All of pewpewlasergun's Comments + Replies

Do you have an example of a valuable search you made recently that you wouldn't have made last year? I'm having trouble telling whether I use search engines an optimal amount.

7katydee
The example that springs to mind most readily is that a few days ago, someone asked me if we had a video cable I hadn't heard of in the office. I didn't recognize the name but knew I'd recognize it by sight, so I searched for the name of the cable online, found a picture of it, and directed the person to the right location.

If other states follow Colorado's lead and legalize marijuana, there could be opportunities related to that. Not very 'techie' though.

[anonymous]100

Doubt it. I've heard rumors -- and I would be very surprised if this turned out not to be true -- that tobacco companies are prepared to fill the market the instant marijuana is legalized.

(But have tobacco companies moved into the medical marijuana market? Outright legalization seems less near-future likely than expansion of medical.)

What's the best way to improve at writing? I was surprised at how much harder it is a few years out of school.

2David_Gerard
Write a lot. Lots and lots. Do it where people can see you. ciphergoth just tweeted this link on suggestions of how to fill a blog. Writing makes you better at writing.
1palladias
One thing that helped me a lot was writing fanfiction. For me, it was good training wheels, since I didn't have to explain the character or the world to a reader, and could try to tell stories without having to be good at everything at once. (I mean, I even wrote filks using Avril Lavigne lyrics to carry part of the plot!) It let me futz around thinking about how to structure a story and what words to choose without getting stalled out by other skills. Also, practice just telling stories out loud! Tell people about your day, retell good anecdotes you've heard, etc for good practice with narratives and editing with high bandwith, rapid feedback (other people's faces!)

Things that aren't typically suggested that worked for me and may generalize:

I. Read mediocre writing. If you only read good writing, you can't tell what makes it good; it just looks like all writing is good. By comparing good writing to mediocre (or bad) writing, you can see what the good writers did that the mediocre writers didn't (or, as is often the case, what the mediocre writers did that the good writers didn't). My writing only started improving after getting out of English class and replacing cultured reading with mediocre fanfiction.

You want to s... (read more)

5ChristianKl
Write in a environment where you have the time to review what you wrote and edit your work. At best have someone else read it and give you suggestions about what you can improve. I write quite a lot but at the moment don't do enough editing and peer feedback. I have probably written 10,000 online forum posts totaling more than a million words but my writing still isn't where I want it to be.
7benkuhn
I can't speak to "best," but I suggest reading Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams, which crystallizes lots of non-trivial components of "good writing." (The link is to an older, less expensive edition which I used.) I'll also second "write a lot" and "read a lot." Reading closely and with purpose in mind will speed up the latter (as opposed to the default of throwing books at your brain and hoping to pick up good writing by osmosis). Also, read good writers.

Unfortunately, there aren't too many ways to cheat the learning curve. "Write a lot" really is the first-order answer, and it's usually the one given by professionals that don't stand to make any money from their answer. Writing workshops and other 'accelerants' seem to be very questionable.

A friend who was recently signed as a science fiction author at Tor suggests that you could try compressing things that you have already written. Take something like a blog post, and express the same ideas and content using half the words. This will help with clarity and concision, as you get better at the exercise- one of the telltale signs of an amateur writer is that they use words inefficiently.

the divers models of Harry Potter-Yudkowsky gathered dust

Divers has gradually been replaced by diverse, in fact this is the first time I've seen it in a text written after 1900. Unless you are going for an 'archaic' feel in your work, I'd suggest limiting your use of homonyms like this.

It has a different meaning. It implies "sundry", with connotations of "diverse". (Also, that's not quite what "homonym" means.) I'm okay with some archaism if I get some precision thereby. If that gets lost on the audience then that audience isn't the one I'm most trying to speak to. But I appreciate the critique!

Thanks.

After a bit of random googling it seems there are a lot of results about 'saying no to people who want to get coffee/pick your brain' so it seems like reasonably successful people with an internet presence get a lot of these requests.

0Alicorn
I imagine different successful people with internet presences have different intersections of request quantity and request tolerance. I don't get people paying attention to me and wanting to hang out with me as often as I'd like yet so that's probably biasing my recommendations.

So I often find that interesting people live near me. Anyone have tips on asking random people to meet up? Ask them for coffee? I suppose a short email is better than a long one, which may come off creepy? Anyone have friends they met via random emails?

