My favorite problems to solve are the ones I don't need to.
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
261–270 of 285 posts
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I wonder if modern corporate culture has adopted soviet style newspeak. Why are we immigrating to the new thing? For the same reasons as we migrated to the old thing. Why is the new thing better? Because it’s just so much better.
If you can convince the higher ups that migrating tooling provides business value, you can do something that requires zero insight or creativity for a few months and at the end of it be promoted for organizing a successful migration despite delivering zero measurable business value. The effects of the migration are gonna be second and higher order effects that are impossible to separate from the rest of the business…
> huge difference between a zero to one tooling effort and an N to N+1 tooling effort
Spot on. There's a serious point of diminishing returns when piling up tools.
At some point the cost of learning, adapting, deploying, maintaining yet another tool becomes a net negative.
Often the solution is to replace 5 fancy tools with 100 lines of Python and Bash.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then as a hiring manager I get the impression that this candidate doesn't understand hypotheticals, which is a big red flag. Happily, we will come to mutual agreement on whether you proceed.
As a candidate I by definition know practically nothing about your company and how it operates internally save for maybe some glassdoor reviews, and you're supposed to be judging how I would perform as a part of said company, same way I'm judging whether the position is worth my time or not. If all your hypotheticals revolve around cleaning up the mess of flagrantly incompetent coworkers/leadership I'm going to get t…
I wouldn't hire someone without telling them plenty about where they will work. You don't have to guess what the workplace is like by decoding my questions. You are certainly welcome to, but the obvious danger is that you will get something wrong. A mature person would just ask, and that's the type of person I would want to hire.
It sounds like you're one of those managers who wants supplicants, not applicants.
Absolutely not. I want human beings with whom I can have a good relationship with, based in communication. I definitely don't want to hire a robot who is making important assumptions based on questionable (and totally wrong) heuristics, and Not bothering to ask simple questions.
So yeah, someone applying a weird algorithm to the questions I'm asking them isn't going to be a good fit.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still do side projects when you’ve got kids. You just have to treat your priorities seriously, which usually means having to give up most of the netflix/social-media time. You also have to realize that in a two parent household, you don’t usually need both parents looking after the kids, and it’s better for both of you if you take turns (for your sanity AND for your free time).
That sounds pretty promising. Does taking turns work well in practice?
It can, but it really depends on the personalities of you and your partner. It works best if your partner also has some independent work they need to get done (or enjoy doing, ex a hobby).
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#265Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…
I'm struggling with this. Manager managing more and more people. Old school on premmy turned AWS and Kubernetes while I was already manager a few years ago, making it hard to learn first principles of k8s and Docker.
Now here I sit, Sunday, staring at a terminal window to force myself to set up a ruby on rails app on Docker so I can shove it into a EKS setup I will set up with Terraform.
Could I do this at work? Yes. Except No. In the hours of 'free time' between meetings and other work, I feel too mentally foggy to play and learn new things.
Please.Help.Me.
I think I just need a vacation.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Air pressure probably dominates over surface tension. Imagine a water column large enough that surface tension is very weak, say a tap with an outlet 1 metre in diameter. At the exit of the tap the pressure of the water is at air pressure ( = 1 bar: any less and the water would be pushed back into the tap). As the column speeds up, the pressure inside the column "wants" to decrease, however the air pressure outside f…
> Also the forces within the column depend on the hydrogen bonds between the water molecules, which will "pull" the column together. Effects at the actual surface will have little overall influence (the term surface tension seems misleading to me). Water is a polar molecule with positive and negative charges corresponding to the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. This makes it a very ‘sticky’ molecule and so water coalesces…
Thanks.
"For the water droplets of 1 micron and 4 mm, the capillary pressures are of the order of 10e5 Pa and 10² Pa, respectively (σ=0.072 N/m for water)."[∆]
Atmospheric pressure is approximately 10e5 Pa at ground level. Capillary pressure is another name for Laplace pressure from a quick Google.
So as your water column increases diameter, air pressure matters more and.
For my example of 1m diameter, I would expect Laplace pressure and surface tension to be negligible. And the rayleigh instability will still occur at a small column diameter, when the fluid is going very fast.
I guess there are two thought experiments:
1. what happens when you use a liquid with an extremely low surface tension in air? (Or maybe even a column of heavy gas like uranium hexafluoride thick enough that diffusion doesn't dominate?).
