At a few companies I interviewed at, fairly established but not tech centered companies, the interviewers had literally just come out of the companies introductory training program.
I don't know if that is really smart, or really dumb. But a lot of jobs I could have probably done really well, I was passed over, and I honestly have to say, inexperienced interviewers have smug attitudes. I got the sense that there was the background thought of "ugh, god, I have to deal with someone's brain that isn't mine".
It's annoying to have to deal with those kinds of attitudes, because it perpetuates them, by causing the people who have bad experience from them to behave defensively next time around.
I've had some okay experience with getting positive feedback leading to callbacks, but these were typically answers to questions that I could have found online verbatim by studying an interview manual. I try not to do that because I think that is dishonest in my actual value.
The best interviews I've had are where it's clear that it is two people talking, and not two computers.
> There's no such thing as a "conversation" between the billions of people with a stake in this.
Well, not exactly. That's how you wind up getting diversity of fields.
People have different interests and different visions of the future. People understand computation differently. People approach the same problem in different ways. Through conversation and code, the web is weaved together.
My thought is this. Put up or shut up. Why waste your time under a forum about a developer who wants more stable, secure software? Surely this view provides some benefit to the community, lest we prefer languages that compute incorrectly with regularity and a proliferation of vulnerabilities across every domain that has been coupled with technology.
I often wonder half amused, "What Would Dijkstra Do?", every time I see the phrase referenced. It's almost like harmful has lost meaning because of the complexity of the systems of which to it refers.
Everything modern is ridiculously complex, even if it looks simple. You can't state that a single thing in a complex system is harmful without forcing yourself to re-evaluate the entire construction of the rest of the system, in which case you can either (A) determine that there is no alternative solution, or (B) the system must be altered in some other way (in which case now multiple things are equivalently harmful. Since (B) happens so frequently, this means many parts of every system are harmful precisely because the system isn't perfect yet (and every part can be minorly adjusted so long as other parts of the system are adjusted - and this latter part is never discussed (probably because the complexity involved is actually complex and someone else would be like 'dude, that's also harmful - your solution has side effects'))).
If it was easy to implement new things people would do that instead of complaining. There's a good reason things are the way they are and not some other way.
Yea, but then it doesn't really make sense to argue about anything, because everything can be statically defined in terms of the environment it exists in. The part can be described in terms of the the discrete whole of which it belongs to, minus the part.
I like to complain a lot, about many things, for like an hour, and then I get frustrated without observable resolution. It's all thinking noise, patterns, I prefer to stay at home, I like sleeping, so tired of arguing on the internet.
I really keep trying to think whether aliens existing would actually radically change my life, individually. On one hand, maybe, but on the other, probably not (and this is more likely).
I feel like I already experience my existence like I am alien to everything that is not me, whether it is talking to a cat or a person or a tree, the whole thing is like 'reality blob' that I am not really sure how all of this happened, nor do I ever have any hope whatsoever of finding the answer to that question. When I wonder thoughts to myself I wonder who it is that thinks the question and who it is that responds with an answer. So many thinkings are just permutations of what has already been heard, and they form patterns and it's really weird.
It's easy to get 'used to things' and 'acclimated to things', I just feel like I have it hardwired in me to perpetually be weirded out by my own existence. Complexity doesn't even describe it, strange doesn't either, as these are all human concepts. You really just have to learn to observe with a completely blank mind. Then it's just like being in this interface that's always super weird and confusing, and it's ridiculous how some people really think they know what they are doing (like in their deepest philosophical and spiritual core, not like 'have to go to work today to feed the kids').
I've read from mathematicians who consider their computer to be a tool, and from others who see the computer as a partner. As a hobbyist who studies automated theorem provers (like coq), there is so much elegance that goes into the computational proofs in order to even construct such a program that allows a mathematician to do their work.
Can you honestly say that it doesn't take an extreme amount of effort to construct the perfect typing system that allows you to even begin to be able to write a proof with a machine? People have to prove that theorem provers are correct with respect to that which what they define. This is no trivial task, it's an entirely different domain of knowledge.
> Closed systems exist, there are things that can be understood so fully that you can't think of any new questions to ask about them that you don't already understand.
