If you start college (assuming you’re an American) do not under any circumstances drop out. This goes double for grad school. What will happen is the at you’ll still owe money on your student loan, but will not have whatever advantages you might have accumulated as a result of having a degree.
I’ll change my socks every day, and more if I’m swapping out workout clothes for fresh clothes.
Oddly, I really don’t experience foot odor. Other bits can get rather ripe, but whether I’m wearing boots or going barefoot, my feet just do t get funky. That said, I have had athlete’s foot and I’ve seen what happens when someone doesn’t change their socks after days of marching and working in the field. I know it’s not a major danger for me at this point, but I’ve got a whole drawer full of socks, and in any case I want them to match with my shoes and pants.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I think that phrase might have been coined by Slavoj Žižek, talking about the pop culture fascination with zombie films. I’m almost positive I read it in one of his books/essays back in the 2000s. I refer to it a lot.
the IRS running an AI designed to close loopholes or otherwise minimize sidestepping
That’s the one kind of thing Congress will be able to agree to outlaw.
The oldest crpg I ever played was called advent, because the Vax computers could only use 6 characters for file names and so the people who ported it couldn’t use the actual name “adventure.” It was basically the same as the game infocom shipped as Zork.
Apparently the original implementation was on the PDP-10 in 1976. There might have been a couple other games that predated it by a year or two, but adventure was the big one in my opinion because it led (eventually) to the creation of the infocom text based game engine and a whole line of games ranging from hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy to leather goddesses of Phobos.
Thank you for this - this was a fantastic explanation.
OBL had written and communicated frequently his opposition to what he saw as the US occupation of what he considers holy land, and it was very much a known driving factor in his actions. We knew about it since the Clinton administration.
I think it’s good and necessary to get rid of “they hate us for our freedom” as particularly stupid western propaganda. Of course they do. They see the West as a decadent cesspool that disobeys god. So does the Islamic Revolution government in Iran, so does North Korea, so does China, and so on. That’s not why you 9/11, any more than you invade Vietnam to end oppression and bring peace. And they’re definitely pissed about Israel too, but my point is that everyone up to and including (iirc) the Red Army Faction issued statements about Palestine. Palestine is a cause celebre. There’s a saying “When all was said and done, more was said than done.” That’s what we’ve been seeing since the Yom Kippur war. OBL could have gone after Israel. There could have been Al Qaeda fighters on their borders. Hell, they could have been funneling weapons in and training Palestinian fighters. It’s lip service and de rigueur.
The problem comes in when people view international relations like a Marvel movie with good guys and bad guys. Note that I am absolutely not saying everyone is the same. As a member of Team Rainbow, I’d rather live in the US than Saudi Arabia, and I’d rather live in California than Texas. The hero story - Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill - has deep roots in American exceptionalism and the beacon of democracy stuff. While not exactly false, it’s also not exactly true, and the idea was weaponized deliberately by people like Leo Strauss at Chicago to create a mythical America that people would think about using exactly the ideas you’re talking about. That’s where “they hate us for our freedoms” comes from. They don’t. They hate us because they’d rather be the ones in charge.
From a moral perspective, I consider something like 9/11 and the bombing of Hiroshima at the same level, just to be clear. That’s not a popular opinion with a lot of people.
But at the end of the day, you have to decide whether Hitler had a point, Pol Pot had a point, Idi Amin had a point, or whether, despite them having a point of view, we’d rather see an international order one way or the other.
I’ve stopped working on that kind of thing because I do believe it’s morally ambiguous at best. I do think people should be fully aware of the motivating factors of all of the actors involved - whether AQ, PLO, IRA, UK, USA, and so on. Just don’t take any of it at face value and instead think about actual, not idealized, outcomes.
I was in downtown NYC when 9/11 happened, and I saw the second plane hit. I then went and did some military and intelligence stuff for about a decade and a half. All of that is to say I’ve been involved with 9/11 and what happened after since Day 1.
My question is this - we all knew this was OBL’s point of view. I mean, after the towers fell I was standing in a crowd outside of Penn Station on 9/11 waiting for it to reopen, and everyone was talking about how it was probably OBL. He has been on that narrative for a decade or more, had executed other attacks, and was a known major actor.
It was very widely known that what had really set him off was the alliance between the Saudi government and the US, and in particular the US military presence in SA, which he saw as a holy land now occupied by infidels.
Everyone involved in “terrorist” operations always gives lip service to the Palestinians. I’m using scare quotes there because I think we throw around the word too much and it has lost all meaning except “people fighting using unconventional means.”
