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"Pluck" is a wonderful verb for this action of picking from a curated list. Thanks, I will use it from now on.


I too was like this kid not so long ago. Here are some perspectives.

1. THE CAUSE - How is he doing academically? I was doing really poorly because of lack of support, and to suppress that frustration I would try to stifle it with games, anime etc. So do consider that possibility that its a response to an emotional problem and not a deliberate decision. They may not want to indulge in media consumption all day, and it may merely be a way to reduce their friction against the world and themselves.

2. THEIR BACKGROUND - Some of the responses here suggest kicking out the kid as they're a legal adult. If my parents were to suddently ask me to step up massively at 18 and did so using force, I would resent it tremendously. Because since I hit my teens, they had long abdicated the role of supporting any personality development activity for me. So I would directly attribute my inabilities to them. Some of you would be aghast reading this, like how could an "18 year old adult" claim this. That's because I'm not American, there was a genuine lack of such opportunities during high school because all was forfeit at the altar of college exams. I actually still resent it a little that they didn't enroll me in something like the (Boy) Scouts, or a karate class, or a swimming class etc. i.e. avenues where I could get out and grow a little as a person. In hindsight, I've recognized that ny parents are people too with shortcomings, and I shouldn't blame them for everything because I can. That would be foolish and myopic. However, my point is that the parents were responsible kid's upbringing and environment growing up, so the resulting kid they have at 18 is their creation. (Americans wouldn't agree, I'm sure some Asians who grew up middle/upper-middle class would.) So its not fair to pin it all on the child. Punitive measures may be a bad idea. I much prefer what /u/WastingMyTime89 has suggested below, to sit down with your child regularly so that they open up about their issues and problems. In any case, opportunities for the kid to get out would be a great idea, both by themselves or with their parents.

3. GLOBAL TRENDS - I assume the kid is a male. I've observed the same phenomenon happening with a male cousin personally, wherein a boy doesn't grow into a being a young adult very well, and instead retreats into his room and anime/games/porn. I think Warren Ferrel's work might be a good start. It might be good to take a birds eye viee of the whole thing and be informed by other individuals ans how they self-improved.

P.S. of course, the kid in question may be quite different from what I've described. But if they are the trying-but-struggling type, you could give him a book called 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. It seems to have been fantastically effective for and well-received by many many young men. My 2 cents.


I remember watching this cartoon called Kochikame as a kid. One episode features a this guy who carries around a portable TV, watching all his TV shows as he goes around. That blew my mind. Such a thing clearly couldn't exist, I thought back then, but just thinking about it made me giddy with excitement. Fast forward 13 years, and I carry such a device with me at all times. Its the stuff of fiction come materialized. Stories like this remind me to stay grateful for the amazing progress that has happened that sometimes goes unrecognized by us.


Exploration vs Exploitation in ML. It seems you explore a lot to find whats 'best', but it keeps you from implementing (in this case Exploiting) a set of ideas. There is an optimum between the two. You could read up on this.

My 2 cents: Learn by need. Figure out your needs (e.g. required feature) and go get just that knowledge from the internet, and put it to practice.


I think this depends. You can (and should) learn things when you need them, but I have found that knowing about things before you need to use them greatly helps you when the rubber hit the roads.

Ideally I think it's a mix, where you always set some time aside (10-15%) to play and experiment with new / unknown things to sort of try to figure what they are/how they work. After that you'll form an opinion and be able to better pick thing to use when building something new and/or ramp up quickly in the learning by doing box because you've had some previous exposure.

YMMV


I did try to do the way as you said in your 2 cents but the more I solve problems like that I tend to feel empty. It feels that I don't know anything and I just know some exceptions or just some solutions to some problems. I don't feel I have a fundamental knowledge base that lets me think from my own neural networks.


Break it up by time. As an example split... say you wanted to build a dashboard in a week. Use three days for research and four days for executing. Look up immediate blocking problems during your execution phase, but stay at a granular level.

Doing good research is a great quality though!


Edsger Dijkstra was suspicious of terms like intuition. He reasoned:

My Pocket Oxford Dictionary --which requires a rather large pocket-- defines "intuition: immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning". If we don't believe in miracles, we seem to have only two possibilities: either the reasoning required is so short and standard that it is hardly worth being recorded or mentioned, or the "immediate apprehension" does not amount to much. In the first case "intuitively clear" means "obvious", in the second case it probably means no more than the absence of obvious counterexamples. In both cases, mathematical texts "recommended" for their appeal to the reader's intuition should be ignored, for such texts promote non-reasoning instead of better reasoning.

Despite the above, there are still people that believe that intuition is a good thing; there is no point in arguing with them for they prefer to believe in miracles.

-----------------------

Source: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...


Wow. But why would your manager do that though? Were you working unreasonably hard, so much so that others couldn't keep up and it made them look bad? Did they dislike something about your attitude? I want to understand their perspective on why they jettisoned a high-performing employee.


I did get feedback that working hard all the time was disenfranchising to the rest of the team. Much of the team did in fact play video games and browse the internet at work. I think the decision was well above my manager. The story is a lot longer but it probably doesn't add much.


> I have a bit of a man-crush on Leslie Lamport

+1 - I really admire him too. I wonder, what makes people like him and Edsger Dijkstra so charismatic in this sense?


I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that he's a very prolific writer and speaker, in addition to contributing to a fairly diverse set of Computer Science fields.

I usually enjoy Lamport's speeches, and I have said before that his book Specifying Systems should be mandatory reading for nearly anyone interested in CS, due to how approachable it is, and yet how deep it goes.


It's interesting that you mentioned Dijkstra because Lamport in one interview said that the original Paxos paper (The Part-time Parliment) was written in the way it was exactly because he was inspired by Dijkstra in his famous examples such as Sleeping barber, etc.


Dijkstra was and Lamport is very good at writing clearly and distinctly. Many people with that level of raw brainpower don't make that effort, so the ones that do are easy to admire and be grateful to.


Its doesn't have to be a software. Mine is a python script that jiggles every N minutes, where N is a command line parameter.


How is a Python script not software?


Right, it is software. I meant software product or software tool.


Anticheat software or similar would still detect whatever sys calls you're making to emulate mouse movement and be able to tell it's not coming directly from the mouse driver.


Guess I will just have to leave 2 little Lego robots pushing and pulling the mouse then.


If you've got a laser mouse, put a 'screen saver' on an old phone and set the mouse on the phone...


The chilling effect is real. It's disheartening that we are asked to play along with unsubstantiated dogma on topics as fundamental as gender. Has anyone here managed to express opinions like Shrier's in a casual manner without having the reputation take a hit?


Her book is the number one result on amazon when you search "transgender"

She's speaking to an audience of Princeton students and grads

You are reading about it on hacker news

Chilling effect? People would pay really good money for this type of exposure.


Its survival bias. She stuck her head out, didn't budge, and navigated the criticism smartly. But many other faculty members and writers have been forcibly ushered out of their positions or made to recant their non-woke opinions.


Well yeah all the time ! Around me (I know no trans and am not either), nobody seems to care, when I say it's perfectly fine and tolerable people either give 0 fuck or agree. The toilet thing only seems to bother girls, the guys I know dont mind if girls wanna come in ours, even non trans. And I think it's less dogma than sad experience with abusive males on the woman's side.


> Easy things feel fast, hard things feel slow, but in the long run you'll get more from doing the hard thing.

Yes! These are called desirable difficulties in the book 'Range'.


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