I'm sorry to hate but it's extremely rich to write

> Do not send me anything longer than you would send to a crush. Some people email me six-paragraph essays about the time they saved a cat from a tree

...in a rambling piece that is not written with much consideration for the reader. I know this is just a blog post, ostensibly written for the author's younger sister, but if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from, he should make some effort to make his ideas digestible. I would suggest he include some transitions between ideas, bother to do some research to back up his claims instead of e.g. referring vaguely to an experiment he heard of supposedly involving "lucky" and "unlucky" people (truly sounds like science).

And for the love of God don't tell me right off the bat that you assume I'm going to keep reading, let alone read closely enough to "notice" anything about your writing. Yuck

Finally, while I know it's popular in Silicon Valley/coastal tech types to use the language of agency to justify being an uncharitable dick to people around you, the spirit of this particular stanza is helpful to deploy only in a small number of settings, generally low complexity environments where the stakes are low and there's a lack of psychological safety, and you desperately need the paycheck.

In any event the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing his experience working in coastal tech. Do yourself a favor and find other role models

>... if the author really wishes to position himself as someone to take advice from...

>... the good ideas here are largely betrayed by the author's bad writing and overgeneralizing...

The author clearly doesn't want to be someone most people take advice from, and admitted that the piece wouldn't be well written, lack nuance, and largely were just things that worked for them, not anybody else. I don't know how one could possibly take this so seriously when they make it very clear up front:

>I'm not really qualified to give advice.

>Don't read this if you are seeking a nuanced perspective.

>These are simply the lies I tell myself to keep on living my life in good faith. I'm not saying this is the right way to do things. I'm just saying this is how I did things. I will do my best to color my advice with my own experiences, but I'm not going to pretend that the suffering and the privilege I've experienced is universal.

Your criticism is rambling, as well,

and the “self-identifying as lucky vs unlucky study” was both real,

and fascinating.

The comments on this subthread are a bit out of touch in a very coastal-tech way -- yes, Oracle is a monster, yes, their tech is garbage, yes, their products are awful.

But Oracle owns Cerner Health (now Oracle Health, but to most users it is still Cerner), i.e. 25% market share of the EHR space, and PeopleSoft, which you are painfully familiar with if you work for a bigcorp or anywhere in the public sector in North America. Their database product is very far from their only LOB.

Maybe I'm naive, but my sense is not everyone streaming on Twitch is trying to make a career out of it. Even for those that are -- everyone starts somewhere. Hopefully those that aren't successful on first brush notice and realize that it takes more than simply starting a stream to build a sticky audience.

Also, there are many people out there who lead fulfilling lives without families and partners. Either way, I don't think you should pity people so readily. At best it's somewhat condescending and missing much of the complexity and nuance of what it is to be a human person

You think everyone on instagram/tiktok with a public profiles tries to become an influencer?

I think that way more of them than would ever admit to it - even to themselves - want that, yes.

But aside from that, nearly everyone on Instagram has followers, at least their families and friends.

Tbf to them, most people equate streamers with individuals having thousands of viewers.. From that perspective, their statements kinda make sense.

While I personally wouldn't be able to perform under such a setting, I'd be lying if the idea isn't kinda charming - it's like wanting to be a rock star, a small part thinks it'd be cool, even if most don't actually want to live the life of a rockstar.

Though the wealth it comes with would be neat to have (I mean most streamers with thousands of non-botted viewers are millionaires at this point, right?)

> It's okay to just not comment on things you are ignorant about. It's okay.

It's ok not to be a condescending twat as well, and yet here we both are.

