bentona

The argument is that the cost of dealing with this legislation will result in the cost of internet service going up slightly, e.g. $10/month. This is irrelevant to the wealthy but impacts the lower classes more.

If you'd like yet another somewhat similar inquiry into the information-theory-based definition of life, I'll mention Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

Some advice based solely on my experience, YMMV etc.

Re: Mentors - reach out to someone who you enjoyed working with in a previous role, looked up to, and would enjoy working with again. Just ask them to have a quick chat, and have specific questions about your job hunt ready - ask them to share their approach to a job search, share what you've done, and ask if they have any advice for improvement. If the chat goes well, you can ask if it's alright if you reach out again. You don't necessarily need a full "mentor", just some guidance.

Re: Referrals - This is not strictly about typical "referrals", but if you can have a chat with a recruiter, you often can similarly cut through initial screens / red tape.

I have had a ton of luck reaching out directly to in-house recruiters for roles I'm interested in on LinkedIn. They're often constantly on LinkedIn, frequently doing outbound, and IME they're often happy that someone reached out - and this can be more effective than spending an hour hand-crafting a cover letter. Keep the message to a couple sentences, share why you're interested in the company, and again, ask to have a quick chat.

Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA

Didn't realize this before watching, but it's interesting that there's an incredibly complicated board state but the game state / actions are deterministic, e.g. the players don't have any choices about what to do once the machine is set up.

Recently watched a related short vice doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kDseTCNGyA

Personally, I find that trying to stay away from single-value representations of skills/health/etc is more helpful and facilitates more curiosity.

Instead of wondering, "Am I better at X than Bob?", I try to focus on "About which part of this problem might Bob have an insight I'm missing", for example.

It's probably true that I was better than 90% of students at some small sliver of something, but that's not super relevant in the larger scope of everything it means to be a student. Getting away from the "better"/"worse" dichotomy is the important thing, IMHO.

Maybe an aside, and I don't necessarily disagree that async is sometimes inefficient, but it's more efficient if you bias for reading instead of writing. For example, take 15-20 minutes to write the thing, so it only takes 3-5 minutes to parse.

This matters because async can become more efficient than sync when it prevents you from having to repeat yourself, but you lose this efficiency if you don't invest in clear writing that is easy to parse (repeatedly) to begin with.

What you're saying resonates a lot with me - I feel like I fell into programming (also writing game hacks), and I'm jealous of the passion I observe in others for SWE-specific concerns.

You look at the core problems of software engineering from a human-centric point of view - which is a great perspective, IMO.

Have you thought about trying to transition to a role that is more human-focused? I'm guessing with your level of experience, it wouldn't be too hard to find a path to team lead or EM. I'd also potentially consider consulting, either freelance or as part of a firm.

Personally, working on a larger "system" that includes people - a team, a department, a solution - is much more rewarding, because I get to work on a larger class of problems with a more diverse toolset, and I get to observe my impact on others.

I would frame it differently. There seem to be many dysfunctional marriages that are carried by e.g. inertia - and because of this, I do agree that perhaps marriage shouldn't be taken as such an assumption. By the same token, though, those that _do_ choose to engage in marriage should accept the responsibility and the (apparently, I am not married) large amount of effort it takes to make it successful. I'm choosing to look at this tactic as embracing that effort, and striving for an excellent marriage, instead of the "passable" marriage which seems to be the norm today.

We don't currently have the means to live forever, but if you manage to live long enough, you might survive until we do.

Any clue what one of these might cost?

> Compare the intelligence of a cow or pig or similar mammal to an octopus and the mammal will DESTROY the octopus

What studies do you have in mind?

Awesome! I'm a little concerned about the pricing though - while lifetime membership sounds great, I'm afraid this could end up something like a "pyramid scheme" where my membership is reliant on revenue from new users to stay alive. I'd much rather pay $5/month or so for something like this.

This might be a bit contentious, but there's no top-level comment starting the discussion about regulation of UX patterns. My concerns are mostly those that could apply to related regulation (cookies, internet traffic, etc.), but I'm wondering about other perspectives

The article alludes to this but maybe doesn’t point it out clearly enough: they can only minimize cost in this way _because_ it’s hard to evaluate - otherwise the engineers in question would just work somewhere else where their value would immediately be recognized.

Interesting take from another market leader: https://www.thetradedesk.com/us/knowledge-center/googles-mov...

I agree with the comments positing that persuasion is clearly alive and well, given the enthusiasm of today's e.g. demonstrations. I believe the author's point, however, is that persuasion can (should?) engage the conscious, rational mind, rather than just fear-based, tribal instincts leveraged today.

Semi-related, IMO it's easier to not get siloed, at work and in general, if you position yourself as a math major rather than a CS major. Most people don't realize the overlap, and think "programmer" when they hear CS and "smart person" when they hear math (I have both and this is my experience, ymmv).

If you're not sure what else you want to do, working as a software engineer for a while is not a bad idea, and may be a very good idea depending on your financial situation - if you want to focus on solving problems instead of working on large software systems, maybe try a smaller company. If you're especially interested in entrepreneurship, this could also expose you to a lot of valuable knowledge.

This might be incredibly pedantic, but since this is a mathematical philosophy article, I'm going to go ahead.

These aren't "hard" problems, they're simply questions that don't make sense. Is finding an odd number that is divisible by 2 a "hard problem"? I don't think so, it's just that it turns out that it doesn't make sense to ask the question.

Some of these "hard problems" actually have solutions that demonstrate they aren't solvable, and these solutions are fairly elegant, in which case I'd also say these are not "hard".

Listening to Hearts of Space as a child was my first experience with "experimental" music - definitely formative.

You can still listen to it online: https://v4.hos.com/home

I agree, but I'm still, probably unwisely, allowing myself some anticipation for Diablo 4.

This is by Gregory Chaitin, who also published a pretty interesting & related book called "META MATH!" [1]

I especially like the Turing / Godel equivalency stuff he discusses.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0404335.pdf

It'd be really interesting to see more than just averages for rates. Many dev shops I've interacted with are all right around $250/hr here in the US / on coasts, I wonder if there are similar standards elsewhere, or different tiers in different areas.

To me, the most interesting implication here is that this must not adversely affect Google's ad revenue. If it did, they would surely fix it. This, in turn, means that apparently we have been trained to interface with search engines such that this is not a problem.

Sometimes I wonder how much my brain has changed to use search engines / how much of it is dedicated to effective googling. Makes me feel like a cyborg.

Cool! I like the doubling-time datapoint, haven't seen that before. Btw, I think your column sort only sorts a subset of the data.

This seems like a potentially game-changing discovery - if we could trivially diagnose 30%+ of cases, that could drastically diminish growth rate.

Are there standard anosmia tests? I'm wondering how to make this actionable in the most efficient way.

There is at least one project listed specifically to enable this.

Here's more detail: https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-12/british-government-wants...

The article mentions that "...allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity, but at a much delayed speed", but also that they don't plan to delay football matches.

I don't understand, do they think that more conservative strategies will slow the virus down "too much"? They mention fear of "constraints on freedom of movement" being lifted too soon, maybe a more rational approach is to just not lift them too soon, rather than encourage gatherings like football matches. Given the numbers in Italy & China, I would argue that several football matches could potentially lead to thousands of simultaneous hospitalizations, which seem to be the biggest problem in e.g. Italy. What am I missing here?

I agree. When I read something like this, I have a hard time trusting that the rest of an article isn't aimed at pushing a political agenda rather than spreading information directly related to containment. I'd rather not have to be suspicious and just focus on consuming & evaluating the scientific information.