Learning nearly anything? You can’t learn to drive a car from YouTube. Or paint a house, or wash a dish, or code, or … Learning requires doing.
Who thinks otherwise?
2,103 karma · joined September 25, 2022
Who thinks otherwise?
And later
> To some hospitals and their business, I’m not a Surgeon. I’m just an employee. Overworked, burned out, replaceable. The noble call to Medicine has been suffocated by the bureaucratic force exerting itself as the medical industry.
How much of the world has gone this way? Feels like there is something sick deep down in society that is manifesting itself as “you are not a human, you’re a set of metrics”.
Seems like this aspect could have been written by an Academic, a designer, certainly a software developer. The debasement of human dignity.
It’s an interesting view-point. What are the “right reasons” to pursue an intellectual discipline? To selflessly further the total sum of knowledge?
> No reason to mourn them leaving
What field? Who’s leaving?
The conclusion has to be that human involvement in these pursuits is facing existential crisis. “Teach me, oh Oracle, the mysteries of the Universe”. “For a fee”.
Both the glory and joy of discovery now belongs to the machines (the owners of those machines). Perhaps that’s fine and well, but I read Anathem and feel the strong yearning to be the intellectual monk. And yes, to fight and debate and think; and obtain my place in history. The history of man.
Yes, but think about what that implies if those are the only motivations left. Gone are the professions. Gone are the ambitious.
There is plenty of space for people to work on intellectual pleasure pursuits (as there is with art and music), but the death of all intellectual based industries is still something to avoid. Or to mourn.
This is the crux of it and goes far beyond Mathematics or Computer Science. To get a bunch of humans to do anything, you have to motivate them. Kleos and Timē; renown and stuff. These AI companies threaten to rip this away from everyone but themselves, and this recent millennium prize is the perfect example.
Solving this problem as a human would have led to tremendous Kleos; my name would be written in the annals of mathematics, lecture tours of praise were mine to be had for the rest of my days. This one victory would have earned my recognition throughout history. The greatest a mortal may hope for. Ripped away.
It would also have given me great Timē. The prize money, the professorships, the book deals. Gone.
If all hope of “renown and stuff” in the intellectual realm is now taken by the AI companies, they will remove all human motivation to pursue these endeavours.
Perhaps the glory will come from slaying these fell beasts.
This is exactly how I debug things. When I first started working I was forbidden from using the debugger “you won’t have a debugger in the field”. Being able to read the code, spot the bug and tie it to the symptoms; that’s a skill. A damned important skill.
Corruption does not need to be overt to be destructive. It’s absolutely pervasive.
Great that Zig is supporting this more “first class”; not strictly required, but looks useful.
The trouble is that as a “foundation”, it’s not immediately useful unless you are Java and can thus consume the record layer.
I also have a huge soft spot for Lisp, so your work here dovetails with two of my favourite things. I hope you get the chance to publish!
“Mayer explained that Don't Be Evil was coined in 1999 by one of Google's first engineers, Amit Patel, who shared a work cubicle with Mayer. She said Patel and other early employees were resistant when staff with business skills began joining the engineer-driven company. The engineers feared they would be pressured into moving certain clients higher in search results listings or building products they did not want to build. Patel voiced his fears via the whiteboard in the conference room where Google sales people met clients. "In this incredibly neat handwriting in tiny little letters on the bottom right hand side of the white board, he wrote 'Don't Be Evil'," Mayer said. Some time later, when Google had 200-300 employees, its human resources team decided the company needed corporate values. They called a team meeting of some of Google's senior staff. After they brainstormed 10 positive corporate values, Paul Bucheit, the inventor of Gmail, suggested ditching those in favour of one that covered all angles - Don't Be Evil. "Originally Don't Be Evil was No.6 on the corporate values [list] but it's the only one that stuck because it's the catchiest and, as Paul said, encompasses everything else," said Mayer.”
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/dont-be-evil-or-dont-lose-...
We forget that many companies are founded by passionate engineers; however they may change over time.
Barren Realms Elite and Falcons Eye were my favourite doors games as a teen (written by his brother). Inter-BBS - playing against people in other countries - was just amazing at the time.
This sounds really really interesting. I don’t suppose you can share more about this?
No offence, but this is a ridiculous thing to get worked up about. Various neurological conditions exhibit in people just being “slow” in exams. No one ever diagnosed me with anything (probably too long ago), but teachers somehow understood that I was one of these and gave me extra time on exams.
