It’s incredible to me that one person has had such a large impact on internet pop culture. I wonder how many distinct individuals have been regular users of his games.
338 karma · joined February 5, 2012
I can't find any of my undergrad coursework online but here's an alternative that looks like a nice intro https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs107/cs107.1194/l...
A lot of those talking buttons videos you see in my opinion are either scripted/edited or a bit of projection/reinterpretation of what’s going on in human terms. I have a dog I love to death and the lengths people including myself will go to reinterpret their behavior in human terms is incredible.
Bruce Willis wishes he looks like this dude
The HN title of this post is currently “the end of poverty has just begun” which made me think “just” = “recently”. So I thought the article would be about something that has indicated that the rate of poverty reduction has increased.
The URL says “history-of-poverty-has-just-begun” which made me think this is an article about historiography of poverty and how it’s not been cataloged well.
The article title says “The history of the end of poverty has just begun” which just completely confuses me.
The article subheading says “ The decline of global poverty is one of the most important achievements in history, but the end of poverty is still very far away.” which to me is a much more accurate summary of the article. Mainly that most of the world still lives on less than $30 a day. But some parts of the world have been uplifted from poverty recently.
My point I think is that, to me, a better post title would be something like “Poverty is only now starting to decline”
- Most Sci Fi is too dystopian
- Project Heiroglyph forced authors to be techno optimist and it didn't go anywhere
- Authors must deal with human malfeasance (isn't that just the dystopian fiction that he is against)
- ???
- Profit?
A PhD is for you if you really enjoy academic style work. If you thrived in high school/college, are innately mathematical, and care a lot about pushing the boundaries of knowledge.
You need to be ok with _not_ focusing on building things but instead focusing purely on understanding things. For me that last part was almost impossible.
You need to be ok with rejection and failure. You’ll try a lot of things and fail and get nothing for the effort. You’ll also have to constantly keep dealing with getting rejected for things like fellowships, journal papers, grants, conferences, awards and such.
You also need to be someone who is OK without a traditional social life and be ok to put in insane hours. Plan on 70-100 hour weeks up until you get tenure. Having a relationship with someone who is not in the system is going to be tough. You absolutely will lose touch with some friends and some family faster than the regular process.
There will be no system to help you. It wasn’t my case but I will warn you that there are many awful advisors. Unlike in the industry there are zero checks and balances and basically no incentives for advisors to keep their students mental health in mind. Your graduate advisor may care but probably won’t. And once you’re about 3-4 years in you can’t get out and I know tons of folks who were basically stuck in sand and spinning their tires.
You will see people who are your peers moving up traditional career ladders. You will see people starting companies. You will see people doing cooler things.
On the other end of all this a lucky 1% or so of people I know who entered the system ended up in a tenured faculty position doing research.
If you do decide to go ahead my suggestion is to find a good advisor who has funding. That is almost impossible to do but that’s all that matters.
It does feel like some folks ignore the business side of things but I think I enjoy being a part of the larger picture. It's definitely not for everyone. I know several people who are personally happy and have had WILDLY successful careers being hands-on tech specialists and ignoring the business side. It's great that it works for them.
On the whole my responsibilities are a mix of things:
1. Technical strategy - primarily writing strategy docs and discussing with other tech PEs. Usually precursor to architecture.
2. Business Strategy - reviews with non tech staff and leadership (across the org) about what the business needs are, where we see the future going. Often takes the form of reviewing other peoples documents or contributing sections to those
3. Product design reviews - reviewing CX/UX documentation
4. Architecture - Creating architecture documents - lots of text and boxes and lines. Several rounds of reviews. Usually precursor to coding or reading other people's code.
5. Coding - takes the form of staring at various IDEs and scratching my head.
6. Reading other people's code - same as above. Also include code reviews.
7. Operations - On call stuff. Usually where all the architecture stuff falls apart :-)
8. Mentorship - structured 1:1s, feedback, etc
9. Prototyping and demos
I spend probably 90% of my time doing the items above. The mix among these items varies but I consider all of it my work. For the rest I sometimes get pulled into the items below that are not officially my responsibilities
- Conferences and public speaking - I could, but choose not to
- Project tracking and reporting
- Managing people's careers directly
- Funding decisions
My work is rarely political depending on how you define politics. To me politics is about "who gets the cool stuff" so mostly funding decisions. I do get pulled in occasionally to sort out "who should build this" discussions but they are usually good faith discussions trying to align expertise and charters before funding decisions are made. Biz and tech strategy does involve consensus building but I suspect the Real Politics™ happen behind the scenes at higher levels.
The harder part is trying to keep my family from taking up that time but that’s a separate problem ;)
Probably the two biggest peace-of-mind boosts in my life have been this, and blocking of large chunks of time for deep/focused work.
I regularly use a self-hosted version of draw.io / diagrams.net for creating what you're calling "multiperspective" diagrams and walkthroughs by hand - basically drawing dozens of variants of a single diagram and embedding them into docs with some text around them. I know I'm not alone, there are probably 100s of potential users in my workplace alone.
This tool can save me days/months of time but the nature of my work is confidential and I cannot use any tools that are hosted elsewhere.
Also do you have any plans of adding real-time collaborative editing support?
I know several folks who would love something like this with a different set of gestures and end-results. Especially smaller operations who have switched from in-person to live during the pandemic. The bigger shops have space for a dedicated operator, but the smaller ones are just the instructors and their students in a zoom call.
I think the key is going to be in arriving at the right set of gestures for the right audience. e.g. yoga instructores are probably looking for ways to minimize/maximize certain screens. Aerobics instructors are looking to be able to mute and unmute and send directed feedback. Both types are often struggling to figure out lighting and how to position their cameras. On all sides I think something simple like capturing the entire class clapping along is hard to do. I think something like this would be perfect for that market.
I think the impact is fairly damaging. I'm surrounded by people with body image issues, and the impact their issues are having on them is heartbreaking.
Sadly when I discuss this with some folks from that industry they pushed me to an academic debate about "well everything is post-processed after the sensor anyway".
There's probably some debate to be had again about whether this is creating issues, exacerbating existing body image issues, or actually just not having any impact one way or another. But I find myself believing that it is both creating and exacerbating.
And for a while I thought these were "first world issues" but many, if not most, of my friends are not part of the "first world" and they still have them.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/11/the-re...
The strangest thing they've done IMO is pretending to have a statement signed by medical scientists when, in reality, there was no checking of who signed it and their credentials (or even their existence)
For anyone looking for the TL;DR:
> This is basically a 1-bit dithering DAC, operating at a frequency below the nyquist, trying to encode luma and color at the same time
I feel this way sometimes too, despite having a traditional CS degree and being in the software industry my entire professional life. Apparently impostor syndrome is more common than we think.
Personally I've come to believe there are very few people who "fit like a glove", and everyone else has varying degrees of this.
Edit: On rereading this it might appear that I am trying to diminish/dismiss your experiences. I apologize if it came across that way - my intention was more to share that I've heard this same sentiment for different reasons from many different people.
I wouldn't consider it useless either, unless I'm hiring an engineer for a narrow focus on something (e.g. I want someone that knows BGP), but I've never done that.
I've found that the ability to learn is fungible.