EfficientSyllabus
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User ID: 827
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
It was the same in Hungary. All the grandmas watched the Mexican and Brazilian soap operas throughout the 90s. The first classic was Escrava Isaura back in the 80s. Then in the 90s it was Esmeralda, La usurpadora, and so on. Today many watch Turkish soaps. In the 90s the series Dallas was also hugely popular. Surely my Eastern European peasant grandparents watched Dallas because they shared the culture of Texan oil magnates. And also Latin American culture, sure. Oh wait, no, it was because of skin tone (grandpa got quite tanned on the sun, working outdoors, so he surely identified with the Brazilians).
I think Americans don't quite get how absolutely normal it is in rest of the world that TV doesn't depict your own culture, cities, stories etc. People who travel to the US are often surprised that "wait, this is really like that, and it's not only the movies?", like yellow school buses, college football, high school lockers, doorknobs, whatever. It's all foreign but we are used to TV being a different world. When my grandma saw the skyscrapers in the Dallas opening sequence it was as foreign as watching some sci-fi. But she still liked the series because the human stories aren't all that different. Sure, you miss many cultural references but it's rarely crucial for the entertainment.
it can't be positive to grow up watching superhero movies and none of them look like you
"Look like you" as in has two arms, one head, and so on? Equating same shade of skin with "looks like you" needs more examination. By the way I had no problem identifying with animals like Simba in the Lion King, even though I never got to see his skin color under all the fur.
Acting is pretend play. Generally there's no problem with acting out the role of someone different from you. Obligatory reference to the ancient Greek men playing female roles all the way back at the inception of theater.
The demand for movies to be visually realistic is quite new too. Obviously theaters couldn't turn the stage into several realistic places within one show, nor could they use hyperrealostic props, so things were anyway much more symbolic and required suspension of disbelief. In such a context, race swapping is perhaps less of a sore thumb. Now that everything is supposed to look hyperrealistic, it's harder to argue for suspending disbelief specifically only regarding DEI attributes.
The problem isn't diverse people popping up in media but the ugly mindset behind it all, specifically that is seen as some revolutionary act, the dehumanizing bucketing of people based on a handful of attributes and patting each other on the back and huffing one's own farts over it.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
It took some time for me to figure out what bothers me most about this. And it's the smell of cold dispassionate bureaucracy, lawyers, signatures, stamps, database entries. I imagine it was some nurse who administered the lethal injection, passed down the bureaucratic chain of command.
Euthanasia may be sometimes the less bad option, when someone cannot live a life of dignity any more. But it's still a tragedy and the person who puts someone out of their unbearable misery should still feel conflicted. Belgians managed to make this clinical and indirect, decision by committee, hiding behind each other. Instead, the chief bioethicist should have personally injected the poison.
Somehow our modern view of life is that it's merely a vessel for positive emotions and fun. If it doesn't deliver that, then it should be tossed aside. That one's life's purpose is one's own quality of life (and that on the short term, too). That's not the only way to view it. One can also see life as duty, towards a community, towards higher purposes. In this sense, she was wrong to ask for euthanasia as she had the potential ability to do good things in the future.
That life is good is an axiom, I can't argue for it rationally. Not a particular life, but life overall. It's not a statement that everyone's life is enjoyable, it's that life is valued. Other things are downstream from that. It may even be seen as the thing that breaks the symmetry of the antonym pair of good and evil, good is the one which is life affirming, which comes from life and points to life. It's deeper than rationality or religion. It's pre-numerate, it's not about perverse extremes of shutting up and multiplying. It is to be felt and then modulated by the intellect, to see how it works out for a particular situation.
The climate alarmists seem to still have an incling towards this when Greta complains that CO2 producers will ruin the lives of our children. But sooner or later the antinatalist strand will take primacy and the misanthropy will become clearer. "Climate anxiety" is already a thing. Apparently (as mentioned in a motte post) some young adults now even skip work based on their climate anxiety episodes. How long before we hear that euthanasia is a good way to deal with one's climate anxiety? It reduces the carbon footprint after all. If you're white, you also make more space for BIPOC.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
What are you testing for? It's natural to be more protective of women. Call it "women are wonderful", "white knight" or whatever, we subconsciously know that the well-being and safety of the (young) women of our tribe/community is crucial for its continued existence, via childbirth and raising families.
