As a daily Safari on iOS user, I don’t care about any of this, but since iOS 26 basic Safari features such as bookmarks and text search have become so buried deep underneath, they are basically unusable at this point.
It infuriates me a lot more than all the liquid glass stuff (on which I’m neutral overall).
I had to double check i’m running ios 26 because none of those things have moved for me recently.
Search is where it always was (type in the search bar, scroll past the google results to the in-page results) and bookmarking is also where it’s always been (share button “add bookmark”)
Damn. I never knew that way to search things. I used to do « Share / Search on this page » which was already obnoxious, which has now become « … » / « Share » / « Search on this page ».
Either I’m dumb or there is a discoverability problem with all these features. Probably a bit of both.
If you go to settings > apps > safari, and scroll to the “tabs” secttion, then turn off “compact” you get rid of the “…” button and go back to what it used to look like before.
Which is why i didn’t notice the change, as i had already set this setting to put the url back at the top an update or two ago.
It’s been there since literally iPhoneOS 1.0. They are calling it “share” now, but really it’s always meant “put / send this somewhere”. The difference with recent versions of iOS is that the share button is no longer always visible but you need to press the ellipses button to reveal it. It’s there along with all the other dastardly actions Apple doesn’t want you to know about, such as “Add to Favourites”.
A friend was telling me yesterday that this is how you can set custom ringtones on iOS. He seemed really excited about it, how cute.
Because I literally could not believe the archaic process previously used until very recently to set a ringtone on iOS. And now it's under the share menu?! Why do Apple people put up with this shit?
I've been able to set a custom ringtone in Android from the OS settings/any file browser app for at least 15 years and I would not be surprised if Android launched with it.
>Apple still sells 30-second song ringtones for $1.29 each through the iTunes Store app.
As a father of an 8 years old, this is very moving.
While Terence is -without a doubt- born with prodigious abilities, I think credit should also be given to his parents Billy and Grace who seem to have managed to simultaneously nurture these special abilities while still letting Terence have a happy (?) childhood. This is not easy to do.
Can't find the reference but from an interview with his parents there apparently there wasn't much "nurturing" other than simply making available the necessary materials which he gobbled up. Its not like they put a made him practice for an hour a day.
A boy in my high school class made IMO and got a gold medal (and later on won the Putnam one year). They interviewed his parents and it was a similar story.
I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.
More importantly, it's not as though individuals like Clements or Erdos was corresponding with Terrence directly to arrange a meeting. His parents clearly played an important role in facilitating and allowing these encounters. That deserves a lot of credit!
> I think you might be underrating the value of even that enabling work. Some parents would not have the financial resources to provide those learning materials. And some parents would take a normative stance on how an 8 year old ought to behave.
And most modern parents would swamp the child with a bunch of mind rotting auto playing TV and video games. There's an account of Terence's time at university where he nearly fails his oral qualifying exams as he spent most of his time playing Civ rather than studying anything. Imagine the travesty for the world if 5 year old Terence had been handed an Xbox.
Yeah I agree, an 8 year old isn't setting up these meetings and correspondences.
I think beyond even having supportive parents, the most important part was that he had a parent that had a degree in the field that he happened to be a genius in. His mother knew exactly how to guide her child through the material, even if it just was to let him go off to a corner and read the books she guided him towards for 3-4 hours a day for fun. So many children have advanced proclivities for certain things and parents that just can't even see what it is their child is brilliant at.
Having someone that knows the path and can point it out to them is a beautiful thing to have as a child.
I think gene and characteristics are more important than knowledge and degree. I happen to have two parents who are both in education, one teaches in university and one teaches in middle schools. Because of this I also know many friends whose parents are also teachers.
Without any statistical significance, but nonetheless the sample size is greater than 5. None of us consider their parents to be great, or even good teachers. All kids squandered sometime after they are free from the parents, usually in universities.
This experience impacts me so much, that I have a bias that teachers should not teach their own kids.
A parent of mine was also a teacher, and other than grading their student's 9th grade math exams when I was in elementary school, I was on my own for most of my learning.
So I agree that yes, just having a parent who is a teacher doesn't necessarily get you much, outside of likely being in a home environment where school is deemed important (many don't have this unfortunately). But where things become slightly magical is when you have a genetically gifted child and a parent that both knows how to guide that genius and has the resources to do so.
One needs to be a (long term present) parent to understand these subtleties.