The existence of closed systems does not imply all systems are closed. Also, you can think you understand things so well that you have to revisit things you think you know in order to find new questions.
> It isn't remotely the class of the hardest problems we can think of. If NP=P that doesn't mean we can solve every problem easily. But it does mean we can solve a lot of important problems easily.
That's fine to you, but there's obviously some communication and definition of terms problems going on, and I don't think that's entirely surprising considering how lost everyone tends to get in the language of it.
P=NP means you can get computers to write their own math proofs. Tell that to a mathematician who would rather compare his process and functionality to that of Picasso or Rembrandt painting, Mozart composing, than that of the self serve pay station at your local grocers. Maybe we can start birthing mechanical babies, I don't really know.
I don't know if I can. What do you mean by concrete?
For me, as soon as I use language, it is symbolic. So even if I were to describe the shape of a rock to you, it is still not a concrete example, unless I give you the rock.
Maybe that sounds absurd, but I am being serious. Can you clarify?
What is the difference between memorizing a sequence of steps and having a couple of sequences of steps culturally contextualized in a symbolic language?
I mean it's literally one language against another one. You can call it 'meaning' all you like, but 'meaning' is representative. You call it 'understand' but to this guy memorizing the entire dictionary in order might mean 'understand'.
You might say you need to have felt 'being angry' in order to know what 'angry means' and to determine this as understanding the meaning of the word is ridiculous because it goes both ways. People make their owns meanings up, the only reason we agree is because we exist in relatively the same space time (with respect to the size and age of the universe) and information only varies so much at the distributed rate it tends to vary across minds, people most people are similar in how their minds function and construct pattern relations.
See, the weird way I always understood NP hardness was by virtue of the impossibility of it. Suppose all NP hard problems are solvable. Assume this knowledge is distributed, a culture surrounds it, eventually that knowledge is structured into the culture intrinsically (like intuitive knowledge, like knowing how to move your arm, the knowledge becomes to effect: deterministic).
Now, if that occurs, then new layers of conceptual reasoning (however it may manifest, the problems of human creativity, of opening domains of knowledge, of forming new ideas or building things, anything humans will be able to try to do once all NP hard problems can be both efficiently discovered and checked).
Assuming we can do new stuff now that we couldn't before, this opens the table to new variation, new problems, and new plausible solutions (but on a meta layer, where the problems of today are intrinsically quickly solvable).
To me, that is what NP hard has always been. Even when you think you have solved it, you haven't, precisely because of the ways we construct and define problems. We either select that which can be known or that which can not, and we translate this into a language. For what can not be known, that which has significant variance across the human domain, such as mind reading, can not be predicted. Even in a fairly formal logical or mathematical language, which becomes more difficult the more compressed the language is with cultural information.
So even though we might say we've solved NP hard problems, that allows us to define new problems of which are going to be more difficult to solve (unless the universe just stops forever or approaches an information uniformity). All that new variation is the new NP hard.
I know it's not a super mathy solution, but there is a problem with being able to look at a letter and knowing it means 'A' which may have very little meaning in one context, but in another it might represent a culturally standardized 'memory'. It retains that which is known. The more information you have to compress into symbols, the complexity of your systems explodes as those symbols can construct more and more permutations and meanings (like what a graph represents). You can't know the answer unless you know the answer, literally.
I still study all the math and formal logic and complexity theory in my free time though (because I do get the dimensional perspective - finding the shortest path is a mathematical problem at heart), but the above is my intuitive understanding of NP hard, that which is infinite and capable of redefining itself in ways the human mind is independent of the collective, incapable of imagining.
I don't know if that is really smart, or really dumb. But a lot of jobs I could have probably done really well, I was passed over, and I honestly have to say, inexperienced interviewers have smug attitudes. I got the sense that there was the background thought of "ugh, god, I have to deal with someone's brain that isn't mine".
It's annoying to have to deal with those kinds of attitudes, because it perpetuates them, by causing the people who have bad experience from them to behave defensively next time around.
I've had some okay experience with getting positive feedback leading to callbacks, but these were typically answers to questions that I could have found online verbatim by studying an interview manual. I try not to do that because I think that is dishonest in my actual value.
The best interviews I've had are where it's clear that it is two people talking, and not two computers.