81–90 of 229 posts
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What is this from. Love the general idea.
War of Art. Solid book; picked it up after seeing this passage on HN hehe
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The hardest part about professional music, is that you have to perform at a schedule. It takes a lot of effort to perpare your body physically and mentally for peak performance ... and often-times you just fail. Have a bad day. That happens. There will be many concerts, where you are just at 70% of your peak ability. As a professional musician, you have to make sure your 70%-version is good enough that people gladly…
> As a professional musician, you have to make sure your 70%-version is good enough that people gladly pay for seeing it. Or you just do electronic music, so that's not an issue!
As Paul Dirac so eloquently put, > “I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations that to have them fit experiment. If Schrödinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's eq…
Isn't this line of thinking which has held physics back for the past few decades? I thought that physics is gradually moving to being more data driven than being driven by ideas of beauty. Sabine Hossenfelder has written quite a bit about this.
- selecting for the H index, that is, what will be most cited, leading to strong convergence around "consensual" or "popular" research, at a huge detriment to diversity of ideas
- one negative effect is a major push for incremental publication (equivalent of a LOC KPI for coders... it's just wrong). “What did you publish this year? How many times was your name in a paper somewhere?”
- putting funds and institutional support behind people you like as opposed to people with the most promising ideas. That's pretty much the story of string theory, and see how despite the failure they are still "winning" politically, occupying top positions and feeding the mainstream vulgarization, whereas those who "lost" decades ago are still AWOL even as their ideas are freshened up by a new generation, whose future against the institutional pyramid is all but guaranteed.
We might still be there (a situation of total stagnation, since the 1970s, at the theoretical level) by 2040 if something doesn't change profoundly in the way university politics have such a compelling handle on research, thus on our progress in science in general.
My 2cts but I'm parroting, people who now speak up in academia.
What I do know about, ML, is all but dead currently in MIT, Stanford, etc. It's just monkey coding applying whatever the industry likes for short-term benefits (again this "incremental"-only approach, playing it safe with 0.001% gains that are, sure, predictably doable). There's no actual research on "AI" let alone the general notion of "intelligence". Not even in neuro. I fear we've lost sight of the importance of basic research, as basic as it gets in a given field, because industry deals run the show in terms of funding. Yet look what Bell Labs or MIT did in the 1970-80s, surfing on the last wave of fundamental breakthroughs of the 50-60s. These days are long gone.
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War of Art. Solid book; picked it up after seeing this passage on HN hehe
Art & Fear? It's also the third-highest-score comment on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The Art of War is unrelated but also form an insightful fella. more focused on adversarial confrontations than Art & Fear though
Has anyone read his books? Seems like an interesting way to get into programming. I enjoy reading, but I never thought that a book about programming would present it's ideas and technical details through stories.
I used his books as a way to learn the things about computer science that I missed out on by not having a CSci degree. They are very mathematical, but that's just a bonus for me. They are certainly not light reading.
I have a BS & MS in CS, and most of the material in TAOCP was still new to me. Even the stuff I thought I knew like hash functions was covered in a new depth I never would have imagined.
I like this: "A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life."
Same with Sir mix-a-lot and baby got back.
They have some pretty low minimums.
If you make one great work - you can coast on that forever.
> I write an average of five new programs every week. Poets have to write poems. I have to write computer programs. It seems more obvious now that I read it. A lot of programmers out there, including myself, are looking for ways to improve their skills and I never thought to myself to write more programs. And not just programs for the sake of programs, but programs that force you to explain to the computer that you u…
>The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A"…
> I write an average of five new programs every week. Poets have to write poems. I have to write computer programs. It seems more obvious now that I read it. A lot of programmers out there, including myself, are looking for ways to improve their skills and I never thought to myself to write more programs. And not just programs for the sake of programs, but programs that force you to explain to the computer that you u…
What does it mean though? What programs? I can't write new programs at work where I maintain existing applications for the most part. What kind of programs, not for the sake of programs, can you actually write almost daily?
Outside of work, it's easy to write whole programs. Project Euler, LeetCode, etc. These are the kinds of programs Knuth is talking about -- example programs to illustrate algorithms from TAOCP.
I like this: "A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life."
Knuth is famously proudly terrible at email and "keeping on top of things". Does that make him a failure? Of course not.
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>The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A"…
Cool but fake.