I find the chess comment fairly weak; while chess is a "perfect information" game (in that you have full information about every piece on the board), at every level that chess is played at there will be unknowns about the player you are facing.
At lower levels, you can certainly play sub min-maxed moves that are more likely to confuse or pressure a weaker opponent. You could call these bluffs. Opening theory is also a wonderful game, you're essentially playing a game of "let's bet that you haven't prepared this particular set of lines as well as I have" with the opponent. The same thing goes for game styles, open vs closed, etc.
Last but not least, playing a perfect game of chess is so far out of the realm of possibility for humans, that the entire "there's always a correct move" is completely irrelevant. We are now at a point where 7-piece endgames have been completely solved, and it involves 4.2×10^14 positions. Good luck memorizing that, and the scaling from there on out is not pretty.
In this sense, chess occupies a very interesting spot; somewhat calculatable for a human (and yes, tactics dominate up to say 2000 ELO), but there's plenty of room for creativity and strategy also. It's also played at an insanely high level, which makes it a worthwhile challenge and time investment. What it does NOT have is randomness. I often wonder what the competitive landscape of a chess variant involving some randomness would look like, or if it would fundamentally change the nature of the game.
I completely agree, it's fantastic both for general fitness, and as a way of exploring. I do this on a smaller scale on a daily basis, walking the 8-10 km route to or from my work (when we have office days). This is walkable in about 1.5 hours, public transport would get me home in around 45 minutes, so I am not really investing much extra time. Varying the route slightly keeps things interesting, and you get a surprising variety with small (1 to 2 street) changes.
Another favourite of mine is cycling around a neighbourhood to get to know it; you get a totally different feel for things than from a car - things typically go by slower, and you are somehow just far more able to observe things.
Availability is definitely a factor, but I feel that a far more important aspect is that a YouTube feel is personalised. It's A/B testing you for weeks on end, and has a pretty good idea of how to get maximum engagement. TV was never this targeted, nor was there feedback to ratchet up what it suggested to you.
Kids don’t stand a chance against decades of data/research and billions of dollars weaponized against human psychology to garner as much of your attention as possible at all times.
Kids should own a device with "adult" bit set to 0, so that they can only use government-approved applications and sites. Why government? Because parents are too lazy or dumb to configure anything and 90% will just let their children access whatever they want and the rest 10% will feel like losers who cannot watch the things all their classmates are allowed to watch.
What happens when the kid eventually becomes an adult? They have to buy a new device? That seems like an really great way to create a bunch of unnecessary e-waste.
Also, letting Big Daddy Government control what we show the kids has got to be one of the worst ideas I've heard. Propaganda machines that parents have no power over? No thanks. That seems like the most likely outcome of this sort of measure. Next thing you know, every computer will also have a "activist" and "journalist" bit; once you normalize role-based access controls, the catgories will only ever expand.
Ehhh I’m more of a “hybrid model” guy myself. I do think the government should be more involved in regulating what these companies can do to us and how they can use our data, but I’m not really in to your vision of how involved they are in apps directly (imagine that kind of power with the Trump administration).
Meanwhile I do think parents should not be expected to literally handle every element of this because it’s just not possible to have eyes on every bit of media/entertainment/etc our kids can find. That being said it is our responsibility to educate our kids on some level, so we can’t just expect to pass the buck entirely to external systems. I do think it’s reasonable to expect some basic guardrails though.
Needs to be a little bit of effort and restriction across the board.
Responsive layout would be the biggest reason (mobile for one, but also a wider range of PC monitor aspect ratios these days than the 4:3 that was standard back then), probably followed by conflating the exact layout details with the content, and a separation of concerns / ease of being able to move things around.
I mean, it's a perfectly viable thing if these are not requirements and preferences that you and your system have. But it's pretty rare these days that an app or site can say "yeah, none of those matter to me the least bit".
Since the fixit just finished on Friday, I don't have hard numbers from this one I'm afraid :)
Historically though, I would guess maybe 5-10% end up needing some followup fix which is itself usually smaller than the original (maybe a typo in some documentation or some edge case we spot when it hits prod etc).
The smaller the original fixes, the less likely you are to need followups so another reason to prefer working mainly on them!
