Going off a tangent here but just wanted to comment how powerful the nocebo effect can be.
I'm familiar with it in the context of strength sports, where "tweaking" your back, knees, etc. is relatively common.
If you tweak something and immediately go "oh no no no I'm gonna be out for weeks now", it does happen. The pain only seems to get worse for days, you can't move, if it's your lower back sometimes you can barely get out of bed.
When you learn to distinguish between "I'm hurt" (something felt a little funny and it hurt a bit, but you're still functional) vs "I'm injured" (something actually went really wrong, like a major muscle strain, or blunt trauma), and learn to keep a positive attitude in the face of pain, you're back in a couple days.
There's a group called Barbell Medicine that completely changed my mindset when it comes to nocebo. They teach people to accept pain is part of life, and to assess it instead of immediately worrying or panicking about it and going into what they call "movement avoidance".
Possibly off topic but after years of trying I'm finally on a good streak at 750Words [1]. What's really changed the game for me is filling out my entry in vim. I used to be bummed with copy pasta entries because I couldn't see my typing speed and distractions ya know just lotsa words / minute but it's worth it with how good it feels to bust out entries in vim with often shift downs like a type writer dinging along without a whim.
g ctrl-g
I always carry little notebooks that are for songwriting, general notes, grocery lists, and anything else that comes to mind.
Drawing notebooks, books full of notes on non-fiction books and videos, clipboards with graph+plain paper, voice memos, and a huge amount of random note apps and websites.
For collaborative projects I usually write a markdown file while I'm doing something worth documenting. Easier distribution to team members.
Interested to try a physical notebook for a personal project though. A progress dairy of sorts.
Yes! I learned this in my first internship when I froze up on the terminal because I had a manager hovering. It's something that comes up a lot in my circles. I did feel a little better when I eventually taught that same manager something about SSH. That excited "Oh you can do that??" felt so good.
I had never heard of this set up a project interview test. Sounds stressful and awkward but
For me, it would possibly be preferred to algorithms because one of my strengths is reasoning about technologies. In group projects and when working with friends, I naturally take the pragmatic setup role.
Algorithms, on the other hand, I struggle with because even tonight at dinner my sister was trying to remember what word describes toxins moving up the food chain, something we learned 10 years ago.
Before she could finish her thought I was blurting out bio-magnification!
It made me think why do I remember some things so well and others really do go in one ear and out the other.
I know to an interviewer it may seem like they're testing if we have knowledge that will be applicable to the job at hand but to me, it feels arbitrary.
I am adaptable. I am not a textbook.
When I am on the other end of that table, I will have already asked for a portfolio of sorts: school work, personal projects, anything that you want to represent you.
I will spend some arbitrary amount of time finding code snippets that are problematic or interesting and I will ask you to speak to them.
I feel that will be enough to know whether or not I want you on my team.
> When I am on the other end of that table, I will have already asked for a portfolio of sorts: school work, personal projects, anything that you want to represent you.
> I will spend some arbitrary amount of time finding code snippets that are problematic or interesting and I will ask you to speak to them.
> I feel that will be enough to know whether or not I want you on my team.
I like your approach but wonder if I would be successful if looked at through that lens—I have looked back at code written a couple years ago and was surprised to find that I was the author and would definitely be unable to speak to my choices then (though I could probably speak to how I'd do it differently now, which might be a useful signal in the interview).
Yes! That's what I'm getting at. It seems like technical interviews as I've experienced them (Microsoft being the biggest name I've tried so far) are knowledge based stress tests.
This doesn't make sense to me because once I become comfortable in a group, immediate stress isn't an issue anymore (background stress yes but that's another beast entirely).
I don't preform well while stressed, to the point that I pass out in acutely anxiety producing situations.
My test (which is really just more of a traditional behavioral interview) is looking for how you introspect and reason about design decisions that you've made in the past.
Something that I value in teammates over anything else.
It's a glimpse into how they will respond if I do have to ask them about why they did this or that in a merge request.
If you can reason about why you chose a foo over a bar 4 years ago then I'll feel pretty confident that you can speak to the decisions you made last week.
My thoughts will likely change as I get more industry experience but this is a good milestone for me to look back to.
It's not always easy to remember how it felt presenting your first programming project or landing your first technical interview. Or worse how it felt just before that stressful event.
We all have a tendency to think wow I guess I was so anxious over nothing. Is this what keeps the status quo in place ? Hindsight bias
Honestly I see no reason to eat this stuff ever unless I'm in a pinch. If I want a burger I'm not wanting something that looks or smells like meat just something with the same form factor as a burger.
Lately it's lentils and kidney beans with walnuts. Smash em all up and you got yourself a nice lil patty.
I make sliders this way with all the fixings and I just don't ever see myself wanting something more "realistic" haha
Wake me up when toilets tells us anything we need to know about our health.
Depending on implementation it could even be scary. A companion app that gives you AmazonFresh ads: A little low on zinc today eh? Why not try some Pumpkin Seeds™
Is anyone working on something like a smart toilet? Sounds like something papa Bill Gates would bank roll
There is some trial work going on to get kits for you to use to test Faecal calprotectin at home and use the camera and an app in your phone for analysis. Obviously there is a hurdle of actually having to handle faeces and put a sample in a tube so it is not something people would love to do. But it could be something people with IBD could do in the future to catch flare ups of their disease early.
"""
Much of evolution depends on historical contingency, too. The earliest organisms had many oxygen-controlling pigments at their disposal. But once lineages of organisms committed to using certain ones for certain jobs, it may have been difficult if not impossible for them to drastically revise that choice.
"""
Makes me feel better about all the technical debt I've contributed to over the years.
Yeah that's my experience as well. I went for a B.A. so I was able to take a larger variety of CS courses than the average B.S. student and it still was only my Web Applications professor that did live coding with web2py and Vue.js
Next figure out how to work the YouTube and YTM recommendation algorithm. I know I'm not the only one paying for premium and actively discovering small independent artists everyday through recommendations.
The YouTube music equivalent of Discover Weekly is probably the "Mixtape" feature (with the main difference being repeats from your listening history are allowed which is convenient in the case of the offline Mixtape feature). A lot of my discovery comes from the new releases view on mobile and desktop. Sometimes I'm one of the first people to view newly released songs from artists I've never heard of. Which makes me think they can't be doing it all by some sort of cross referencing of listening habits to recommend songs that other people with similar tastes to mine liked. Maybe they do actually have a complex neural network trained on my listening history that can do decently well in deciding what I would like. I do actively like and dislike songs and have been doing so for years so that may be why it's working so well for me.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo