This article matches my own life experience: Rather than what have you changed your mind about in the past decade, I use 'in your whole life'. Speaking personally, there are only two big things I've changed my mind about. I'm working on a third... I wish the article had included something in the vein expressed by Charlie Munger, which is a 'how-to' for intellectual integrity.
"I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't
know the other side's argument better than they do.”
One of the main points of the article that I totally agree with is that recipe authors fudge times by massive amounts to make the total time for a recipe "acceptable". A favorite recipe from years ago in Cuisine magazine for a way-better-than-ordinary Spankopita called for washing and chopping the spinach. In 1982, fresh spinach was almost always very sandy, and needed multiple washings. The recipe allocated less than 5 minutes for the task that probably took me 20 minutes the first time. (Yay for the advent of pre-washed spinach!). Similarly for doing phyllo (aka filo) dough the first time. Very fussy, very time-consuming. A more truthful phraseology might be "after you get good at this, it can be done in as little as x minutes". We do get faster at repeated tasks ... The cynic in me sees at as part of a pattern where we're constantly lied to in advertising blurbs, headlines and summaries, but that's another rant ... :-)
Well, I'm thinking more of a web site Hello World than a C++ Hello World. The original point of Hello World (per Kernighan and Ritchie) was to ensure that all the tools were installed (the compiler itself wasn't a given) and in your path and configured correctly. So yeah, I was say even in 1988 (when I started programming in C) there's a way in which Hello.c was 5 minutes. But when I started with Rails (years later), it was more like 1/2 a day, and the Hello World notion had expanded in scope by quite a bit. I didn't spell out the _kind_ of Hello World I had in mind. My bad.
Well, I haven't used either of those, so I can't comment on a comparison ... but the point is less 'powered by an ai' and more the fact that I'm using English, not the jargon of create-react-app or dotnet new or the rails version or the django version ... Right now, my experience programming with an AI is that I'm much better off asking for subroutines to do this and that, not ask for a complete architecture. Mostly for debugging reasons: When it doesn't work, I want the debugging to be manageable. Getting the AI to debug its own code has not been a productive path for me, but hopefully soon.
I suspect as things evolve with the Large Language Models, there will be integration with existing computer languages and frameworks. That the ability to say "Create a web site using language X with framework Y" will become a reality. This ability to get Hello World done in 5 minutes instead of 1/2 a day to walk through a intro book/tutorial, well, that's a win.
Then, down the road, each AI might have a preferred/default language, technology and framework. Quite possibly newly created. This has a parallel to intermediate representations (the earliest of which I'm aware of is p-code in UCSD Pascal). But it is also analogous to compiling C to assembler, and then machine code. Similarly with Java. Wolfram is correct when he talks about needing it to be a representation that the creator can inspect and verify. Not necessarily the least bit easy with a complex project. It will be an engineering journey, but it does spark in me the hope that English (or anyone's native language) becomes the high level language of choice for guiding machines in tasks. Mathematica? Humph. Stephen Wolfram is very pleased with things he's thought of or perhaps synthesized, but I'm gonna say, I think Mathematica is not the generic solution we will want.
For some definition of useless, I suppose. Without trying to be contrary, most of what I (we) know is 'useless' in terms of whether my knowing it has a "useful" impact on my life. Knowing that there's an equation governing gravitational attraction doesn't really impact my life experientially. It's true that if you're trying to design any system that involves a Carnot cycle, it becomes useful, but given no such job description, it's not 'useful' information. Much of science _is_ useful in our STEM-oriented world, to those using it.
I think some of the reality is that regardless of most other factors in our lives, love and relationships are a Big Deal, so stories in that realm have in some small way more usefulness. Thus, I know the plot of Romeo and Juliet better than I can give a summary of the Second Law.
As a generalization I have to disagree, at least in America for high-school subjects. I looked at both the math and biology texts from recent years. The math texts were written by people who didn't understand math, and the biology text was so focussed on the No Child Left Behind Act requirements that it was rubbish. (Also look for Richard Feynmann's experience reviewing textbooks). Undoubtedly there are good textbooks out there, but they are just as much in need of review and recommendation as non-textbooks.
