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How my genius roommate changed my perspective

farhadg.com

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Re: How my genius roommate changed my perspective

#151

Post by htek »

no_time wrote: post #38
icu wrote: post #32

This reminds me of an 80s tv show called MacGyver which impressed on me as a kid that you can use what you got to get out of tricky situations. I've done loads of different things as a result of this attitude. The only time I stopped to think about the show's wider influence was when I was at University (some time ago) in the Engineering building with my best friend (an Engineering student) and a phone went off with…

>After reading this article I wonder if there are MacGyver-esque influences on younger generations? Just type "Lifehack" into youtube and search. Extremely low signal to noise ratio in videos made with monetization above all else. It's quite tragic. A counterexample would be colinfurze[0] who makes very entertaining and inspiring videos. Apart from being a two legged OSHA violation his content is top notch. [0]: http…

We're all just trying to be good little capitalists, extracting value from someone/something as cheaply as possible and selling it to someone else for profit. See ya at the bottom! ;)

Re: How my genius roommate changed my perspective

#152

Post by js2 »

ppseafield wrote: post #98
elcomet wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The king put him in command of his forces to engage Yue’s navy in a midwinter river battle and the forces of Yue were routed The story is nice but some details ruin it IMO.. How would a salesman know how to command an army ? Also, the success of an army depends on a huge number of factors, not only dryness of hands.. Military strategy seems more important than hands

This is essentially a parable nested in another story to make a very specific point. The story this appears in shows Huizi complaining to Zhuangzi about some extremely massive gourds that he couldn't use as one might use as e.g. a ladle, so he get frustrated and smashes them. Zhuangzi comments that obviously they would be better as floating vessels, and Huizi could have floated down the river in them. All that to mak…

> if you have the wrong expectations for the way something is, you're going to suffer because of those expectations.

OTOH: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -- George Bernard Shaw

Re: How my genius roommate changed my perspective

#155

Post by tfandango »

icu wrote: post #32

This reminds me of an 80s tv show called MacGyver which impressed on me as a kid that you can use what you got to get out of tricky situations. I've done loads of different things as a result of this attitude. The only time I stopped to think about the show's wider influence was when I was at University (some time ago) in the Engineering building with my best friend (an Engineering student) and a phone went off with…

Mark Rober comes to mind.

Re: How my genius roommate changed my perspective

#157

Post by 14 »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #41

Reminds me of the story of Zhuangzi, the Chinese philosopher, on how one thing can be used in very different ways: There was once a man from Song who was skilled at making ointment for chapped hands. For generations, his family had made their living by washing raw silk. A traveler happened to hear of it and offered to purchase the formula for a hundred catties of gold. The man called his family into conference and sa…

As a dad I can tell you I often have to use a bowl for a cup or the handle of a wide handled for for a spoon. For some reason that always drove my partner nuts. Guess her solution was to wash the dishes lol.

Re: How my genius roommate changed my perspective

#158

Post by turdnagel »

FarhadG wrote: post #143
turdnagel wrote: post #142

Good article. I feel very comfortable doing this with code and not so much with physical material, where the constraints are much more imposing and the risk of screwing something up is much higher. Based on my experiences with programming, I imagine part of being able to think this way is also having experience building things physically. The fact that I can think about connecting pieces of backend infrastructure, or…

(Author here) As a software engineer, I'd love to know more on how you apply this.

Two principles I see at play here are fluency (a mapping between a desired action and the physical action of using a tool) and parsimony (building something in the simplest or cleverest way to achieve the goal). You get fluency through practice and the parsimony comes through experience, a kind of wisdom - similar but I different concepts.

With software engineering, I think when you're comfortable with the syntax and capabilities of the language you're working with, you get fluency. And then once you have experience using the standard library and some common external libs, you learn parsimony.

Re: How my genius roommate changed my perspective

#159

Post by frazbin »

DantesKite wrote: post #156

A lot of the commenters here are the embodiment of the “Actually” meme, critiquing the least important parts of the story, like an editor looking for a typo, rather than engaging with the spirit of the story. This isn’t a code base waiting for review.

And if it were, stop anyway! Humanities classes are sposed to help us engage with content like this, but stem students often don't take them seriously (

Re: How my genius roommate changed my perspective

#160

Post by spywaregorilla »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #41

Reminds me of the story of Zhuangzi, the Chinese philosopher, on how one thing can be used in very different ways: There was once a man from Song who was skilled at making ointment for chapped hands. For generations, his family had made their living by washing raw silk. A traveler happened to hear of it and offered to purchase the formula for a hundred catties of gold. The man called his family into conference and sa…

This story seems really weird by modern standards. The silk washer gets a great deal. The traveler could likely have offered far, far less because the value he saw wasn't obvious at all to the silk washer.

Traditional storytelling would probably have suggested that the silk washer was naive and suffered for it, but he comes out great in this story. The traveler takes a huge risk in assuming this will prove to be a hugely important military asset, and I guess comes out ahead, but he was already in a position to pay this dude hundreds of catties of gold so... did it really make a difference?

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