Somewhat tangential, but this reminds me of when I took a certain Microbiology midterm in college. I hadn't put much effort into that class leading up to it, as I had some tough CS classes that consumed my focus that semester (also was admittedly not a great student in general). So when I finally went to take the midterm, after cramming like mad before the exam, I quickly realized I basically didn't know the answer to most of the questions, even what I crammed was only a small portion of the material.
The exam was huge, at least over 10 pages, and even when we technically ran out of time, the professor was kind enough to move the remaining exam takers to the neighboring lecture hall to continue taking it. I recall I spent a total of 2 hours on that exam.
Now mind you it was mostly short answer or multiple choice questions. The multiple choice questions were pretty sharp too, lots of traps and false but sounds right answers mixed in. But if it had been purely essay questions, I would have been screwed.
However with such a huge corpus of information in front of me, I ended up basically learning all the material on the spot. I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
In the end I got B+ in the exam (which was curved to an A), and walked out understanding the material better than I did walking in.
Reflecting in the experience years later, I've wondered if a hypothetical LLM which was ignorant of microbiology could do the same thing if fed that exam. In some respects the traps they placed in the multiple choice questions actually were what helped me refine my understanding the most. Made me appreciate information theory more.
> I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
This strategy saved my ass on so many tests from high school through college that I did not study properly for.
I think it would certainly be possible to write a test such that this strategy doesn’t work at all, but lucky for me no one did in any meaningful way.
There was a couple famous papers from a few years ago asking why computer science students, sorted by ability, seemed to form two clusters.
In one of the studies they got incoming CS students to fill out a multiple choice exam on programming, before the class had even started. Then they looked for hints in their exam results to see if they predicted the end of semester grade.
Turned out following this strategy was an incredibly strong predictor of success in computer science. Some students somehow got 0 (or close to it) in the multiple choice test. But the researchers looked at their answers, and could see that the student was forming hypotheses about the questions. Even if they got all the answers wrong, they answered all of them with a consistent idea of what the computer programs might have meant.
Weak students just answered each question individually based on vibe, without using what they learned (or figured out) from other questions.
> I just kept doing multiple passes through it, each time I noticed one of my answers contradicted one of the others, I would make adjustments to harmonize, which indirectly refined my understanding.
I used to do something somewhat related during exams: I could never find contradictions/mistakes while working forwards, because somehow my brain would make the same mistakes consistently every time I go through something in the same direction, no matter how slowly and methodically I would do it.
So I worked as fast as possible in the forward pass and then reversed the problem in my head and worked backwards just as fast. Except this time I would often find the expected inputs would no longer match the actual inputs, so it helped me identify a lot of mistakes.
Yeah I walked into this with my pitchfork ready but isn't this stuff pretty... reasonable?
McDonalds is just a restaurant, they predict what menu items you like and how likely you will come back, is that really a problem? What is the concern here? I don't use their app but presumably for those that do, isn't this exactly the type of data that would simply influence whether the app offers a coupon or something? Or how well a franchise is doing? Maybe also what to keep on the menu or how much to stock?
What exactly is the bar here I wonder? McDonalds has security cameras, it also has menu kiosks with cameras (I think?). The alternate reality evil tech-like McDonalds could have theoretically used facial recognition to categorize all footage of any given customer, then used this footage to estimate their friends, spouse, BMI, age, gender, ethnic group, attractivness, disability, etc. They could then sell it to third party data brokers for extra cash.
That would certainly be the kind of dystopian surveillance to get me swinging my pitchfork around, but this? Having assumed the worst I'm now walking away realizing McDonalds might not be so bad after all.
I purchased a house within commuting distance of Boston in my mid 20s, back in 2022. Didn't need PMI, the mortgage terms weren't unreasonable to me (fixed 5% interest), and the monthly payments for utilities plus the loan are still well within my means. It's even got an attached garage.
I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.
In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.
To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.
According to census bureau data, 1 in 3 people aged 18-34 now live with parents, a huge change from past generations. So you're hardly an outlier in that respect.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.
> the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out
That is 'small' cheat code if parents tolerable. I have multiple peers which got much better life and places to live because lived with parents in their 20s.
It just doing napkin math and even if you live 5 years with parents and doing minimal savings (saving rent and part of food) you already poses good chunk of deposit when comes to buying property.
I reject your characterization of my comment. I explicitly called myself an outlier and said I didn't want to get too specific, so I'm not sure where you're getting "clever" from. I wasn't claiming credit for my circumstances. I was identifying the actual variable that separated my outcome from peers in similar circumstances, because that's useful information for anyone who does have that option available.
And plenty of people do. I know people who could live at home rent-free and chose apartments anyway because they wanted independence sooner. That's a legitimate preference, but it's still a tradeoff, and pretending the tradeoff doesn't exist because some people don't get the choice at all helps nobody. "Not everyone can do X" is true of literally every piece of financial advice ever given. It doesn't make X bad advice for the people who can.
