I am guessing because some hormonal changes in mid/elder life will kick in some kind of emotional down that is mostly fillable by children, rather than peer validation and stuff.
That's what I am terrified of. Celibacy allows me to have room to do everything I want to do in life. I'm just terrified I will wake up one day (again) with a hormonal landslide affecting every thought, direction, and attitude I have.
Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other types of reference materials often conform to a rigid and pedantically defined aesthetic. This aesthetic is more about context, appearance, intuition. Editing is an art form.
Conveying meaning differs from conveying the intended meaning with clarity. When you have to say 'most people', we already have a problem. Reference material should refer. Leaving it up to intellectual interpretation is simply no good for material that is meant to record and preserve information.
That said, this possibly has nothing to do with the difference between 'comprised of' and 'composed of'.
> Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other types of reference materials often conform to a rigid and pedantically defined aesthetic. This aesthetic is more about context, appearance, intuition. Editing is an art form.
Right. That's called a "house style", which is not about correct or incorrect but rather about having a more-or-less arbitrary standard all writers must adhere to in order to make the final product more consistent.
I want to have a midi keyboard for this purpose exactly. This spontaneous nature is another modality. For example I can dictate this message while spinning a pen with only the intention not to drop it and nothing further and yet I've become very skilled at it with no effort.
> I would not contend that mastery of the more theoretical topics is a prerequisite to becoming a good programmer. There’s abundant evidence to the contrary. But it is a necessary step in absorbing the culture of computer science.
I personally don't care about my feelings about the culture of computer science. I care about computer science, and I think you have to participate in all of the worlds, to achieve a mature understanding of the computer and it's role in society. When I can separate my mathematical and logical mind from my emotional mind, I can focus enough to do work. When my emotional mind ramps up because I'm (rather unscientifically) comparing myself to a very selectively observational evaluation of the value of the achievements of others, I am not sure what gets done aside from the passage of time.
Try to prove yourself wrong about believing it is better to be wrong all the time.
Insanity!
I agree with you for the most part. But there's a line. When it starts to destroy your personal identity and sense of self, you've crossed that line. Sometimes it's just better to be right and trust yourself.
Or not. That's zen, I think. Trying to have so much information about everything that you wind up overloading yourself with it and can't make heads or tails of it, because in every simple truth exists an infinite proof. Analysis paralysis!
Despite superficially resembling some self-referential paradoxes, if the heuristic can stand up to itself, it's not a paradox. You try to prove it wrong, and you fail, so you keep it, which, lo, is exactly what I've done. (Or perhaps more precisely, while it is not a perfect fit and I could quibble with details myself, it is the best one-sentence summary of true science in my opinion, and I'm familiar with most of the usual ones, and aware that I've only seen this variant in one or two other places even so.) No paradox, no contradiction, no insanity.
Alas, if you're looking for an excuse to tie either yourself or me up in some sophomoric philosophical conundrum, this doesn't do it. But there's no lack of such things if you look, so don't be disappointed. Keep on trucking. May I suggest Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid if you would like the industrial strength version rope, err, braid to tie yourself in?
I understand where you are coming from, but I'm not trying to engage you in a 'sophomoric' debate. I came to the existential philosophical argument from mathematics and the computer sciences, not the other way around. I started my interest in computing science through automating proof (mathematical and computational). I doubt you care, but it's more about looking at the big picture of software development versus the little picture. You can't build anything if you keep testing the first thing for every bug, including everything it was built with, including all the mathematics used to reason about it.
But I'm sure there are two ways to respond to my comment: pretend you know what you are talking about, or admit you could be wrong and care to engage me in a real conversation. I've been down the same road hundreds of times on the internet, and it is hard to find people to talk to about things and meet in some kind of scientific, logical middle. But if that's not your thing, oesn't bother me if all you came here for was to prove yourself right about the noble ethics of your science. At least I'm no longer trapping my mind in a paradox of it's own creation. (Or am I? I never really know).
Logic is very different from science, that's all I have to say. Rigor is for precision, not discovery.
"I understand where you are coming from, but I'm not trying to engage you in a 'sophomoric' debate."
