I am trying to do this as well, but being surrounded by news/social/stream outlets that just push unnecessary hype its hard to achieve this. Any recommendation on how to filter out the junk?
The entire online news chain is polluted it seems to me.
If you have access to a decent Library, I believe the benefits to the individual by using it are:
1) economic, save you money
2) social, you interact with people
3) physical, you are moving around
4) mental health, you are using a different part of your brain and being proactive by planning to engage in new knowledge
Then hopefully you can feel positive, optimistic, and look forward to reading the books you just borrowed!
I have a gigantic Dropbox folder with hundreds of PDF tech books that I am slowly working through. The focus is on the canonical and classic over the hippest or latest new thing. There have been a number of books that I read when they were fairly new that are classics now, like some of the Wiley titles on networking. It's one of the best things you can do for your career. Whenever you have some extended downtime, instead of hopping on social media and doomscrolling, open up this folder and keep working through books you need to read and understand.
I did the complete opposite: I threw away almost all my books, digital or physical. I now restrict myself to having two books I’m actively reading at a time, one fiction and one non-fiction. If I reach the final 15% of either one I allow myself to buy a new book, not before. This has massively increased the number of finished books.
I found having a Dropbox folder with hundreds of books to be both completely useless and paralyzing. I kept switching books, or i was unable to pick one due to too much choice and ended up just scrolling instagram or Reddit.
It is true that for it to work you need to have enough discipline to not get distracted by the other books, sticking to one title until you finish it or at least extract the optimal value out of it.
Read the Mythical Man Month. If you have ever managed a software project, it will ring true and right like really good mythology. Write down pithy parts to steal for future slides in presentations to management.
- If material is a few years old yet still very highly regarded, it's probably worthy.
- Prepare yourself some content in advance that's both interesting and useful so it's low-effort to switch if you find yourself reading or scrolling out of boredom. I have rails guides bookmarked for this purpose - 5 minutes waiting for an uber gains me some useful knowledge while alleviating boredom.
- Search wide, be selective. A few good reads is better than a lot of average/bad ones. Be prepared to skip chapters if it isn't delivering value after 2-3 chapters, and quit entirely if you can't find worthy content after reading a few chapters + table of contents and skimming a few more chapters. Give it a little longer if you're unfamiliar with the topic or style.
- A lot of 200+ page books could have instead been 10 page essays. Quickly move over unimportant sections if you get the impression they're filler. Same (or, more so) for other mediums too.
My approach is mostly to curate your news/social/stream feed to individual people that post the sort of things you like, and to slower-moving publications. Limit your follows on social media. Prefer blogs and RSS over Twitter-style social. And/or read journals/magazines/books and reviews of them instead.
E.g. the old "The Morning Paper" blog by Adrian Colyer (https://blog.acolyer.org/) seems maybe up your alley? It's over now; dunno if what the new online versions of that are. For substantive programming stuff, these days I mostly read magazines and books, like CODE, Logic, and 2600. (IEEE Computer Society and ACMD have journals, but they're prety theoretical and academic; guessing that's not what you want here. I haven't found them very useful in my own programming work.) Sad to say, the current scene for this doesn't seem great. Old school Dr. Dobb's sounds like maybe what you want, but AFAICT there isn't really much like that any more? LWN and OSNews seem like modern online versions of stuff in that area, for system programmers at least. MIT Technology Review is also decent, but less about programming per se.
RSS and a designated slot to consume your feeds in a reasonably systematic manner.
Letting algorithms figure out the presentation of information just doesn't work well for people. Even FT which I read is always putting random crap on the front page and pushing important bits down to the second or third page-down.
I am shocked to read this. Why are they still using leaded fuel? There are so many well known research that links lead in fuel to unstable mental health and crime in population.
That's the excuse. Basically the real reason is that they only care about safety of the planes, not of the people handling the fuel (e.g. pilots, ground staff), or breathing the toxic fumes (everybody on or near an airport). So, they only care about safety when it is a very narrowly scoped notion of that concept.
