an intermediary between AI and product people, but I feel the competition is not gonna be in my favor.

If AI truly replaces all creative work, maybe a good way to go would be acknowledging your inferiority towards a superior species, buy some land in the country and try living a quiet life off the farming?

Approach all my planning from resource (time and energy) allocation perspective. Previously I would just make a dump of all things that I want to achieve, which made any kind of planning unrealistic.

Stay afloat but do not try to actively climb anywhere, save energy for inner work and contemplation. Stay at my current job (ok pay, just got hired), do not actively learn anything technical unless required for work (not interested, tired from technology). Do no work more than is necessary to feel I'm not gonna be fired.

Approach very critically all learning endeavors that are related to programming, and only do things that I absolutely enjoy. Drop at first sign of dissatisfaction.

Spend time on high RoI things (critical thinking, stress management and overall well being techniques). Drop low RoI things (movies, TV series, guitar).

Try to fight news and politics addiction.

Contemplate on how and where I want to spend the rest of my life.

>stopped considering questions in terms of my own preferences and started considering them in terms of how they would connect me to others

Feeling connection to others is one of your own preferences, ultimately you act in your own interest anyway.

The tricky part for me is to evaluate my preferences when they are in conflict and choose what is optimal.

I had a funny situation with kindle. It was connecting to the internet all the time, I enabled airplane mode and then it started complaining about it all the time.

Out of spite I added password to my wifi (I didn't have any and I even named my hotspot smth like "free" for my neighbors to use, wouldn't do that now).

To my surprise, some ~8months later I discovered my kindle to happily connect to my wifi. I'm pretty sure I would never enter the password there, because the kindle was the reason I added password to begin with. Maybe there is some more sane explanation than "kindle bruteforced my wifi", like a bug or some nuance in authorization protocol?

edit: it happened 7 years ago with kindle 2013 paperwhite.

There could be multiple factors I think, like: your language skill level, translation quality, "closeness" of languages, psychological predisposition towards your native language.

Depending on the form of the thing you are translating it can be simply impossible to translate properly (like poetry).

I'm currently reading English translation of "Black Obelisk" which I believe is written in German and it isn't any worse than Russian translation (my native language) to me.

In any case, what was originally asserted is that English is somehow worse than other languages as a "transitional" translation language for words or simple phrases, so I argued with that specific idea. Translating literary works is a subject of it's own and where the quality is much harder to measure.

I don't think this is inherent to English, or any other language (perhaps in more specific cases when there is no word with the similar meaning).

I think in general we pack a concept in a word and lose some information this way, so when you want to be precise with what you are saying you have to bring your definitions with you. Essentially with translation you take a concept and "pack" it in a word, then look for an equivalent packing in different language, then unpack. Naturally, this process is prone to losing information.

> I find it telling that most people who start an online course never finish them

I wouldn't go this far. Enrolling to an online course is essentially an effortless endeavour, unlike on-campus studying. You don't pay anything (or pay less), you don't have to move physically, you (sometimes) can go at your own pace, you can take just this one course instead of the whole curriculum, etc.

Not at all, I actually liked the idea a lot. It's just hard for me to take a any positive feedback from a person I pay to listen to the said feedback.

Yes, I'm overall optimistic about therapy in general. I did get some valuable things out of my sessions, and I think it would've been hard to find these things somewhere else.

Therapists tend to get expensive though, when I improve my financial situation I'll definitely look for some more.

I had similar experience, but can't say my therapy was a huge success. When gotten familiar with my situation, my therapist said the we need to build trust and that she's gonna do the work that my parents failed to do.

I was initially much more inclined to have "here's my habits and behavior patterns, tell me what to fix there" type of sessions. Then I tried to play this game of trust, but the idea of trusting and leaning on someone who sees me once a week to do job and get paid seemed just wrong.

How so? I would imagine it be the case if the job requirements were "3 years exp with k8s, 5 if you are a woman".

Sometimes they just look for a reason to cut the salary or make you more overtime-compliant, or something else. Basically a tool to squeeze out more.

The routine is to take you but make you feel like they do you a favor by taking you with less exp than it was originally stated.

Wow, that resembles something I wanted to implement myself. It's crazy how most of the things you think of doing are already done. I think I will migrate to it eventually, thank you.

MIT OCW is great, I'm very grateful to them for doing this. Still, it's closer to books for me than to MOOCs by overall experience.

I have never used much websites for the on-campus courses, they are rarely self-contained and require more organization and research to use. There is one good feature of those: they often have excellent assignments that you often won't find in textbooks, so I think can be a good complement to a textbook. One thing that bothers me though is that these can go down at arbitrary time and you can't be sure it works properly. E.g. a website for 2013 course may have some of the links broken and you will only find out when you get there. Still, better than nothing and I appreciate greatly such initiatives.

