Your examples and many in OP’s list are non-actionable non-concrete advice. For example, “take care of health” is non-actionable but “go running one hour after you wake up” is actionable. However, much better advice is not about what to do but what not to do. The absolute golden advice is what everyone is doing but why you shouldn’t in a specific context. This is more akin to a traveler coming out from journey and recounting what he/she considered mistakes.
I have actually felt "connect the people" is very naive and cause of virtually all of their problems. It matters who are you connecting to whome. Are you connecting terrirists to other tterrirists? Are you connecting pedophiles to their potential victims? All connection tools are massive amplifiers for the adversaries and if they are left uncheck then disadvantage can overwhelm the advantage. I think their mission should be connecting the right people for the good purpose. The problem is these adjectives are hard to define except probably at the extremes.
AR/VR are just one of the surfaces. I think it will be sort of "Second Life" on industrial scale. It would be available in all places. Most people will probably end up using in 2D. Now we can expect people to spend their free time on raising virtual pets, do virtual farming, go "outdoors" in artificial scenary and being preyed on by weirdos in those worlds. It is like a drug and could be a big business.
Internet has good things and bad things but on these apps there is nothing good happens. I can imagine may be VR will be used to celebrate gradma's 90th birthday by her entire family virtually. But from what I can see, these will be about 1% to 2% of use cases. I don't think designers would intentionally encourage it but if you make meth legal, how many would actually use it for medical reasons?
My worry is that they are not thinking about how many ways this can go wrong. There are already iPhone apps that allows you to put on avatar and meet people in a 3D virtual world. According to DoJ these apps are haven for pedophiles. Nothing good happens in these apps. People with severe mental issues show up, try to hit up others and eventually end up destructing real lives. Initially, everything looks safe because it's all virtual, anonymous and no body is touching you but that sense of safety goes away very fast as you meet wierdos and divulge more and more information. Some of these apps have rules like no nudity but people finds out various ways to be provocative even more than if they were nude. As things are "virtual" everybody wants to push towards extremes of everything. These apps are places worse than Medusa's head.
If it makes you feel better, op is not representative of developers in US. He is not even representative of people at Google or other big tech. Most people do work their ass off, some even on weekends and holidays. You are looking at a "lottery" winner and thinking life is unfair to you. In this case its not even lottery because such slacking off in your most productive young years severely limits your career choices when the party ends. Outside of top 10 big tech, comp is not too different from what you get in Europe.
PageRank was precisely invented to solve this issue. I have never understood why Google Scholar itself took stance not to even compute it and stick to h-index. Google Scholar is a defacto standard for looking up researchers and whatever metric they adopt would be adopted by the rest of the world.
One of the good test case for any flight booking website is Bhutan. Kayak seems to do good job while G Flights says nothing available. Also later doesn’t seem to allow flexible dates, a critical feature if you ask me.
These forums attracts unsuspecting vulnerable people and turns them into their cesspool member. Once you are cesspool member your beliefs cannot be altered. That’s the issue.
I visited 8chan/pol for the first time before it went down. I think reading content there should absolutely make anyone think hard about reasonable constraints on free speech. For example, I saw someone started a thread about population in Nigeria rising. Several anonymous commenters piled on, virtually everyone referring to Africans as “subhumans”. One commenter proposed that western countries should issue tags to hunt Africans in same way as animals and utilize their skills to survive as hunting challenge. Other commenter thanked Trump for shutting down Ebola research and hoped it will soon spread again. It was very clear no one had any rational debate. No one cared to fact check or cross-question anything. You can literally through whatever number and cite whatever source you want and everyone merely would go with it as long as it supports racial superiority. Everyone was busy one upping another in how grotesque and extreme they possibly could be. It is at this point I realized that hate is an addiction. I am certain it gives large dopamine hits for these people to consume all these material. It is probably highlight of their day to justify themselves as savior of humanity, being superior and created favorably by god than others. They probably hang out in here very large portions of their free time not for learning something but for pure entertainment derived dopamine hits. They are neither looking for nor want rational debates or reasoning from the other side. I can see how someone vulnerable will get in to these forums and become terminal addict. These forums should not be considered any less dangerous than drug dealers who handout cocain to young kids.
