I experienced this a lot as a kid. Adults tend to leave out a lot of context in their answers to children. Often, it seems like they don’t even try to see the question from the child’s point of view. For instance, I didn’t do well in school. When I asked adults why doing well was necessary, they would give answer along the lines of “if you don’t do well, then the only job you’ll be able to get is as a janitor.” Perhaps that’s true, (or not?) but the answer was largely devoid of meaning to me as a child.
I try to give kids honest answers, but there's a chasm of missing metacognition and unshared context that is hard to bridge.
I speak of spending a lot of time at work. And argue that developing intellectual interest and stamina that supports one feeling good during that time is one of the most viable / likely paths to live a happy, fulfilled life.
It's still a huge leap of imagination. How can you tell a kid what being in a dead-end job that you hate is like? It may not sound too unlike what you're asking them to do, burying themselves in their studies.
So we can talk about finding the interesting parts of studies--- interesting subjects. History as stories. Writing as imagination. Math as trying to figure things out. It's immediate and also hits the important part of the argument. As Csikszentmihaly said, “Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”
And now that I'm a teacher, I try to run classes that have a whole lot of the things that I liked best in other work, and to share them with kids.
I think Maths (and physics) education is better when teachers also add some of its history. Most of maths was discovered for some need and lot of people working in the domain had really funny lives. Some anecdotes linked to some theorem or formula could make them easier to remember for certain students.
I taught upper quartile 5th graders contest math. Talking about Gauss adding up the series 1, 2, 3,... 100 quickly and frustrating their teacher really resonates with them.
Also telling about Hippasus allegedly being drowned by the Pythagorean cult for showing irrationality of sqrt(2) is always exciting :D A lot of middle schoolers love the slightly gruesome.
Adults tend to leave out a lot of context in their answers to anyone.
Even knowing this, I constantly have to step back, sometimes a number of times, to explain the background of the background before then getting into the actual details of the "thing" I'm supposed to be explaining.
Working on a project for X months and then having to compress and abstract that knowledge into a 30 minute introduction to a group of people staring from a clean slate is a gig that requires more preparation than expected or allowed for.
It's been ages since I last looked but IIRC Visual Studio is still the go-to and only real option for oldschool win32 programming (i.e. native windows, COM, etc.). I'm sure there are plugins and machinations to make VS Code competent at win32 too but for some companies and shops they're sticking to Visual Studio.
Top athletes have a history of having mental breakdowns as they realize they've aged and no longer can dominate as they once had. Famously, Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear off during a match, but there are other examples like Serena Williams' berating of the umpire during her loss to Naomi Osaka. It's always a bit sad / pathetic to see adults lose their cool when losing to a child.
What a ridiculously ignorant take. Magnus is far and away still the greatest chess player in the world. The gap between him and everyone else has narrowed, but its still a significant cap. Compared to Hans, they're not even in the same universe in terms of chess talent.
The issue isn't his belief. It's that he's throwing a tantrum and has ruined two Chess tournaments (so far). He's free to believe whatever he likes, but to resign in a match in a tournament is not fair to all the other players.
The top 8 players in the tournament get invited to the next tournament. Hans Niemann got a free point from the game Carlsen resigned. That impacts the standings for all the other players. It’s hard to see how they’re not impacted.
In addition to that one, very concrete impact, the situation may also have subtle effects. Players may be going into matches against Hans being down a point when they would have been tied, changing the psychology of their play style. Similarly, Hans may play more confidently being up a point. Even spending a single second thinking about the situation is an unnecessary impact forced on the other players by Magnus. Pretty unsportsmanlike.
The only thing is, I don't think Magnus is losing to anyone else at a disproportionate rate. The only pattern I saw identified is Hans winning at a disproportionate rate when the match was streamed live. Or am I wrong?
Hans beat Magnus once at the Sinquefield Cup, and technically here though it was Magnus resigning. Meanwhile at the Crypto Cup which was the last time they played before this Hans got trounced by Magnus. Keep in mind based on their ratings Hans had a 5% chance of beating Magnus while playing black, unlikely but not a particularly shocking upset.
> Fully deserved, after a performance that showed great resilience, determination, and quality. As for me, I am happy to (barely) be younger than the second and third place finishers combined
GP is wrong because Magnus won this tournament – but he did lose to Pragg three times along the way. But I don't think you can say you are "losing well" when you congratulate the silver medalist while holding gold.
You're wrong because, what flex? Pragg is 17 and Alireza Firouzja (the third place finisher) is 19. His comment reads more as a hat tip to two young rising stars than anything else.
