InclinedPlane

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vor 8 Jahrendiscuss

> "Being a dick to someone trying to earn a living says a lot about your character."

Wow, you hit the nail right on the head. Being a dick to someone trying to earn a living does say a lot about your character.

Cold calling someone is being a dick to someone trying to earn a living. Period.

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

It's usually not so bad. Generally a big project is actually split up into lots of different smaller projects, each of which have an owner. And typically a dev won't touch code that isn't theirs except in unusual cases. Teams that have more closely related or dependent code would typically try to work closer to each other and share code more often than teams that are more separated.

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I've been doing it off and on to varying degrees for over 10 years, more intensely lately as part of mindfulness based cognitive therapy. I'll throw in some anecdotal stories:

- Feeling anxious, stressed, or grumpy, realizing it, taking a moment to take a breath, let my shoulders relax, and trigger myself to become calmer and more collected. Two years ago I experienced a life-altering situation involving a medical situation with a family member that involved basically non-stop stress for a full week. Every single day when I got in my car to go home I just broke down crying in a way I've never done in my entire life until then, and then every morning it felt like I had to reassemble my component parts to become a functional human again and do what needed to be done. Being able to center myself and keep my anxiety and stress in check when it was at risk of running away was hugely important not only to getting through that experience and having it strengthen me rather than destroying me but also to getting the things done that needed doing (which had a positive life-altering impact on my family member as well).

- Something as small as coming out of a grocery store and being disappointed by the rain then taking a moment to breathe and relax then walking through the rain and just accepting it without feeling annoyed or inconvenienced by it.

- Something as big as feeling a big self-critical thought bubble up in my brain, the sort of thing that could easily cause a plunge into a depressive mood for a while, acknowledging that it's just a thought and that it is neither intrinsically true nor intrinsically something I have to get caught up in, then feeling it dissipate and go away, powerless.

- Being able to recognize when I'm living life too much on autopilot then having the ability to basically reach out and turn up the volume dial on experiencing the world.

If you work on it enough you get to a state where you can reach into your toolkit and pull out various tools to deal with different experiences and situations. Being able to recognize those situations as amenable to tool use and being able to actually use those tools and watch them work can be enormously empowering and satisfying.

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

It's not doing nothing though, you're actually training your mind, but because you have to use your mind to train your mind you have to do so indirectly. It's very much like Mr. Miyagi training Daniel karate by getting him to paint fences and wax cars. The skills develop sub-consciously, but with practice, the skills still come.

Learning how to "empty your mind" or more accurately to simply be a thought-spectator while avoiding getting swept away by thoughts as they flow through your mind may seem like "doing nothing". But imagine how useful it is to have those skills when you're trying to concentrate on something else? If you can avoid being swept away by random thoughts when you have nothing else to hold your attention, think you'll be better at concentration when you do have something? And that's just the tiniest benefit.

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

No, there's a ton of science on the benefits of meditation and mindfulness in treating stress, anxiety, depression (where it is as good or superior to any medication) as well as ADHD, drug addiction, etc. It's really a shame that American/Western culture denigrates meditation/mindfulness as "hippie dippie shit" because it is an astoundingly, life alteringly powerful life skill that absolutely everyone should learn.

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

The problem with trying to convince people to try meditation is that it's a very "darmok" type of conversation, it's like trying to explain purple to someone who is color blind. Meditation is one of the most complex and subtle and yet also one of the most simple things imaginable, it's very difficult to accurately sum-up everything going on with it not only in a succinct way but in a way that is completely understandable to people who have no experience with it. I'll give it a shot nevertheless.

First off, understand that the way skills of the mind work are like any other skills. The more you practice, the better you will become at them, and the more conscious control you will have over them. Think about something like throwing a baseball. It takes a lot of practice to get good at it, but eventually you do get better. And then you set up "hooks" from your conscious mind (certain triggers in the way you hold the ball and stand, etc.) that bridge the connection to the unconscious hand/eye coordination parts of your mind. Something similar can happen with purely mental things as well. You can use classic training techniques (stimulus/response etc.) to train just about anything you want, though in practice it's been discovered that a few specific kinds of skills are more important than others.