You also hear just the success stories which are often extremely marginal, when such approach wouldn't fit development curve of some other potential genius we would not be hearing their less successful story, would we.
Not diminishing the overall message, in 80s even in western democracies deeper info was not so readily available so its not like his parents just threw him wifi-connected tablet with wikipedia opened and that was it.
But I think what should be celebrated more is some proper hard long term effort and not just usual approach with exceptional results.
Apologies I am not a native speaker so sometimes more complex thoughts take long sentences to explain.
We are discussing his parent's contribution to his growth. Some, like me, tend to agree they just gave him (good) tools and he found his interest and way through and beyond due to superior analytical skills and overall intelligence, not through some super duper tutoring by them.
I have cca such cousin. He was way ahead of his class (which was already math-focused class from secondary school), geniune interest in deeper math, physics and philosophy from early age. Even very good at software development in old Pascal or C. Nobody was tutoring him in any way, he just went to public library and borrowed what he liked.
The stuff thats not hard but still counts as discovery and learning must be self-motivating in way more average folks simply don't experience, not with same topics.
His parents, as an old saying in my country, must have done a tremendous amount of good things in their previous life to be rewarded with an easy kid :P
That’s simply not quite true if you read the article. When Terence Tao got stuck on a continued fraction problem, his mother told him to use the quadratic.
In contrast when I was a kid and was thinking about optimizing my program to print all prime numbers, my mother, instead of telling me about the sieve of Eratosthenes, told me to do school-approved math instead.
Now shoutout to my actual math teacher, who, having been told that I got stuck on writing a program to solve simultaneous linear equations, told me about Gaussian elimination.
Agreed. It's been decades, but personally being acquaintances with IMO and IOI gold medalists made me rethink a lot of things.
With our society being ostensibly meritocratic regarding intelligence, people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume.
At the individual level of a newborn infant, all the genetic gifts collapse into a fixed quantity. Nurture and hard work (and self care and many other things) become 100% of the controllable factors.
Nurture and parental mental health are not controllable by the child, so those become fixed from their perspective as they grow to maturity. That still leaves a lot.
All the former G&T kids on here talking about whether they could have been this or that are likely discounting their own contributions that they made and make every day to their own trajectory.
No, you were never going to be Einstein, no matter what, but you can still be the best version of yourself- the kindest, the most capable, the happiest, the least resentful.
Maybe that’s happy talk? Certainly some people have been dealt a tough hand, and it’s an American naive attitude to think that can always be overcome. Sometimes it can’t.
> All the former G&T kids on here talking about whether they could have been this or that are likely discounting their own contributions that they made and make every day to their own trajectory.
I completely agree. I commonly see such sentiments online. People claim that if they were truly challenged more or had better resources, then they would truly become something noteworthy. However, I disagree with them after a certain point. If you need someone to coddle your abilities, then I would argue you aren't nearly as gifted nor talented as you may have been lead to believe. I am not claiming that only the truly talented will be able to white-knuckle their entire way through life on their own. Rather, I believe people contribute equally to their environment, which I believe is similar to what you were stating.
> you were never going to be Einstein, no matter what, but you can still be the best version of yourself- the kindest, the most capable, the happiest, the least resentful.
Tao himself would say that one does not have to be like him nor the best at anything to make a meaningful contribution towards something. I think the example he once used was a lot of the technology we currently have. Sure, perhaps some exceptional people designed it, but how many thousands upon thousand of people contributed to turning the design into an actual product?
> it’s an American naive attitude to think that can always be overcome. Sometimes it can’t.
While true, what kind of world do you want to live in? I rather go to the grave believing I had a chance versus knowing my destiny was essentially invariable. I believe that even ordinary people can be full of surprises given the right catalysts and circumstances. Maybe not Von Neumann level of surprises, but humans are pretty clever creatures.
You don’t have to be a perpetual optimist to choose the best path available to you. But still, that best path is pretty rough going for many people all over the world.
It's still meritocratic even with dramatic genetic differences between individuals. A peer comment mentioned an anecdote of Terence nearly failing his orals because he ended spending all of his time playing Civ instead of studying anything.
It's basically the Gattaca story. Somebody can have the most brilliant mind in the world, but without actually applying it, they're not going to do great in life. If you give a person of average intellect Tao's life of dedication and work ethic, then he's going to end up a world class mathematician. He probably won't end up at the top of the top, as that's going to be reserved for those that hit the mega-lottery of genetics + dedication, but will also have no problem leaving his mark on this world and living a comfortable life.