What ruins tournaments is inviting a guy who plays at 2900 level with little security measures and barely at GM level once those are introduced (happened at Sinquefield cup). It doesn't help has cheated in the past and plays his best chess consistently when there is live broadcast going on.
Magnus isn't yet feeling his age chess wise either. He wins most tournaments he enters, including demolishing 4-0 a guy who won the Candidates twice in a row (the most important tournament in chess for every player who isn't currently a world champion) and he is league above others rating wise.
being the top chess grandmaster is no guarantee of sanity.
to take the most famous 3, Fischer, Kasparov and Carlsen:
- Fischer was always a bit of a paranoid arsehole, but he went completely off the rails after he retired. I won't go into specifics, but it's a quite interesting read
- Kasparov has never seemed the world's most sane man, but then he's from a radically different culture
- Carlsen is as far as I know quite sane, but from watching his streams I never really got the impression that he was particularly level-headed, or even just a pleasant person. take for example this whole debacle; even if he is right, which he may well be, he hasn't been exactly mature or sportsmanlike in dealing with it
if you have the singularity of mind to get to such a high level in anything - especially a solo sport like chess - I would speculate that there's a high chance of other things being missing. even if there isn't, the environment of fame and power once you get there seems pretty harsh on the mind
Fischer was a reasonable, intelligent person. His manners got a lot milder once he got old.
Kasparov is probably the most mature of them all. He got into politics in the worst possible country and somehow survived, which tells me that he knows how to negotiate with people who are hostile towards him and he still beats super GMs to this day.
Magnus likes to joke around claiming that he is the best, but overall he is/was the nice kid of chess, always kind and respectful towards everyone. And even humble and level headed when he loses. This whole cheating scandal revealed a face of him that the world had never seen before.
Fischer was a raving paranoid anti-semite who couldn't maintain a human relationship of any variety for practically his entire life. intelligent, yes. reasonable, no.
Kasparov I don't know too much about, but I know he's taken some very odd stances and positions over the years, and as far as I know concluded that he wasn't cut out for politics because he (in more or less words) lacked the social skills
Magnus is actually the best, so is it really a joke if he says it? but that's not really what I'm talking about. I've watched his streams, and it's always seemed like just below the surface is a cocky, dismissive guy that doesn't suffer fools gladly
> it's always seemed like just below the surface is a cocky, dismissive guy that doesn't suffer fools gladly
If this is how he feels and he suppresses it 'just below the surface', isn't that good enough? If he naturally feels that way but tries not to act on it, and to top it off, actually is the best, is dismissing things that deserve to be dismissed, and is dealing with fools, then I would say that is an admirable trait.
I am not here to decide whether Magnus is a good or admirable person or not. I am simply attempting to observe the mental states of the people at the top level of chess. I would say Magnus is not out of the ordinary for what he is, which is a top-level sportsman, but compared to a regular person, he's probably a little odd. as is Kasparov and as was Fischer especially.
however, with these three being the most famous, perhaps they are a skewed sample. on the other hand, that skewedness is part of the data because, by being famous, the mental impact on them is and was probably larger.
My point was more that it is not odd at all to be that way if you actually right about it (are the best, etc). Plus the fact that he is trying to suppress it shows that he knows it is the right thing to not be a dick. These things combined make your asserting that he somehow out-of-bounds statistically (personality wise) invalid, in my view.
as the top chess player, you're allowed to say and do and be things that others aren't. your defence of him is evidence of this. your judgment is rarely questioned. you're allowed to think of yourself as the best. people don't mind - even expect - a level of aloofness. however, his behaviour is different from the average person's. whether that is correct or not isn't the point. whether there is justification for that is not the point. justifications in fact make the point further.
also, it's not just his streams, he's also dealt with this whole cheating mess pretty immaturely, and I'm sure I could easily pull 3 other examples of odd behaviour out of google
You argument is tautological 'they cannot act average because they are exceptional'. You cannot separate one from the other -- either put an 'average' person in their position and judge how they react to it (in which case Magnus would be a good example), or say that people who are seen as exceptional could never have been 'average'.
It seems to me you are arguing for the latter, which makes your whole argument pointless. Am I mistaken?
EDIT -- To clarify: your argument is tautological because any example that is brought up will be someone who has become famous and idolized, and thus negated by your 'a normal person wouldn't act like that' retort. It is impossible to hold up a non-famous chess genius because we can't know who they are.
Failing to come up with any statement while making awkward allegations in this manner is hardly cool, I think. Especially in the position Magnus is in.