My perspective until now was that the Wikimedia foundation was already supposed to be a union-like organization. Would it make sense for Linux maintainers to form a union within the Linux foundation? The vibes feel similar to me.
Yeah I was expecting some giant text dump based on the complaints in the comments here, yet all I see is a pretty normal README? It's not even that large.
If we are splitting hairs some sections could have been left out or broken up into a dedicated doc, but this is still vastly better than a README that explains too little. At minimum I expect a README to give me guidance on what this is and how to get started with it and having stuff like a file layout helps with exactly that.
I see no reason not to be empathetic. The frustration is fair, but it's aimed at the wrong layer. These people were guided into this spot by bootcamps and curricula that start at React and never go down the stack.
My experience was the reverse. I learned HTML and CSS first, then Rails in college to serve templated pages. I understood the client/server boundary fine as a concept, what I couldn't see was where it actually sat in a web context. I sort of knew JavaScript ran in the browser, but then I'd see ERB templates stamping values directly into script tags, so the server was writing the JavaScript that ran on the client, and my mental model fell apart. Where does my code actually execute? Why does this variable exist here but not there? Why does the page have data the network tab never fetched? Nobody ever sat me down and explained the request/response lifecycle as its own thing. I had to assemble it from fragments over years. This was around 2017 for context.
How you learn something shapes how you keep learning. If your mental model is misaligned, everything downstream is friction. The thing that finally made it click for me was reading the actual HTTP RFCs, which is apparently a weird thing to do, because HTTP itself is absent from nearly every guide and curriculum. Tutorials teach you the framework, maybe the language, and just assume the protocol underneath. These days I make newbies read the MDN docs like a book and skim the HTTP wiki page, learn the history of the protocol. It's short! It's not even a book! That gives you a firm foundation. But if your foundation starts at React, drilling down is like digging past bedrock. People don't know where to start, and Googling only shows them wrong answers because they don't yet know how to ask the question.
Are you sympathetic to a doctor who specialized in surgery and now always recommends surgery, even for a common cold? Or would you say they are in the wrong job, if they are anywhere but surgery?
Ridiculous example that does nothing to argue the original, fair point. Obviously health interventions demand more finely tuned solutions than information technology
FWIW, maintaining at least a moderate degree of empathy even in systemically frustrating situations is good for the empathizer and thus in one’s interest
You can agree or disagree with the consequences, but the voting rights act never had any explicit provisions about districting, this was something conjured entirely by the courts. It was even framed as a temporary measure at the time of the original ruling.
So not exactly bewildering, I personally saw it as closer to inevitable. The Supreme Court never had the power to legislate, it can only interpret, and a shaky interpretation always has an expiration date no matter how popular it is.
Friends who give ultimatums like this are usually toxic and worth ditching. Your friend would be better off cutting you off now, regardless of what they decide about the job, than continuing to associate with someone who'd emotionally manipulate them over a career choice. Healthy relationships simply don't look like this, and dressing it up as principle doesn't change what it actually is.
The fact that this feels like a normal thing to say to a friend tells on you a bit. Get out more, spend time with people who don't already share your priors, and the certainty starts to sand down on its own. Threatening your friendships over someone else's career is not the moral high ground, it's just an ugly way to treat people. Humility is understanding you can be wrong about things even when you're certain you're correct.
This is why I believe we should only listen to amateur opinions on everything, experts simply lack historical credibility. For example I've recently purchased a healing crystal (half off) for only $5000 dollars! It cleared up the imbalanced energies my street guru told me about right away.
I would never have been made aware about the consequences of imbalanced energies in the first place if I had asked an expert instead. They probably wouldn't even suggest an immediate solution to the problem like my reliable street guru always does! Something to consider.
Ironically the street guru hucksters might have a better track record than the dangerous products mentioned above.
Less charitably, it's a mistake to imply that simply being a bigger corporation makes you go from street guru to "expert". Bigger company trying to make money off of you at any risk to you is just the same bucket at a different scale. In this context the other side is probably "expert consumer advocate" since that fits the idea above of these dangerous products advertised as cure alls.
It can be worse in terms of justice. You might be able to charge or win in court against a street hustler. Most people can't beat a big company in court. They usually won't even try.
I honestly agree with you in many respects, I'm simply spinning in some nuance to a topic I keep seeing.
The snake oil salesmen is productive precisely because the actual effects of the snake oil they are selling is unknown to the consumer they are introducing it to. There isn't easy answers to this, it's just a fact of life that we can try our best mitigate.
And apparently fish oil actually does help your brain. Weird world we live in.
So I think the focus on "experts" is actually a consequence of declining institutional credentialism. You didn't trust them for claiming to be experts, you trusted the institutions who called them experts and said you should trust them for that reason. But expertise implies competence not trust. Not everyone operates with good intentions even with the right credentials, including many institutions themselves.
