vkk8

Assuming the only purpose of universities is to serve the job market. I'd argue that the primary function of the university system is to transfer the collective human knowledge forward. The fact that some of it is sometimes needed in jobs is a secondary effect.

But you're right that there should be schools that teach the practical programming skills. But it's the the trade schools that should be developed towards this goal, not universities.

Anecdotally, I was (as probably many here were) ahead of the curve in digital devices usage when I started hanging out in IRC and various web forums as a teenager in early 2000s. At some point I noticed that just using computers induced some amount of anxiety compared to "old tech"; whenever there was some period of time when I used my computer less (like christmas, vacations, etc.) and joined back to the "world of the normal people", I felt much calmer and happier. Even though I noticed this, it was difficult to log off during normal times since most of my life was in the internet.

Now everyone is using digital devices all the time and the "normal people world" has ceased to exist. Also almost everyone is anxious and/or depressed. I think this is not a coincidence. However, I do not think that this is due to social media per se, but using digital devices for anything (social media being just the reason why most people use them).

My theory is that just using digital devices for anything is somewhat stressful; you have to keep the eyes focused all the time (Can you think of other activities that require this? There aren't many and they are all somewhat stressful), you have to navigate all the various applications and menus, you have to occasionally solve minor problems that you run into when using the devices, etc.

Using digital devices is the same for your brain as heavy, repetitive physical labour is to your body; in small amounts it might even be healthy, but several hours every day is going to destroy your body/mind.

Really? Here in Finland I see a lot of products in the supermarket that claim to be made out of "100% recycled plastic". I can't really compare volumes of plastic waste vs recycled plastic products, but it seems that at least some of the recycled material is put to use.

> As a layman non-scientist, I wonder why we see so many relatively low-value observational studies in diet/nutrition, often with results that get contradicted or fail to replicate a few years later.

On my peak fitness enthusiasm I kept a rigorous food diary for some time and it was such a pain in the ass that I don't believe for a second that food diaries coming from people who are not 100% committed and interested in keeping one are accurate at all. People would often forget to log small snacks they have, or estimate portion sizes completely wrong, or neglect logging sauces, oils, condiments, etc.

> "People who consumed more than 20% of daily calories from processed foods had a 28% faster decline in global cognition and a 25% faster decline in executive functioning compared to people who ate less than 20%,"

I wish they just showed a graph of "decline in cognition" vs "percentage of calories from processed foods" instead of making me try to parse the relevant information out of sentences like that. What 10% of my calories come from processed foods? I'm I completely safe or is the effect linear in percentage of calories or what?

Indeed. I hate the term "ultraprocessed" so much, because I have no idea what to look for if I try to avoid it.

If I chop my potatoes before boiling them, is that processing? If not, which steps in cooking count as "processing"? And how many of those steps need to be included for the food to be "ultraprocessed"? How can I avoid accidentally "ultraprocessing" my food when I cook it at home?

This is a bit crude way to put it, but maybe you're right.

At least for me, becoming a father changed my perspective on everything so much that it's almost like I'm not even the same species anymore as I was before having them. Sometimes people without children feel like they're not even proper adults even if they are older and/or more senior at work or whatever.

> Maybe, but again, I don't see why that should be necessary. Tesla should not have been able to do this, period.

Maybe you're right. However, much of the modern hardware business operates this way. At least Nvidia and Intel have been known to sell the same chips as different models, but just some part of the chip disabled via firmware.

> Sounds like all around bad decisions. The previous owner shouldn't have sold it as a 90 or at least disclosed that, "It's a 60 but Tesla swapped out the batter with a 90 and left it configured as a 90".

To be fair, for people not intimately familiar with the craziness of modern tech business, it's reasonable to assume that whatever capabilities the car has at the moment of purchase, are going to be there indefinitely. On the face of it, cutting car battery remotely via software patch sounds about as reasonable as remotely removing a room from a house you purchased.