Bureaucracies are weird like that. This is fundamentally not about people's safety but about covering their own safety (i.e. ass coverage). The problem is not something bad might happen but that they'd be held accountable for it.
Never mind that something bad has been known to happen for the last half century or so that they are not being held accountable for. People actually get sick and die because of leaded fuel but it's not their problem. And never mind that the bad thing that might happen is basically some ancient engines not running that well with unleaded fuel. That's why certification processes exist for engines. You can test this and decide to not certify certain engines for unleaded fuel. Ensuring people fly around with certified engines definitely is their problem. Any modern engine is basically certified for unleaded fuel already.
I mean, planes falling out of the sky is a fairly significant safety issue. "Safety of the plane" is misleading if there's people inside the planes lol.
And to be clear, "knocking" means engine detonation, which very quickly leads to catastrophic engine failure. Which is something that you don't want while in flight.
Until now, the only alternative was to fly a turbine-powered aircraft that can run on Jet-A. The problem with those is that turbines are far too expensive, and terribly inefficient at low altitude - both of which have kept them out of reach for most of general aviation.
Admittedly Turboprops can be somewhat more efficent at lower altitudes than turbojet and turbofan engines. But still not terribly efficient at say sightseeing or cropdusting altitudes, and they are still a lot more expensive than avgas engines (and that is not even accounting for the fact that the aircraft designed to use them are bigger and more expensive than many avgas based prop planes).
Oh please. Single engine planes are far more than toys for rich people. General aviation is training new airline pilots, medical flights, aerial surveying, charter flights otherwise inaccessible areas, and a method to fly supplies to areas during emergencies. This level of ignorance is extremely frustrating.
The estimate is that about 65% of general aviation traffic is related to "business and public services". [1][2] The other 35% is personal in nature. From that, about 22% is flight instruction for new pilots - most of whom are trying to get into the airlines. [3]
So that would mean about 13% of general aviation is recreational.
(Also, for what it's worth, many general aviation pilots I know aren't rich by any stretch.)
Maybe in more rural areas. But are you really going to tell me that 65% of general aviation traffic in LA, SF, NYC,..etc is related to 'business and public services'. Do private jets for executives count as for 'business services'.
The numbers I gave were national averages for the US. Of course those numbers will vary by location.
That said... you'd be surprised how many flights out of the small GA airports in big cities aren't personal flights. Air ambulance, news crews, law enforcement, firefighting (usually more on the periphery of the city), utility companies doing inspections, and aerial photography all tend to operate from these locations.
On the other hand, I'd certainly expect the number of flight school operations to be higher in areas with a large population.
A lot of what people think as "Silicon Valley" is actually centered around general aviation industry - for example San Mateo County at least in 2015 had majority share if its economy based on aviation, with majority of it being GA
Going to need a source for that claim - generally the largest industry in a given area is government, then hospitals or schools, then some specific niche. I don't think there's any airplane manufacture in NorCal anyway - this would be a bit more believable about Wichita.
Because you're looking for "airplane manufacturer" and possibly large one. Though for example just a stolen throw from Google Mountain View campus you have Northrop and Lockheed-Martin.
I can't find the original webpage after 7 years, but the source was San Mateo County page related to county-owned airports, and it included all sorts of aviation industry (both flying and ground side)
Every single airline pilot has had to train in a small piston aircraft that runs on leaded fuel. There simply has been no alternative if we want to have a supply of trained pilots.
Not to mention medivac flights, overnight delivery of many laboratory medical specimens from doctors' offices, law enforcement, high-quality aerial imagery in maps apps, farming, access to rural communities in areas like Alaska...
Cessna's are used to access small regions in many countries can't even be accessed if it wasn't for a Cessna due to lack of funds, places that take up to 3 days by motorcycle. The fuel mix is basically copied worldover.