I seriously doubt a person with average intellect can become a world class mathematician, let alone a decent one. Just on grid. I have seen people in college that were tremendously hard working fail math classes and just not understand it. At some point saying they should just try harder is cruel.
The logic in my claim is that the overwhelming majority of people will reach nowhere even remotely near to their genetic potential in literally anything. You can see this in any endeavor where performance can be objectively measured - chess is the obvious one. A 2000 rated player is not much more than a strong amateur, but that already leaves one in like the 90th+ percentile for a game that millions of people work and study at.
It's not like the other 90% of people lack the intelligence or whatever else to be much stronger than they are, but it requires extensive dedication, work, and suffering that many just uninterested in tolerating for the sake of improving at a single domain. I think your example largely proves the point. Anybody of average intelligence can obviously excel at undergraduate math if they're willing to dedicate themselves to it, but many people aren't. If somebody was failing at math it's probably because they were just treating it like you might e.g. literature, and trying to do cram sessions relatively shortly before each exam, whereas by the time somebody gets to stuff like diff eq math starts turning more into a puzzle game that requires developing things on a subconscious/intuitive level.
This was not undergraduate math in my case, but I still don't agree.
I don't think anyone of average intelligence can excel at undergraduate math. It of course depends on the degree and the school. Can anyone with average intelligence excel at an undergraduate math course in community college for their psychology degree? Probably yes. But an undergraduate math course at oxford as part of a maths degree? Not for sure not.
I think you are severely underestimating how much intelligence factors in how fast and even what at all you can learn. Take the opposite end of the spectrum. The US army rejects candidates with an IQ of ~85 or lower. Because they have found this group cannot contribute meaningfully. Let that sink in. Just a drop of 15 IQ points means the US army has decided you cannot be effectively taught anything to a minimum degree of competence. Now consider that the average IQ of a mathematician is 130 (https://realiqtest.webflow.io/posts/iq-by-occupation-a-compr...).
I'm speaking of math majors, or fields with a heavy math requirement, of course. Diff eq is not required anywhere, as far as I know at least, for non-technical majors. As for the army, I wouldn't just hand-wave away soldiering. You're talking about people being put in high pressure situations with ever-shifting dynamics, potentially against a human adversary, where lives are at stake. And they think everybody except the bottom ~32% of society is fit for this task.
I'd certainly expect an average person who dedicates his life to mathematics to end up with a higher than average IQ largely because while IQ is a useful measure, it's not an independent g factor. Studying mathematics is going to absolutely help train your brain in many areas that are also beneficial for performance in IQ exams. So for instance, some studies have shown that each additional year of education, relative to a fixed base, can causally contribute 1-5 additional IQ points. [1] So our person in question would almost certainly expect to see a significant and measurable IQ increase.
And FWIW I'm rather on the opposite extreme of those who argue for some sort of tabula rasa. I fully acknowledge dramatic innate differences between individuals, but I'm largely arguing that such differences only become major factors for people who approach their genetic potential in something, which most people will never get even remotely near, simply because the amount of dedication and sacrifice it takes is something that very few people are willing to accept.
Well the central post that the commenter made about the army’s iq requirement is trivially fact checked to be untrue. The army doesn’t administer iq tests as part of screening. They do asvab which tests _knowledge_ which you can study for. They have correlated outcomes in that a high IQ usually means a high asvab but they aren’t identical (you can for instance top out an asvab test and practice shows meaningful improvement whereas there is no top iq and if you can practice for it the test is flawed.)
"Dedication and work ethic" is almost certainly nonsense here. Some people do the activity a lot without having any ethic or dedication - they like it.
He stopped playing video games, presumably in part because of this event. [1] Many, if not most of us, would instead just let our professional life dip a bit and try to roll back the gaming a bit. Going completely cold turkey is a person with a special sort of dedication and ethic.
There is zero, absolutely zero chance of the 50th percentile IQ becoming a world class mathematician. People who say this have no idea exactly how smart these guys are.
It seems like a bit of a pointless and unanswerable argument about semantics, the only bit is the irritating "ohh if it's SOOO EASY" about something that was definitely framed not to be easy.