Considering the entire rest of your message consists of you essentially trying to lord over me whatever superiority you seem to think you have, and not missing an opportunity to slide a snide comment in, which I'd also observe is consistent with your original post, I've come to the conclusion that the rest of your post belies this claim. You're being abrasive and abusive while trying to pretend to be so much more open minded.
No sale. I recognize that tactic and refuse to engage with it. I'm sticking with my original assessment; you're being too sophomoric to engage with, and I reject your attempts to psychology me into engaging with you in the presupposed frame of your superiority.
Apologies, I would not interpret receiving my post back to me in the same way (I do not think, I usually read my posts back to myself and pretend I am talking to myself to try to understand how another person may take it, which I realize is fairly biased given my potentially unique perspective on reality). Human socialization is very difficult for me.
People used to look at me weird when I explained how I was paranoid that someone was routing all of my conversations between multiple people, in an effort to cluster intelligence and intellectual contributions without any participant knowing what they were contributing to.
Take that, therapy. Yes, the paranoia was somewhat imaginative, but it was an exaggeration of something that actually can be mechanized. The people I explained this to didn't believe me that you could create chat streams this way.
I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but I sure hope that you got to deal with that fear with a professional. That would be a difficult way to live...
In lisp, think of symbols as things that represent other things. Instead of having to evaluate each expression in the complexity that the programmer builds, everything can be substituted until the computer is left with a simple but expansive form. The machine is very good at evaluating this simple form, because it only needs to look up a few things to process the entire calculation, which is really just a collection of an ordered organization of the same calculations over and over again.
A pointer is not the actual data. It's just a trail of connections that eventually lead to the data you want, instead of having to manage a bunch of data you don't need to, or want to manage. It's computationally efficient and it is elegant. It represents exactly what you tell it to represent.
We need more AI working in the domain of computer security. Stuff that learns under specific guidelines to restrict computational behavior, given specifications of expected behavior.
I love implementing stuff like standardizations. Seriously, I love reading documentation that has lists of codes meant to concisely summarize specific frequently occurring events. I am the biggest nerd when it comes to pouring through documentation that was designed specifically with the intent to unify a common need that started off fractured.
In general though, it's just hard to know exactly when and where to implement what standardization. It's not just HTTP. The entire world of programming and computer science would be much more elegant with intelligent standardization, but it's literally a hard problem. The source of information is the hard problem. It is subject to change.
How can you standardize something that is consistently evolving, evolving to the point that it is expected that the functionality of the system is going to exceed all known expectations of it's operation and behavior? As developers, we are consistently striving to exceed our own boundaries, to do things better, more optimally, more safely, more legibly, more precisely, more correctly. Our expectations of ourselves is what screws us when we think about 'the big picture', because we apply the same model of reasoning to 'the big picture'.
Yes, we do not know what we do not know. However, we additionally do not know how to determine the difference between 'that which exists that we do not know' and 'that which does not exist that we do not know'. That is the core problem that lays underneath the lack of implementing standards, and it the reason people standardize things in the first place. Standardization prevents us from re-inventing the wheel. Standardization makes things safe. Standardization makes complex systems predictable even when information about adjacent systems are unknown. Standardization is a vehicle for implementing trust.
People get confused because there are too many words for the same thing - too many ways to describe the same things, too many languages to do the same thing, too many explanations meant to teach the same thing. Either we have to learn the hard way (by observing massive failure, or by experiencing it), or we have to hope we are implementing things the most correct way, and trust we will get there.
It's one way of thinking of what learning is. Some learning just is experience. Simplifying the experience, using the mind, can sometimes make the learning more complex than it needs be.
Choosing to make the distinction between the thought stream, the external world, and the observant self is one way to think. It is already on a layer of abstract conceptualization that is more complicated than it need be.
I just like letting go of the idea of what everyone else says learning, experiencing, and thinking is, and just let everything flow. That's when I feel most comfortable. When I let go of 'a way I think I should be' and I know instead 'I have always been the way I should be. It feels like a conscious jerk in thought when you remember to stop guiding yourself, and you just know you are already there.
That's what I am terrified of. Celibacy allows me to have room to do everything I want to do in life. I'm just terrified I will wake up one day (again) with a hormonal landslide affecting every thought, direction, and attitude I have.
Cats like me though, so there's always that.