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Embrace the Grind

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Re: Embrace the Grind

#291

Post by phpnode »

thr0w__4w4y wrote: post #277
piyh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote Tricks of the Mind and that was a great book. One piece that has stuck with me for ~15 years now is the 20 word series that I can recite forward or backward after spending 5 minutes visualizing them in a "linked list". For example, telephone - sausage - monkey. Vividly imagine dialing a payphone with a sausage. Next up, sausage monkey. Vividly, using all your senses imagine a monkey flinging sausages to the…

I've done the exact same trick in my mind to remember a sequence -- the "linked list" linking A to B, B to C, etc. It just seemed natural to me, I didn't read it anywhere. If you have the "head pointer", you're probably golden. When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory Palace?) of building a ca…

The book covers both techniques (though not in great detail), Memory Palaces are another term for Method of Loci[0] - in my experience it is actually much better and faster, but requires habitually revisiting rooms in order to remind yourself of their contents (this is as quick as mentally walking through a door into a room and glancing around it from left to right). This is easy and fast but it's also easy to forget to do it and then the contents do start to fade. I use the layout of the first house I owned as my "palace", so it's a real place but no longer somewhere I actually go to in real life which helps avoid confusion.

The linked list idea works well and arguably lasts longer, but it's also much more time consuming to "set up" (for me at least), and suffers from O(N) time complexity just like a real linked list (i wonder if it would be possible to construct a mental skip-list!) and if I forget a single association then the whole remainder of the list is forgotten.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

Re: Embrace the Grind

#292

Post by cbushko »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #198
cbushko wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resonates with me so much as I was in this position 3 years ago. My boss came to me and said "we want to move from AWS to GCP, using kubernetes and not have it be a mess like we have now" I was new, senior, free from ownership. I chose to stay as a team of 1 so that I wasn't burdened with fires and meetings. It freed me up to put my head down and get the work done. The grind was learning GCP, kubernetes, terrafo…

> we want to move from AWS to GCP Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The fire is 1/3 of the cost of the frying pan.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#293

Post by majewsky »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #97
chrisco255 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time you grind to get that 100% perfect solution, the number of requirements the business has put on you in your backlog has extended well beyond what you can keep up with. It's not like software engineers are the only actors in a software system. They are reactive to the needs of product development who are reactive to the needs of customers. You have to balance your limited development resources against a co…

I was gonna say that! curl and ffmpeg are definitely commendable "100%" FOSS projects, but they aren't chasing new features. HTTP3 is big, but it's not like curl had to break HTTP 1.1 compatibility to add it. AV1 is big, but it's not like MPEG1 will ever change. Both projects deal in protocols, which means most of their requirements are literally set in stone, or silicon. Whereas youtube-dl is constantly breaking _on…

> YouTube is constantly breaking, probably on purpose to thwart youtube-dl.

I don't think they're trying to thwart youtube-dl, because there's so many low-hanging-fruit countermeasures that they don't employ. youtube-dl can download a playlist with hundreds of videos at 1000x playback speed. You can't tell me that's not distinguishable from regular users going through the website.

What's more likely IMO is that the constant changes that ytdl is catching up with are caused by good old CADT (Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers) inside Google, driven by their infamous "build over maintain" culture.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#294

Post by louwrentius »

Nemrod67 wrote: post #257
louwrentius wrote: post #46

This article may be the most important article on Hacker News you may read this year. The message of this story is obviously beyond just our IT related professions. I really wonder if people do understand what needs to be done but won't. Or that they really don't see a way out of a mess. Are people really wilfully blind to 'obvious' solutions that are boring, labor intensive and terrible to implement? Don't they see…

I think the core of it is indeed values, but in the Real World it's about printing money. If the natural incentives for "Better Things" are replaced with "Get all the moneys, escape any consequences" then we get the current macro-economic incentives in all domains. I guess it will either devolve into total-vertical-transnational integration (imagine being a citizen of Apple), or we'll have to create a new country "fo…