Think of it this way. Do you have any activities you do to relax? Do you have any comfort foods? Do you have a favorite shirt or piece of clothing that boosts your confidence? Do you have any phobias or fears? Do you have any pet-peeves (like bad drivers on the road)? All of those things are actually learned behaviors. But all of them are based on external, physical triggers. Maybe your response to eating your comfort food was built up over years of being raised in a loving household and a particular food item reminds you of that. And then eating that comfort food later also reinforces its place as a comfort food because you will have previously used it for comforting and found it to work. Have you ever watched a storyline on television or in the movies where someone has been given something like a drug or a lucky talisman or something and gone on to be successful and confident with some activity only to discover that they were tricked by their friend who gave them the thing and in actuality it was a placebo, and the confidence/talent was in themselves all along? Meditation is the same way. Imagine having a lucky shirt that makes you feel more confident when you wear it. But then imagine spending a lot of time practicing pretending you're wearing the lucky shirt whenever you want to, giving you the ability to have that "lucky shirt" feeling whenever you want to. Think about all of the other ways people try to influence their own mental state through external behaviors (going on walks or drives, taking a bath, taking a vacation to get out of a rut, listening to music, etc.) and imagine if you could go into the brain and, say, "going on a long drive in the country" with just a lever that you had control of. Everyone already engages in these sorts of behaviors to change their own mental state, they just start with external methods of triggering those changes.

So that's one aspect of it, but it's hardly all of it. Brains are complicated machinery, and mastering them is equally complicated, and subtle. Another major aspect is mindfulness and "being mode". It's very easy for humans to get stuck in "doing mode", so much so that people tend to think of it as synonymous with existence. Doing mode is how your brain gets shit done, and it can be very effective. It has to be, because it was evolved in an era when not being able to complete objectives could translate to death from a million different potential sources. Doing mode is like a PID controller, it's constantly examining the separation between the desired state and the actual state, and driving towards lessening the gap in every way possible. It's great if you're trying to escape a leopard or avoid starvation, but it has some negative consequences in our modern world where the things that your brain might think about wanting to get done are not exactly easy to get accomplished within a few minutes. Indeed, the brain's "doing mode" mechanisms are the source of a lot of unnecessary rumination and negative self-talk which cause or greatly enhance a lot of unhelpful mental problems like depression and anxiety. Moreover, doing mode has tunnel vision. It is a furious optimizer and will constrain your experience of the world down to the essentials for getting something done. If you've ever done something on "autopilot", had to re-read a section of a book several times, or done something like scarfed down a meal while multi-tasking with something else, you know what this is about.

Unfortunately, these traits cause doing mode to often burden us with anxieties, depression, and a diminished level of perception of the world. The most direct cure for the excesses of doing mode is to learn "being mode" or mindfulness. In being mode you learn that thoughts are just thoughts, they aren't "you" intrinsically nor are they inescapable. You learn to reconnect with your senses and your experiences as they happen. This can have a profound impact on life because being able to acknowledge a thought in your head, say to yourself "this is a thought, but it's just a thought, I can think it or not, but it's not necessarily me, nor is it inescapable" can rob a stream of negative self-talk (in anxiety or depression) of its power. And experiencing the world mindfully in the moment is almost inevitably a way to improve your happiness. This is very much a "stop to smell the roses" sort of thing, but in a "you're already smelling the roses, just connect with that experience and actually allow yourself to experience smelling them" sort of way.

A lot of mindfulness is based on acceptance and compassion, which are cornerstones to how the whole system works. It's not about forcing yourself to "get better" at some skill. It's about putting out feelers to connect with your experiences, finding what's there, carefully and compassionately acknowledging what's there, and moving on. You don't have to force yourself to do or think anything special, but by engaging in practices regularly you'll often see changes regardless. Accepting is about accepting the good and the bad, experiencing it, and being sufficiently mindful to let it pass through you rather than control you. Often these practices have a strong positive impact on people, but the irony is that if you try to force that sort of control right out of the gate you'll often fail.

It can be unbelievably powerful though. I've had times of having very serious negative thoughts that might push me into a bad mood spiral come bubbling up and experienced moments where I simply acknowledged the thoughts as just thoughts and then watched (mentally) from the sidelines as those thoughts were robbed of all power and just dissipated instead of drowning me in sadness. I almost cried experiencing that for the first time.

So much of mindfulness and meditation is about shifting your perspective with respect to your body, your mind, your self, your feelings, and the world. Through practice you build up skills in taking more control over your mind, because in a lot of ways those skills have to be built up subtly, without necessarily directly aiming for them. One of the big ones is just basic breathing meditation where you sit, concentrate on your breathing and basically watch as your thoughts go by. Is the point to have no thoughts? No. Is the point to have only very specific thoughts? Not really? Is the point to beat yourself up if your mind wanders? Quite the opposite. But the thing is, if you sit and just do that on a regular basis you're going to get better at watching thoughts go by in your mind, and ironically you'll end up having more control over that process. Think of what happens when you're trying to concentrate on a task? You get distracted by other thoughts and stimuli (also thoughts). Imagine if you'd spent a lot of time practicing just watching thoughts pass by without letting them hook you and take you away. Think you'd be better at concentrating?