I believe the typical American who sees the upper middle class, the same way the rest of the world sees america as.
Usually they start on a plane like Cessna 152 that is older hab their parents. Even military pilots start like that, just tend to switch for newer turboprops sooner.
For reference - considerable portion (possibly even majority, especially if you don't count USA due to different licensing) of airline pilots will have their first jet/turboprop experience when they will be training on airliner after getting their "frozen ATPL". In one airline it was common for chief of training to give every new trainee a copy of MSFS 2004 with professional addon for the first plane you'd graduate for, and the better trainees used that to become familiar with plane - cause usually the largest previous plane they flew would be a small twin piston plane like Piper Seneca.
I don't think that novaRom was not saying that we compete fairly. I read novaRom's comment to say that we can't win if we play fairly.
I also read 'AI Superpowers' and I agree with the book's premise that long term China will win the 'AI war' economic competition because their society allows broad use of data and since they are more of an online Internet-connected society they have much more data to use for training deep learning systems. China is also throwing a ton of money at supporting startup AI companies.
I pains me to be too critical of my own country (the USA) but I think we are really making bad mistakes by: 1) not sufficiently supporting research at the government level. 2) turning our students into life-long debt slaves with student loans. 3) screwing up our long term economic and social health by, for example, not providing free meals to poor kids in schools (one of the very cost effective ways to get a more educated work force - kids who are hungry in school tend to not do well). 4) stop allowing Facebook/Google/etc. unfettered use of private data while at the same time not figuring out a way to get more training data to people doing basic reseaerch.
I haven't read the book, I'm adding it to my encumbered reading list (this site spins off so many excellent recommendations it's difficult to keep up).
1) Is the argument then that only the government can succeed with large scale initiatives? Pretty much everything that government is involved with becomes encumbered, if it's liked to a code base it drives up complexity for diminishing returns performance wise. I like the mission that NASA does and private initiatives are much more cost effective.
2) Schools are expensive with the rise of access to cheap money and ballooning administrators vs instructors. Should this be regulated?
3) I'm not against the "lunch" program. I'm curious why is it a schools job to feed students? The meal programs extended from lunch to breakfast and dinner. Isn't it a parents basic job to feed their kids? If this were someone with a pet would you consider them a good custodian if they can't meet their obligations? I'm not talking about someone on hard times I understand crap happens but more of an extended living scenario.
4) Stop giving information to these companies. This is akin to "I can keep a secret but the people I tell can't". Is it really private data if you share it? If you have a spending problem, stop buying crap.
What are your proposals to drive research domestically? If there were a market for it that's untapped seems like a goldmine.
Thanks for your comments. For 1) occasionally the government does a fine job. I worked on two large scale DARPA projects that were well managed and had good results. Also early funding of the Internet, grants for university research, etc. 2) then why can countries like Germany provide tuition free college, even for foreign students? To me, education is starting to look like big business. 3) because the free food for hungry disadvantaged children is cheap with a large potential payoff. 4) well. It would be better to have a long talk about this, but briefly: I alternate from being a long term FSF/ACLU supporter and decide that the benefits of giving up privacy are worth it. My latest ‘sin’ in this regard is signing up for G Suite and using it for my whole work/research workflow. I try to be mindful about privacy and decide in a case by case basis the value from sharing private data.
Correct, both the U.S. and China plays dirty tricks. In fact the whole world plays dirty tricks. The only difference is that the U.S. is expected to be the role model of the world, and will always look worse than others even when carrying out an equivalent dirty act. China, Russia, and others know this and they use this to their advantage.
Wikipedia has flaws,too. 1. Your account need to have good history or social repo for your edits to be seriously considered by Wikipedia admins. 2. Admin can have their own set of bias and can decide to ignore edits.
Remember Wikipedia is a centralized and under control of single entity, fact that they rely on donation doesn't change anything.