5Alicorn
I have a lot of friends who I met through fan mail - people contacting me to tell me they like something about my online footprint. My recommendation is to establish online correspondence for a while, then when they don't send "leave me alone" signals like terse or perfunctory responses you can ask to hang out.

It is to an established biomedical researcher's favor to promote the impression that they have a rare and valuable skillset, and to imply that there is a shortage of people like him. As you pointed out, for 200,000 you could have your pick of top employees, so he obviously doesn't actually believe that one is worth that. When I was considering a career in biomedical research, these are the factors that swayed me away from it:

  1. Frequent layoffs and closing of research centers by industry.

  2. An abundance of highly qualified people - when I talked to post-

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3VipulNaik
Thanks, this is useful inside information.
0buybuydandavis
Research positions should be considered like professional sports positions. Few slots, lots of varying levels of interns, farm teams, and semi pro teams, and all of them being funneled to the "real" professional ranks. Huge supply of applicants for limited slots. Not a great position to put yourself in, unless you have some basis for believing that you're just better than the rest at some combination of researching and lobbying for a position.

Its expensive to get health insurance when you aren't buying with a group.

4chaosmage
In the US, yes. Part of the poster's point is that you don't need to stay in the US. I won't make his choice, mostly because I like being around employed people more than I like being around unemployed people, but international mobility is clearly a point in favour of the lifestyle he's suggesting.

Does anyone have advice for getting an entry level software-development job? I'm finding a lot seem to want several years of experience, or a degree, while I'm self taught.

1jefftk
Practicing whiteboard-style interview coding problems is very helpful. The best places to work will all make you code in the interview [1] so you want to feel at-ease in that environment. If you want to do a practice interview I'd be up for doing that and giving you an honest evaluation of whether I'd hire you if I were hiring. [1] Be very cautious about somewhere that doesn't make you code in the interview: you might end up working with a lot of people who can't really code.
1maia
If you have the skills to do software interviews well, the hardest part will be getting past resume screening. If you can, try to use personal connections to bypass that step and get interviews. Then your skills will speak for themselves.
  1. Live in a place with lots of demand. Silicon Valley and Boston are both good choices; there may be others but I'm less familiar with them.
  2. Have a github account. Fill it with stuff.
  3. Have a personal site. Fill it with stuff.
  4. Don't worry about the degree requirements; everybody means "Bachelor's of CS or equivalent".
  5. Don't worry about experience requirements. Unlike the degree requirement this does sometimes matter, but you won't be able to tell by reading the advert so just go ahead and apply.
  6. Prefer smaller companies. The bigger the company
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Ignore what they say on the job posting, apply anyway with a resume that links to your Github, websites you've built, etc. Many will still reject you for lack of experience, but in many cases it will turn out the job posting was a very optimistic description of the candidate they were hoping to find, and they'll interview you anyway in spite of not meeting the qualifications on the job listing.

Ancillary Justice is one of the best debut science fiction novels of 2013. It concerns an AI that used to control a ship with its own humans it had direct control over. There are two alternating narratives, one when the ship is complete and another when the ship has been reduced to a single human. As you can imagine, much of the story involves the identity of beings that control numerous individual bodies.

0Zubon
Ancillary Justice is quite good, and it went on to win the Nebula and Hugo awards for the year. In addition to AI and identity theory, there is also quite a bit about gender and language, as the dominant empire has no gender in its language and little to no dimorphism, either physically or culturally. The AI tends to guess (with mixed results) when dealing with other languages and cultures.

I'd like to know how many techniques you were taught at the meetup you still use regularly. Also which has had the largest effect on your life.

I'd like to go against Robin Hanson's recommendation and tell people to go see Her. The visual direction is beautiful, as one would expect, and quirks like fashion, advertisements, and art are just jarring enough to remind you that its the future. I found it easy to overlook the 'why don't they just buy an AI and make it write the letters' problems because it isn't really a movie about technology changing us, but how relationships and their endings do.

7Oscar_Cunningham
Note that Robin doesn't recommend not seeing it. He's really quite complimentary about it.

What's the difference between corrections and criticism? Did you get any that changed the way you do things?

