@Exuma, this comment is ridiculously resonant with me, the part about 'learning transaction isolation for the 50th time' is very on point too.
Everything you said I pretty much feel the same way. I've accepted it as part of how I work, and the advantages are many (and valued by many) - but yes, interacting with deep experts usually ends with feeling a bit like a fraud. I feel like I maybe was an expert at whatever the thing is at some point in time, momentarily, but then I just shed the information as soon as the next thing needs to be done, and it just ends up as part of the background inference pattern matcher.
Certain things where I'm really forced to learn something deeply do stick, but I find my ways of thinking about that domain to be very different to most 'true' experts, and rely heavily on visual models and analogies with other concepts.
I like how you've expressed this insight, and it is so true.
Becoming great at a particular technology stack means modelling it in great detail in your head, so you can move through it without external assistance. But that leaves an arena without discovery, where you just reinforce the same synapses, leading to rigidity and an absence of awe.
ADHD is quite badly named imo. It's not so much a deficit of attention but a disregulation. If you are interested in something then you can invoke an almost obsessive fixation on the task (hyperfocus I believe some people call it) which lends itself well to coding in certain conditions.
> If you could look for something like multiple accounts tweeting the same thing within 1 minute, in the past couple weeks, you could turn up some candidates for test accounts
I think this would turn up alot more results than you bargained for.
Yeah correct, alcohol is technically a positive allosteric modulator of the GABA-A receptors, which means it potentiates the effects of GABA in those receptors. Over time, the receptors downregulate to compensate for being over-stimulated. Upon withdrawal from alcohol, the GABA-A receptors are unable to respond strongly enough to the GABA which exists, so in effect you're undersupplied and that contributes to the DTs. Alcohol is actually a very messy drug that acts on a huge range of receptors but the effect on the GABAergic system is probably the most significant.
The book which Bill Gates recently gave a copy of to all 2018 college graduates - Factfulness, is a very well written and comprehensive treatment of this and more by Hans Rosling (Gapminder). Highly recommended, it's not long either - you could read it in a couple of evenings or a weekend easily.
That is what net means, there will be positives and negatives which contribute to the net. For the record I agree with you, I think Facebook is overall negative but not by much, there are very strong positives.
Maybe off-topic to your original need. But I've always wanted / needed a utility that can de-duplicate media (images, music, videos) that I have scattered around which are the same thing just at different qualities/resolutions.
I get that for music and video this is actually quite challenging but images - - I would've thought quite easy? I've tried a few tools which claim to do this over the years but they all fail rather miserably / require a paid upgrade to do it better (although what is demonstrated in the free version is never impressive enough to consider paying).
Might be a good project for myself in my spare time, but wondered if anyone knew of anything obvious I was missing? FSLint and stuff is great for general filesystem de-duping, this is a slightly more complex case.
Very clever, and nice writeup! A few years ago I wrote a bunch of bash scripts to control my phone over adb (found it useful to script certain things and write messages etc. Before things like WhatsApp had a Web client). This has taken that concept to its most elegant formulation! Well done.
Quick thought: had he continued for years, he would be tried as an adult and completely screwed. As it stands, his adolescent trolling mentality has indirectly allowed him to have a chance at a normal life.