joeldg

What he is saying is literally the basics/first week in "Art 101" and addresses the OP who was asking about "learning".

Biden is great... maybe not as progressive as other Dem's would like but I am moderate (D) -- and here is the thing, most voters want to pay their bills and not think about politics.

I got really turned off by some of the things Bernie was going for (like voting from prison) which are pointless if you have someone like Trump in office shredding the whole country. I like Bernie as a person but we would have lost Florida by a landslide with him on the ticket.

For this moment, Biden is great, I couldn't be happier.

Not a dumb question at all. I am 46 now and am a Senior SRE at at large company here in the valley and have been where you are, I went the startup route for a while but in the end this is a better fit for me.

There is an old saying that "someone who doesn't like to talk about their work, hates it." If your free time is not involved with what you do at work then you may be in the wrong profession or, you may have not had a chance to marry the two. Filmmaking and government are both GREAT areas for tech!

I used to live in LA and know a lot of people in the movie industry who work in computers there and make a very good living. It's not just VFX folks but also game companies and all the support that goes with media, from websites, pipelines and advertising. There is a ton of ways to be in tech/programming and work in film or game industries in LA or New York. Same goes for politics, except that is going to be more limited to Washington DC (which is surprisingly a great place to live). In DC and the surrounding areas like Maryland is where all your tech folks at a multitude of government contractors, lobbyists, data collection and campaigns (as well as security).

If it is just about money and if you want to stay a programmer in regular tech then my advice in answer to this is; challenging yourself is always the best/better option unless you are explicitly taking a break. If you want to advance in your career and not stagnate, if you want to not be bored then you need to challenge yourself at every step. If this is not possible in your job, find a new job. Finding a new job is easier than you might think, every company is hiring programmers, data science, large data, reliability people even in the middle of a pandemic. Most of those companies will move you to one of the hubs of tech. Get that book cracking the coding interview, do practice interviews online, read all the cheatsheets for interviews people have on github, contribute to opensource, write tutorials on Medium and Github pages and try to land a job in Silicon Valley, you will make money and live in a pretty place and if you are careful with money you can retire early. (all the FIRE kids are doing it)

Figured I would toss that out there.

Guys with hemorrhoids swear by them.

In related news: "People don't understand financial markets ... AT ALL"

Long ago, I had applied for a software position at Google and they brought me in then said "We are going to interview you for a systems position" and I was like "umm, but I applied for a software position and am not prepared for a systems interview" then they said "roll with it, lets see". As I told them, I bombed at least partly because it threw me for a total loop and I was pretty shocked at the rudeness of that.

I didn't get further along in that process because of that stupidity and have never even considered them as a place to work since, and I am an SRE/PE these days.

spellcheckers use them, any time you see a company with millions of users let you know your email address was already registered, domain name registrars use them -- basically anything with a large search space where you need to know if something is in (or not) the dataset. They are useful all over. I wrote a modified version of bloom filters so the filter files are about 1/3rd the size (but with a slight cpu tradeoff) for a domain name registrar. They are kind of a staple of computer science.

In my experience it goes exactly like this just about everywhere:

job: here is your macbook pro, welcome! you: <install homebrew>

One issue with SMI and what is known as "The Control Problem" is that you are trying to come up with rules for something that is not just smarter than you, but is 'vastly' smarter than you, and in fact the entire human race put together.

You are basically trying to figure out a way to 'in-effect' cheat a god, which in relation to us, yes that is basically what it would be. An SMI is pretty much the definition of a god (and a possibly crazy greek god as well).

The idea that something like that would turn the universe into paper-clips, is somewhat silly and most of the arguments along these lines discount that "S" part of the whole thing.

What is the answer..

There is none.

you should do Khan Academy stuff on programming, read up on data structures and why they are used etc.

honestly you would have been in way over your head if you had managed to get the job.