0gwern
Corrections are things like 'you have a typo in X' or 'your CSS is broken' or 'you forget this'. Criticism is closer to, to paraphrase one, 'X is the worst thing on your site, is incredibly embarrassing, and you should feel bad for ever writing it.'

“Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

Neal Stephenson - "Quicksilver"

What strikes me most about this quote is how well Stephenson understands the psychology of his audience.

2player_03
Having just listened to much of the Ethical Injunctions sequence (as a podcast courtesy of George Thomas), I'm not so sure about this one. There are reasons for serious, competent people to follow ethical rules, even when they need to get things done in the real world. Ethics aren't quite the same as tradition and protocol, but even so, sometimes all three of those things exist for good reasons.

I suspect that many traditions and protocols promote competent decision making. Do you think that, say, the U.S. military would do better in Afghanistan if President Obama issued an order declaring "when in battle ignore all considerations of tradition and protocol"? Group coordination is hard, organizations put a huge amount of effort into it, and traditions and protocols often reflect their best practices.

[anonymous]430

Whenever a group of subcompetent people get together to do something, they assume they are competent enough to throw tradition and protocol out the window...

Regarding touch-typing, do you find yourself reaching 'top speed' often while programming?

7Lumifer
It's not really about typing large amounts of text quickly, it's basically about (1) not having to pay attention to the keyboard, your fingers should know what do without taking up mindspace; and (2) your typing being able to keep up with your thinking -- the less your brain has to stop and wait for fingers to catch up, the better.
7gwern
It's not the top speed, it's the overhead. It is incredibly irritating to type slowly or make typos when you're working with a REPL or shell and are tweaking and retrying multiple times: you want to be thinking about your code and all the tiny niggling details, and not about your typing or typos.

What's the minimum amount of people it needs to be effective for you? Not sure how I'd do with just one other person.

0John_Maxwell
Are you differentiating between people who provide a video feed and people who don't? (I just checked it out a while ago, and there were 2 text participants and 0 video participants... I didn't really see how it could be an effective motivator, and closed the tab for the sake of stimulus discrimination.)
2Lachouette
I agree with BerryPick on the optimal amount of people. Usually it gets more fun with more people, but for disciplined working you don't need more than two people that are actually around. You should maybe try and see for yourself what works best. The schedule for the following week should be full enough to pick a time where at least one person is around.
2BerryPick6
For me, it's been effective with just one other person (often tkadlubo himself :p) in the room, but I find it's most effective when there are three to five others working.

Is the idea with the case studies to conduct an email interview with the subjects? Or just collect publicly available information from around the internet?

0diegocaleiro
I was thinking the latter, since the evaluation is supposed to be only of a very very specific fact about them, not about, say, "their latest book" or whatever they want to display these last few days. Laura and Danila may want to display their strategies.

If anyone feels even remotely inspired to click through and actually learn python, do it. Its been the most productive thing I've done on the internet.

This makes me wonder how much my writing skills would improve if I retyped excellently written essays for a while.

Could anyone comment on the market for biomedical engineers? I'm specifically interested in regenerative medicine, so the common advice of "get a degree in MechE or EE and apply to biomedical companies" doesn't seem like it would apply.

To clarify, the cost of meals and accommodation was $40/week.

Would this really make WBE emulation much harder? We already know som neurons synapse with several thousand others, so adding a few hundred adjacent neurons doesn't seem that much more difficult.

I disagree. It also provides several other examples for those (like Kaj_Sotala) who didn't find the post's example of agency sufficient.

7chaosmosis
Those examples are not descriptive of how agency is hard. They don't bolster the strength of the post.

In the previous post it was suggested that to be Level 1 you should be able to do any of the Level 1 tests at any time. Perhaps have a quarterly testing schedule, with the date chosen at random? Post a table for each of the attributes showing Levels and actions, and have something like you can consider yourself a level X if you do at least Y actions at that level.

This would encourage building habits rather than ramping up for a week or two and testing yourself, like one-and-done leveling does, as you would have to be ready for a test at any time. If it... (read more)

4cousin_it
At this point I'm wondering if we should just skip the tests and incentivize the habits directly. There seem to be one or two awesome exercises in each area that are almost guaranteed to make you better if you do them regularly. Such exercises can be pretty hard to find, though. In particular, I'd be really interested to find an exercise for "social stuff" that was as good as Project Euler or jumping rope.