2. How could you model a system to avoid the dynamic effects of air circulation (donut flow as occurs with a helicopter) and the dynamic effects of having water laden air where the column starts to break up. Does a thick downwards jet of water at speed (over the terminal velocity of rain) still show narrowing? Or do other surface interface effects cause problems? What happens to a thick downwards jet that is over the speed of sound?
Edit: The water exiting the tap is at approximately 1bar, I need to be clearer about pressure differentials rather than absolute pressure...
Edit: what I was trying to point out was that "surface tension" is misleading, and that air friction and gravity are not the only other major forces acting on a stream of water from a tap.
Edit: Also thinking of a dam with holes down the side more than 10m. I am guessing air pressure matters the most when the water is at low velocity exiting a wide nozzle, when the water is accelerating the most due to gravity relative to its velocity.
[∆] https://towardsdatascience.com/the-shape-of-a-water-droplet-...
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not popular because it's not realistic in most environments. In many cases it's advantageous to use those things you listed because that's what the market can provide talent-wise. I'd rather deal with learning new tech that's well documented than some custom lib that "just works" but no one understands because the architect left years ago. My whole career has been about consistent education, so that doesn't inti…
I believe you have agreed with me in your points especially regarding talent and turnover. The shiny tech today will be a legacy 6 months later or a year if you’re lucky. Then the talent pool will change and you can’t attract the devs who religiously follow new trends. You’ll end up hiring people to deal with your {legacy} system or as you pointed out .. substantial changing it.
That’s not a universal truth. Java was shiny once upon a time. Rails was shiny once, even C was shiny once. This stuff is still being used (not legacy). I’m sure when rails first showed up, people were calling it a fad.
In JS land there’s a ton of churn though for sure if that’s what you were thinking about. Not all of it though.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
This 1000x. Sadly the extended out of state family seems to like FB, and I try to follow science/math twitter. As you get older, something in you clicks, that you realize that time spent being angry, or combative, reduces the time you have for enjoying things (family, life, etc.). Your time on earth is a zero sum game. Maximize its utility, maximize your enjoyment, minimize your negativity (e.g. outrage of the day on…
Even better (imo) is going beyond the maximization maxim and realise the “beauty” of the analog, a world you directly see, hear, touch. Just existing without a specific goal, which is indeed similar as a vacation / holiday. However people seem to reserve the “no goal” mindset only on vacation, but you could also integrate it into your life.
I’ve been practicing no-goal vacations daily and hourly.
Like, a 30-min vacation sometime after work and 2-3 minute vacations hourly.
The key is to drop all goals and switch to a sense of complete freedom, even for a short period of time.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude was smart, but definitely a sexist. He didn't believe that women would be as capable of doing physics and engaged in some really awful behaviors that were weird even at the time (having meetings at a strip club? asking to paint students in the nude? really?). The lockpicking stuff in "Surely..." is a really fun chapter but also makes it clear that Feynman does not actually care that much about inconveniencing ot…
> He didn't believe that women would be as capable of doing physics Interesting, from having read about his sister[1] I really got the impression that this limiting belief was something he bucked heavily, despite having been explicitly taught women were incapable of science by their mother and grandmother: > Joan was an inquisitive child, and she exhibited an interest in understanding the natural world from an early…
Most people who hold bigoted beliefs permit exceptions. Feynman is on written record saying things like being surprised that a particular person was able to do physics, given that they were a woman. It would not surprise me even a little that there were some women that Feynman believed to be intellectual exceptions while also holding nasty beliefs about women in general.
Even if all of this is excused as a product of the man's time (I don't believe that all of it can be), it still adds a disappointing aura to the otherwise fascinating stories he tells.
Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
#270A couple of comments here focus on the ability to play -- which is important -- and on blue sky thinking, etc. All very important, true! But what really strikes me is how this situation Feynman was in is a perfect example of Deep Work. He could expore whatever his mind needed to explore, and do it for as long and in whatever way he needed. I'm pretty sure this is an often overlooked success factor for his Nobel win.
Actually Feynman did an opposite of Deep Work for that case, he literally worked in strip-club on purpose.
By today standard it's like working with reddit open, gamepad on your lap and pornhub on second laptop. If I had to make a fancy explanation I'd say "turn your work to a lifestyle so you naturally do it while entertaining".