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Would you think there is still a chance for iPad games that are well-made and well-advertised on the internet, that cost perhaps over $10, maybe even $20, to do well?

I see this as, first you have the stuff that's top ranking on the app store which is mostly f2p optimization problems. But hardcore gamers should be able to spread the word about an actual good ipad game, right? Or is the notion of an ipad game itself not hardcore enougH?

What could "use pedagogies that work better for each group" possibly mean other than racial and gender segregation?

Here I'll break this down into pseudocode.

    for each group in racial_gender_groups:
        teachWithMaterialFor(group);

Hell, she even cited "genetics" and "the way the brain is wired." You can't get any more blatant than this.

I just think it's a tragedy that the prof only goes this far.

The observation in the article you paraphrased is more the realization of a student or bright child, not a fucking professor. It's sad that we let things degenerate this far in regard to CS education. Only in CS is this "let the rest fail" the conventional wisdom (conventional idiocy that is).

And yes, racial segregation of classes is something that enriches the upper class in general, and the prof is advocating this and that alone makes me hold her in contempt.

That's right on with "too shy".

The issues of pedagogy whether it is music or programming are largely sociological.

So why not make being a manic musician attractive and marketable like they do in movies about music?

I guarantee you that the core inspiration that starts (and to a large extent sustains) any involvement in any activity is aesthetic. This makes aesthetics the beginning and end of activities.

But in programming, we just use the manic people as Golden Children to somehow whip the other students into shape. This utterly fails of course, aesthetically and practically and in every other way imaginable. It's an ugly way of doing things and it doesn't actually produce good programmers.

Ok, instead of reading a Wikipedia page or two, or the most elementary chapter in a probability/statistics textbook and gaining a bunch more skills (among them the tools needed to reason about whether your MCMC is doing anything close to reproducing the original distribution), I can peruse a huge blog post filled with patronizing language and it doesn't even have the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm listed out even in pseudocode. Got it, this is what progress looks like.

Pretty much. Also, as a non white person I feel their echo chamber effects acutely. Casual racism and race "realism" is especially pronounced in nerd circles.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote extensively on this and I feel he said it best.

[Excessive reading] robs the mind of all elasticity; it is like keeping a spring under a continuous, heavy weight. If a man does not want to think, the safest way is to take up a book directly he has a spare moment.

- "Thinking for Oneself"

Contains a great quote by Pope Duncaid 3:

"Forever reading, never to be read."

Link:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/...

Hawthorne effect: "Feels good to track mood."

> - "The computer only does what it is literally instructed to do. What do you literally want to do? What are you literally instructing the computer right now?"

I feel like after you really know a system you almost start thinking only in terms of its components. "Hmm I want to do X...somehow I just automatically thought to modify function Y and call it in module Z."

Wow, this was a big wake-up call. It's ironic because I am in research and I always did a lot of theory and problem definition up front for whatever I did, but I am now in this "reckless rapid prototyping" phase where if I get some idea I have to try it out RIGHT NOW, stepping back be damned. Ironically it results in getting stuck more than I would have wanted!

I guess this is the fourth tip?

- Step away from the computer

What was interesting is that the higher-performing group (Alpha) was stuck less often that the lower-performing group (Gamma). Is this the next programming motto after "Don't Repeat Yourself"?

Don't Get Stuck!

Now how does one avoid getting stuck while programming? I still get stuck a lot, but these really helped:

- Test what you write as quickly as you can.

- Hold it in your head! Or you won't have a clue what all your code, together, is doing.

- To get started, ask yourself, what is the simplest thing that could possibly work?

This is also known as value _creation_ versus value _transference_:

http://halfsigma.typepad.com/half_sigma/2008/03/value-creati...

I do not completely agree with the guy's views; in particular I do not believe in there being anything other than value transference, and value "creation" means you are closer to physics, transferring value at a physical level, than to politics and sales, transferring value from other people. But it does cut the bullshit.

Aka the importance of mentally being a headless chicken. You're not being "introspective" or otherwise "deep" when anxious. You're just applying a blanket negative bias to all of your observations, and then looking around mostly to confirm the bias. Anxiety is crippling, full stop.

Is the blotchiness due to uncertainty principle or sensor imperfections? Both maybe?

The part at the end where she is against top-down thinking, and instead promotes bottom-up inductive thinking where you first figure out how to make airplane parts well before tackling the whole aircraft, is a lesson I've learned the hard way an almost unhealthy number of times. She also seems to understand the difference between leadership and management.

Other than that, the 90% figure seems pretty believable to me. If you are playing with containers of gas, you can do stuff that is quite close to the physics textbooks' chapters on thermodynamics. The water is probably so they can get to 750 kwh per tank.

Are there any other processes where the engineered efficiency is that close to ideal? Pumped-storage hydroelectric is close.

Thanks!

How did you get your terminal to look like that?

This is an excellent attitude to have and may be the only healthy attitude.