This doesn't mean that young men checking out isn't a tragedy. But it's different.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Okay, but is there anything interesting or unusual in this aspect regarding programming? Why does this always come up when debating software dev?
My guess is that there is an abundance of otherwise low-status kids who, by virtue of spending too much time "in the basement" can punch above their weight. And that these avenues are not properly gatekept by usual prestige and status gatekeepers. Or is there some other reason?
Solving your own problems is exactly the rush. And it can't be something that someone told you would be a good problem for practicing programming. It has to be something where you want to have the result and are eager to get closer and closer step by step.
For example I wrote bots to automatically fill out various HTML forms, or modded games, built websites for gaming clans, processed and synced subtitles for downloaded movies, scraped websites like the parliamentary election result website to slice and dice the data myself, to process Wikipedia dumps in various ways etc. Nobody told me to do any of these, but such things led me through lots of classic CS topics and I read up on how to do them with a goal in mind. That's so much better than the prof dropping some artificial problem on you.
Like if I have two subtitles in two languages and one is properly synced up, but the other isn't, but might also not correspond to the first subtitle perfectly one-to-one, then how do I find out a plausible correct alignment? This leads to various algorithms like edit distance, longest common subsequence etc.
But this presupposes that you have such computational or automation use cases in your life. For example today with Netflix existing, I might have never learned about video file formats, subtitle file formats, never had to correct audio or subtitle sync issues. If my parents had been rich and Steam existed, I wouldn't have had to learn how to play with the Windows registry, to mess with the Program Files, to understand how to use firewalls to set up LAN games etc. And all such endeavors open up new problems to solve, now you have to install an IDE, figure out environment variables, understamd that vague C++ compiler error, read up on what the words mean, all still with the goal that you want to get that thing working, but without any external pressure like deadlines, so if I want, I can take a side quest into deep diving into graph algorithms for a few days or whatever.
If you don't see such problems around you, if you don't care to customize stuff on your computer, you may look at project ideas but those always seem artificial because someone already did them and we know there is a solution. It's a schoolish problem. When you build something for yourself, you have to define the problem, the scope, then go further and further. Some riddle websites are also cool, like http://www.pythonchallenge.com/
I'm not saying that such self study is sufficient but it made my formal studies much easier because I could tie the concepts to first hand experiences.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I just had an idea. What if this is analogous to slut shaming? What if the point is that the "autists" give away something (programming labor) for too cheap because they enjoy it, thereby depressing the price on it? Young women slut shame their peers who are too eager to have sex with every guy for fun, because this no longer allows the more modest women to place demands on guys and sooner or later the default expectation becomes that every woman must quickly put out.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
You are setting up a circular argument. Good programmers need intelligence. By intelligence we mean whatever makes people good at programming.
This has no explanatory power.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
If an intelligent person is externally motivated to do stuff, by teachers, parents, expectation, poverty etc. they can perform well.
So basically, drive can be substituted by something else, but the cognitive power of your brain can't be replaced through external influence.
To tie it back to the original point: just because you get good grades in high school, and get good test scores, doesn't mean you'll be a good at practical programming. You can even do a full CS degree program and still not be good at programming compared to your peers who pour a lot of hours into it from this itch to create stuff.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Intelligence is usually understood as an ability, the cognitive processing power, your ability to deal in abstractions and meta levels, notice patterns, keep more stuff in your working memory, etc. It's distinct from experience, lexical knowledge, amount of acquired skills etc.
If you don't want to use the word intelligence like this, then let's name my concept intelligence_2, and understand my statement as "intelligence_2 is a distinct trait from willingness to work hard from an intrinsic drive."
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Well, maybe those professions are being held back then. But electrical engineers are close enough to programmers in culture, I'd say. Or at least they are in my bubble. And as for other engineers, there's less of an open culture and things are proprietary. Realistic projects can only be done on the company scale in industry, there no equivalent of free software or Github for those professions.