Totally different context, but at my company, they started reusing some IDs that are supposed to be unique because they ran out of them and the old-as-fuck computer systems can't handle longer IDs.

Coming from theoretical physics background, I find the mathematics and physics side of game development quite easy. Is this considered a real advantage if I wanted to pursue a career or something in game development? Is there some way to leverage my physics/math skills to do this stuff as a serious hobby, perhaps even making small amounts of money from it?

Like probably many people, I've wanted to make games since I was a kid, but somehow there is never enough time or energy to start doing indie development seriously and I always imagined there's no way I could get hired in a game company without a good developer or arts background.

I have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and I feel the same way about it. It's not an illness, it's simply a maladaptation to the kind of world we live in.

Most milder mental disorders are probably like this; it doesn't make any sense from the evolutionary point of view that a significant proportion of the population would have largely genetic trait that is only harmful in all situations. It's just that traits like ADHD and high levels of anxiety probably were helpful - or at least not harmful - in our evolutionary context, but are not anymore.

This is, I think, why simple things are so difficult to do in large corporations and everythings costs about 10-100x more money than you would expect. Often, it would be much easier to change the processes and workflows than the software.

Is this how software development in corporations really works? I'm not a software developer, but I've contributed to some large open source projects and I thought it would be similar. Maybe with the difference that the issues would be raised by a Q/A team or other people in the company instead of random people across the internet.

How do you get a software engineering job as a physicist? I'm one and I tried applying for a few (mostly with titles like "machine learning engineer", etc.) and mostly received no responses. For comparison, when applying for "data scienist" or "quantitative analyst" (in finance) jobs, I got many offers. Around here, the SWE people seem to assume that physicist can't write good code.

Data science is an oversold profession. When studying it, you learn really cool things; Bayesian models, reinforcement learning, AI, all the trendy stuff. In reality, most of the data scientists end up spending almost all of their time interacting with horribly designed, decade(s) old databases and the analysis part of their job is mostly just plotting the mean as a function of time and doing logistic regression over and over again.

I can find dozens of "bright lights" in a Finnish online store. Looking at the specs of one of them (https://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/714353/Innolux-Epic-...), it promises 1500 lux when sitting half a meter from the lamp.

I can sort of see a lot of the fitness industry being disrupted by this. Much of what physiotherapists and personal trainers do is just showing people how to do stuff like squats and push ups safely. Depending on how accurate the pose detection used in this link is, this could maybe be done just by filming yourself doing the movements and the algorithm giving you feedback.

I don't think the point of prison is to change your views (the system doesn't care what your views are). It's to make you less likely to re-offend and the vast majority of people to not offend at all. I would guess that there are lots of people with radical views who never act on them exactly because they are afraid of the legal consequences (e.g. prison). This means the system has worked on them.

EDIT: Not that I'm defending any particular prison system or making a moral statement here. In many countries the prison system is horrible and probably not even very optimal at preventing offences. It's just that in my mind the prison has one main purpose; to act as a deterrent for crime, and most of the time, for most of the population, it somewhat works for that purpose.

Do you mind if I ask how do you even manage to do 60-70 hours a week of productive technical work? I can do maybe 2-3 hours of programming a day before my concentration starts dropping. That plus whatever meetings I have gets me to maybe 4-5 hours of work per day, the rest is just dicking around while staying online on Teams (before it was chatting with people in the office, now it's doing whatever I want at home).

I know there are also people who work longer hours here where I live, but usually they are in some kind of management positions and majority of their time is spent in meetings. All the developers and technical people that I know tend to be a bit lazy. Maybe it's just my social bubble, though.

To be honest, I was pretty discouraged by the other comments here. I know many friends here, who are like me, and work 40 hours per week on paper, but in reality they have something to do maybe 50-75% of that time (sometimes even less). Since we are all remote now, that time is free time. Based on the comments here, in the US tech, the standard seems to be 40 hours a week minimum, plus more if you have any kind of responsibility.