If your cutoff of "world class mathematician" is a few hundred or thousand people, then no chance. If their cutoff is "earn a comfortable living" and the top 10% of the world is 800,000,000 people most of whom don't study mathematics, then can an average intellect with an obsession for math end up working a job a normal person might call 'mathematician' by working on AutoCAD or 3D rendering game engine or industrial statistics and process control or economics or vehicle aerodynamics and be in the top 10% of the world in mathematical ability? Possibly yes. And you can adjust the numbers and criterion to get a yes or no whichever way you like.
>you can adjust the numbers and criterion to get a yes or no whichever way you like.
Good idea, I'll do that :)
>can an average intellect with an obsession for math end up
>working on AutoCAD or 3D rendering game engine or industrial statistics and process control or economics or vehicle aerodynamics and be in the top 10% of the world in mathematical ability?
I think this does happen quite a bit and the need for strong math in these difficult areas is so great that there will never be enough people as briliant as Tao to fill the positions.
That's so far outside the mainstream anyway, most systems are going to screen the rare person like that out without understanding why.
Now what happens when those having top 10% of ability are very excellent themselves, but cases come up that would yield only to a Tao level of "natural-born" problem-solver?
A mathematician is someone who creates or advances math. Not someone who uses math. If you don't understand how the word is used, that's your problem, not a problem with the statement.
mathematician /măth″ə-mə-tĭsh′ən/
A person skilled or learned in mathematics.
One versed in mathematics.
An expert on mathematics.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik
None of the definitions require creating or advancing mathematics.
People in the field would never, ever call someone "versed in mathematics" as being a mathematician.
I don't even buy that regular people call someone who is "versed in mathematics" a "mathematician".
If you met a 30 year old person and asked what they do and they said "I'm an athlete" - do you take the dictionary definition there too? Most people will assume they mean a professional athlete.
> absolutely zero chance of the 50th percentile IQ becoming a world class mathematician.
Good, we don't need billions of them anyway.
I wish modern society would quit focusing on individual intelligence over collective intelligence. We can take something like the microprocessor, for example. The smart group that designed the microprocessor was not the same group that designed the software nor the group the built the parts nor the group the assembled the device. However, every group is equally important.
>> people generally don't like to listen to stories that suggest that nurture and hard work aren't as important as they presume
Having grown up in australia but living in the us, this attitude is very american. It's quite funny to see when you don't grow up thinking it. I married into a very athletic family and have a child who is a precocious athlete. Many parents ask us what training regime or practice sessions we do. The answer is nothing. People don't react well.
If you work at it you can get better. It's true in both cases. Getting better and getting as good as the very best are two very different things. One is about you. The other is mostly about others.
I don't think our society is even remotely meritocratic regarding intelligence. Maybe it is meritocratic regarding psychopathy.
We merely have a few pockets, where the very brightest are rewarded. However going from average intelligence up to those pockets, there is a ton of people, who are clearly more intelligent than most others. Much more intelligent than the typical lie-your-way-through-life people, who haven't shown any significant skill, yet are elected by the masses.
OK, this is making it political, but it's true in many countries, if not most. The truly very intelligent people rather focus on their area of expertise, where not many other humans are able to understand what they are doing or able to achieve a similar result. Similar thing happens in businesses. Talkers rise in the hierarchies, doers who don't self-promote massively remain low in the hierarchies, in most businesses. I don't see many scientists becoming millionaires for advancing humanity. We don't recognize great skills and smart people collectively in many cases. We chase silly trends and make-believe.
I could see "meritocratic regarding intelligence" somewhat in the way that smart kids don't have many problems at school usually, and then later at university, and then can maybe get a well paid job. But that's where the meritocratic system ends. In the job world it's mostly about other things. Like how well people fake being social with their higher-ups. Or how they have less worries about lying about their abilities. Or how they promote first and foremost themselves, rather than everyone, who significantly contributed to some achievement.
Hierarchies are promoted because they coordinate the work of large numbers of people and make them vastly more effective at scale. That's quite meritocratic.
Hierarchies are promoted because they concentrate wealth and power among a few people, who distribute it to a few people they more-or-less trust. It's just feudalism with less violent feuding.
That's a pointless observation though, the interesting point is that hierarchies manage to concentrate benefits because working as part of a functioning hierarchy makes even the individuals involved a lot more effective, to the point where they're better off even with much of the benefit flowing towards the top.
Even co-ops have hierarchy-style management, which is often professional management. It's just done on behalf of the collective membership instead of answering to a corporate board. (But the oversight is often weak in any such scenario, so the professionals involved can accrue significant benefits.)