All of that aside, I’m honestly curious if this is the first time what I’m assuming are younger people are finding out that people like OBL and Arafat had a point of view and were not cardboard cutout bad guys. Nobody really believed they hate us for our freedom. I mean, there is a conflict in worldviews between conservative Islam and liberal western culture, but there’s also a conflict between conservative Islam and everything that isn’t conservative Islam, and there’s a conflict between conservative Christianity and liberal western culture that also results in acts of terrorism.
There are multiple geopolitical and moral dimensions to US involvement in regions around the world including the Middle East. They’re all worthy of debate and discussion.
I just am confused that a) this is new material for anyone and b) that people are treating it like they discovered Mein Kampf or the Protocols for the first time and are taking them at face value.
Given the world’s “second greatest army” is unable to defeat a smaller nation directly on their border after having an unlimited amount of time to train, prepare, and move forces into position, it’s pretty much a defeat on their side.
Given the world’s “second greatest army” is unable to defeat a smaller nation directly on their border after having an unlimited amount of time to train, prepare, and move forces into position, it’s pretty much a defeat on their side.
I do not mean this to come off as blunt as it sounds, but I’m trying to be both clear and concise.
What you’re talking about is not how game theory works. What you’re doing is taking the most basic, highly abstracted representation of a generic idea and expecting it to correlate with reality. It’s the same thing people do when they ascribe some kind of wish fulfillment to the free market or to evolutionary dynamics. It’s not even a platonic ideal - it’s drawing a supply/demand curve and thinking you understand how prices work in a market economy. Here’s the main issues you’re running into when you try to play Ultimatum with something the size of the Democratic Party:
We as voters aren’t playing Ultimatum. Instead, we are playing minimax as an emergent strategy to defend the rights of marginalized populations.
I am a moderately heavy kindle user and have been since the second version they shipped. When I upgrade, I usually buy the best new model available. I am skipping the one with pen support because Amazon’s text autosuggestions are absolutely the worst I have ever seen - it’s like they’re just using a random number generator and not a predictive algorithm - so my current Kindle is the Oasis.
It is so far beyond any other one I’ve owned that they’re not really comparable. The backlight is steady and even with no patchiness. The text reads cleanly with no fuzziness around the fonts. It’s comfortable to hold, and because it just inverts very cleanly and automatically it makes it trivial to hold upside down if you change hands or roll over. My requirements for a case are that it makes the device easier to hold and prop up for hands free reading in bed. Any of the origami cases should do - I think they’re all very similar in design but I’d just go off the reviews for build quality.
That said, there’s a number of kindle books that cannot be read on kindle devices because the publisher decided to prioritize the formatting over the text, and those I have to read on one of my iPads. I still prefer the kindle for text only books because it’s lighter and easier to hold.
The oasis has a slightly different form factor so it might be worth checking out in person, but I went from skeptical to really appreciating the design.
That is literally not how it works. That’s how people think it should work, but when you see that it doesn’t, you have to turn back and review your premises and your model. I know the way you think it should work and how you want it to work, but when it doesn’t work you need to revise.
The problem is this - the feedback loop is insufficient and the correlation is unclear. If you are directly negotiating with someone, then you can play Ultimatum. If you are one of a hundred million people casting a vote for one person or another, you cannot. Perot cost Bush I the election, and Nader cost Kerry the election. Neither party decided that they needed to move in the direction of the spoiler candidate. They’re especially not going to do so for 3p candidates who pull in the low single digits, even if they lose by low single digits, because they’ll think they can get more by moving towards the center.
You can vote however you want, but don’t base it on a theoretical foundation that has less than zero application to the scenario you’re modeling. It really, honestly is a minimax choice, and if you are truly an ally for those of us in marginalized communities, you have to recognize it.
I’m not being a right winger here - I’m a member of the DSA and this is in line with what they (and people like Chomsky) advise. But I’m not talking about even that angle. I’m just talking minimax and BATNA. If negotiations fail (ie we didn’t get Bernie), the best alternative is Hillary. At least Roe wouldn’t have been overturned and we wouldn’t have states suing to make ten year olds give birth to their rapist’s babies.
I’ve taught game theory. Voting isn’t the Ultimatum game, because the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing, resulting in the main party generally becoming more conservative. Look who ran after Reagan - the entire Democratic Party shifted right with the third way. Look who we ran after Trump.
In voting the way it’s currently configured, there are two elements from game theory that apply. The first is minimax strategy - minimize the maximum damage your enemy can do. Above all that means keeping republicans out of office if you care about minimizing harm to women, minorities and immigrants, the poor, and the LGBT community.