Also,I don't think that other professions are really as straightforward and standardized as these conversations make it seem. Programming isn't sooo unique. Generic IT admin stuff or network engineering, infrastructure design etc also has a lot of the same difficulties. And someone who mucks around their home router and built some PCs as a kid will be better at such IT work. You'll be a better car mechanic if you're in some car modding community since growing up. You'll be better at roofing, construction planning, flooring, plumbing design etc if you dive into it obsessively. People just don't do it that much for whatever reason.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I'd add reading other people's code. I picked up a lot of coding by osmosis as a kid just fumbling around existing codebases, just trying to get a program to do something I wanted. I literally had no idea what is a for loop or what are function calls, I just dived in and tweaked it. Of course it works better the more background knowledge you have. But the main point is to se real code, instead of the idealized stuff that a lot of courses teach, eg "design patterns" just for the sake of design pattern, unrealistic standards of code cleanness, like the very opinionated Clean Code etc. The best open source products from respected companies don't code like that, but get shit done. I'm not advocating for spaghetti code, just to get a taste for real, working codebases as opposed to toy examples with unrealistic elegance. By reading code you can pick up good or bad habits alike, but that's not a reason to avoid it.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I think puppies are supposed to bite, that's how thay play. In my experience they grow out of it as they mature. I'd only rebuke the puppy if she's biting too hard.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Just use the fully general template to get better at anything.
Find the appropriate level of difficulty which is not too easy but not overwhelmingly hard that you just fail without a chance for improving. Then on that level, push your boundaries, be consciously willing to step out of the comfort zone. But also be relaxed and confident, and don't imagine the stakes as too high. You can try again later too. And evaluate your performance afterwards, think of better ways you could have acted in hindsight, imagine future situations etc.
In terms of conversation, you can probably chat with close friends. How about friends of friends who still share many interests with you? Then you can expand to more and more different people. If it works one on one, how about small groups, then bigger ones?
Also realize that most conversation is just about vibes and not content. Showing interest in whatever's ratting around in the other person's mind is the main point, as well as sharing the moment etc. A few brain farts don't matter, just don't be defensive about it, go about it gracefully. Lots of people without broad lexical knowledge can nevertheless be good conversationalist.
And to have more interesting stuff to say, you also need to do more interesting stuff. This is a bit backwards, though. It's probably more fruitful to realize that there are a lot of interesting things out there that you haven't dived into yet. Perhaps out of an ego situation, that you consider yourself above normie shit, you conceptualize your self worth in terms of your knowledge in obscure specialized stuff and so you block out the possibility that normie shit can be interesting too.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I'm saying that there's a separate personality trait that's something like the drive to make stuff despite failures, to not give up in the face of difficulty. And this is not always a Hollywood hero upward trajectory. One side of it is someone trying over and over with sub-par results or taking way longer than others with less stubbornness but more intelligence would. I know people who are relentless and put lots of energy into something fruitless and they aren't very skilled for it. They may build dangerous contraptions out of wood and metal but with lousy construction, inefficiently etc. They may obsess over reading history and politics and come out of it believing various pants-on-head tinfoil conspiracy theories, or may spend way too much time on building hopeless perpetuum mobile constructions etc.
Willingness to work hard (intrinsically driven industriousness, relentlessness, stubbornness) can be decoupled from intelligence. On the flip side, many intelligent people are lazy and coast along, wasting their potential.
This is where the discussion turns to "why do we expect programmers to be obsessive and do their profession also as a hobby when nobody expects that from accountants or civil engineers or surgeons or lawyers?" And some accusations that programming is toxic and elitist and exclusionary, biased towards basement dweller neckbeard incel nerd techbros who have nothing better in their lives than messing with a computer.
As this often comes up in discussions, I have tried to think it through and here's my current opinion. Those other jobs are perhaps less fun on the whole (fewer people enjoy them as a hobby). Those other jobs are also not available for practice for kids. At the same time I would expect that good professionals would tend to keep up with developments in their field even just out of interest. And the professional skills of engineers or mechanics of any sort probably correlate to how much they tinkered with things as kids. Whether this correlation is due to direct causation or the common-cause type is another question.
The complaints typically come from two places. One is DEI, the other is from older devs with families and outdated skills. Maybe a third one: accusing tech companies of implicitly requiring unpaid labor for skill development and exploiting the naive twenty something guys and depressing wages because "its supposed to be fun, here's some pizza and a ping pong table, now go make me some profits."