I have a family and, while I like the idea of getting a bit more money, working 70 hour weeks even occasionally and having 2-4 weeks worth of holidays per years sounds worse than horrible to me. Now I have time for family, hobbies and work, all three. In an environment that makes me work around the year, basically without breaks, 40-70 hours a week would force me to pick only one or two out of the three (and one of them would have to be work).

We tend to reserve the word "tech" for new technology especially. Cars, power tools and horse wagons were also new sexy technology once upon a time, but no-one calls companies making those products "tech companies". The categorization from "tech" to "normal stuff" happens when a technology becomes ubiquitous part of our society rather than play stuff of early adopters and hackers. Arguably this has recently happened also to social media, internet advertising and many other internet technologies so maybe we should move on and recategorize those things as what they are instead of "tech".

So what is "tech" now, if we take the definition to be "new technology not yet widely adopted by everyone's grandmother"? Maybe some of the blockchain stuff? Nuclear fusion? Reinforcement learning based AI agents? Self-driving cars? Hyperloop? Homomorphic encryption? Nerve implants? Robots capable of moving in unpredictable environments (like Boston Dynamics has)? Artificial meat? Space ships?

ADHD isn't a discrete trait, it simply means that "you are in the lower x percentile of the population in the ability to concentrate". Even people whose concentration skills are close to the mean of the population can feel like they "have ADHD" and be diagnosed with one if they eg. work a job that requires more than average amounts of concentration which they don't have. For a good layman's discussion on this, see: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo... (for people who are not familiar with SSC, the writer is a psychiatrist by profession so he should know this stuff).

Every time someone tells me they have ADHD and suggest they should take some measures to accommodate it, I think of this Slate Star Codex post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

It's about Adderall (a popular medicine for ADHD), but the beginning of the article has a great discussion on the nature of ADHD.

According to Scott Alexander's review (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...), 0.3mg is the correct dosage for melatonin and higher doses might do more harm than good. I think you have accidentally replicated some of the melatonin research on yourself.

I personally wouldn't want to use melatonin all the time. Relying on a drug to keep my circadian rhythm going seems fragile and scary.

By some definition, a person who does anything besides swearing when a piece of software doesn't work as expected is already a power user.

I see this in many of my relatives. Googling the problem or checking the settings menu is something I do when asked to fix a technical problem in a piece of software I have never seen or used before and this more than they did before handing the problem to me.

I don't know which field you studied, but I think that in physics it's not quite that bad. There might be some research published that's just wrong or fraudulent, but not that much. I think it's because in physics, outside maybe high energy particle physics, it's usually feasible to check other people's experiments. In theoretical physics it's certainly common to work through other people's results before extending them.

However, I would say there's a lot of pointless research. Lots of graduate student and postdoc working hours are spent to produce results that no-one could possibly think are interesting or useful just because papers need to be produced.

I think it's the reduction of the system into a career mill (PhD for students, tenure for postdocs and grant money for professors) that ruins it. Science is inherently too unpredictable to be reduced into an algorithm that just about anyone can use to produce knowledge.

Neither is being introverted/extroverted.

Our mind is more complex than simple dichotomies like this assume. We all behave like "introverts" in some situations and like "extroverts" in some situations. We constantly adapt to our environment and our responses to external stimuli are not stable in time. They also depend on our internal state like hunger, tiredness, etc. much more than these sort of classification schemes would have you believe.

All the Jak games were amazing. I wonder why the genre has almost died now?

You might be interested in the concept of "duality" often used in e.g. theoretical physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(mathematics)

If you want to be even more general, check out a field of mathematics called category theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory). Its' central idea is to describe mathematical structures in terms of "objects" and their relationship with each other (called morphisms). I'm not extremely knowledgeful in this subject, but I believe mostly everything you get out of categorical theoretical treatment is too generic to be useful, but has resulted in some real results in e.g. algebraic geometry.