The benefits of coordinated cooperation are called “civilization”.
While meritocracy in high dimensional humans is a muddy thing, as being capable, and being capable at what is actually needed often diverge.
But at the organization level, the benefits of strong coordination of the right things are clear. Virtually every business study, studies this. Virtually every political leadership study, studies this.
Cooperation has so many efficiency and effectiveness benefits. Institutionalizing the right kinds of cooperation, i.e. coordinating it, even more so.
This is the civilization superpower.
This is why billions of people can spend their days doing other things than food production, and can live in places with no food production in sight.
I don't disagree. That's why I qualified my statement with "ostensibly".
But being really intelligent, at least for the top 1% or so, is often advantageous enough to offset any disadvantages from your class/cultural background etc.
I also wonder whether your "psychopathy" is just "ambition". After all, while intelligence alone doesn't guarantee anything, "intelligence + ambition" takes you quite far.
Personally, I can see how even an honest-to-god meritocratic society ends up with psychopaths at the top. For most people with normal-ish psychology, the risks and stress that comes with being on top of anything high stakes is just too much.
Laszlo Polgar would disagree [1]. He contends that raising a genius is something you can actually target intentionally (whether or not you should). His proof being 3 daughters who became GMs and one that was a generational talent. As far as audibles go, that’s quite a flex. Yes, the daughters are not all equally talented and chess isn’t quite the same as math, but we’re talking about gradiation within an achievement only reached by much less than 1% of all active players. To me that’s genius level. Also, it’s not necessarily an accident that the youngest is the one to have attained the best result. Evidence is quite clear that older siblings can help their younger ones achieve more faster because the younger ones see it as a path to follow/if they can I can.
Even if you disregard the anecdote (n=1) thing, it's quite obvious that genius has a genetic component to it, and the father being a good chess player tilts the odds in his favor quite a bit.
Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.
Laszlo was casual amateur at chess, and it's an n=3 sample at least. Though one sister 'only' made it to IM, but that was likely more due to social reasons. She decided to get married, have a family, etc rather than continue on with chess as actively as the other sisters.
> Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.
He wrote that the reason he chose chess was because it was objectively measurable. You play the game, you either win or you lose; there is no way to dispute the outcome.
Imagine that you have dozen children, each of them genius at something different, and that you are surrounded by people who want to prove you wrong. Whatever the artistic genius does, the people who hate you can simply say "yeah, he did something technically impressive, but it's lacking the... nebulous artistic qualities that only we can judge... therefore, not a true genius". Now the chess genius comes and wins every tournament against the adults, there is no way to argue that "yeah, he won all the chess tournaments, but... for some reason we still don't consider him to be a chess grandmaster".
That's just utilizing potential already present there and nurturing it far, the father was an established chess player and university professor and their mother is probably in similar range. Sure, it works, why would anybody argue against or find this shocking or relevatory?
Try the same with babies who are already visibly not the brightest (say in kindergarden group), their parents are also average or worse regarding intelligence. There is a ceiling, it may be high or not but its there. If you haven't experienced it in your life you are one of lucky few (and certainly didn't push yourself hard enough to sense it).
Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved. We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.
Data point: my comment prompted different reasons for why Polgar was successful: it’s genetic, he had time to spend with his kids, he was a professor, his kids all happened to be gifted, if you go to a kindergarten class you’ll already see kids that aren’t bright. Clearly more comfortable for explaining away because it forces us to look at why maybe we aren’t geniuses or our kids aren’t.
> Same goes with memory - you can train it far, use various techniques. Then comes somebody natural (yet still far from what we would call genius) who didn't bother with any of that and immediately surpasses whatever was achieved.
It’s always hard to compare how much effort and for how long they’ve been applying it between people. Someone starting earlier can make them seem like a genius. Someone who spent time developing their memory through various games may feel like they spent no time on it and “it’s natural” while someone else had to explicitly work at it instead because they never were encouraged to play memory strengthening games.
> We are not created equal and all have hard boundaries, be it health, cognition, body regeneration and so on.
