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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#321

Post by nels0n »

carlob wrote: post #292
nels0n wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be a fool. The amount of material this guy relies on is the work of his subordinates. Matthew Cook, etc ... he would never be considered anything like a hero in the eyes of a true nerd. He is stands for the dark force and will always be remembered as such

Disclaimer: Stephen Wolfram pays my rent. The times have changed a lot since Matthew Cook, now a lot of my meetings with him are simultaneously live-streamed on several different platforms and the recordings are available for anyone to use. If anyone were to say all the ideas on the particular piece of Wolfram Language I'm working on are all Wolfram's I'd have hours of video recordings to show. I haven't tested my th…

U r just a puppet implementing ideas from higher ups within the wolfram clan not him. As if u know how the times were when Matthew cook was still w the company. Come on puppet , grow up

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#322

Post by pault »

yiyus wrote: post #266
pishpash wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all very nice but it's all not work related. Water cooler conversation may be great for incubating the very very beginning ideation of some 20% project, but come on, how often does a 20% project really happen. When it comes to real work (well defined work), where what you need is a mix of concentration time and focused interactions to address questions, remote call could be much more efficient than face-to-fac…

It's not always about projects. In order to be productive at a company, there is much more to do. In water cooler conversations, you learn who you have to talk with for this or that, you learn about meetings you may attend to learn new things, you learn that little trick that makes your work more efficient or about that colleague who is really weird, or about how to solve administrative matters. Not everything is in…

I don't understand your point. I worked remotely for ten years and there was constant banter in the slack (skype before that) channels. We would spend as much time socializing as we would if we were in the office. I won't make any assumptions about your work experience but I believe most of these criticisms tend to come from people that have never worked at a remote-first company. If anything, remote is slightly more effective since you can have watercooler chats and go back to them months later to remember what Steve said about his cool personal infrastructure projects. :)

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#323

Post by cowsandmilk »

jnty wrote: post #262
hellofunk wrote: post #166

I personally wonder what has the modern world come to, that an individual cannot take a leisurely walk without distraction, and thus feels like they must be working on a computer while getting in some basic movement for their body.

Given the alternative would be working while being sedentary, I think it's probably a fairly good (if odd) setup? I'm assuming he doesn't take the laptop like that when we he wants to walk to the shops at the weekend.

> Given the alternative would be working while being sedentary

I would say the alternative is to not work 18 hours a day, but obviously that is his choice.

> I'm assuming he doesn't take the laptop like that when we he wants to walk to the shops at the weekend.

I wouldn't put my bet on that. He has said in the past that he uses his weekends to grid down his e-mail backlog. Rather, his graphs in past posts show him not talking on the phone on weekends, but still pretty constantly emailing.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#324

Post by homoiconic »

jclay wrote: post #29

I really like the personal homepage idea. Reminds me of the iGoogle days. Anyone know any products / tools to create a simple one consisting of essentially an organized collection of links? I guess any static site generator could work, but would be nice to have an out of the box theme and can show RSS Feeds.

I just started using Notion (https://notion.so) for organizing to-do lists, links, notes, and reminders. It's simple yet amazingly flexible. I highly recommend it.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#325

Post by jfultz »

Arbalest wrote: post #136
mlevental wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you know what's insane about that video? the CEO of a 100 (200?) person software company is writing docs. but then again i'm not surprised that wolfram is a micromanager.

The way you say it is like you're saying that Documentation should be second class, not just that it is anyway. Keep in mind that the software in this particular case, is software used mostly for the API, so the Documentation is front and centre.

Very much so. The documentation is the specification, so it's not merely writing the documentation, but writing the specification.

Another interesting tidbit that plays into this...the syntax coloring is programmatically derived from the documentation (yet another consequence of the documentation being the specification). This wasn't mentioned in the meeting because most or all of the participants already knew this, but it's an important part of the subtext of the discussion.

Speaking as an insider who wasn't present at that particular meeting, but has been present in some other live-streamed meetings.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#329

Post by nabnob »

alexpetralia wrote: post #167
hellofunk wrote: post #166

I personally wonder what has the modern world come to, that an individual cannot take a leisurely walk without distraction, and thus feels like they must be working on a computer while getting in some basic movement for their body.

It's a world that increasingly values cognitive output over physical output. Doesn't seem that dystopian to me.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#330

Post by yiyus »

pault wrote: post #322
yiyus wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always about projects. In order to be productive at a company, there is much more to do. In water cooler conversations, you learn who you have to talk with for this or that, you learn about meetings you may attend to learn new things, you learn that little trick that makes your work more efficient or about that colleague who is really weird, or about how to solve administrative matters. Not everything is in…

I don't understand your point. I worked remotely for ten years and there was constant banter in the slack (skype before that) channels. We would spend as much time socializing as we would if we were in the office. I won't make any assumptions about your work experience but I believe most of these criticisms tend to come from people that have never worked at a remote-first company. If anything, remote is slightly more…

You don't understand that many people prefer interacting with other people in person instead of via a slack channel?

You can like your remote job. I agree there are ways to make it work, for certain people and certain jobs, and it can even be better than a workplace in some cases. I am not criticizing it, just explaining the advantages I find from working in an office with other people (btw, I have done remote work too, though never in a remote-first company).

I wonder if you have tried socializing in person and via a computer. It's so much better in person, that I don't care about not having logs. If you don't understand that, you may be a robot.

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