>How has the social aspect + taking the course with others helped you in the past First of all there was just a general excitement "A course just opened and there are like 40 thousand of us". If you spend time around people that would do things like that than I guess the effect won't be as striking. But 40k was like a half of the population of the town I lived in. It felt like a part of something huge.

In general, thinking that many people go through the exercises right now and struggle just as I am was somehow motivating and uplifting. Reading that something had the same issues as you 5 years ago vs right now somehow make quite a bit of difference for me.

Then there is interaction. Getting your questions discussed and helping others on the forum is totally different for me than just browsing through a dead forum section for a possible answer to my problem. I had a technique: when I completed something I would go to forums and read questions, and then try to answer them at least in my head. Doing so with a "real" questions that are waiting for an answer is more engaging because in addition to practice you also help someone.

And the most insane thing that only happened once: competition. I was doing Sedgewick's algorithms and the automated grader itself was brutal. I loved the course so much that I took it twice, the second time doing all assignments to 100/100. But in addition to the grader there was forum section where people would show their stats (how fast their solution worked). I remember cutting my time only to discover next day that someone did better, and then half excited half suspecting that the person simply trolling with fake numbers would go and try to optimize my solution even further. I would wake up at 5am to work on it before work, the whole place is messy with drawings on paper, etc. I cannot imagine doing the same thing when reading a book.

I see a screenshot there defines an anki card? Couldn't find any mention about anki in docs or on the github (I only skimmed though). Would be interesting to see if there is a possible interplay.

I myself use vanilla org mode for this purpose (spaced repetition). My workflow is the following:

1. Create a hierarchical structure with leaves representing bits of knowledge. For example postgres/indexes{btree, GIN, ...}

2. Have a study session with materials (books, video, etc).

3. Try to recreate a concise version of each subject and place it under leaves, so put text in btree, GIN, etc. If I cannot do something I skip it and fill as much as possible.

4. Verify written, fix if necessary.

Then, the document will sit there for a while and when I feel that I need to review a certain subject I would open a tree node and try to recall the child nodes, or sometimes go directly to leaf nodes and try to explain each. Then verify with the data there, maybe do additional research if something isn't clear.

I initially wanted to make anki cards for every piece of information that goes to leaf nodes, but it seemed that hierarchical organization suits me better. It would be interesting to try an automatic card system that would keep track of when I reviewed the concepts and remind me to do so.

I've seen this one in 'the old days', but never actually took it, just skimmed through the introduction. It was hard for me to grasp what I would take from it, even though it seemed interesting.

Can you please summarize what you took from the course? How would you use outside of the course the information you've learned? I would imagine something like "I've learned a model A that can be applied at real life situations such as a, b to get better insight", or maybe even "I can write a simulation to predict how some system will evolve in the future"?

I would certainly hope so, in a sense that this being free and available to everyone can really help, especially poor and underprivileged, but also lifelong learners that can't attend a university.

On the other hand, making a good mooc is a massive undertaking and it's unclear where does the money should come from. IIRC the initial idea behind moocs was that the certificate is going to be prestigious and people would want to pay for it. But what happened was that far more people would drop off early, and those who complete rarely bought the pdf.

Also I don't think online remote learning can substitute offline on-campus. Even very immaterial things like CS or math can benefit from in-person interaction with professors, which also further depend on the personality of the student. Immersion in the studying atmosphere is much deeper (you being among other students) which, for me anyway, is a huge motivation boost. Then there is also networking and the baggage of useful acquaintances that you come with when you graduate.

Well, essentially what I was asking is "is there any good new stuff or is this movement dead", meaning the 2012ish hype of open university knowledge, so I don't think it's a question of a recurring nature.

Most of the replies here are more suitable to "what are good moocs", which is fine and what I more or less expected anyway.

As to regularly resubmitted post, this kind of touches the issues I asked. If there aren't many (or none) good new materials then there is no much point reposting same things again and again, similar threads from 2016 or 2018 will do. Some communities post a compilation of what new courses are gonna start soon. I don't find these useful, because they end up being just a huge dump of everything. I guess what I would find interesting is a recurring post about learning that goes like like "what are you learning/learnt recently/this year/this season" and why a mentioned source of learning was good. This naturally will focus on quality rather than quantity.

That actually surprises me a lot. I've seen plenty of critique about lacking generics and exceptions, while haven't seen much complaint about ADTs. From my rather dilettante point of view they are neither too complex for "philosophy of simplicity", nor they add much of compile time. It seems to me they even can be implemented as a syntactic sugar on top of type casts. I certainly cannot see them being more complex than generics.

If you like slow paced movies I would recommend checking out his (Tarkovsky) other works. Ingmar Bergman and Bela Tarr also come to mind. They are definitely slow and pretty far from being literal too.