CPUs don't have logic or reason, so it's not a good analogy. E.g. you can replace an infinite set of memories by distilling them into a few bits of knowledge that underpin that given set of experiences.
I don't think an analogy is meant to be factually equivalent, it is meant to convey meaning. I perfectly understood the meaning of the parent comment, even if it is technically inaccurate.
We aren't trying to understand minds or caches, we're trying to encourage a practice that has little to do with the inner workings of either.
If by clone you mean clone of Yelp the day it launched, with basically no data, maybe.
Wrong twice - Product is half the battle, and it’s not easy.
The bare minimum to compete would be native and web apps with good UX, competitive reviews and search, and better social features. Then you can fight the other half.
> The bare minimum to compete would be native and web apps with good UX, competitive reviews and search, and better social features. Then you can fight the other half.
That does not seem like a winning recipe for competition. The bare minimum for competition would be some type of product differentiation that substantially differentiates the experience. Trying to compete on things like data, UX, or search doesn't seem like a winning formula to me.
I totally agree you have to differentiate and avoid replication as much as you can as a startup in general, but this conversation is mixing awkwardly two discussions now.
In context I was pushing back on the idea that cloning it to any competitive degree isn’t a mountain of a task.
But out of context of this thread, then yes as a startup your strategy should involve simpler, novel features that let you avoid some work. Of course if you're aiming to replace Yelp eventually, you do have to do that hard work and I doubt you'll really get far without doing it ultimately. Ratings/search is the product. You can simplify it in other ways though.
I mean just not being a corrupt mob like entity that exists to harass restaurant owners would be a plus to me. Solving the chicken and egg problem of actually getting momentum would be much harder.
Then it is not only competing with yelp but also with Google Reviews which has the advantage of being in the search page itself.
I agree that fly fishing is beautiful, but disagree that it is an elective way to make things more difficult in the name of beauty. Most fly fishing happens in relatively shallow rivers where flies comprise a large part of the fish diet. There isn't really any other way to catch the fish. What I love about fly fishing, though, is that it often takes place is beautiful mountain streams. The beauty of the environment is hard to beat.
Yeah, match the hatch matters, but not as much as you think if you give them something else juicy.
I live on a class 1 trout stream. I've talked to plenty of fancily dressed fly fisherman in for tourism struggling to catch large trout. I do better with a worm or grasshopper on a hook. And the funniest of all is that the biggest browns I've caught were using bread by the local hydroelectric dam because people feed the ducks there and the trout adapted.
Fish are fish. Trout are nothing special. The environmental beauty is still there when using a spinning rod.
In your anecdote, your comparing tourists to a local. Of course a local is going to be more productive regardless of tackle. There are a lot of anecdotes here, with very little data.
Not really true, about no other way. In such waters an ultralight spinning rig with a small hook and single split shot, with just a worm on the hook, is far more effective.
So effective, fly fisherman consider it "cheating".
Live bait with the proper rig will pretty much always beat an imitation fly. Same goes for organics (fish eggs) that will have scent/oil/particle trail.
But did the bubble already burst in tech? Valuations are very low right now. I don't think we're necessarily at the bottom yet, but I think the worst has already come to pass.
Nobody can predict the bottom, or how low things will go.
But I disagree that valuations are very low. Frankly, many tech companies (Uber, Twitter, etc) are still unprofitable money-losing machines with high valuations because of their potential growth and expectations of future profitability. There's an argument these companies should be worth much, much less.
For the past ~10 years in particular, investors haven't cared about profitability; a market downturn may change that.
Also, as the recession or depression continues, advertising is going to get scaled back and may destroy ad-tech companies like Alphabet/Google and Facebook.
Your prediction is as good as mine, of course. But I'm a bear, expecting a river of blood to flow through the streets of Silicon Valley.
I agree with your general assessment of the economy, but those are all factors everyone knows.
The adjustment we saw earlier this year was going from “the economy is booming and interest rates will be 0 forever” to “interest rates are going to 4% and we’re going to have a recession.” That’s an absolutely massive adjustment in expectations and stock prices, especially of high growth tech companies, reflect that adjustment.
In order for valuations to drop substantially further, a similar expectation adjustment would need to happen. Something like “I thought we were going to have a recession but now it’s worse than the Great Depression”. Simply adjusting expectations from “minor recession” to “moderate recession” isn’t big enough to crater the markets like we saw earlier this year.
Shopify's explosive stock growth always struck me as kind of scammy - or to be more charitable, the results of a very well targeted marketing campaign. It's back to where it should be - along the way, VTEX and BigCommerce jumped on the IPO train at exactly the wrong time. Everyone was sniffing their own farts in that sector for the last two years. Glad to see it come back down to earth.
