This hits home. For me stopping coffee (and caffeine) consumption was also one building block of taking care of my generalised anxiety disorder. I enjoyed the morning ritual, but it stopped with quitting drinking coffee. Maybe I should give decaf a shot, but I also miss just grabbing a coffee when out with friends (usually tea does not scratch the same itch and is not worth it when everyone else around you is enjoying a great smelling coffee). All I want to say is “Thanks for sharing” I guess. I was able to connect with what you said.
I went to the US recently and was fully prepared to drink caffeine on the trip because of all the cool coffee shops and roasters. But I was amazed that decaf was basically a first-class citizen there. The hotel breakfast had one giant brewer for regular and the same giant brewer for decaf. It was amazing.
And it’s pretty important to realize that well-made decaf doesn’t have to taste worse than regular coffee. James Hoffmanns decaf project proved this for me, and his video about decaf sold me on the idea: decaf drinkers are the OG coffee drinker, drinking it purely for the taste, even without the drug-induced high that caffeine gives you.
ice overview. A personal struggle of mine as someone who is self taught (with a degree in statistics) and has a full time job that does not constantly require programming, I struggle with learning fundamentals alongside doing actual projects. If someone has any advice in this regard, it would be much welcome.
I don't have any advice on self learning, but I have been getting a MS in CS for similar reasons. I also have a stats degree, work full time, and struggle with self learning. For me, being in a structured program makes it easier for me to manage. Certainly not a requirement, but it is the way I learn best. Maybe look for classes you can take at a local university or online and see if anything grabs your attention.
Write something. My usual suggestions (although I am biased) would be an operating system or a compiler. Or both! When I was in school those were typical course projects in a CS program. (The program I took was more to the circuit and electronic side of it, and my final year project was to design a CPU in VHDL.)
A compiler will exercise most of the fundamentals, and in ways you're probably not too familiar with, if you primarily just do a bit of scripting or numerical computation. Areas like parsing - how do you deal with reading in arbitrarily nested recursive structures? And the abstract -- how should you structure the representation of a program internally, perhaps as a tree? And the concrete -- what opcodes does your processor accept?
Im a student right now and have a background in a non-CS field so struggle with the impostor-syndrome/fundamentals double whammy. The advice I’ve found most valuable is to basically cosplay as someone who’s a complete pro. What would that person read for news? How do they practice their craft? What books do they read on their free time?
Cosplay that role long enough and you become it. I’m still learning but it has been a great signpost for me over the last couple years.
Nice overview. A personal struggle of mine as someone who is self taught (with a degree in statistics) and has a full time job that does not constantly require programming, I struggle with learning fundamentals alongside doing actual projects. If someone has any advice in this regard, it would be much welcome.
A long time ago I got a paper with my name on it in PNAS because a professor I knew had been invited to submit one as part of a conference (bypassing the usual peer review) so I got together with another prof and a student and we smashed together a few student research projects into
which I think is a good paper from the viewpoint of "correctness" but on another level isn't a normal research paper as it isn't about one project. A lot of weird stuff goes on like this in academic publishing. When I was studying physics I got invited to present at a CS conference on Java in academic computing and didn't really understand the opportunity I would have had to have gotten a paper published pretty easily based on my attendance (e.g. really connections, I knew people who knew Geoff Fox who was organizing it)
I think this is a nice and interesting article, but as far as I understood they showed the participants where the videos was from. It makes the result hard to evaluate. You take a group of participants which are likely to prefer TikTok already and think of Reels as a meme and then you say "these are TikToks, these are Reels, which do you prefer?". Of course these people will probably like TikTok way more.
In no way I want to defend Reels (in fact I don't consume neither TikTok nor Reels), but a blind test would have been really really important here.