This strikes me more as a matter of taste, i.e. more art than something which can be provably wrong, or correct for that matter. The concerns you outlined might be concerns the author doesn't have to worry about for whatever reason -- if this fits neatly and seamlessly into their existing workflows then that's great, and I for one appreciate learning about other peoples' approaches like this even if they don't immediately work for me

IMV it's a clever trick, and like you my instinct is that if I attempted to integrate this into my own workflows, I would endure some sort of hardship down the line but it's not immediately obvious when or how. Or maybe for certain things it would be fine and less painful than other options, like other similarly clever tricks I felt uneasy about at first

PyPy is a JIT-compiled implementation of a language called RPython which is a restricted subset of Python. It does not and has never attempted to implement Python or replace your CPython interpreter for most intents and purposes. CPython is the official reference implementation of the Python language and what you probably use if you write Python code and don't understand the difference between a programming language and its implementations (which is fine)

This doesn't sound right. PyPy has always been described as an alternative implementation of Python that could in some cases be a drop-in replacement for CPython (AKA standard Python) that could speed up production workloads. Underneath that is the RPython toolchain, but that's not what most people are talking about when they talk about PyPy.

Exactly correct. PyPy is a replacement for CPython 3.11, which aims to be fully compatible with pure Python code (C extensions are a more complicated story).

There are a few companies doing this already -- I think AI Dungeon was one of the first movers in this space. I don't know how it is as a user, though

Every polynomial interpolates itself -- meaning that you can often apply this interpolation procedure to your favorite/nemesis polynomial or equivalently rewrite your polynomial of interest in this Lagrange basis, and see if the coefficients lead you anywhere. This is especially helpful in proving polynomial inequalities. For instance, Chebyshev polynomials T_n enjoy an alternation property over their extremal points -- so in the Lagrange basis, in many problems (e.g. Markov type inequalities) they emerge as the extremal case in the triangle inequality.

My beef with this approach is that it is a little unsatisfying in the sense that it sort of feels like we "got lucky". That is, it highlights this special feature (alternation) while burying the interesting structure that leads to such polynomials being extremal in these problems, as can be seen if you attempt certain seemingly trivial extensions of classical inequalities -- but nevertheless it's an important trick in extremal polynomial theory and approximation more broadly

Yes, there is a pervasive anxiety around strangers and impromptu socializing among younger millennials and Gen Z particularly in North America and parts of Europe, and across age groups in certain subcultures. There are lots of causes for this, but this phenomenon is neither as entrenched nor as universal as you might think and the dangers are basically infinitesimal (zero for all intents and purposes). If you are respectful and mindful of how you engage, the overwhelming majority of people will at worst ignore you. Which sucks, yes, but more than likely they won't even do that, i.e. they'll probably reciprocate

I agree re the pretext scenarios disappearing and re neurodivergence adding extra challenges.

RE the former: there are lots more of these pretext scenarios than you might realize

RE the latter, I realize it's not your point but for what it's worth, you won't really be able to tell in most cases that someone on the street or wherever is or isn't nd. Meaning: there's a good chance that the person you are talking to is nd themselves. Lots of us are pros at masking

In general though i would say to be careful when generalizing about human behavior in a way that causes you to implement and enforce rules / limitations on your own behavior in response. This is unavoidable, right? And yes, there's often an nd component to this. But especially as you get older, these can start to calcify and limit you in increasingly destructive ways

Letting curiosity be the motivator behind starting these conversations and cultivating curiosity more broadly can help -- or at least I have found it to be helpful in making initiating feel less forced. I wonder about people's jobs or the reasons they are visiting a place or what they think about what's happening nearby, or just generally who they are.

One antipattern I've encountered with this approach tho is that sometimes anxious people will exhaust their conversation partners with a battery of questions. Even if thoughtful, this can sometimes have the effect of exhausting your partner, and tends to keep the conversation steered away from actual connection. YMMV, but either way be mindful and make it a point to share yourself

> If MAA does not understand that there is huge market for Mathematics targeted towards Computer Programmers, they are just dumb.

Presumably a large math textbook publisher that has been publishing math books for literally one hundred years is very tapped into what books likely will and won't sell. I find it unlikely that a layperson where it concerns math book publishing would have some unique insight that MAA does not have. Even if there is a substantial enough market, there are likely unique considerations that MAA is beholden to which we aren't privy to

I don't know what the calculus is like to get an extended version of an existing book published by another publisher, but Dover's Aurora series consists of modern original texts as opposed to their usual republications of classic out of print texts -- this is how Emily Riehl had her "Category Theory in Context" published