aiwv (u/aiwv) - Readit News

aiwv commented on Cisco Acquires Splunk splunk.com/en_us/blog/lea... · Posted by u/siddharthb_

davidu · 2 years ago

Meraki and OpenDNS both became better post acquisition, and in both cases I’d say it was because Cisco let them continue to maintain a lot of control, the leaders stayed around, and the majority of the engineering teams did, too. Cisco has a long list of successful acquisitions. The release says Gary will report to Chuck directly, which is a strong sign Chuck will make sure Splunk succeeds. (nb, I was CEO of OpenDNS)

aiwv · 2 years ago

Like you said, Meraki got better because the core team, including engineering and sales as well as the founders, stuck around for about two years. Things did go significantly downhill once the founders left but by that point the company was already so successful that the exodus of great people that followed their departure probably didn't even impact their bottom line that much. I will say that I personally found working for a Cisco subsidiary pretty terrible relative to working for a startup but, hey, the checks cleared.

aiwv commented on Thelonious Monk’s Tips for Musicians (1960) openculture.com/2017/12/t... · Posted by u/jynxxx

quacked · 3 years ago

> This is a very neglected area of piano pedagogy. It also relates to the great difficulty of most chamber works for piano.

You are SO right. I really wish that modern composers would come up with a bunch of chamber stuff that actually sounds good (i.e. like real baroque/classical/romantic music) but isn't incredibly difficult. I have never once played in a chamber ensemble as a pianist, and I was up to about the level of the easier Beethoven sonatas by the time I "quit" and started focusing on guitar. All of my favorite chamber piano pieces (Mendelssohn piano trios, Schubert Trout Quintet, Brandenburgs, etc.) would require 2-5 years of intense daily practice to even play a movement at speed with mistakes.

> Trust me, there’s a near infinite variety of ways to sound awful

Yeah, yeah, okay, fair enough. But I'd bet that the biggest improvement most of them could make right off the bat would be keeping time properly. (Maybe not if you're on a wind instrument and can only honk.)

aiwv · 3 years ago

Yeah, I was astounded by how quickly my singing improved when I started practicing with a metronome. Keeping time seems to me the easiest thing to improve if you focus on it (but that's just my subjective opinion). Once you can keep good time, the rhythm of the song imposes restrictions on you that actually help you figure out how to physically perform the movements demanded by the music and then subsequently groove them so that you can focus on all the other elements of making music.

aiwv commented on Thelonious Monk’s Tips for Musicians (1960) openculture.com/2017/12/t... · Posted by u/jynxxx

quacked · 3 years ago

Oh yeah, Monk is 100% right. Keeping time is far more important than both intonation and feel. (And intonation is more important than feel.)

Young music students in the US are usually taught in a pre-conservatory style (analogous to how young students are taught in a pre-academic style). This leads to the mental prioritization of playing the correct notes, giving recitals once or twice per season, and following the movements of the ensemble leader. These are all terrible habits if you want a society where lots of people can play songs together and don't take music too seriously.

If you've ever been to a kid's recital and all the pieces sound awful, it's not because they can't play their instruments, it's because their teachers taught them the mental habit of stopping when they made a mistake, and then assigned them pieces at the upper limit of their competence. You must play through mistakes like they're not there, keep the rhythm with your foot and the melody line in your head. Also don't play the hardest stuff you just learned in recitals, play stuff you can do with your eyes closed while holding a conversation.

If you're a hobbyist musician, stop focusing on scales, theory, improvising, and correcting miniscule mistakes and start focusing on keeping perfect time and memorizing a whole shitload of songs. If you look up "Victor Wooten Music Lesson" on YouTube and basically watch every single thing he has to say you'll make more progress on your sound in one year than you did in the previous ten.

Music is meant to be played together, and to play together you need to keep time.

aiwv · 3 years ago

> If you look up "Victor Wooten Music Lesson" on YouTube

I can't recommend Victor Wooten enough. His book "The Music Lesson" is also great.

aiwv commented on Staring into the abyss as a core life skill benkuhn.net/abyss/... · Posted by u/troydavis

UnpossibleJim · 3 years ago

Those are good reasons, I'm not going to deny that but there's something to be said for enjoying life while you're young enough to take full advantage of it. Being poor(ish) when you're young isn't the worst thing in the world, when you have no real responsibilities. Grinding to make money in your thirties and beyond, when those real responsibilities hit always made more sense to me... but I may have done all of it wrong. I don't know.

aiwv · 3 years ago

> Grinding to make money in your thirties and beyond

I sort of think grinding is generally wrong at any age. If you feel like you're grinding, perhaps it's time to take stock and consider what you could be doing differently so that you don't have to keep grinding to both meet your responsibilities and enjoy life. Of course some might find themselves with enough exigencies they have almost no choice but to grind, but I doubt too many people on HN are really in that boat.

aiwv commented on Ask HN: How to find mentors? · Posted by u/trwawy11221122

sshine · 3 years ago

> How do you find mentors?

