noema

Inheritance can be clean and expressive when used diligently. If you wish to express a tight cohesion between classes with default functionality (especially when it pertains to instance variables), an abstract parent class can keep the shared logic in a single place. I run into this often when dealing with Android UI code which tends to involve many "variations on a theme" classes.

IntelliJ / Android Studio / other JetBrains IDEs. Maybe a little too resource intensive, but the UX and context-sensitive intellisense is light-years ahead of the competition.

I haven't used Xcode much personally, but it automatically shoots up to the top of my hate list on account of the fact that it's a mandatory 20GB hog just to use the iOS Simulator. In my particular use case (React Native + Expo development), attempting to manually prune the installation files of SDK packages I will never use (e.g. Watch) somehow breaks the simulator.

>hasn’t it been suggested that the internals of google translate and similar systems have effectively constructed such a meta-language?

No, Google Translate and other state of the art machine translation software rely on large corpuses of linguistic data from which they make statistical inference. They do not have a 'centralized metalanguage' which ontologizes meaning in the manner described by OP.

I think ultimately this endeavor would run into the same issues which befell the efforts of the GOFAI research program. A translation layer would need to "understand" embedded higher-order contexts of language making implicit references to the world, and which vary by different languages and cultures. Such contexts are not analytically decomposable in a manner which permits a centralized mapping.

As with GOFAI, a formalized representation of meaning entails certain ontological assumptions about "how the world hangs together". These assumptions often hold true for an isolated domain of inquiry but falter when dealing with more complex phenomena. I could, however, see such a system useful for 'Simple Wikipedia' articles which largely consist of existentially quantifiable sentences.

There is a wealth of philosophical scholarship on the issues of semantics and formal representation; I recommend the works of Hubert Dreyfus if you want to dig into this more.

>What I've wished for instead, for years, is actually an underlying "metalanguage" that expresses the vocabulary and grammatical concepts in all languages.

We've been down this road before... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis

And if you're going to read Derrida, make sure you know your Husserl first...

Wasn't the "Gang of Four" book written entirely in C++?

Leetcode interviews are more of a sadistic entrance ritual than anything approximating a fair gauge of skill or experience. I see no other reason to make proven developers study textbook problems during their free time (they sure aren't implementing knapsack algorithms from memory at work).

It often goes unmentioned that these interviews test the wrong skills for software development and even instill bad practices. To wit, those artificially handicapped online IDEs force you to memorize language APIs which any real IDE would handle for you -- forget that the JS lowercase string call is "toLowerCase"? Too bad. Also, since time is of the essence, and no debugging tools are provided, you better be using an interpreted language (read: JS and Python -- and really only the former unless you can import the correct libraries) and littering your code with print statements.

Other companies opt for the ostensibly fairer "take home CRUD app assignment" but this too is a facade to lend credence to a preselected candidate pool. No matter how well you complete the assignment with all enterprise grade best practices, you'll still playing the lottery (and this time with a five hour time sink).

Bottom line is don't interpret a lack of success in this draconian system to a personal defect. Ideally, seek employers who assess candidates fairly and qualitatively.

Any non-reference book which can be "read" in this manner probably isn't worth engaging with anyways. This reminds me of that "Lamborghini in my garage" guy who claimed to be able to read a book in five minutes, and whose entire library was self-help / pop-psych / finance-bro fluff with no intellectual substance. Of course such material can be digested quickly.

Are they named after a very large tropical rainforest?

Looked this up and saw the promos. Anything endorsed by both Steven Pinker and Alan Sokal is bound to be bad faith, intellectually dishonest hackery.

"Best practice Android development" is soon to phase out XML (for the most part) with Jetpack Compose. Working with two way data binding in XML seemed like a good idea, until you had to debug it.

Cool stuff but what's with the logo? The branding is a bit too Affliction-esque for something usually associated with elegance...

There are many people who would claim that he isn't a real philosopher ;) Don't skip Max Weber and Georges Canguilhem, two of his biggest influences.

Yes, you can't beat the classic essayists. Sir Thomas Browne too. Melville draws a lot from these writers in Moby Dick.

You would definitely appreciate Intelligence and Spirit, which employs game theory, linear logic, and Hegel towards a theory of artificial general intelligence.

I think there is a distinction to be made between information in the ontological sense and information in the pragmatic sense. The former does not have any purchase on "meaning" or "use", only a metric of informational entropy or degrees of freedom, irrespective of observation. However, the sense in which you speak of information is the pragmatic dimension, where an observer receives a datum of semantic content against a given backdrop of pre-established "meaning". This sense is problematic as an objective metric.

I didn't claim Wiener founded it, only that his popularization of the term is more ubiquitous than Shannon's formulation.

Probably one of the dozen or so most important publications of the twentieth century. Ironically though it would be Norbert Wiener's interpretation of information (exactly Shannon's times minus one) that would cement itself in the popular lexicon due to it being far more intuitive. Where Wiener posits information as negative-entropy (or "order"), Shannon interprets it as representing a degree of freedom, or uncertainty. The problem with Wiener's is that the underlying epistemology carries a subjective bent, where information is equivocal to "meaning" or semantic content. Shannon's, meanwhile is ultimately superior as an objective metric, though far less intuitive (under his interpretation, a random string is technically the most information-saturated construct possible, because it possesses the highest degrees of freedom).

The opacity of contemporary humanities texts is overstated. Yes, the general academic style tends to be verbose and baroque. But it bespeaks a certain hubris when a layman to a given field claims an absence of meaning to its work. The topics being discussed are often technical and by virtue of their intended audience (peer scholars) presuppose vast amounts of preliminary knowledge.

More resources ARE being shifted to those "practical" (read: revenue-generating) programs, to the detriment of students. The purpose of higher education is edification, not securing directly applicable job skills - that's what trade schools are for. Being able to read, write, interpret and communicate well are just as important to a software developer than the textbook CS curriculum.

It's only because of the harsh economic reality of America's university system that such a prospect is even thinkable.

To this I would add a couple of classic mid century studies on perception: Arnheim's "Art and Visual Perception" (which imo should be mandatory for any UI designer), and Merleau-ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" (this one requires some extensive background reading, but it's well worth the effort)

Go for an Onyx Nova Pro. Runs on Android, has a large screen (perfect for PDFs) and ability to take notes with a stylus directly on the text.

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and the short stories of Borges