Thats true, but the same was said of height but height only became 90% genetic once we fixed nutrition. I see no indication that our systems of parenting and child rearing are robust enough to make intelligence and academic outcomes purely genetic. It’s far too chaotic and you need to apply consistent effort daily almost from birth before the intentional learning stuff even happens. Making sure the mother is in good physical shape before birth, taking all the supplements before and after birth, limiting exposure to toxic stuff, making sure the baby is getting a good mix of engaged play, time to be chill, and exercise, making sure both parents are able to keep the child engaged and studying and understanding of expectations, adjusting the environment appropriately as they develop so they’re constantly challenged and enjoy and seek out challenges, that’s it’s emotionally and psychologically safe for the child, riding the balance of a little bit of frustration and recovering from that vs no frustration or frustration without a break, etc etc etc. a bunch of that happens before you start academic play to teach verbal and math skills and each of these is an add on (eg we know physical education is important for brain development).
Data point: I was at a prenatal class and after the nurse said marijuana isn’t good for the baby, one of the parents was asking “but like what’s the actual limit before it’s harmful”. So don’t be too sure that “surely kindergarten is early enough that kids are still on equal footing”. Another data point is I know a parent that has a 4 yold that doesn’t know how to read nor write because “he’s stubborn” nor is he going to preschool. Yet every parent that I know of that’s applied effort has their child typically by 2 or 3 and writing by 4/5 which is when basic math should already be going.
Nowhere did I state that there aren’t natural limits. But I also think academic achievement isn’t 90% genetic - there’s plenty of “naturally gifted” people who go on to not achieve anywhere as near as much as those who just work - perseverance trumps almost everything and environment trumps that because that’s how you learn perseverance.
The closest to the truth for Polgar is he had time to spend with his kids, but mainly because he prioritized doing so in a way to help them grow. Also, he did so with help from his wife. He wasn’t a chess prodigy. He chose chess because there was a clear demonstratable progression that a) could be used to demonstrate his theories b) his kids had immediate feedback on success c) could repeat the game endlessly to try out various tactics d) they studied chess as a family.
I agree, not every child can become a genius. Most of the reason for that today is less because of a learning disability or “physical limits” and more because of the environment the children are raised in (and the need to teach them perseverance and to keep trying regardless of how others are achieving).
Yes, but that kind of aristocratic tutoring is not scalable to the bulk of the population. You need the equivalent of deep PhD expertise in every subject to accomplish that, and even AIs are nowhere close to that level.
I think they deliberately underplayed their role in this. Especially with Asian parents who think such nurturing is part of the "norm". I wouldn't be surprised that they spent TONs of time tutoring him when he was young -- and when he was more or less self-bootstrapped they don't need to spend too much time.
But I could be wrong. He is definitely a genius so maybe he did grasp the ideas rather early, like from 3 or 4.
In my house we discuss a macro feature of children as being "school-shaped". If Terence Tao wasn't school-shaped, would he have been as successful? The counter-point to that is to ponder how many children fail to achieve a similar level of success because they don't fit into the school system so are left by the wayside.
That's a specific school problem. I think being school-shaped is not about being bored, but more about being willing to do tasks on a schedule and can learn a lot of material through a lecture style.
Agreed. But generally it very much depends on the school and the effort of those in and around it. Terrence was very fortunate to have parents who supported him and likely lobbied for his unconventional high school/primary school split education, and equally fortunate that his schools were able and willing to accommodate him.
Where I grew up there wasn't any way to deal with those of us who did better. If you did worse there were all sorts of programs, they would move you to a separate small class so you could get extra help and stuff like that.
My problem was everything was too easy. I was bored. I would get reprimanded for not working because they gave us an hour worth of work, I finished it in 10 minutes and then did other stuff. I basically didn't have to study for anything, I just showed up and got Bs. If I put in 10% effort I got As. And all I ever got for it was yelled at for having done everything they asked me to do too fast.
So I started sitting in the back of the classroom minding my own business and trying not to be noticed. I'm convinced my life would have been very different if I hadn't been completely jaded from most of my teachers basically punishing me for being better than the rest. By my mid teens I didn't give a shit, I was happy coasting along doing better than the rest just by showing up.
My choices were my own and I'm doing pretty well now. Got my shit together in my late 20s and got a CS degree. Best decision I ever made. But I can't help but think I could have ended up on a path like this much earlier if my teachers actually supported me rather than treating me like a problem.
> But I can't help but think I could have ended up on a path like this much earlier if my teachers actually supported me rather than treating me like a problem.
It's interesting you raise your teachers / organized schooling when Tao's parents were cited earlier in the thread for providing him materials.
Where do you see mothers and fathers stepping in (or not!) with children of greater ability?
