And there are projects that interest me where whatever they’re up to is all in a chat so the rest of the world never does know if/how things have been progressing.
I still suck at being verbally coherent, as my brain isn’t quick in the right way, but my guess is that it’s good to have "talking points" that you’re trying to work toward from wherever the question actually started, and an outline to make sure to hit points A, B, C, and D about matter E...
I always went in as a naive kid "they will ask a question and I will say the answer; repeat" because I was brought up to be so passive. And still am so passive. And I naively thought they’d recognize there must be something there if I could get that GPA.
I hate chats so much. Having to ask something manually and then wait and hope for minutes/hours/days for a manual reply, I can’t think of something more opposed to what people who are familiar with what computers can do for humanity should recognize the value in, and yet here we all are.
I remember Jim Watson saying that stupidity could someday be cured, and everyone absolutely lost their minds and pretended that he was calling stupid people bad. Somehow.
Not hugely surprising to today-me, but I was still young enough that it was a bit disillusioning to see that people couldn't even see (or say out loud) that being more intelligent would help us all.
I puzzle over how, out in the open source world, so much seems to have shifted from testing for a while before releasing to just releasing and acting like it was normal that there turned out to be lots of bugs. Or never releasing at all and expecting others to use whatever happens to be in git right this moment.
Sacrifices always seem to be presented as the killer or the people giving up something they value, but I would not be at all surprised if it were basically a display of power — killing people those who are poorly-connected or who are rivals in some way.
I'm still amazed how few Americans are capable of caring about the health and lives of other people, their neighbors, their communities. And thoroughly in denial that anything could ever befall their perfect selves.
I feel not convinced, given my experience, but I don’t know how to express it briefly. Maybe I could say that you need to have to happen to have some of the right tastes.
I also didn’t, and maybe it’s me because I never have really made any very like-minded friends ever, but computer science sure didn’t make it easy, since there were always programming projects that could eat up every minute of your day every day. Or maybe a different school would have been a different story.
In my—undergraduate, not-very-specialist—days of being taught something or other about entropy now and then, I felt like we were being told "This state is special, so the entropy is low, and then it probably ends up in one of these other states, and none of them are special, so the entropy has increased”, and it would seem to me that we could appreciate all of the states as equally special if we were big-brained enough. Maybe like the integers being Ramanujan’s personal friends.