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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#291

Post by mark_l_watson »

5166cc9c39fa61 wrote: post #112
mark_l_watson wrote: post #75

I just don’t know about hiking with a laptop. Down time is also productive time. That said, it is interesting how he organizes the digital assets of his life. A little off topic: I subscribed to use the Wolfram Language a couple of years ago and really liked the integrated documentation, and the capabilities built in for just about everything. What was a turnoff was the very slow cycle time between entering code to b…

Rather than throwing even more money at Wolfram, it would be even better to put up a fund (maybe a crowdsourced campaign) to buy the rights to Macsyma and PDEase to release them under the GPL.

Except the Wolfram Language provides access to vast information about the world.

I worked with the Knowledge Graph at Google and Wolfram Language seems like an easy to use personal version of that.

I would be happy to pay for it, forever, if it were more responsive.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#292

Post by carlob »

nels0n wrote: post #225
sytelus wrote: post #209

A lot of people don’t know absolutely massive amount of functionality that is stuffed in to Mathematica. It does everything from symbolic math to astronomy to economics to deep learning to biology to ... If Wolfram had figured out how to make his software free while still having sustained business, he would undoubtedly be the hero of the tech/nerd/geek world, perhaps shoulder to shoulder with Jobs or Linus or Gates -…

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 theory yet, but I think the day I decide to switch jobs those might prove useful.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#293

Post by carlob »

duado wrote: post #102
biztos wrote: post #95

Here's a guy I think of as very successful, and very smart, and yet he seems extremely tethered to his computers. Meetings while walking, and assuming nobody notices? Questioning the practicality of time spent outside? That's kind of... really... sad.

It’s not that nobody notices that he’s walking... it’s that, what is anyone going to do about it? Who signs their paychecks?

I'm just going to say this: walking is faaaar better than eating :)

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#294

Post by nadc »

levesque wrote: post #163
kevinventullo wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the conference call linked lower in the thread has increased my skepticism for remote work. Another commenter pointed out how much smoother everything would have gone if everyone had been in the same room.

Don't kid yourself, it's not going to be as efficient. Audio and delay are big issues, as not everybody can talk at the same time. But the point is that it is doable, and some companies have good success with that. They are usually small-medium companies though, my guess is we won't be seeing any 100% remote unicorns popping up.

Both GitLab and InVision are 100% remote unicorns, last valued at $1.1B [1] and $1.9B [2] respectively.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/19/gitlab-raises-100m/ [2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/11/invision-valued-at-1-9-bil...

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#295

Post by carlob »

slm_HN wrote: post #53

I can see why some people think this guy is a bit much (Wolfram-branded Pilot Precise Grip pens, Wolfram Cloud, Wolfram Language) but this is a very thorough and interesting article. He even admits the embarrassing stuff: Apple Mac Pro.

> Wolfram-branded Pilot Precise Grip pens,

Honestly, that's just swag. I must have a box of them, plus 10 t-shirts, cardboard spikeys, bags from various conferences.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#298

Post by agumonkey »

copperx wrote: post #285
agumonkey wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Younger I loved having all my shit around me on my desk. It was hyper natural and hyper efficient. Nowadays ... nope. It feels a bit like reading your own undocumented one night epic project .. with age you just love a bit of structure and cleanliness

Same here. Brain shrinkage is real; one can't deal with so much disorganization as one gets older.

Maybe that's me being in denial but I don't consider it to be shrinkage. In the recent years, it seems that motivation went from small to broad. I'm not less capable intellectually [1]. I'd say it's a decrease of energy and blind passion and more things to handle that divide attention and care. There's also a bit of energy saving dimension.. as a programmer we oughta know that a well maintained structure avoid worst-case complexity.. same goes for your drawers :)

[1] I'm actually a lot smarter than my college self, I tested few years ago when wildly sick trying to do proofs from scratch on stuff I knew nothing prior (theorems on fibonacci series). And after a bit of sweating and pencil twisting I managed to have insights and solutions. So it's not a linear decrease in brain power, it's more like a rotation or shapeshift.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#299

Post by crispyambulance »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #240

I always find it interesting to see what personal productivity improvements highly successful people _do not_ implement. Considering that the typical productivity speel for technology & progaming tasks is tiling window managers (minimize mouse movement), mechanical/ergodox/split keyboards (ideal hand width and orientation), possibly linux or OSX w/ homebrew to automate tasks using scripts. It's interesting to see how…

    > It's interesting to see how relatively rare these setups are among CEO's (in tech) and how 'normal' the setups of successful people really are.
I suspect that's because one's setup isn't really a big deal.

Saving a odd second or two because you're using a split mechanical ergodox or whatever dvorak keyboard with no window manager and scripts to automate the wazzoo out of everything adds up to... not very much at all unless you're doing very repetitive tasks where seconds count.

I mean, I think folks should just use whatever makes them happy, and it is interesting to see what people end up using like on usesthis (https://usesthis.com/). But really, people can be productive with almost anything.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#300

Post by fooster »

jhall1468 wrote: post #109
hjk05 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares if he’s arrogant? Linux is a mean bastard and Stallman is a weirdo who eats stuff of his feet during interviews. None of these people are well balanced great guys you’d take to the pub to watch football, but that’s not why their impressive in what they do and accomplish.

Linus is mean, but aware of it and actively working on it. Stallman is harmlessly weird. Wolfram thinks he's the smartest person on the planet when he's objectively not. You are correct in that these are not the reasons they are impressive. It's the reason (in Linus and Wolframs case) they aren't particularly good people. You should have to suffer brilliant assholes.

> Wolfram thinks he's the smartest person on the planet when he's objectively not.

That was definitive. How is he objectively not? How are you defining the smartest person on the planet. By what criteria?

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