Lots left to go down. Think of the global events right now - all we need is one or two more destabilizing events and we're in a bigger heap than we are currently.
The bubble may have burst but doesn't mean you've bottomed. Still haven't seen many companies go belly up or VC fund shutdown. All we've seen is valuations drop and some layoff but not big layoffs and also the valuation dropped from their spectacular highs so its all relative.
That's in the realm of a dotcom bubble style implosion. There are plenty of other prominent names to add to that list. Having lived through the dotcom destruction, this rhymes, even if it's not exactly the same.
Very true. But the crazy thing is, in the opinion of many people, these companies were so overvalued that -80% feels like a "correction" more than a "crash".
Like Nikola is down 94%, but it's still worth $3 billion on paper. This is for an electric vehicle company that staged a video of one of their vehicles being driven, only for us to learn in a fraud trial that it was rolling down a hill, with the excuse that they never claimed the vehicle was moving under its own power, just that it was "in motion." The company is worth nothing at the moment; any "worth" it currently has is a speculative bet that it will eventually produce something of value.
We need to start seeing the GOOG, META, AMZN, etc. stocks tank 80% before we can compare to the dotcom bubble, IMO.
What’s the argument that being entertained by weaponry is morally comprised? The only argument I can think of would be reliant on a belief that human killing is always morally wrong. I’m not sure many people share that belief. But would love to hear an alternative perspective.
They aren't abstractly used to murder hypothetical people. Real humans have had their lives and families and entire countries destroyed by us, using these machines.
We can say we didn't do that, we individually have very little control over who our government kills and how. But as long as we take delight in the implements of that destruction they are right to hate us.
But there are other cases where peoples’ lives were saved by such machines. E.g. billions of dollars in weaponry has been supplied to Ukraine to defend the country from invasion. Was that immoral too?
Right now I'm not actually arguing against militaries existing or anyone making or controlling military equipment. It's consistent to consider them a gruesome and shameful necessity, rather than to take joy in their prowess and ingenuity which is a bit the norm in the US.
I don't know, it's kinda cool seeing technology pushed to it's limits. I would never join the military and opposed my country's participation in most recent wars but I just like the tech, airplanes in particular.
I know but come on. "They're just so cool though" isn't a very solid defense of finding entertainment in large scale death-dealing machinery. Like truly think of yourself in the shoes of someone who for example had a child killed by one of these things. What would you think about someone "just liking the tech" with no thought given to the intended or actual use?
The problem with your argument is that you’re only looking at the negatives. If you believe that weapons can only be used to kill children, then, yes, your view makes sense. If you’ve been adversely affected by weaponry, you likely hate weapons with every fiber of your being. However, there are others who have used weapons to defend themselves against unjust aggression and those people may view weapons favorably. And finally, there are most people who have never been directly impacted by the machines of war. Those people probably fall around a neutral opinion of weapons. Some may skew towards a positive opinion, some, like yourself, skew negative, but overall largely neutral. Given this sentiment distribution, I don’t think you can make a judgment on whether or not it is immoral to like reading about weaponry.
I'm not trying to make a generalizable philosophical argument about all weapons though. I'm specifically challenging the free pass that american military machines get in techie circles merely because they are technologically sophisticated.
Our tolerance for misery just because something is impressive is a bad thing about us and we should strive to be better than that.
It's complicated... Consider this: I think Ukrainians would be very happy if we'd give them a bunch of fighter jets. Even though they've been on the receiving end of these I'm sure they'd be happy to get some right now.
These machines are not really for dealing death, even though that is what they do. They are just as capable at preventing innocents being killed. They are mainly intended as a defensive tool.
I’m pretty certain your hypothetical victims here would hate us for destroying their country and/or killing their family, not for “taking delight in the implements of destruction.”
I agree it is a complex topic rife with moral quandaries. Another component of the overall picture is the sobering reality that without the weapons of war and military technology, we wouldn't have a country or government to call our own. Nations are born from the victors of violent conflicts, so it is difficult to grasp that my own distaste for violence and military technology is a direct privilege granted from their previous use by those who came before me.
There's an old lefty joke I believe dating from the vietnam war that I heard many years ago it goes like this:
"Does america need to have the most powerful military in the world?"
"Well it certainly does now!"
Maybe it didn't have to be this way. If it does maybe we should just stand up and bear the consequences of the world we've made. If everyone wants us destroyed so badly they might be on to something.