I'm curious about what topics you have knowledge of where it's failed. Does it seem like there's a pattern to the failures? I've been using GPT for coding help, and it it is very helpful in ruby and bash, though it often delivers buggy software: Badly handled non-happy-path conditions, mostly, which when I tell it to handle the case, it may. It's a huge help for me finding gems and showing me standard ruby library syntax. On the other hand, it's been useless when I try to get it to write Applescript for me. I believe that says more about AppleScript than about GPT. Sigh.
A 'recommended option'? Eek. Recommended by who? I don't believe any country in the world condones suicide, and I doubt that any will any time soon.
I had some friends who were in serious financial difficulties a number of years ago. They were destitute, but they were nice people, and stayed with friends for free. Creative solutions are often available even in the worst of times for people that are not abusively over-using friends and relatives.
Sadly in America, the homeless are often mentally ill, and in this Liberal's opinion should be provided food and shelter, not a recommendation that they off themselves.
I think our identities are often very tied to what we do at work. So being out of work is extremely painful.
Suicide is strongly coupled to wanting to end pain. Usually emotional pain. Dealing with that pain in other ways should certainly be the first recommendation from any outsider. From the inside, it's IMHO "the right choice", though not an easy road, I admit.
I think the mention of exactly where is useful to this audience. Other people using the same open-source library might realize --- oh, we've run into that bug but never realized it. Low probability, sure, but nonetheless.
> Standardized tests are much easier to prep for than GPA and extracurriculars.
Based on comments so far, I'm curious what you mean by this. My own take is that you are correct because standardized tests are 'easier to prep for' because, in many ways, they are IQ tests that you can't prep for, or rather that Bang for the Buck of prepping is low. So, poor, smart kids with no prep can take the test hung over and do well, as the author says. Rich folks can get tutors to spend tens or hundreds of hours prepping, and have only a modest impact on their score.
I believe YouTube would need to hand select such videos. According to Tubefilter 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. (2019 data) It's hard for me to see how YouTube can be held responsible for _anything_ that is posted. Not that some effort shouldn't be made, but the scope of the task is enormous.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time banging my head against the wall of Zork, and in the end felt it was a "guess what I'm thinking" pastime that was not worth my time.
Any given change to a car might by itself fail to seem radical - I agree, yet in the decades since 1909, how cars (and trucks) are used in our world has changed radically, and radically changed our world. Paved roads and freeways, gasoline production, the repair industry, and taking for granted that a person of ordinary means (in first world countries) has the ability to travel dozens of miles to work daily. Foodstuffs can get transported hundreds or thousands of miles and be edible. My parents didn't eat a green leafy vegetable from October to May as children, because such veggies didn't grow locally in Winnipeg.
"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced."
Yes. Chelsea Sullenberger ("Sully") made the same point in an interview. He said in the early days of the airlines, the CEO was always a pilot, and error margins were set much higher than legally required. Now that CEOs tend NOT to be retired pilots, new regulations are needed to raise the safety margins beyond current regulatory points to what a safety-conscious pilot would choose.
Not an expert, but here's my best guess. When I learned to fly a small plane, you pulled back the yoke at a specific speed. This is called 'rotation' and lifts the nose of the plane off the ground, (wheels are still on the ground) and changes the attitude of the wings, creating substantially more lift for the speed. The plane then lifts quickly off the runway. Presumably different possible weights in a larger plane would cause you to choose different speeds at which to rotate. I also presume rotation is also a more gradual process in a larger plane (a few seconds long???), so the 'early' part of the rotation occurs, gets the plane off the ground, and allows the space for the angle to become steeper in the later part of the rotation. Would be happy for an expert to review and comment on this.
I agree that it's hard to see from the outside how calculating weight figures for an airplane could be software load-dependent. But this all smacks of the point that Brooks makes in 'The Mythical Man Month' all those years ago. Two guys in a garage can make a program that does 'x', but to make a programming system product that does 'x' is more than an order of magnitude more work. The complexities introduced don't relate to the 'x', but the intricacies of large systems. Deciding that 'someone has fucked up and should never work again'? Sorry, competent and conscientious people regularly make such mistakes. Which is why we need tests, software review, engineering processes et al to catch those mistakes.
Perhaps. She did know how to use a calculator, and generally she does better at arithmetic things than I do (balancing the checkbook, eg.) because she knows she's not good, whereas I know I'm good, so I'm more careless. Also, math wasn't and isn't important in many jobs, including hers. So "explains a lot of the problems this country is in" isn't the stunning argument for your side you may believe it to be. No offense intended.
