rob2312 (u/rob2312) - Readit News

rob2312 commented on How to reduce stress and overcome anxiety as a software developer andreizgirvaci.com/blog/h... · Posted by u/MD3XTER

rob2312 · 3 years ago

I've been experiencing similar things recently and have also been making a couple of changes to try and help. Removing caffeine/alcohol has been a huge one for me -- initially I found it very difficult to not drink, because I thought that drinking always leads to 'fun'. After stopping, I tried a couple of times again to drink (a couple of glasses and even one total binge session). I've noticed that I just don't enjoy the feeling anymore, and the hangover effects are just not worth what little gain I now get from it. It was journaling that helped me uncover that -- I could track how I felt after days with caffeine, days after drinking, and then the answer became pretty clear to me. Maybe i'll enjoy drinking again soon, but right now I'm content to skip it.

One thing I still struggle with is being able to give myself downtime after work. I always feel the need to be progressing with something -- completing more video games, reading more books, or getting stronger at the gym. I'm not sure how best to deal with that feeling.

rob2312 commented on What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition blog.janestreet.com/what-... · Posted by u/yminsky

gautamcgoel · 5 years ago

I know a guy who works at Jane Street; he was formerly one of the brightest undergrads at Caltech. He turned down an offer to do a PhD at Berkeley to take the Jane Street offer, IIRC. He is pretty idealistic and has an interesting philosophy about working in finance: he thinks moving money around isn't that societally valuable, but he donates 10-15% of his income to charity each year (I think he picks charities using the GiveWell/effective altruism methodology). In his view, the value of his lifetime charitable contributions exceeds the impact he could hope to have in pretty much any other field of endeavor, so the job is completely worth it.

rob2312 · 5 years ago

https://80000hours.org/articles/earning-to-give/ describes that philosophy in good detail. It's a pretty compelling argument, in my opinion

rob2312 commented on City Map Generator – Create procedural American-style cities in the browser maps.probabletrain.com/... · Posted by u/jsiepkes

q_andrew · 5 years ago

I made a project like this too! Except it's not finished yet. Basically trying to turn the procedural buildings into a roguelike or something similar. https://andrewmanq.github.io/2020-05-28-new-buildings/

rob2312 · 5 years ago

Nice! Those fake windows are a really cool idea

rob2312 commented on City Map Generator – Create procedural American-style cities in the browser maps.probabletrain.com/... · Posted by u/jsiepkes

rob2312 · 5 years ago

I did an undergraduate project based on the same paper as this (not nearly the same quality, but similar enough if you squint).

The procedural method used for this kind of generation is really powerful -- you usually see L-Systems being used to create basic sort of fractals but these sort of implementations can become pretty smart. For example, you can provide a height map of the terrain, and make it so that the roads find smooth paths down hills.

And then that's before you realise that the buildings themselves can be generated via rules which describe how to make buildings. And then, the layout of rooms in a building, and the layout of furniture in each room. There's some really impressive potential here if a group of people were devoted enough.

Another good paper is: http://peterwonka.net/Publications/pdfs/2006.SG.Mueller.Proc...

rob2312 commented on VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality thebolditalic.com/vcs-hav... · Posted by u/gammarator

thereisnospork · 5 years ago

> And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder?

It leaves them as a statistical someone with an objectively poor resume.

If you want more women founded companies, you need more women engineers. If you want more women engineers, you need more women cs majors. If you want more women cs majors, you need more women interested in and excelling at math in high school.

It may not be 'fair' that the statistical woman has a 'worse' resume, nor is it 'fair' that the statistical rich kid has a 'better' one, but its asinine to address fairness at the narrow end of the funnel.

rob2312 · 5 years ago

So, just leaving the issue unsolved for probably around 20 years or so and letting under-represented groups play catch-up.

There are a lot more meaningful and effective actions that can be implemented now, which would correct things in a shorter length of time. I do think that the 'pipeline' is the fundamental way to fix the issue -- but I think that the best way of creating that interest is to present those under-represented groups in our society now, rather than later.

rob2312 commented on Millions to be made in Unbundling Reddit realrealgood.substack.com... · Posted by u/sharemywin

rob2312 · 5 years ago

Reddit has the problem where the most popular subreddits (r/gaming for example) have generic content upvoted the most, and so there often isn't actually anything worthwhile there if you have an actual interest besides memes or general industry news. Then on the other extreme, you have overly niche subreddits for specific video games, where most of the content is just fan art, overly in-depth subreddit drama, or similar memes now just re-skinned for that specific game. There isn't really a middle ground for a lot of these categories, for the people who want "just enough content for the games I like". I've found either subscribe to r/gaming and get a broad amount of nothing, or subscribe to a list of the games you enjoy and get a very in-depth lot of nothing.

rob2312 commented on If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs tttthis.com/blog/if-i-cou... · Posted by u/TTTThis

marmot777 · 6 years ago

I disagree with the author’s idea that blogs shouldn’t have a focus. I think the best blogs are these sort:

1. By an expert in a specific domain.

2. Blogs by someone in the process of developing expertise, documenting what they learned along the way. The idea is it really helps the learning process to learn something well enough to write about it cogently and teach others.

rob2312 · 6 years ago

On the second point, the ones that really appealed to me were the indie game dev blogs. They would figure out a unique mechanic or way of implementing a nice graphical effect, and then do a short post about it. Then other developers might pick up on it and adapt it for their projects. Most of the time those blogs were eventually abandoned along with the games they were trying to make but I think that a lot of indie games that have been released probably learnt a lot and sourced inspiration from those blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if a game like Terraria found a lot of inspiration from all the procedural generation blog posts after Minecraft came out.

rob2312 commented on Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality theconversation.com/remot... · Posted by u/discocrisco

6gvONxR4sf7o · 6 years ago

Can someone help me understand this? The thesis is that remote work is making inequality worse, but all they show is an association between working remote and income. Where's the thesis coming from? Even if it was a causal association, with more remote work causing higher incomes, that seems like a good thing.

rob2312 · 6 years ago

> The higher a person’s salary, the most likely they are to be able to work from home

and

> employees unable to work from home, such as restaurant servers, personal trainers or manufacturing workers, may be laid off temporarily or permanently, a burden that seems to be falling disproportionately on low-income workers.

People with higher salaries are more likely to be able to still work, whereas people with lower salaries in different sectors are far more likely to have been laid off due to the physical nature of the job. Hence poor people have been disproportionately hit, increasing income inequality.