I think 5-10% is pretty good, it probably means that the codebase is mostly understandable and maintainable. I have definitely worked on some which were full of little traps and landmines just waiting for eager do-gooders to step on, which was sadly a self-fulfilling prophecy for the app.
I've heard this argument before from the perspective of C# having more keywords and language features to be aware of than something else (in my particular argument, the other side was Java).
From this perspective, I can't say I disagree as such. If you look at the full set of language features, it sure is a lot of stuff to know about. The argument that it is too much, and that we should sacrifice expressiveness and signal to noise ratio in the code to keep the language simpler, I don't agree with.
While I certainly had the _concept_ of compound interest taught to me at some abstract mathematical level, the application to real life practical financial scenarios was definitely not done [1]. Economics as a whole was an optional subject.
I think schools and curriculums could do a whole lot better in representing this important facet of life. More broadly, I often feel that "applying all that math you've learned to real things" is a subject that could be taught.
[1] Seriously, having applied math questions like "Johnny earns X per year, with a cost of living of Y. Assuming inflation of Z and average yearly returns of R, what percentage should he be putting away, starting at age 25, so that at age 50 he essentially gets the equivalent of his own salary each month?" would likely cause some lightbulbs to go off in the kids' heads.
> the application to real life practical financial scenarios was definitely not done
Of course it was. You can't teach compound interest without referring to money or banks. That's the whole point of it. Otherwise it's just multiplication.
It... is just multiplication. And can't talk about GP's experience, but I can tell you that going through scientific schooling and engineering schools in the French system you'll learn exactly how to calculate the math and never have a single example such as mentioned above.
We're here to build bridges, not count stashes of money after all!
You'd probably get those if you went through "economic studies" (which is a different track and where math includes a lot more statistics even in high school).
Not only you can, I still don't see how the financial "magic of compounding" isn't bullshit for vast majority of people - you can't really make significant money this way in reasonable time spans (5 years rather than 50).
5 years is "get rich quick!" scam territory. The real aim is to manage finances for the rest of your life which may or may not be 50+ years, but will definitely be in double digits if you're of an age for thinking of managing your savings. If your horizon is shorter than that, you're essentially on your deathbed already.
5 years isn't a reasonable timespan. Compounding over the course of a 35 year career, earning a modest wage, will fund a comfortable 20 year retirement. If that's "bullshit" for most people then too bad. Good things come to those who wait etc.
A 20 year retirement on the back of 35 years of working means dying before you're 80?
Given current life expectancy, and particularly if you find a life partner, the chances of at least one of you surviving through at least 85 are pretty high (like above 60% for the US).
I assumed that a "real" career and substantial savings, after paying off debt, begin at age 30. And the 20 year retirement was me being conservative. In truth, saving only 20% of your take-home for 35 years will be more than enough for 40 years.
I wonder where it will go when Y>X. Maybe open question what is the solution. A) Violent revolution and Johnny taking over means of production. B) Death.
The problem is that the financial industry is, like, capitalism-maxxing.
How do you teach "financial literacy" in a practical way without referring to specific products, offerings, or corporations? You really can't.
If you talk to people about investing or retirement, they're gonna talk about Fidelity, Vanguard, whatever. Which is very practical. But I'm not so sure we need our government and education system to basically directly endorse these corporations.
At lower levels, you can certainly play sub min-maxed moves that are more likely to confuse or pressure a weaker opponent. You could call these bluffs. Opening theory is also a wonderful game, you're essentially playing a game of "let's bet that you haven't prepared this particular set of lines as well as I have" with the opponent. The same thing goes for game styles, open vs closed, etc.
Last but not least, playing a perfect game of chess is so far out of the realm of possibility for humans, that the entire "there's always a correct move" is completely irrelevant. We are now at a point where 7-piece endgames have been completely solved, and it involves 4.2×10^14 positions. Good luck memorizing that, and the scaling from there on out is not pretty.
In this sense, chess occupies a very interesting spot; somewhat calculatable for a human (and yes, tactics dominate up to say 2000 ELO), but there's plenty of room for creativity and strategy also. It's also played at an insanely high level, which makes it a worthwhile challenge and time investment. What it does NOT have is randomness. I often wonder what the competitive landscape of a chess variant involving some randomness would look like, or if it would fundamentally change the nature of the game.
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