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mechEpleb

113 karma · joined June 14, 2020

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mechEpleb··on Note that I wouldn’t pass the listed minimum requirements
The most important thing is just to apply because unless you're connected, the job search process is much like a lottery.
mechEpleb··on Stop using your work laptop or phone for personal stuff, because I know you are
Establishing the habit of regularly checking your schedule and thus being aware of any upcoming events would mostly solve this.
mechEpleb··on The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014) [video]
You'd think that, wouldn't you? Yet here I am, someone who grew up thinking computers were obtuse and boring because getting the computer to do anything interesting seemed like it would require knowing a thousand things not related to the issue at hand. I was always a mechanically minded person, so while the inner workings of things seemed interesting, making toy websites (the entry level computer thing to do in that time period) seemed about as interesting as watching paint dry.

But here I am, working as a software engineer and half way through my MSc in computer science. It took a couple of low level microcontroller classes in my mechanical engineering undergrad for me to see the light.

mechEpleb··on The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014) [video]
I get the feeling that the world was significantly more open to kids growing up with access to computers in the 80s and 90s, because as someone whose formative years were the 00s and early 10s, the interesting bits of technology were already buried under a thousand layers of abstraction and indirection. Kids nowadays won't ever learn what a shell is unless they go out of their way to learn it for some reason.
mechEpleb··on Seizing the Middle: Chess Strategy in Business
And they did that because it makes sense from a military perspective, not because they were aping go strategies. Are you being obtuse on purpose? You're taking two radically different problem domains and producing a shaky, extremely high level mapping between some elements in them that is essentially unfalsifiable.
mechEpleb··on Seizing the Middle: Chess Strategy in Business
I would argue that this is ridiculously reductionist and probably has nothing to do with the actual decision making process on either side.
mechEpleb··on The Consciousness of Invertebrates
I said nothing of qualia. Science has no tools to even begin trying to model, describe or explain them. All I am saying is that from a physical perspective, a mind is just as deterministic as an orbit. So far nobody has discovered anything to suggest otherwise. You're taking a concept that exists outside the conceptual space of physics and using it to make statements about physical systems.
mechEpleb··on You use more open source software than you think
Getting it out there. If your goal is just to ensure that a well supported open source solution exists and people can use it instead of having nothing at all or only paid proprietary garbage, a permissive license makes far more sense.

If your goal is sticking it to the man and demolishing capitalism or whatever then it's different of course.

mechEpleb··on The Consciousness of Invertebrates
>You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic.

What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders.

To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.

mechEpleb··on “That Won't Work”
>Like, if someone thinks what I does suck I always invite people to tell me so.

That's you. Plenty of other people will defend whatever they come up with regardless and need to protect their fragile egos.

mechEpleb··on Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
I'm not sure misogyny is the only possible explanation here, and I am almost certain it doesn't account for the entire gap.
mechEpleb··on Kinda a Big Announcement
> Though I think that's mostly on Google "optimizing" my queries by dumbing them down.

I'd say it's become a lot worse than it was just a couple years ago when you could massage the queries to get you exactly what you want. Now google seems to think it's more clever than you and turns every question into an entry level one.

mechEpleb··on Drunk Post: Things I've Learned as a Sr Engineer
I don't think derisive attitudes in the workplace adequately explain it, because there are a lot fewer women in CS/engineering school too.
mechEpleb··on I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
>There are lots of actual engineers being outearned by boot camp grads with two years experience.

Hasn't that been the case for decades now?

mechEpleb··on I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages
You can't demand more when plenty of others will do it for far cheaper.
mechEpleb··on What's Accenture? (2020)
In house there's less incentive to underbid and overpromise
mechEpleb··on What's Accenture? (2020)
>hey intern, here's the topic, here's some buzzwords, here's the word and slide count, you have 3 hours
mechEpleb··on Tech companies say they can’t find good employees – companies may be the problem
Yes, usually that reason is that once you are unemployed you fall to the bottom of any hiring manager's list of eligible applicants.
mechEpleb··on Tech companies say they can’t find good employees – companies may be the problem
Because you are already stuck on the path you picked and have no choice
mechEpleb··on Student passes 3 classes in 4 years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA
That would be true if said intelligent people were optimizing exclusively for the metric you're looking at right now. In reality they usually are not, as they are themselves stuck in a system where their incentives are to optimize for things other than their supposed mission statement.

The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result

mechEpleb··on Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed
>You can argue that your processor's clock speed hasn't changed, the program has just memoized some intermediate results and no longer has to actively compute them, but that seems like a disingenuous argument.

A disingenuous argument indeed. Almost as if you took the entire premise of the argument you disagree with and put it inside a "you can argue" block which is then dismissed with no rebuttal.

mechEpleb··on GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage
Engaging in political activity would require leaving my room.
mechEpleb··on Canadians derailed a train and drove it to City Hall for power after a ice storm
Power lines are not put under ground in most of the world. Nobody wants to pay an order of magnitude more to hedge against occasional downsides in reality.
mechEpleb··on The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed
The number of people who need cars to survive is far greater than the number of people who can afford to fix every nuisance fault. So long as it can keep rolling and comply with whatever minimum safety requirements actually get enforced, people will run it.
mechEpleb··on Don't use functions as callbacks unless they're designed for it
The first is an example of default argument syntax, it doesn't mean you can call functions with extra arguments, only that a value will be provided from the declaration if the call doesn't.
mechEpleb··on GitHub Should Start an App Store
But there are strong incentive structures in place that introduce a correlation between the interests of these individuals and the company's success at driving up share price or even making money. It's not as straightforward as that in reality, but a noisy profit/shareprice maximizing agent is not the worst approximation of a corporation you could come up with.
mechEpleb··on The untold story of ‘circle of trust’ behind world’s first gene-edited babies
It boils down to the fact that there are large potential (if improbable) downsides to messing with DNA, and people have a strong cognitive bias against actively inflicting harm vis a vis just allowing harm to happen on its own.

I personally don't think it's possible to prevent this kind of thing in the long term, so everything ranging from edited children born with horrible disabilities to deleting some potentially beneficial mutation paths in the human genome from existence is going to happen anyway.

mechEpleb··on The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets
If I show up at the capitol building alone and demand to be put in charge, is that also a coup attempt? Obviously where you draw the line is subjective, but this event never had anything close to the requisite backing to become an actual coup, so calling it that feels a bit disingenuous to me. What it was is a riot and and an insurrection, but not a coup.
mechEpleb··on The nihilism of r/wallstreetbets
4chan is still mostly teenagers and 20-somethings from middle class families shitposting for fun
mechEpleb··on Jwz: I told you so, 2021 edition
If you just want to use their software, the community doesn't matter at all.
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