I go up to them, and I ask them.

And they usually like to spend any amount of time explaining, if they see that you're someone who might be able to understand the answer. And that's to a large degree just attitude. People are usually really happy to talk about things they know a lot about, not just to sound smart, but because they really like to think about it, and you get to think about it when you hear yourself talking... I really enjoy ranting, and listening to rants. I learned a lot of CS by listening to hour-long rants at the cafeteria. Some nerdy person just piping their /dev/urandom into your visual cortex.

Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

aiwv · 3 years ago

> Knowing what to want to know seems much harder.

This is truly the most important question and one that only you can answer for yourself, unfortunately.

aiwv commented on We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom (2021) realizeengineering.blog/2... · Posted by u/rzk

crazygringo · 3 years ago

This article is totally ignoring the existence of academic "handbooks", which is where the wisdom lies.

The whole idea is that individual papers are supposed to be exploratory, throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. They're supposed to be a deluge of information.

But then every decade or so a team of academics take it upon themselves to serve as editors to a handbook, which attempts to survey the field in terms of history, where the most value has been found so far (and what hasn't panned out), and current promising directions. Usually something like 20-50 chapters, each contributed by a different author.

If you want to get into the wisdom of a field, the first thing you do is pull out the most recent 800-page handbook, read the first few chapters, and then drill down in your area of interest on the remaining part.

To say there "are no prizes for wisdom" is absurd, when being selected to publish in a handbook (or being an editor) is prestigious, a mark that you've very much "made it" in the field.

And of course there are plenty of other things that serve similar roles, such as literature review papers or similar. (In philosophy you can write a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, for instance.)

If you aren't finding wisdom anywhere, it means you're simply not looking right.

(And this isn't even to mention the fact that at some point somebody will popularize major progress in a field in a general-audience book, e.g. when Daniel Goleman wrote the book "Emotional Intelligence" or Stephen Hawking wrote "A Brief History of Time".)

aiwv · 3 years ago

Not only have I never heard of this kind of "handbook" (in spite of having an advanced degree), it isn't clear to me how they actually would be a reliable source of wisdom. It sounds like they are supposed to be a meta-analysis of the current state field, but to take it up a meta-level, who is analyzing the meta-analysis? How do I know the editors didn't just select their friends who have similar viewpoints? In the abstract, a handbook seems as likely to send me wildly astray as it is to send me down the right path. Almost by design, I'd naively expect handbooks to amplify the status quo and discourage more radical ideas (as most institutions are wont to do). This might be good or bad depending on the status quo but either way I'm likely only going to get out wisdom proportional to what I bring in.

aiwv commented on Ruby delights built into the language technology.doximity.com/a... · Posted by u/codenamev

n0tth3dro1ds · 3 years ago

So you have to add code to debug it with #tap? I don’t care if the chain is unbroken: you have to CHANGE THE CODE YOU SHIPPED in order to properly debug it. That’s idiotic. And before you say “oh, this is just an exercise”, I can tell you from personal experience that I encounter this endlessly in prod code with both Python and Kotlin chained functional style garbage. It is often not debuggable without break-up and unrolling.

aiwv · 3 years ago

> you have to CHANGE THE CODE YOU SHIPPED in order to properly debug it

If I'm at the point where I need to debug a production process with breakpoints, I'd rather just find a new job than worry about my coworker's coding style.

aiwv commented on Richard Feynman on looking at the world from another point of view (1973) cassandradispatch.org/ric... · Posted by u/shafyy

trap_goes_hot · 3 years ago

What are some instances of people en-masse trying to emulate a scientist's womanizing or similar traits? What I mean to say is, the problem we're trying to solve/avoid - does it actually exist, ever?

aiwv · 3 years ago

Many if not most "hard" science cultures (math, physics, etc.) have a strong undercurrent of competitive gamesmanship. In its worst form, it becomes about vanquishing your rivals more than it is truly about advancing the human condition. I believe this is a factor in driving many people out of the field, including many extremely talented women. The womanizing is consistent with this culture even if it doesn't always come out directly in lectures or papers.