I agree with this, and someone has already pointed to the Paul Graham essay "Do things that don't scale". I will say, you need to build to accommodate some growth, but in my head at the startups I've been at, I always figure we should build for 10 times current traffic. Room to grow. There were times we never got to 10 times current traffic. (and died). And a time or two we did, then it was time to re-architect for 10 times the new current load. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Which for some, (like me), is ludicrous. My own take is that children learn best (or for some, learn at all) when their interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher. (I only did homework for teachers I liked throughout my time in elementary and high school.) I claim most of what we learn in school is completely irrelevant to our lives anyway (with a clear exception of learning to read at all). My wife rose to an executive position in a big company without knowing her 'times tables'. "Teaching the curriculum" also leads to the textbooks that came into use after the "No child left behind" legislation. When I read them, I was simultaneously outraged and wanted to cry at (a) how dry they were (b) how memorization-focused they were (c) (for Euclidian Geometry) how much wrong information they contained.
With billions of books in the world, having a very short white list of books means the chances of a teacher suggesting a book that would inspire a particular kid plummets. We get a little closer to Farenheit 451 every passing day.
Several people who have mentioned "How to Solve It" by George Polya. It's been decades since I've looked at it, but a favorite Polya quote of mine is " "The open secret of real success is to throw your whole personality into your problem."
I can't remember if the book addresses this, but for myself my inability to tolerate frustration really impeded my ability to work on any mathematical challenge for decades.
My basic complaint about ORM is that it is such a massively leaky abstraction. That the (sometimes, but not always-made) claim that it 'abstracts away the sql' is just plain false. An understanding of SQL is typically necessary. Many ORMS are introduced by saying 'this expression translates to that sql'. Oops, no abstraction there. I like this sketch of objection because it's in some respects just friendler sql syntax.
Not mentioned so far: Paying attention to dreams recalled from sleep. In order to remember them, a journal and pen by the bedside is necessary, as the dreams get forgotten within minutes.
A simple DIY technique for working with dreams is to take different images in a dream and write about the image in the form "I am <image>, I <attribute or aspect of the image>. For example if I dream of an open window "I am an open window". I allow things from the outside to affect me. When it's stormy outside, I need to close. I am a window, people can see into me, whether I like it or not." (Keep going for multiple iterations.) There is a 'tingle test', where the meaning of the dream, when spoken or written, produces some kind of wordless aha. Most dreams have multiple layers of meaning, so don't stop the first time you get a tingle.
Sexy idea, but as someone who started using vi in 1987, a software solution seems way better. I map the seldom-otherwise-used key sequence jk to <ESC>. If I were doing it over, kj would be slightly better, for times when I am Just Kidding. I do this in both .vimrc and .inputrc (using different syntax, sigh). My fingers generate the escape without thought. (As is true for tons of vim normal mode actions I use regularly.)
Donald Knuth once said (or wrote) that sometimes it's very useful to dig deeply in a very narrow place if a subject is both broad and deep. He wrote a book on bible verses this way: (3:16, Bible texts illuminated). He also said he has a number he picked (I forget it, but somewhere between 50 and 100) and when evaluating a book, goes to that page and reads the whole page carefully. Being adolescent at heart, when I decided to emulate him, I picked 69 as my number of choice. I went and read page 69 of this book (number on the page, not the PDF page number). Section 3.3, making analogies to legislation and cooking. Fluff, not worth reading IMHO. Of course, prefer the opinion of anyone has read the whole thing to the one I'm expressing here.
Yes, these are good examples of ... well, 'useful' scalping. The scenario I had in mind was when big scalping outfits have a modus operandi of buying huge quantities of tickets for re-sale. Aided and abetted by the technology of the web. I don't think it happened too often before that.
At your suggestion, I did the Google search. I did not find an 'overwhelming consensus'. There are some sellers who are motivated to allow it for complex reasons (public perception, value of sell-out crowds which allow TV broadcast of sporting events and ancillary sales. e.g). The fancy term 'allocative efficiency' which is econ-speak for 'we should always sell to the highest bidder' is described as a positive outcome of scalping. Personally I find that nauseating, and of no real value to (original) providers (sellers) such as entertainers. There are first-person interviews of entertainers distressed by the way scalping impacts their fans.