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Programming is hard to fake. In most school subjects it's enough to know the "teacher's password", so memorization (of facts or algorithmic processes to solve one of a few types of problems that are likely to be in the test) is a decent strategy for getting good grades.
In programming, you have to problem-solve, face uncertainties, without an option to bullshit your way out of it (the code either compiles or not, it either crashes or not, and the computer doesn't care about your emotional state or your deadline or whatever).
I think the necessary relentlessness and intrinsic motivation required is comparable to playing musical instruments or sports. And incidentally, it's mostly boys who spend insane amounts of time on practicing the guitar or football or yoyo or skateboarding or even video games etc. without any external pressure from parents and teachers.
If you don't give a shit about playing the guitar, and have no aptitude for it, a private tutor will similarly have a very hard job to try and teach you to play.
It's impossible to teach things like this, it's only possible to learn them. By that I mean that the action has to come from the learner. The teacher can't actively put anything in the learner's brain. You can lead a horse to water and so on.
Intelligence surely is a factor here but it's not the only one. I know intelligent people who are not obsessive tinkerers and less intelligent ones who constantly muck around with some stuff, building various kludge and messing with their car, building stuff around the house, repairing this or that in a custom way etc. This itch to make things is a big component in who will actually learn to program and who won't.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Resume padding doesn't exist in Europe, you get admitted based on cold hard criteria like tests and grades, not cozy fluffy stuff like extracurriculars, quality of personality and "well-roundedness". Still it seems that standards have to be lowered steadily. This is understandable for universities that are growing in student count. For already very selective schools like NYU, it's probably due to a change in selection criteria.
Old-man-yelling-at-clouds time: It's maybe too easy to say that today's generation is coddled and soft. But there does seem to be a difference. Youths always used to be entitled/lazy/whatever, but that was in defiance of the messaging towards them. Now a generation has grown up who were told all along that they are a special little unique snowflake whose greatest value lies in "being who they are". (It's tempting but probably futile to summarize entire generations like this but whatever.) At the same time though, it seems that zoomers are more neurotic, anxious, self-conscious etc., drink less alcohol, have less sex, drive slower, generally are more aware of their constant public image (online, and also in person due to the constant presence of Internet-connected cameras in people's pockets). The stakes are high all the time, and reality smacks people in the face compared to what they were told.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I've heard this all my life from teachers and professors. I went to university many years before covid and profs were always ranting about how unprepared our cohort was and how it was so different back in the day, and high school standards are falling off a cliff and they must offer all sorts of prep courses about stuff that used to be core high school material. And a few years before that, my high school teachers were ranting about how primary schools don't prepare students for high school any more and they must repeat primary school material during the first year. And this is in Hungary where there is no "customer mentality" in education like in the US.
The reality is, the fraction of capable people per cohort is fixed (or grows very slowly) over time, but more and more people are going to higher and higher educational levels. At that point it's basically inevitable that every new cohort looks less and less prepared and cannot learn the same material as the cohorts a decade prior.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
"It's too difficult to meaningfully contribute to this society" vs "there is no difficulty any more, we must artificially make things difficult"?
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Is the art in the arm movements or the idea, the composition, the choice of colors etc? If I memorize how to paint a Mona Lisa replica, am I as impressive as Leonardo?
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Renaissance works have been filtered and preserved based on quality. Prehistoric art probably went through a much more random series of events and what is left is probably not the pinnacle of the contemporaneous state of art but some random person's makings. But I have no qualifications to say either way, but it seems logical.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
I wonder if that would really suffice for them. After all, the guy may generate the image at home on his PC, then memorize it and paint it on site from memory. If this is still "A-ok", then this is a weird esthetic preference.
EfficientSyllabus
2yr ago
Not to mention that the AI model itself is built using beautiful and creative mathematical ideas and engineering principles. The code can be elegant etc.
So it's not culture then. Back to skin color. Okay, then why was every little girl playing with black baby dolls ("négerbaba") during socialism? "That one was available" is not sufficient because as far as I heard first hand, kids and parents had no problem with it and liked it.
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