I didn’t want it (who wants to be in an exam a minute longer than required!). But I did need it through high school. In university I was able to complete in time (mostly); I suspect because I had practiced doing exams so much by then that I’d figured out how to optimise for time (maybe everyone knows this and I was just very slow to learn it?).
I’m someone who excelled academically, and it was an important part of my identity at that time. And I do remember exams (before teachers gave me more time) where I’d get a lower grade as I’d only completed 70%. It was incredibly painful; I knew the material, if only I could get it down on paper in time! (I’ve also been an incredibly slow writer). Extra time for someone who struggles to complete on time isn’t cheating - it’s allowing people to demonstrate what they can do.
However, the only way out is through. I confidently speak in front of 100’s regularly. I can pick up the damn phone (still a twinge of anxiety, but nothing like it was). The cure that works just seems to be “do it until it’s mundane”.
As an aside, it’s vital from the career perspective. You can’t let fear, no matter how extreme it feels, stop you. It’s a terrible cliche, but still true “no courage without fear”.
In water/wastewater much of infrastructure is physically remote and physical security is the typical engineering trade offs. https://validmfg.com/product/lift-station/
Inside this box you have access to the “production” network, if you will. Unfortunately, most SCADA systems implicitly trust their RTUs/PLCs, so this has always been a weak point for the system. Hopefully the situation has improved.
The reality is that critical infrastructure is rarely tested against genuine hostility, except in times of war. There is “cyber” activity going on all the time, but attacks that require physical proximity will probably only happen when things have escalated to hardware. Hopefully the NSA’s of the world run “pen testing” for these companies from time to time.
> In a way, it's more worship of technology to say humans are hopelessly, powerlessly dumb, and technology inevitably rules them.
You as an individual have some autonomy against the machines. Some. (Scroll facebook an hour a day and show me your resilience to engagement engineering). But the point of this is what happens at population scale.
To ignore our biology is as stupid as suggesting we must be ruled by it.
We’ve invented a technology that hijacks that part of humanity more effectively than anything ever. Asking people to “not be so stupid” is not going to help.
You can see in these pictures, where every input and output is a real physical thing, just how much density of information was required for Operators to process. As we moved to computer screens representing the same, those original screens would represent these control room layouts faithfully (and you can understand why, training an operator must have taken ages; retraining is not palatable).
Over time, multiple “control rooms” coalesced into one room of computer screens with fewer operators and yet an exponential increase in information to process. So how on earth can a person keep track of it all? Intervene promptly when things go wrong? Determine what needs attention right now vs something that can wait? As a problem space, the seemingly simply world of designing SCADA UI is quite fascinating.
Paracetamol/acetaminophen has a therapeutic dose that is uncomfortably close to the fatal dose, but is otherwise as safe as any drug can possibly be. So long as you don’t take too much.
Ibuprofen is also relatively safe, but it has a number of ways that it can do damage even at the therapeutic dose, if you are taking it all the time.
The main one is that it depletes your mucus lining in your stomach, which can lead to bleeding and death (used to be a big problem here in Aus when codeine combined pills were available without prescription). It’s also harder on your kidneys and liver.
Completely fine at therapeutic doses taken as per instructions and not mixed with alcohol. But having it every day is going to be much worse for you than the paracetamol and almost certainly lead to health problems.
To a point. Plenty of people from previous generations with missing digits and hands thanks to play with commonly available fireworks of the area (Australia based, so no idea how common that remains in the US).
My own experiments from my youth also one time resulted in some shrapnel punching through a 5 inch thick concrete tile very close to someone’s head (thought we were safe behind said tiles).
Get involved with the kids blowing stuff up so the danger is within reasonable bounds.
However, you need to remember that these simpler tools were a product of a much simpler set of requirements. Fixed themes, fixed screen size, fixed aspect ratios. I imagine a wysiwyg editor that gives you all the power of, say, CSS, and yet remains simple for simple things, sounds like a much more difficult task. I haven’t worked on UI in 20 years, so maybe such tools do exist.
This made me laugh so hard! I am gen x, and we used to say exactly the same thing about you spoiled, entitled, narcissistic, gritless millennials!
You should have seen what it was like when I first started! You should have seen what I was like!
You’ve got it all wrong! It’s not the generational differences that are the problem, it’s these darn young people are too darn young! (And some of them are a completely useless waste of space, as I was until life slapped a bit of sense into me). It’s a bit over the top, but I really love Musashi (novel) for this representation of the worthless youth who needs to be tied to a tree and suffering to the point of death before finally breaking and getting his crap together (become a human being; not just an animal). Feels like an (exaggerated) representation of the genuine journey all young men must make.