My parents did provide me with materials. They were happy to buy me books and stuff.
But school is where I spent most my time and did most of my learning. My single father had enough to deal with, working full time alongside being a farmer. He isn't exactly an academic. He did what he could. The school system failed me massively. Both in not supporting nor encouraging my exceptional performance, and in ignoring my bullies even when they walked in on it and when I told them about it.
A dream of mine was that in order to get a PhD, you would not have to publish original research, but instead you would have to _reproduce existing research_. This would bring the PhD student to the state of the art in a different way, and it would create a natural replication process for current research. Your thesis would be about your replication efforts, what was reproducible and what was not, etc.
And then, once you got your PhD, only then you would be expected to publish new, original research.
That used to be the function of undergraduate and Masters theses at the Ivy League universities. "For the undergraduate thesis, fix someone else's mistake. For the Master's thesis, find someone else's mistake. For the PhD thesis, make your own mistake."
I am not very familiar with Triplebyte but I really appreciated this (seemingly) candid yet lucid writeup about how it was all went down from the inside.
These kind of insider perspectives, even if they come with their own biases, are very interesting nevertheless.
I wish I would see these types of articles more often.
Alongside a link to Google's explanation of why they do it, that's a very reasonable and helpful reply. "Changing the queuing method from the standard first-in, first-out (FIFO) to last-in, first-out (LIFO) [...] can reduce load by removing requests that are unlikely to be worth processing"
> Most services process queues in FIFO (first-in first-out) order. During periods of high queuing, however, the first-in request has often been sitting around for so long that the user may have aborted the action that generated the request. Processing the
first-in request first expends resources on a request that is less likely to benefit a user than a request that has just arrived. Our services process requests using adaptive LIFO. During normal operating conditions, requests are processed in FIFO order, but when a queue is starting to form, the server switches to LIFO mode. Adaptive LIFO and CoDel play nicely together, as shown in figure 2. CoDel sets short timeouts, preventing long queues from building up, and adaptive LIFO places new requests at the front of the queue, maximizing the chance that they will meet the deadline set by CoDel. HHVM3, Facebook’s PHP runtime, includes an implementation of the Adaptive LIFO algorithm.
For instance, a bunch of clients all make a request to a server at the same time, briefly saturating the server. If all the clients have the same timeout without jitter, they will all try again together at the same time once the timeout expires, saturating the server again and again. Jitter helps by « spreading » those clients in time, thus « diluting » the server load. The server can then process these requests without saturating.
The basic idea behind that is also used in all sorts of networks where you have multiple stations sharing the same medium with everyone being able to freely send stuff. To solve this, if a "collision" is detected, stations then use a random timeout before they send again in the hope that the next time there won't be another collision.
I highly recommend going through the make documentation at least once in your career. Per the lindy effect, as it has been around for 40 years, it has a decent chance of sticking around for another 40.
To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.
AI doesn’t help because if you can articulate your genuine motivation as a prompt for an AI, you should just use the prompt as the cover letter which will be a lot more effective than using the AI-generated letter, as the AI will muddy your authentic motivation and diminish its impact.
> To me, a good cover letter is about being actually motivated to apply to a specific job and then simply explaining why.
Money. I want money. That's the reason I am applying to your job offer. I found a job offer that meets my skillset and I applied to it because I want an income.
But this isn't what you expect me to write, is it? You want something more, so I'm going to bullshit you so I can get the job that will allow me to get money
Ok. If you can explain in a little more detail how you get the job done and what qualifies your assessment of the relative efficiency, then you probably have the basis of a decent cover letter.
Did anyone ever get hired by answering the question of "Why do you want to work for us?" with "Because I need a pay check"?
Because that's realistically like 80% of the motivation for most job/candidate pairings. In my case the remainder is usually like 15% "and it doesn't require selling my immortal soul to the devil" and 5% "your tech/problem is vaguely interesting".
Given the above, I feel like a typical cover letter is really an exercise in spin.
A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them. But this question isn't usually posed explicitly, which I guess is confusing for some people.
Also, almost no-one is motivated so purely by money that they are equally interested in all jobs that pay the same. You can probably think of some reason why you would want to work at company X as opposed to any other number of other companies that may be offering similarly-paying roles.
I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.
It really depends on the market. Sometimes there are great looking companies that you really would like to support because they somehow seem awesome to you. But you don’t always have that luxury.