I think the short-term vs. long-term topic is indeed part of it. But that already implies that people actually see and understand the long-term version.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#295

Post by louwrentius »

pm90 wrote: post #147
louwrentius wrote: post #46

This article may be the most important article on Hacker News you may read this year. The message of this story is obviously beyond just our IT related professions. I really wonder if people do understand what needs to be done but won't. Or that they really don't see a way out of a mess. Are people really wilfully blind to 'obvious' solutions that are boring, labor intensive and terrible to implement? Don't they see…

Its often more complicated than that. I worked on a team that interfaced directly with the semi-technical "Customer Account Managers" who did the technical setup for customers on our system. The system itself was pretty old, written by people who no longer worked at the company. There are often a number of things that are wrong with the system or don't scale, and every week there is a new issue that would bring down…

Thanks for sharing this. I think this is a good example of the kind of story we encounter more often.

But I think this is also a good example about values. Part of this is also how you 'sell' your story towards other teams, to get buy-in so we all get out of the fire-fighting. I bet you and your team tried, probably multiple times.

However, if that doesn't work, you'll have to cut your losses. Stay for the money or leave for the values. What does an environment do for you long-term?

I really wonder if there is some kind of way to negotiate a way out of this mess.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#296

Post by piyh »

phpnode wrote: post #291
thr0w__4w4y wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done the exact same trick in my mind to remember a sequence -- the "linked list" linking A to B, B to C, etc. It just seemed natural to me, I didn't read it anywhere. If you have the "head pointer", you're probably golden. When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory Palace?) of building a ca…

The book covers both techniques (though not in great detail), Memory Palaces are another term for Method of Loci[0] - in my experience it is actually much better and faster, but requires habitually revisiting rooms in order to remind yourself of their contents (this is as quick as mentally walking through a door into a room and glancing around it from left to right). This is easy and fast but it's also easy to forget…

I can build my grocery list in my memory high school and neighborhood. The skip list could be built as an acronym built out of first letters taken from named areas.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#297

Post by jamiek88 »

nullsense wrote: post #288
whimsicalism wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is enough to be "textbook ADHD" then the definition is even broader than I thought. Being performant when you're focused but having trouble getting there, having difficulty getting basic chores done, etc.? That's just many people in life. Ultimately, I don't really trust the psychology field to determine what is a mental illness and what isn't. It wasn't that long ago that being gay was in the DSM.

The definition is indeed more specific than that. Don't be silly. The part that is incredibly relatable there is 1) life long inability to get your shit together (not just periodic or some of the time), and 2) a deep seated emotional anguish from being berated by people your whole life for not doing what you're supposed to when you're supposed to. It does terrible things to your health, finances, employment and relat…

I could have written this and I’m on the verge of losing my marriage too. Already lost my career.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#299

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dan-robertson wrote: post #260
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those students are in the wrong career. You can't make good things from data without (metaphorically) getting your hands dirty.

Or maybe they have just learned something—these are students, not seasoned professionals.

Yeah definitely. To be fair, I was kinda harsh, but it's incredibly frustrating to see people ignore core parts of the DS workflow because it doesn't map neatly to cool technologies. Especially when that part is the base for pretty much everything you'll do with data.

Re: Embrace the Grind

#300

Post by SixDouble5321 »

dehrmann wrote: post #285
dorkwood wrote: post #213

I experienced this when I first started learning the piano. When I played the first song I had learned for my sister, she was amazed. "Wow, I could never play like that", she said, "my fingers don't work that way". But when I broke down for her exactly how I'd learned it -- by breaking the song down into manageable chunks of just a few notes each, practicing each chunk with each hand separately many times until profi…

Most skills tend to look something like this, where dedication and repetition lead to proficiency. Could be piano, chess, video games, programming... What are some skills like this that are high-leverage--skills that help with lots of other skills?

Deliberate practice Critical thinking Time management
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