Now when I come across ‘competitive nerds’ I’m extra cautious to not appear to be too threatening to their assent to alpha nerd status
I agree with this approach.
Being highly competent and also un-ambitious has allowed me to build a very comfortable career. The ambitious people know they can use me without fear of me backstabbing them, and they more or less insulate me from the politics.
My kids eat and my job is low stress, perhaps at a cost of reaching my personal professional potential. I'm pretty happy with this arrangement.
25-30 years ago, there was a game studio called 2am Games that made a series of strategy-type Java games that allowed online multiplayer. All the games were monetized with ad clicks. Click on an add, get 15 more minutes of play time.
Their most popular game was an RTS called Chain of Command. You had a squad of four soldiers that you could position on an isometric board designed to look like a farm. 5-10 players would each run their four-man squads into a firefight and play some scenario - seek and destroy, capture the flag, etc.
The other two games I enjoyed were a business strategy game called The Invisible Hand and another RTS where each player took a European country and conquered cities using robot-like walking tanks.
All of the content from 2am Games is lost to history. Chain of Command has some clones out there, but I've never been able to find anything - roms, source code, clones, for the other games. It's a part of my childhood I'll never be able to re-experience.
This is the reason I find it useful. To me, OOP is as much about your organization as it is about the best way to load, transform, present, edit, and store data. I think the culture of some companies lends itself to various kinds of programming, but it's the cultureless companies where OOP is most useful. The places where nobody is trying to change the world, where people work to pay their mortgages, where an executive may only work for two years and a programmer may only work for six months.
It's in an environment like that where a self-documenting, self-configuring code base with custom classes and exceptions that guide the next developer is essential.
Every developer should have two users in mind. The person using the software, and the next developer who maintains the software after you're gone. OOP is a great way to empower the second user when the only thing that will reliably outlive the developer is the code base.
I'm definitely curating as I scan my library. The first thing I look for is the potential for insight due to a host-guest paring that I may not have seen before - or that I have and it was pretty good last time.
If it's a news-driven podcast, I'll look for topical content I've been interested in lately.
After that, it's just what every topic I'm interested in at the moment.
I would also recommend very liberal use of the pause button. If the conversation is bubbling specific thoughts up in your head and those thoughts seem more interesting than the conversation - PAUSE IT. Nothing will be more relevant than your own insight on the topic. Once you've synthesized the thought, unpause and see how your thoughts compare to the podcasters. This is probably my favorite thing about the medium.
I bought a copy of Hamlet with copious footnotes a year ago, and I really enjoyed reading it - but I found the language too taxing for leisure reading. I'd return to my work and find my mental energy had been drained!
I can certainly see the value of reading Shakespeare, but I'd almost need a long vacation to devote to picking up the language.
It makes me wonder how much of my school years I wasted, because I probably could have mastered Shakespeare at the time and still have that tool in my toolbelt today.
I took 3 years off once and kept to myself and loved it.
Were you stoned the whole time?
I only ask because if you're loving what you're doing, then there's usually some modus operandi or Summum bonum driving you.
A really good high is pretty straightforward.
Most others I know about tend to require something that contributes to a community, but certainly study or meditation can be lonely yet meaningful pursuits.
I'm with you here. I have a personal rule that the first information into my head each day comes from the Bible, which for all the criticism it gets is ultimately a story of hope in the face of many disasters. It's been a huge boon to my mental health.
Certainly those late 90s budgets all kept government expenditures below 20% of GDP.
You could also try to raise taxes without stifling growth (and thus reducing revenues), but that's an even harder technical problem to pair with a similar political problem. Personally I'd be in support of a constitutional amendment that caps Federal revenues at 20% of GDP, so I wouldn't be on board for this, but to each his own.
Take a look at page 39 in the latest budget summary[0] and see if you can find the right places to raise revenues and cut spending to eliminate the $1.148 trillion deficit for 2023.
I read Gleick's The Information[0] a few years ago and was riveted. Do you have any suggestions for further reading if I wanted to take a hobbyist interest?
Is there a mechanism for empowering a polity to protect minors from certain things the polity deems they're not ready for that doesn't rely on arbitrary rules?
This is my answer. How do you know you've learned something? If you're learning how to build something, you know you've learned it when you can build it.
Fiction is a little tougher, but I've found conversations with my wife help me here. If I can make her as interested in the story as I am, then I must be retaining enough of the important points to say I'm absorbing enough of what I'm reading.
This makes sense. Prices are literally encoding information - first the demand for the item being priced and then the cost of supplying the item. The price of beef is signaling a lot of phenomena including consumer tastes, weather, costs for feed, slaughter, and transportation, etc.
You could argue that central banks putting non-market pricing on the money supply distorts the information that a market-priced money supply would transmit effectively - and that's why all these crises seem to originate in the finance sector.
Not sure how deep you intended this joke to go, but the NBA had 23 franchises in 1980 [0] that scored 108 points per game[1].
Now there are 30 franchises scoring 114 points per game.
If you look at the points per game stats, scoring dipped as the number of teams expanded, but rule changes, officiating changes and increases in talent over time led to more points being scored.
So a 1980 point was almost certainly worth more than a 2022 point.
This. It was all I could think about while reading the piece. The US Navy is capable of making the seas safe, but under current political conditions I don't even see THAT happening forever.
To make this work, the air force would almost certainly have to get in on the act, and that makes even less geopolitical sense.
I agree with this approach.
Being highly competent and also un-ambitious has allowed me to build a very comfortable career. The ambitious people know they can use me without fear of me backstabbing them, and they more or less insulate me from the politics.
My kids eat and my job is low stress, perhaps at a cost of reaching my personal professional potential. I'm pretty happy with this arrangement.