Also, I have direct experience with this having spent time in some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the US. I can assure you that the culture I'm describing exists. As a postdoc, my supervisor was so insecure that he would go out of his way to undermine me publicly and he was one of the leading scientists in his field and in his 70s at the time. There were also good, generous people, but as the old saying goes a rotten apple can spoil the lot.

aiwv commented on Richard Feynman on looking at the world from another point of view (1973) cassandradispatch.org/ric... · Posted by u/shafyy

labrador · 3 years ago

> He quite explicitly dehumanizes the women who work at the club when he realizes that buying them a few drinks isn't enough for sex.

You fault him for not knowing "there's no sex in the Champaign room"

> I expect better from someone with his intellectual prowess.

I recommend that you don't look into the sex lives of famous and admirable thinkers through out history.

> He always seems to know better than all the idiots out there.

He's a working class guy as am I. This is an essential conceit and source of humor for many of us. We take pleasure in out-smarting the our so-called superiors.

aiwv · 3 years ago

> You fault him for not knowing "there's no sex in the Champaign room"

No, I fault him for being an entitled asshole.

> I recommend that you don't look into the sex lives of famous and admirable thinkers through out history.

The greater the man, the greater the shadow. That is why I am reluctant to admire _any_ great person. You are absolutely right that the more you dig, the more you learn how flawed everyone is. My problem is that there is an uncritical deification of Feynman that seeks to whitewash the aspects of his personality that were far less than admirable.

> We take pleasure in out-smarting the our so-called superiors.

And thus mirror exactly the behavior that you don't like about them.

To me, Feynman epitomizes smart but not wise. I cannot hold a candle to him when it comes to understanding the physical laws of nature, but almost nothing I have ever heard from him actually helps me a better human, which is not true of some other great thinkers. YMMV of course.

aiwv commented on Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative itcommunity.stanford.edu/... · Posted by u/ryzvonusef

TeMPOraL · 3 years ago

> What seems unique here is that it is that it an unorganized mob. The democrats certainly try to get the wokes support, but there is no woke party. Obama even called them out as keyboard warriors.

I remember back in ~2010-2012 when this was seen as an exciting, new, positive development. That was back when we were talking about 4chan trolling Scientology <insert "Oh Fuck The Internet Is Here" meme here>, and the Arab Spring (back before it became apparent it wasn't just Twitter vs. authoritarian governments, and that people didn't come out of it better off). I remember cheering to a TED talk that talked up decentralized activism, comparing it to "murmurations", complete with video of starlings flying to "Pachelbel - Canon In D Major".

A decade later, I don't find it inspiring or exciting anymore. I find it utterly terrifying. Yes, even back then, I had the thought on the back of my mind, that this "unorganized mob" could be abused (something the TV show Continuum later reminded me of), and is capable of pushing for both the right and wrong thing. But there was this sense of optimism that it'll "arc towards justice". Oh how very wrong we were back then.

> And this is why I disagree with Elon, I don't think the wokes are any more dangerous than any other performative religion or subculture. They are annoying but have no real goals other than winning the virtue signaling game.

I don't know what Elon Musk has to say about this, but I disagree with what you wrote here, for two reasons.

1. They've already proven to be much more dangerous than "other performative religion or subculture". Other religions and subcultures didn't manage to make people afraid of speaking their mind on the Internet. Other religions and subcultures didn't manage to change hiring policies, standardize all kinds of weird trainings in corporations, or make a well-known university publish an absurd list of "bad words".

2. If anything I was taught about late 19th and early 20th century was accurate, socialism and communism started with decentralized, organic movements popping up all around the world. Those movements were then quickly co-opted by competing political upstarts, who first started to fight another - until, after a lot of bloodshed, one group emerged victorious, took power from the incumbents, and became a defining force of 20th century history.

My point being, decentralized, distributed mobs with no real goals but lots of pent up energy are a resource to political schemers. They are thus dangerous in the same way spilled gasoline is: on its own it just smells bad, but it creates an environment where a single spark can lead to a lot of devastation.

aiwv · 3 years ago

> Other religions and subcultures didn't manage to make people afraid of speaking their mind on the Internet.

Have you ever heard of gamergate? Do you have any idea what it's like to be a woman on the internet?