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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   2843 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 23, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Leetcode is unendingly boring

So you have come around.

I remember you saying a few months ago that you don't find the idea of leetcode all that bad.

Leetcode questions are puzzles with a lot more constraints than initially meets the eyes.

And they usually require you do have certain algorithms and "tricks" memorised. There was a time in college when I was preparing for that years IEEE Xtreme and could pump out leetcode questions all day. Unfortunately I have to out myself as a brainlet and confess that I don't remember how I solved some of those questions at all, Some of my own code looks like ancient Chinese to me now.

Asking a programmer to solve leetcode is akin to asking a professional engineer to solve differential equations by hand again like he did in college.

I'm sure some of the FAANG 550k base, 500k in stocks, PhD by the age of 18, posters can't relate, but eh.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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