Came here to say something similar. Humans are much closer to “other” animals than what they think, and social instituions like marriage were created to prevent social mayhem.
> Humans are much closer to “other” animals than what they think
Plain false. Humans are very unique compared to other animals as I wrote in another response. See prof. Sapolsky's lectures on the topic. He's an outstanding anthropologist.
I think I agree with this. Society's laws and contracts mirror our instincts and feelings. We create laws because they encode a deep-seated feeling that most of us have about things. Not everyone agrees on every law; most of us don't want to murder, and would be sad if we did, but there are still serial killers.
We don't change our instincts just because there are laws. Look at how many people are in prison for drug possession. The law is much weaker than brain chemicals being expressed. (Also, not every law is based on wide agreement of human emotion. Sometimes lawmakers simply do whatever. I'm mostly talking about the ones that have been around since the dawn of humanity.)
For most of my life, I have been one of those guys who were like your friends. The point about intimacy hit hard - I have never seen such a simple point expressed so beautifully.
Glad to see a book by Andrei Martyanov being recommended here. I have read all three of his books. There is no reason to trust or agree with everything he writes, but unfortunately the current trend is to try and suppress any kind of discussion rather than try and understand someone's viewpoint.
I also don’t agree with everything he writes or says (his YouTube channel is wildly entertaining). But I trust him more than others as he’s a pro western US citizen who has a solid background in the Soviet navy (anti shipping missile expert, I believe). He even gets into military mathematics and field manuals from time to time.
Yes I watch all his videos. My favourite is “Some very needed comparisons”. I started doing.(just for fun) a complete under-graduate and graduate course in Mathematics in my spare time after watching this video.
Are you doing an online course? Funny enough, I was thinking of the same thing (or at least some mathematics basics before an online CS curriculum). I'd love recommendations if you have any. Cheers.
No, just via books. I have a degree in mathematics which I completed 20 years ago so part of it is just recalling what I had learned. But otherwise I just bought books covering the entire curriculum - some based on Susan Rigetti’s blog post on mathematics (should be easy to search).
We often hear that choosing the right algorithm will get rid of all performance problems. There is no "need" to understand what is happening under the hood and all programmers should only work at higher levels of abstraction.
My take away from this question and and the top answer was that the above is not true. It does not mean that everyone has to code using assembly - it means that good programmers are aware of where their abstractions may leak.
Knowing the character of your data is priceless. The only time I was able to throughly beat GCC with optimizations is when I knew that most 32-bit values being calculated upon are actually fairly small (in tens of thousands) and that I could use that to my advantage.
Agree, people probably underestimate the value of documentation. For example, Michael Kerrisk the well-known author of the book The Linux Programming Interface is the maintainer of the man-pages project and has probably has more contributions via documentation rather than actual code.
Putting on my philosophical hat for a minute, I would say that while humans have put in lot of social structures to counter evolutionary tendencies, they still slip through in all our interactions with other humans.
Agree, I have been in the industry for long enough to see that they are discriminated against. One thing which can counter the effect of height is humour - people who are funny and extrovert can get over this to a large extent (I guess this goes not only for professional relationships but personal ones too).
I am personally still doubtful of Rust's adoption. I consider the 2008-2014 period the peak hype cycle for Haskell and don't see that it changed professional programming much. I predict it will be similar for Rust.