Reasoning with these people is like reasoning with flat earthers. You present all evidence and they will still flat out deny that Earth is a sphere. They are not driven by reasoning but their internal beliefs that they have already locked in as infallaible. They have already heard all the reasons you just laboriously articulated and put together. You are not giving them any new information. You are just wasting your time. Their goal of listening to you at all is to probe any possibility to convert you in to their little tribe and they happen to have all the time in the world, often being jobless.
This seems like good use of AI that can auto respond with smart anti-hate speech blurbs. I am sure, someone would counter this by AI for hate speech. Ultimately these forums would be just dominated by different AIs fighting out each other so we can all go back to doing something useful.
I personally don't like this whole sponsorship thing. This sets up people to optimize for getting and retaining sponsors instead of doing things that they would have wanted. A better approach could have been to offer money o fix issue or implement feature. For example, you could file issue/feature request on a project where developer has indicated that they have no time to work on and then offer $1000 to fix it. This is small amount if you depend on it for your business. The developer can decide if its worth their time and interest.
These are the questions we call it the enumeration types. This means the answer to these questions requires scanning large number of options, sort them effectively and return top few choices. Ask someone what are your most favorite 10 movies and you will know how hard it is to answer these effectively and accurately.
Another thing is that much of the organizational memory these days is available electronically. When I join new team, I go through recent documents, slides, meeting notes, emails in internal discussions etc in first two days that is available to everyone in the team. I also learn building source code, looking at architecture/design docs, their evolution over time, release plans etc. After doing all these for first few days, it makes sense to ask specific questions as opposed to let me Google it for you questions and you would look prepared and worth spending time to talk details beyond giving elementary pointers.
Few days ago we visited a company that makes avionics for small private planes. I looked at the hardware, a simple touch screen and tiny linux computer with usual sensor connections. I thought I could build this myself in a weekend for may be $300 tops which is an order of magnitude lower than their sell price. However what I learned was that the thing is expensive is not because hardware or software is expensive but the QA and certification process. There are regulations that avionics needs to work in all kind of weather at wide range of temperatures and pressures while still being accurate and have million hour of run time testing without any crashes and survive extreme shocks, vibrations and G-forces. Someone is after all betting their lives on your device. Now suddenly you have to care about strength of every soldering joint, specs of every transistor and reliability of every screw. Add on to this the customer support, marketing, warranties, legal expenses, returns and other typical overhead of production. If I'd to make device that is compliant of all these, it wouldn't come cheap. Making a hobby device for demo to school kids is quite different than making device that would help people make life and death decisions.
I'm wondering if someone should be starting a new generation of TAOCP as wiki. As wonderful as TAOCP is, frankly, first volumes are bit outdated. Many problems that were mentioned opened have had huge progress and many new fields have opened up since their publications. Several Level 50 problems are now being taught in CS Masters or some even Bachelor levels. Besides I really find MIX too arcane and getting in the way. In a way, it's kind of disturbing that we still fall back on ~40 years old material for the field as fast moving as Computer Science. Sure, much of the CS is timeless but we are ignoring so much progress and growth in fields such as Computational Geometry, Number Theory, Cryptography, Semi-Numeral algos and so on. Also, even if Knuth manages to complete all of his planned volumes, it would still have scratched only tip of the tip of a iceberg. Of course, some of material will start becoming stale pretty much as soon as it was created. Currently Wikipedia is not a great option to create such writing because it doesn't allow content in "teaching style" or things like creating exercise. If we can distribute this effort out with editor that can approximate Knuth's meticulousness, it could be great boon for our field. Knuth as an original flame bearer could be a great person himself to start such an effort.