Can someone with a stronger physics background explain why anyone would think this is a good idea?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414582

Points: 24

# Comments: 43

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135a...

That being said, these have been my favorites:

- designing data intensive applications (a great way of understanding systems + the basics of SRE)

- the senior engineer (I love the prototyping process he lays out)

- the effective engineer (lots of good gems for approaching prioritization)

- debugging (by David agans)- a great resource for a formalized debugging process if you don’t have one

- on writing well (I’m halfway through this, but it has been indispensable for writing tickets + messages at work)

Therapists are trained to help and give you custom things to do based on what you need. I found one that gave me a lot of structured “assignments” and questions to ask myself and I’ve never felt better than I do now.

I think as technologists we want to think that code can "solve" some of the problems in the art world... but I think we still have a really, really long way to go. I tried to get style transfer adopted at work (worked at a creative technology firm in NY) but frankly I think deep learning methods for art generation tend to be really unpredictable, which make them pretty hard to use for professional applications. Imagine deploying production code that only worked 85% of the time... would be a nightmare. I felt, and feel similarly about deep learning approaches to art. They're just so finnicky and unpredictable, for example, add a single extra pixel to that example in this article and the output would look completely different.

Either way, cynicism aside, stable diffusion is awesome :).

I found asking for help as a junior is definitely harder when you don't have people around (walking up to someone's desk vs slack message with ~20-60 minute delay then zoom call): and I often found myself blocked on tasks.

I found learning is generally harder remotely for me as well: the sheer amount of information + resources + help you get from serendipitous conversations with other engineers should not be understated. It's the same reason people got so angry over paying so much for remote university: it is objectively a worse learning experience.

I think this is just my personal stance: but I think in my perfect world I work in office for the first 5-10 years of my career to optimize for learning + relationship building, and then once I get more senior (or have kids) I transition into either hybrid or fully remote.

After about 5 years he did this graduation speech and in it he referenced that: “yes, AI is getting great, your phone is a supercomputer, but the truth is that a computer will never be able to hold the hand of a dying patient and tell them it will be all be okay.”

That being said, I'm getting to the age where I think I'm ready to settle down a bit: this philosophy I think is most useful if you're young or lost and also don't have much responsibility.

“What kind of life do you want to live?”

“A life full of color. I couldnt bear to have a boring life: I want my days to be full of joy and pain and laughter and success and failure and broken hearts and love. To be honest I don’t care where I end up, I just want to look back and smile at a life I painted with all the colors I could find.”

Something I've been thinking about, not necessarily in the interviewing world, would be to have a simulation of distributed systems for non-production code: in theory I think you totally could have a simulation layer for databases / server loads and test how your code performs in such environments.

I guess it exists in production: but haven't seen it for either a) learninga bout distributed systems, or b) for interviews

Anyway as an example: this video is kind of the inverse of skydiving, (360 camera on a balloon floating into space), but definitely an interesting experience that can't really be replicated on traditional media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCve1w1GFOs&ab_channel=Seeke...

Another really interesting one: https://tenderclaws.com/theunderpresents

Curious if anyone else has any other ideas, or if there are any senior engineers out there that have done projects that really helped them in their career. (In either expected or unexpected ways.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050968

Points: 6

# Comments: 4