As opposed to the conventional wisdom, which wants us to Never Settle by keeping on jumping between things, reading broadly and pretending you are a coding god after reading all the X vs Y articles, never building up enough expertise in any one thing, while holding out for that one gig that will hit the spot.

And Just Getting It To Work as is commonly understood really translates to Do a Shoddy Job So It Looks Good On The Surface, Fuck Understanding Or Actually Getting It To Really Work.

Nice assumptions dude. I guess this is the internet for ya; post something that is not even very controversial, and your own caricatured projection is jumped on.

On your other note, it is not bullshit as long as it is sustainable and people are being fed. If it was, you bet it'd be fixed, one way or the other, up to, including, and beyond cannibalism to genetic re-engineering not to need food.

On the other hand, there is your typical TechCrunch startup lol.

Don't even bother replying. It seems we are so different in how in touch we are, I could be locked in an internetless and lightless room with no outside communication for the rest of my life, and still be able to do non bullshit work, which I'd scratch into the walls with my fingernails, so when I die and they open the box to take me out they (at least the in-touch ones) will be awed and the world will be a better place, while you could be handed the US presidency, or the leadership of a multi-national corporation, and still cock it up by starving the population and workers to death by removing "bullshit jobs" lol.

I can't believe that fallacy got around. It's oxymoronic, it is just like the sentence "non-swimming fish moves around in your filled aquarium."

Ok, you are literally equating food production, which includes agriculture which led to humans being able to support groups bigger than a circus troupe, with "bullshit job." Got it.

Ok, then let's kill 99% of the people on this earth. Oh no, where did our civilizations go?

Having long term impact that is noticeable is good and should be everyone's goal. But being this confused about value is what leads to shit like this.

My subjective value judgement can still be better than yours, and its degree of truth will be seen in the years to come.

The only concept you need to understand to get the truth of my statement is _order_.

A "meaningful and important" job is an opportunity to impose your own kind of order on the outside world. You will instinctively know this, as a human being, when you are in this state.

On the other hand, you will just as instinctively know when your job is to actually generate disorder for the rest of us, dragging everyone else down with you so you can get some small scraps from self-absorbed "important people", because you've given up on aiming for anything more significant.

All the people you talk about have chosen their nation's culture as their canvas, shaping the thought of wide swathes of the population of the United States.

In contrast, everything TechCrunch is known for is a gossip rag that is only read by desperate or clueless startup types whose content is generated by inner circles of bullshit work generators whose claim to fame is simply creating a vanishingly small fraction more noise on Ethernet, fiber optic, the 2-5GHz spectrum, and a few VC bank account numbers.

You tell me what kind of influence you'd rather have.

Where do you get the nyancat progress bar?

They claim that avoiding vacuuming the same area twice saves power, but is that true in every situation? Math-wise, it seems possible for a self-avoiding path (with thickness) to be _longer_ than a similar path (with thickness) that does self-intersect, so the vacuum is on longer, so it actually consumes more power.

Edit: And if you do go over the same spot twice, you should be able to detect that with your navigation system so that you can turn the brushes and suction off or something.

I actually think this is a completely valid viewpoint, and the people downvoting you and criticizing you are more signaling their supposed moral superiority---suicide and depression is a topic people love to brag about how supportive and real they supposedly are but the person who actually lifts a finger to help, probably 1 in a million of these people.

Thank you for keeping it real and saying words that are hard to hear but quite accurately describe the situation: suicidal people are rejects of the socio-economic system, and it's fucking hilarious that so many of us get indignant about suicide while, operating in this system, being active or passive agents in contributing to the suicide of others around them.

Very well said. I agree, it seems that in this society mental illness, depression and suicidality are more used as a label to further ostracize those in distress instead of as a signal to actually take steps to help them while they can still be helped.

Can I get some background on what the leaked HBGary emails are, I'm curious.

I think we actually agree. I too feel that computer science these days is gibberish relying on the form but not substance of mathematical proofs to convey superior status, whereas "why" systems worked back then didn't require mathemtical _gibberish_ to explain, but were actually very well rooted in mathematical reasoning.

Completely agree. The fact is that most people in STEM aren't so much encouraged to go into STEM as deceived into it by a combination of science documentaries, science types bragging that STEM-like subjects are of Superior Intrinsic Value and Lead You To The Meaning Of Life, and parents selling the field to their children as an easy way to make money.

And a very good point about the hacker/elite snobs pissing on other classmates + gender imbalance and lousy social environment, it's not just limited to CS undergrads but is widespread in Ph. D programs as well, you'd expect that these Head Nerd types would have gotten with the program of life by then.

Combine the shitty social elements with a shitty ROI plus an increased awareness of other kinds of worth than being a coding rockstar, and you've got a bunch of disillusioned, not-very-young people who feel they have been deceived into making their life choices.

The last point is also what's making me reconsider being involved in computer science. It seems like even research universities are increasingly doing work that are more low-quality first-startup style grabs at attention, using machine learning (itself a balkanized field devoid of theory) as a semantic stopsign-marker of objective quality, and less of "classical" computer science results that were very mathematically informed.