391–400 of 946 posts
The other Windows-related idea that took an embarrassingly long time to work out is device / printer / memory contexts.
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A big one for me not necessarily for “socialism” but for questioning the bog standard capitalist narrative was seeing how the quality of content often goes down when creator monetization is added on a platform. That’s not supposed to happen. Adding a way for people to make income is supposed to incentivize better content and allow people to invest in that content. Instead what you get is a flood of addictive and sens…
> ... Adding a way for people to make income is supposed to incentivize better content and allow people to invest in that content. ... What it does is incentivise more content. More is not always better for everyone, and is even less likely to be better for those who were early adopters to the platform - but what it is usually is more popular . It's just democracy in action: the largest numbers decide, and sometimes…
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As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this. I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California,…
I’m not sure > As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming…
My feeling is that the best way to reduce subconscious bias is to have good race relations. And the best way to have good race relations is to have more positive interactions than negative interactions.
A thought experiment: Imagine a non-Mexican person says "I love celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It's an excellent excuse to drink tequila!"
As a culture, we can decide whether that's a positive interaction or a negative interaction.
We can make it a positive interaction by laughing and clinking glasses.
We can make it a negative interaction by calling the person out for cultural appropriation or trivializing an important Mexican holiday.
My intuition is that making it a negative interaction is a big mistake, because it worsens subconscious racial biases and generally makes the world a less pleasant place. I recommend playing this game https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb to better understand my intuition here. (Based on what I've read about Israel/Palestine, the game is an excellent description of why things have been getting so bad there lately.)
Matrix multiplication. First encountered it in high school, where the textbooks presented matrices without any real motivation, and matrix multiplication just seemed like a weirdly-defined operation. Once I got to linear algebra in college and matrix multiplication was presented as the way to compose linear transformations, it made a lot more sense.
The easiest way to describe matrix multiplication is nested function composition. f(x) = 2x g(x) = x + 5 It should hopefully be obvious that "nesting" the two isn't commutative: g(f(x)) = (2x) + 5 = 2x + 5 f(g(x)) = 2(x + 5) = 2x + 10 One miraculous fact here is that no matter how many functions we stack, we only ever have two terms: x and a constant term. Thus, we can represent this 'linear system' in terms of its c…
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Getting rid of data abstraction and encapsulation is throwing the baby with the bath water. The abstract concept of OOP (messages between complex objects, as defined by Alan Kay) is an attempt at mimicking biological systems. Most modern languages implement data abstraction, but call it OOP, where they encapsulate some functionality with the data it operates on. Really helped with varying data formats in the AirForce…
OOP does not have a monopoly on abstraction and encapsulation. What OOP does, namely object-level encapsulation, is just a very extreme way of structuring code around mutable state. IMO the better alternative is to avoid mutable state as much as possible and keep data and code separate. Code structured as pure functions is easy to test and encapsulation can be done at the module level.
I am a Scala programmer, and our code mixes OO and FP. Almost all of our classes are completely immutable.
In the end, you will always need to encapsulate data and functions in some manner. The FP approach involves module systems, but as I understand it, objects in Scala actually provide a better module system than found in pure FP languages.
Learning history / literature in school is important. I was a total STEM math nerd in school. I used to frequently complain how I don't get what's the point of it, or how it's a waste of time and I'm learning nothing. I still think the emphasis of school was off, but I get the point of it now. Stories are like code for humans. You can't tell someone what it means to be good or bad, or to give them a course in philoso…
The power of follow ups (especially in sales) One thing which held me back for a very long time was not following up with people who didn't show much interest initially. I wasted so many good leads thinking it is impolite to follow up with people after contacting them once. My whole life changed once I understood the power of follow ups and understanding that most people are so busy that it takes at least 6 reminders…
Unit testing and using dependency injection to write test-able code. I'm not sure if it was years, but it wasn't immediate. I just didn't understand why dependency injection was good at first, and not just someone's weird personal code style choice. I thought it was just people being "Enterprisey" which I'd encountered many times over the years. Once I committed to unit testing, I realized how necessary it is. Unfort…