> A cover letter is also supposed to explain why the company should want you to work for them.
For the generic cover letter that’s a reasonable thing to focus on. I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question (or even worse: “why do you want to work for us rather than our competitors?” which is even harder to answer, especially if it’s a tiny startup you’ve first heard of by reading their job post on LinkedIn).
>I don’t think the reason of “I already applied to all the better sounding ones, but they all ghosted me” is gonna win too many points either.
Not if you word it like that.
>I’ve seen plenty of application forms that specifically ask the “why do you want to work for us” question
That's what I'm saying. That's the formal question posed, but you can easily answer it by explaining why you'd be good at the role. "I want to work at X because I believe that I could make a significant contribution to Y given my Z skills".
Absolutely. While in an ideal world, everyone would love to land a job that perfectly aligns with their personal values and interests, the reality is different. The current market conditions are dictating a lot of our job search and choices in companies. A vast number of talented engineers are out of work due to circumstances beyond their control and applying for multiple jobs becomes less about passion and more about survival. While a personalized cover letter sounds great in theory, when you're trying to send out dozens of applications to ensure you can keep the lights on the idealism takes a backseat to practicality.
> I’ve never heard of a family being divided because its members dance different styles, but I am in one divided by political and religious opinions.
Being a dancer (lindy hop) with a large number of dancers in my social circle, dancing is actually a frequent source of tension among many couples around me.
Couples splitting up because one is heavily more invested in dancing than the other is a common occurence.
And don’t get me started on lindy hop vs west coast swing.
> And don’t get me started on lindy hop vs west coast swing.
The sad thing is that (for the most part) I don't think the westies really hate on the lindy hoppers much. You can see, admittedly older, clips[1] of dancers throwing in a bit of lindy, balboa, and shag in top level comps. Of course, this is Sylvia Sykes, so maybe that's an exception.
> Couples splitting up because one is heavily more invested in dancing than the other is a common occurence.
This unnerves me. My partner could and would dance all day, anywhere, any scenario. I have to be unbelievably drunk to come close to anything resembling dancing. Any event we go to together that involves dancing is intensely emotionally debilitating to me for that reason, and sometimes I worry that it's a basal insurmountable incompatibility between us.
> And don’t get me started on lindy hop vs west coast swing.
I'm puzzled where this comes from, since they're entirely different scenes. On a social dance night, or say, a festival, one may find Blue/Balboa/Lindy Hop (and possibly Shag), but hardly Lindy Hop and West Coast Swing, since the music is different.
Edit: Actually, the message that the article sends is exactly what happens - dancers try other dances, then they share how they've integrated them into their dance, or how interesting is anyway to try something different - as opposed to intellectual condescension.
> Couples splitting up because one is heavily more invested in dancing than the other is a common occurence.
There surely are occurrences of this, but I wouldn't describe the phenomenon as common. It implies that a romantic relationship is based entirely on dancing, which I don't think is frequent; also, the vast majority of the dancers leave the scene within 3/4 years.
I've personally lived the "mismatch of interest", but it ended up like any other separate hobby in the context of a couple.
I’d add also that this is really only an issue for some women. Most men I’ve met end up leaving the dance scene once they have a partner - if said partner doesn’t dance.
It’s reflected by polling the crowd. There are way more women in relationships out dancing than there are men out dancing in relationships. Single men dominate the numbers when it comes to dancing.
This is why I don’t really recommend it to most men as a way to meet women. It’s lopsided numbers and it’s hard to stand out in a good way as a beginner - in most dance scenes anyway. That said, if you have a lot of time to kill and are big on learning new skills… it can pan out but it’s a multi-year endeavor that often doesn’t go anywhere.
To me, Internet's permanentness should be treated according to Murphy's law: you should plan for everything you wish would go down to stay up indefinitely and everything you wish would stay up to go down at some point.
Vim is basically the only editor you can safely assume to be available on any machine you’ll ever interact with. In my opinion, this fact makes it a requirement for virtually any developer to be able to confidently use vim during a production incident to, say, fix a broken config file while being connected to the machine through (multiple hops of) SSH, without any ability to use your editor of choice.
Once this basic-but-crucial skill level is mastered, using vim more proficientely as a daily driver is entirely a matter of taste. Personally I prefer using a fully-fledged IDE for anything that goes beyond a simple script.
It infuriates me a lot more than all the liquid glass stuff (on which I’m neutral overall).