The second concept that applies is the BATNA - the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If the negotiated agreement fails (we get a left democrat on the ballot) our next best alternative is to get a Democrat elected.
We came within a hair’s breadth of not having another election, and at the very least we will be looking at a roll back of LGBT rights, a nationwide abortion ban, and a massive crackdown that will make sure they don’t lose any more elections.
The US would benefit from being a compulsory voting country. There’s a couple of ways of conducting polls - two of them are “likely voters” and “eligible voters.” The LV model can vary from poll to poll but usually has some criterion like “voted in the last election.”
The LV polls are usually to the right of the EV polls, and the conventional wisdom is that the greater the turnout, the better the democrats do. Republicans on the other hand are generally trying to make it harder to vote.
So compulsory voting with vote by mail would pull things a bit to the left, at least for a few years.
We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.
-James Baldwin
You’re still really young.
First, getting an education and getting a career going is a great start. It shows a level of maturity and that your life is moving in a positive direction. That’s a big plus.
Second, you mention that you’re from an immigrant culture. That might be skewing how you perceive the age vs relationship factor. In the US, it varies widely by socioeconomic class and geography, but just starting to get out there at 25 isn’t that unusual and shouldn’t raise a lot of red flags. I wouldn’t lead with it as an intro statement, but if it comes up naturally after a few dates with the same person, they’ll have the context to understand rather than rush to judgment.
Getting in shape generally only helps - it’s also a signal indicating that you have your life on the right track and do self care - but charisma isn’t all about weight or even appearance. You should be able to talk great, listen great, or both.
The main part you need to pick up is being able to establish the mental hooks around the ideas that are central to programming. Do you know how you can watch a choreography session and see the dancers just pick up the moves as they’re described/demonstrated? That’s because they’ve learned the language of dance. It’s an entire (physical) vocabulary. It’s the semantics of dance.
What you need to do is do that with programming. There’s a number of getting started with books and videos, but you’re going to want them to learn the fundamentals of not just a language but of programming.
If you’re talking about using other people’s functions (like in an api), then the function name should give you a clue about what it does. The cool thing about functions is that you don’t have to know how they’re doing their thing, just what they’re doing. If you have the source code, you will find you remember more if you use comments to make notes for yourself (it engages more of your brain than just reading).
If your problem is writing your own code using functions, start out more slowly. Write a program that’s just a giant block of linear code. Once that’s working, then take a look as to how to break it down into functions. If you have a block of code that sorts a list, for example, and you had to copy and paste it into three different areas, that would mean it should be a function.
Use comments very often as you’re going. Before you write a block, write a comment about what it’s supposed to do. You’ll start to see some generalities, which will be you learning programming, not just a language.
I can totally recall a story that explored this idea already.
I’m a manager at a FAANG and have been involved in tech and scientific research for commercial, governmental, and military applications for about 35 years now, and have been through a lot of different careers in the course of things.
First - and I really don’t want to come off like a dick here - you’re two years in. Some people take off, and others stay at the same level for a decade or more. I am the absolute last person to argue that we live in a meritocracy - it’s a combination of the luck of landing with the right group on the right projects - but there’s also something to be said about tenacity in making yourself heard or moving on. You can’t know a whole lot with two years of experience. When I hire someone, I expect to hold their hand for six months and gradually turn more responsibility over as they develop both their technical and personal/project skills.
That said, if you really hate it, it’s probably time to move on. If you’re looking to move into a PM style role, make sure that you have an idea of what that all involves, and make sure you know the career path - even if the current offer pays more, PMs in my experience cap out at a lower level for compensation than engineers. Getting a $10k bump might seem like you’re moving up, but a) it doesn’t sound like you’re comparing it to other engineering offers and b) we’re in a down market and I’d be hesitant to advise anyone to make a jump right now if their current position is secure. Historically speaking, I’m expecting demand to start to climb back to high levels in the next 1-2 years.
Honestly, it just sounds like your job sucks. I have regularly had students, interns, and mentees in my career because that’s important to me. One thing I regularly tell people is that if there’s something that they choose to read about rather than watching Netflix on a Saturday, that’s something they should be considering doing for a living. Obviously that doesn’t cover Harry Potter, but if you’re reading about ants or neural networks or Bayesian models or software design patterns, that’s a pretty good hint as to where you should be steering. If you’d rather work on space systems, or weapons, or games, or robots, or LLMs, or whatever - you can slide over with side and hobby projects. If you’re too depressed to even do that, take the other job. I’d rather hire a person who quit their job to drive for Uber while they worked on their own AI project than someone who was a full stack engineer at a startup that went under.
Anyway, that’s my advice. Let me know if I can clarify anything.