I really love this. It makes me feel weirdly nostalgic, even though I've never been to California, or indeed the US. As a tech-obsessed teenager in the 90s, some of the older companies here felt almost mythical at the time. Plus lots of California generally would show up in so much pop culture, films, music videos and so on, and the sort of vintage-y vibe I'm getting here feels really reminiscent of that.
One of my personal rules for life is that wherever possible I avoid businesses which are big enough to have call centres, especially if those call centres are in another country. Obviously that's impossible for a lot of things, but I try. The small local ISP I use, for example, is totally worth the additional cost. I can call them, and there's no "press 6 for support, your call is important to us" nonsense. A couple of rings, and I'm stright through to an expert who has the knowledge and authority to fix my problem right away.
I do music production as a hobby, and I definitely see this. You can get a lot of plugins these days that will do all sorts of auto generation for you — chord progressions, melodies, stylistic aspects, variations, and so on, and a lot of them are incredibly high quality.
Each to their own of course, and if I was on the clock and doing this for money I think I'd love to be able to click a button and create an authentic-sounding Motown bassline or whatever, but for me... while it does sound great, and somewhat depressingly is almost certainly better than what I could create by myself, I find it quite an empty and unsatisfying way of working. I loved it at the start — look how fast I can make a track! — but I've been slowly moving away from this sort of thing, and I'm back to having more fun as a result.
I experienced something very similar to this when I had a kid. As you say, minor, but still noticeable. Like I was having to make constant small corrections to my balance. It worried me a bit at the time, although in retrospect I'm convinced it was caused by sleep deprivation. I wasn't getting more than a few (broken) hours a night for many months. It went away as things started to settle down a bit.
Speaking as a self-taught "programmer" who never got far beyond the rudiments (basic scripting and automation is about as far as I go), I find stuff like this utterly mindblowing. I'm aware that sorting and maze generation algorithms exist of course, but it's magic to me. I don't understand them at all, and seeing them visualised like this, in such an appealing way, is incredible.
For what is worth, programmers who went through college and/or university didn’t learn this stuff there, so technically speaking we are all self-taught.
Search about Depth-First Search and Breadth-First Search algorithms, they are very short and easy to understand.
You will be able to build and solve your own mazes in no time.
It might be in their courses, but they doesn't mean they understood or retained it properly. Lots of programmers get by without ever reimplementing those in industry work
In fact implementing them for production should be a fire-able offense if they have not searched for a library that does it.
The only place in industry where this should be used is in interviews and candidates should never be asked to do it again if they pass that phase. We cannot have people working on stuff they interviewed with.
Cramming the night before an exam isn't the same thing as learning. It doesn't change who you are and the way you see the world. It doesn't give you new abilities you can use for the rest of your life.
Cramming the night before an exam isn't the same thing as teaching either. If we need to accept that teaching is always the outcome of the worst performing learners it would follow that schools don't teach children to read. After all, illiterate people exist. That some teaching outcomes exist which are contrary to the curriculums goals doesn't mean that curriculums don't exist.
There are billions of us and learning outcomes are varied in part because teachers vary in skill. With so many chances and plenty of bad teachers, it is inevitable that some small fraction of the population gain the perception that trees aren't taught in CS programs even though they almost always are.
Nobody in this thread has claimed that trees (or sorting or maze generation algorithms, which don't necessarily involve trees) aren't taught. Guessmyname claimed that "programmers who went through college and/or university didn’t learn this stuff there," not that nobody tried to teach it to them. Every claim in the thread about what is taught has been a positive claim that some things were taught; there have been no negative claims claiming that something or other wasn't taught or wasn't in a curriculum.
Teachers can have a significant effect on the learning process, but learners have a much larger one. Other things like available learning resources and institutional incentives may have larger effects than teachers, curricula, or even (variation among) learners.
That's a fair point, and for many students true, but also not what I was claiming which is simply that these techniques are usually taught. If students fail to learn or have no interest or cram and forget, that's another problem.