There wasn't anything said about Wikipedia being a bad idea, but rather that it shouldn't be your sole source for fact-checking. I've learned that people only trust Wikipedia to the point at which it confirms their biases.
Part of the problem is that Wikipedia is generally pretty darn accurate. Everybody always talks about funny vandalism stories, but generally it's pretty good. The issue of course is that there's parts of it that definitely aren't correct.
This makes it easy to say "Well if it's accurate 99% of the time then it must confirm what I thought!".
Protecting users data is a very hard problem to solve in current tech landscape. There are enormously profitable business build around this and are driving significant portion of economy.
Only solution I can see is to build alternative economic model that can thrive while protecting data, otherwise it would be an uphill battle with all tech giants that are going after user data for profit.
This would be great, but for that model to work, the end users themselves would have to pay to have their data protected, when in principle I think most people would argue that their privacy should be protected in the first place.
For data protection to work efficiently, there has to be a centralized store of data that's deemed private, with a way to authorize / deauthorize consumers of your data. Of course, with centralization, it paints a big red 'hack me' crosshair.
Privacy is already lost. There are already cameras everywhere, be it personal home Nest cams, or surveillance cameras inside grocery stores, or street cameras at traffic lights. The fights now for data protection, IMO, are just feel-good initiatives that aim to provide a false sense of data privacy. Take Facebook for example - they've pledged to protect your privacy, offer data protection tools, a way to export all your data. Before privacy became a huge thing, I'm pretty sure people felt comfortable putting all their photos and data in Facebook due to the trust in them being a large enough company that they should protect your data, right? Same goes with Equifax. Same goes with banks and credit card processors.
The burden of data privacy and protection lies more towards the end-user than towards multi-billion dollar companies you entrust your data with. They may provide the tools, but once your information is out there, it's retrievable via various means by bad actors. You can keep guns in your home to protect your family, but if you aren't educated enough to use them properly or if you leave your doors and windows unlocked, it's not going to help.
Edit: my case in point - Facebook records found in public Amazon cloud servers [0]
No matter how much they try to sell it as a good will gesture towards mobile users, I will not buy it. There are good examples where company starts off with good intent but later turns into a typical selfish corporation. Lets face it, every single corporation has to continuously grow, as demanded by market, which means at some point they will break their promises to implement new means of making money.
I feel like this for most sensational news stories that I hear on news. Too much agenda in every news pisses me off. I wish there was a way to filter out such agenda.
I agree. Train were so much more fun as I can recall from my childhood memories. Now I rarely see someone traveling via train, and those who do are trying to save some money(train fares are cheaper in other countries).
I guess time that's available to people has shortened so much that they can't afford to engage in fun once in a while. Even the damn vacation feels so hectic and stressful. I guess that's because most people's idea of vacation is going to new country/city that they have never visited(totally unfamiliar with things there) and try to cover all of it in 1-2 weeks(all they get in a year).
NASA actually receive lots of funding(might be second after military). Most of their work doesn't align with any of the politics promises, even then they receive good chunk of budget spending.
No, no, no. I just picked a couple of numbers of relevant research-related agencies as a general comparative. ("This is is the kind of league NASA is in.") Other comparatives might be DOE, NOAA, USGS, NIST.
The federal budget is about $4000B. Discretionary spending is about $1200B. NASA is so far down in the noise of this that it's not funny (20B/1200B ~ 1.7%).
As an example, Federal highway spending (not state) is $44B.
Health and Human Services was $1.7 Trillion, Social Security was $1.1 Trillion, Defense was $1.1 Trillion, NASA is pretty far down the list (~19th), at $24 Billion, .35% of budget:
Plus, one looses so much(health and relations) in the process of making lots of money quickly that their option of coming back is no longer available.
Lots of money also heightens one's expectations and comfort requirements so much that they hardly save much and, even if they do, its not enough for them to maintain lifestyle for long without new income.