If you want to try meditation / mindfulness with minimal effort just set aside a few minutes every once in a while and spend some time where the only thing you're consciously doing is breathing and being a spectator for your own thoughts, watching them go by, discovering when you've become distracted by one and simply acknowledging the inevitability of that happening before returning to your brief period of thought-watching.

The end result isn't turning into a Jedi or a Wizard or developing a special power. It's being able to connect with yourself, increase compassion and understanding of yourself, and to be able to be in the moment and present in your own life, experiencing it with fullness and richness (the good and the bad) without being shunted off to autopilot all the time, and being able to not be subject to the whims of your own self-criticality.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

That's $60 mil retail, not what Atari took, I'd be surprised if they hit breakeven since you need you factor in manufacturing costs and they likely took maybe a third of the retail price.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

A correction: France has always been a member of NATO, they withdrew from integrated military command for several decades though.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

    4. Ditch team building gimmicks (see #3 for what's important).

I'd say gimmicks aren't going to save you, but consider morale events and other subtler stuff to help build team cohesion. Things like going to lunch regularly together, for example. When people are more comfortable with each other it makes it a lot easier for them to collaborate, rely on each other, ask each other questions, mentor each other, etc.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

You'd be surprised how easy it is for teams to do the wrong thing. Most people have too narrow of a focus, not enough perspective, and not enough wisdom to even care about the right things. Without people with experience, vision, and influence often times the right things just don't get done.

Being nice means not being ruled by your emotions and not slipping into pettiness. If you have a disagreement with someone, do it nicely. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Etc.

But on the other hand, sometimes it's necessary to do or say things that are unpopular or difficult to accept. The difference is doing the unpopular thing that is necessary vs. being mean because you can't control your temper or you're just a jerk or you're trying to "win" some stupid technical argument. Don't be a jerk, don't yell, don't belittle people, but absolutely call people out on their shit when necessary.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

If you don't derive satisfaction from helping your team, absolutely do not become a lead. Between meetings, planning overhead, interruptions, team communication, documentation, and so on you'll never reach the kind of individual productivity you could alone.

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

POSIX time.h defines "unix time" as seconds since the epoch in type... time_t, which (according to the POSIX standard) can be either an integer or a floating point value.

In practice though, "unix time" is merely a convention which is based off of the POSIX standard.

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

I think you have the concept of leap-second backwards. A positive leap-second means that the time-of-day is held for one additional second. Since unix time does not respect leap seconds there are 35 different unix time values at the resolution of seconds which refer to periods of time lasting 2 seconds instead of one.

And that means that unix time at a resolution higher than a second will jump backwards at those 35 different leap seconds.

vor 13 Jahrendiscuss

It still annoys me that unix-time is not monotonically increasing. It was such a beautiful idea and it got totally screwed up by the lame idea of leap seconds.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I'd say Unix and C have more warts, and more serious warts, than Javascript does. But we have come to accept those warts in Unix and C as "the way things are" whereas we generally perceive javascripts warts as such. Arguably the decision to use null-terminated strings in C in order to save one or two bytes of memory per string is an error of much greater than Y2K proportions that we are still paying for.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

I'm not so sure about that. Modern IA64 compilers and systems are actually pretty damned decent. Though the fact that they are still only comparable to a monstrous, teetering pile of hacks and kludges (x86) is not much of a recommendation.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

x86 is a perfect comparative example. An architecture that is a patch on a patch on a patch (add several more layers here until you're tired) going back to the 8086 a kajillion years ago (a processor which was less sophisticated and powerful than an arduino). Intel tried to kill the architecture (replacing it with IA64) but AMD patched it yet again and the result was successful.

Nobody sane would design an architecture like x86 (or event x86-64) from the ground up today. Yet here we are.

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

x86 was a historical accident, and yet it has become the most popular architecture for personal computers and servers in history.

There are plenty of examples of languages that are worse than Javascript for the web. Java being a perfect example. Java and Javascript co-existed on the web for quite some time (in theory they still do). Java is based on a "proper" IL. And yet here we are, talking about some hypothetical new IL to replace Javascript, despite the fact that there is no guarantee it would actually be better, as the historical example of Java has shown us.

You need to get more than just the VM "right", there's a billion other factors, Java screwed up, Javascript hit the mark (despite its many other flaws). Perhaps LLVM is the future of web applications, it's too soon to tell. What I do know is that Javascript may not be perfect but it's still fundamentally good, and powerful enough (largely through closures and prototypes) to allow for robust workarounds to its flaws (jQuery, coffeescript, etc.)

vor 16 Jahrendiscuss

"Worst possible"? Sub-optimal perhaps, but Javascript is becoming very fast in the browser, perhaps it's not such a bad choice after all.