That said, it's not like I was taught the specifics of generating mazes, even though there was additional content on it in the textbook etc. - I'm talking more about the general algorithms.
Maze generation is sometimes used in CS classes as an example of data structures like union-find or algorithms like minimum spanning tree construction; http://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~hzhang/c31/notes/ch07.pdf is one example. It wouldn't be terribly surprising for someone to get through an undergraduate CS curriculum without encountering maze generation, which is kind of a shame, and though hopefully they do encounter minimum spanning trees at least a few times, their application to maze generation may be nonobvious. And Mike has visualized a number of other maze generation algorithms here that are more specialized.
But I was saying that when guessmyname said, "programmers who went through college and/or university didn’t learn this stuff there," they're probably mostly correct, regardless of whether this stuff was taught, because most programmers who went through college and/or university were mostly focused on getting good grades, not learning, and you don't need to learn this stuff to get good grades. So your response that it was taught is not entirely to the point.
My favourite instance of this is the Brabham BT46B, which used fans to suck the car down onto the track. Not cheating by any means — they never tried to hide it — but nevertheless a very creative interpretation of the rules!
I don't jump start my brain. I drink a lot of coffee and feel grumpy. I have a toddler, so this happens every day. I've always hated getting up early in the morning, and nothing I've ever tried has made it better. Left to my own devices, I'll gravitate towards going to bed around 4am, and getting up at around 11. The times in my life where I've been able to do this for an extended period are when I've felt most rested and energetic.
I know this can sound like a sort of edgy teenager thing to say, but I just prefer the night. From about 9pm onwards, my mind is absolutely buzzing with energy. Most of my learning, throughout my whole life, has taken place at night. I feel like my brain doesn't work properly until at least lunchtime, so wherever I can, I arrange to do easy stuff in the morning. Responding to emails, any light admin, nothing that needs too much focus.
This resonated so much with me. I've tried to force the issue many times - sleep patterns (early to bed; early to rise), diet, exercise, etc. but early morning will never be natural to me. My brain works best late at night and always will. It's partly lack of distraction, I'm sure, but I at night when it's dark outside I feel more content, more relaxed, which somewhat paradoxically allows me to work more efficiently/creatively.
I can't help but wonder if your experiences are in no small part due to (generally speaking) less distractions/interruptions? As in, people aren't awake to interrupt you (toddler life excluded)?
I consider myself a morning person however I find that unless I explicitly ignore messages/emails/etc. until some time block I schedule in, or practice Pomodoro, that nothing really ever feels like it gets done. I just feel "busy" at the end of the day which quite honestly, is not fulfilling. I'd much rather be productive than busy.
Most switched on I've ever felt was at university. Get up at midday, go for a run, do some CS classes in the afternoon, eat, code until 4am. Total flow-state from midnight to 4am.
For what little it's worth from a random internet person, I agree with you 100%. I do it the same way as you, with the database stored on Dropbox, and an offline key file. I just can't make myself trust an online service for this stuff, as irrational as that may be.
Even if KeePass turned out to have some expoloitable vulnerabilities, it's still running solely on my machine, and I don't allow it to connect to the internet at all. I suppose yes, if someone breaks into my computer I could be in trouble, but if they can do that, they can just steal my session cookies anyway, password manager or not.
Mine too. I think it's great. So many quality of life improvements. For starters, all the tab handling options. Being able to specify where new tabs open, and where you go when you close a tab. Tab stacks are amazing — five minutes after learning how they work, I was already wondering how I'd managed for so long without them. Being able to tile multiple tabs in the same window. The list goes on and on. The neat, compact interface. The sidebar that gives you a searchable list of closed tabs. Smaller things, like being able to see the entire URL in the address bar again.
There are a few rough edges here and there, and it certainly doesn't feel as responsive as Chrome, but I highly recommend it nevertheless, especially to those who get frustrated with the main players removing more and more features with each new version.
Does he care about anyone but himself? Does he have children or grandchildren? Nephews or nieces? Does he care about their safety and welfare, and want them to have good lives?
