6,784 karma · joined April 24, 2012
However, I speak/read/write in what is technically my second language (English) as if it were my first language.
1. Language and how interrelated it is to our ability to transfer knowledge and experience, as well as its role in structuring our internal thinking. I haven't seen any academic research on the matter, but there are more and less concrete instances of this throughout history. This Wikipedia article about the history of Algebra is a great example of how 2000 years of evolution led to a formulation of the same concepts, but with a reduced cognitive load that 10-12 years olds learn today as a matter of course. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra#Stages_of_a...).
2. Knowledge, transferred through language, education, and culture. Calculus in the early 1600's is a great example, without it and subsequent developments, probably 80% of the college/post-grad math/science/physics education wouldn't even exist. The stuff we teach our 18 year olds today required the 1600s' greatest minds to figure out.
3. The capacity of our human wetware.
It's hard to treat #3 in isolation because our modern concept of intelligence is inextricably tied to #1 and #2. Also it's hard to place where "critical thinking" and "creativity" enter the picture, since they both rely heavily on all three aspects above.
I can tell the difference in games if I go looking for it, but in the middle of a tense shootout I honestly don't notice that I have double the DPI.
I've seen this happen a lot with mediocre leaders. "Code Yellow" equivalents happen because they weren't able to understand that A was really the most important thing, typically because B, C, and D were important for optics or politics, but not genuinely important to the customer or the problem at hand.
A "Code Yellow" is a useful political tool to move an organization to focus a bit more on problem solving by saying "I don't care about your politics, your org charts, whatever, just solve the damn problem." In that sense, it really does work.
I disagree with that take on sophistication. As a counterexample, Hemingway's work is a masterclass on sophisticated prose done with minimal language, but I wouldn't want to read Pride and Prejudice in Hemingway's style. There isn't one yardstick for "sophistication".
The Odyssey is an interesting example of this (and one the author uses). I was taught the Fagles translation. That translation is not easy to read, and in many ways its choice of language is a distraction from studying the literature. I wouldn't pick that translation for my own children, even if I feel that they should at some point study The Odyssey, which I do.
We should be treating these works as what they are: literary classics, but in a historic dialect, where part of the literary exercise is the archeological/anthropological dig through the prose. As far as I can tell, that's how the author is approaching it, and I don't think calling it out that way is lowering any bar.
Oral immunotherapy seems to be very effective but sticking with it is nontrivially hard.
Fortunately, peanuts aren’t expensive. The expensive part is the trained allergist whose job is to keep up with the research, and in my case, who I suspect will be publishing interesting papers in the next few years.
Egg albumin is also interesting because the vast majority of kids outgrow it. My toddler has a peanut allergy but has already outgrown his egg albumin allergy.
You have to shop around for allergists willing to do it. Our first allergist told us they weren’t comfortable doing it but it was becoming an increasingly popular option and referred us to several allergists who did it. We’ve also spoken to allergists who were bearish on it. It’s because there’s very little published data.
The general consensus among allergists is that early exposure reduces the chances of developing the allergy in the first place, but people on oral immunotherapy are still allergic, they just have a high tolerance and can still have anaphylactic reactions. Some will outgrow the allergy, but for peanuts most don’t and the data doesn’t yet exist for whether peanut oral immunotherapy increases the likelihood of outgrowing the allergy.
One detail in particular makes a huge difference: oral immunotherapy seems to be significantly more effective in babies (starting before age 2) with significantly better outcomes. Adults and young children have a much higher incidence of side effects (most common one is a constantly upset stomach) that makes avoidance potentially still better for overall quality of life, but our allergist told us that among their <2 year old cohorts they’ve seen zero out of [upper two digits] experience any of those side effects at all. We started our son when he was 1 year old.
In our case the kid started eating peanuts basically as soon as they started eating solid foods, so the allergy happened despite early exposure. Actually we caught the allergy early enough to start OIT early because of early exposure.
As one of many, many parents, my observation has been that there is so much contradictory parenting advice because there is so much variation in the kids, in terms of behaviors, personalities, the order in which they bootstrap their motor vs verbal skills, body awareness, etc., etc. As a result, consuming parenting advice is like going down a checklist of things to try, and the kid won’t respond to most of it.
In our case the kid picked up signs we were teaching him (not ASL, just intentional signs) weeks before corresponding words, and there are still words he signs and understands but can’t pronounce. The point was to introduce expressive language for functional concepts (hunger, wanting help, wanting to be picked up, etc.), and beyond its role as a precursor to spoken words, it absolutely made our lives easier.
It’s a well known phenomenon that the ability to pronounce words lags behind the ability to express “language”. Your kids clearly didn’t need it, but it’s still a useful tool.
Qualitatively, I think it becomes “big” when you have to leave the space of generic “it just works” technologies and you have to start doing bespoke optimizations. It’s amazing how far you can get these days without having to go custom.
The baseline is something like a 4-year vesting schedule with a 1 year cliff and monthly after that, uniform distribution. Anything more back-loaded or worse than that is a red flag.
I'm not sure what a good solution could be, just that I've seen enough examples of trying to research a potential partner where you get one story from a loose acquaintance and a totally opposite view if you are lucky enough to have a good friend willing to give you the real story.
I own a system in one of the tech giants where sampling is counterproductive to our problem domain, and where in the pipeline we deal with each of those issues is our bread and butter problem that can sometimes swing costs by $millions.
The good news is that if you diagnose food allergies early and start someone on oral immunotherapy when they’re extremely young (<2 years old), the early evidence is that you can build up significant tolerance with basically no side effects. That’s the boat my child is in - we started them on peanut OIT at just over 1 year old, and the worst symptoms were a skin breakout or two, and today they’d probably be able to eat a couple peanuts with no reaction.
The downside is they have to continue their daily dose forever. There are some interesting alternatives coming into the market though.
Edit: they will still need to always keep epipens nearby, but at least now there’s no fear of anaphylaxis when someone nearby on the plane eats a bag of peanuts.
The vast majority of Factorio players are not familiar with programming. A small but very vocal and very enthusiastic minority are though.
I'm not a discerning drinker, but sometimes I'll still order a fancier beer or glass of wine, because... why not? I don't do it often, so I don't mind dropping some extra bucks, and sometimes I experience something new and interesting.
Sure trying to do everything through JWT’s and cookies makes things harder, but reasoning about attestations by a user from one federated identity provider that a service from a different federated identity provider should be able to query specific data on behalf of the user is messy no matter where you do it, and every medium sized enterprise has that problem somewhere in the IT stack. At that point JWT is just another serialization format for passing attested data around.
More or less. The complexity comes from having to solve the edge cases, so it’s helpful to be one level of abstraction higher where your code is closer to your conceptual space.
For simple cases, plain old TLS should be enough, ideally with short lived client certs.
It’s a bit like “don’t roll your own crypto” advice. Don’t roll your own auth.
It's true, you are indeed passing around full-blown .NET runtime objects. In fact your whole shell is running inside an instance of the .NET runtime, including the ability to dynamically load .NET DLL's and even directly invoke native API's.
It feels a bit like JS in the sense that you're best off sticking to "the good parts", where you get the power of structured input/output but you don't end up trying to, for example, implement high performance async code, even though you technically could.
I think the nature of your dependency on them and their dependency on you figures heavily into your viable options to address the overall communication problem. In my experience this kind of issue is often unique to the specific pair of people.