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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • TLDR:
    Nature can’t simply select out consciousness because it emerges from hardware that is useful in other ways. The brain doesn’t waste energy on consciousness, it uses energy for computation, which is useful in a myriad ways.

    The usefulness of consciousness from an evolutionary fitness perspective is a tricky question to answer in general terms. An easy intuition might be to look at the utility of pain for the survival of an individual.

    I personally think that, ultimately, consciousness is a byproduct of a complex brain. The evolutionary advantage is mainly given by other features enabled by said complexity (generally more sophisticated and adaptable behavior, social interactions, memory, communication, intentional environment manipulation, etc.) and consciousness basically gets a free ride on that already-useful brain.
    Species with more complex brains have an easier time adapting to changes in their environment because their brains allow them to change their behavior much faster than random genetic mutations would. This opens up many new ecological niches that simpler organisms wouldn’t be able to fill.

    I don’t think nature selects out waste. As long as a species is able to proliferate its genes, it can be as wasteful as it “wants”. It only has to be fit enough, not as fit as possible. E.g. if there’s enough energy available to sustain a complex brain, there’s no pressure to make it more economical by simplifying its function. (And there are many pressures that can be reacted to without mutation when you have a complex brain, so I would guess that, on the whole, evolution in the direction of simpler brains requires stronger pressures than other adaptations)


  • I want to preface this with the mention that understanding other people’s code and being able to modify it in a way that gets it to do what you want is a big part of real world coding and not a small feat.
    The rest of my comment may come across as “you’re learning wrong”. It is meant to. I don’t know how you’ve been learning and I have no proof that doing it differently will help, but I’m optimistic that it can. The main takeaway is this: be patient with yourself. Solving problems and building things is hard. It’s ok to progress slowly. Don’t try to skip ahead, especially early on.
    (also this comment isn’t directed at you specifically, but at anyone who shares your frustration)

    I was gonna write an entire rant opposing the meme, but thought better of it as it seems most people here agree with me.
    BUT I think that once you’ve got some basics down, there really is no better way to improve than to do. The key is to start at the appropriate level of complexity for your level of experience.
    Obviously I don’t know what that is for you specifically, but I think in general it’s a good idea to start simple. Don’t try to engineer an entire application as your first programming activity.

    Find an easy (and simple! as in - a single function with well defined inputs and outputs and no side effects) problem; either think of something yourself, or pick an easy problem from an online platform like leetcode or codechef. And try to solve the problem yourself. There’s no need to get stuck for ages, but give it an honest try.
    I think a decent heuristic for determining if you have a useful problem is whether you feel like you’ve made significant progress towards a solution after an hour or two. If not, readjust and pick a different problem. There’s no point in spending days on a problem that’s not clicking for you.

    If you weren’t able to solve the problem, look at solutions. Pick one that seems most straight forward to you and try to understand it. When you think you do, give the original problem a little twist and try to solve that. While referencing the solution to the original if you need to.
    If you’re struggling with this kind of constrained problem, keep doing them. Seriously. Perhaps dial down the difficulty of the problems themselves until you can follow and understand the solutions. But keep struggling with trying to solve little problems from scratch. Because that’s the essence of programming: you want the computer to do something and you need to figure out how to achieve that.
    It’s not automatic, intuitive, inspired creation. It’s not magic. It’s a difficult and uncertain process of exploration. I’m fairly confident that for most people, coding just isn’t how their brain works, initially. And I’m also sure that for some it “clicks” much easier than for others. But fundamentally, the skill to code is like a muscle: it must be trained to be useful. You can listen to a hundred talks on the mechanics of bike riding, and be an expert on the physics. If you don’t put in the hours on the pedals, you’ll never be biking from A to B.
    I think this period at the beginning is the most challenging and frustrating, because you’re working so hard and seemingly progress so slowly. But the two are connected. You’re not breezing through because it is hard. You’re learning a new way of thinking. Everything else builds on this.

    Once you’re more comfortable with solving isolated problems like that, consider making a simple application. For example: read an input text file, replace all occurrences of one string with another string, write the resulting text to a new text file. Don’t focus on perfection or best practices at first. Simply solve the problem the way you know how. Perhaps start with hard-coded values for the replacement, then make them configurable (e.g. by passing them as arguments to your application).

    When you have a few small applications under your belt you can start to dream big. As in, start solving “real” problems. Like some automation that would help you or someone you know. Or tasks at work for a software company. Or that cool app you’ve always wanted to build. Working on real applications will give you more confidence and open the door to more learning. You’ll run into lots of problems and learn how not to do things. So many ways not to do things.

    TLDR: If it’s not clicking, you need to, as a general rule, do less learning (in the conventional sense of absorbing and integrating information) and more doing. A lot of doing.





  • If their password was actually good (18+ random characters) it’s not feasible with current day technology to brute force, no matter how few PBKDF2 iterations were used.

    Obviously it’s still a big issue because in many cases people don’t use strong enough passwords (and apparently LastPass stored some of the information in plaintext) but a strong password is still good protection provided the encryption algorithm doesn’t have any known exploitable weaknesses.



  • Yup.

    Spaces? Tabs? Don’t care, works regardless.
    Copied some code from somewhere else? No problem, 9/10 times it just works. Bonus: a smart IDE will let you quick-format the entire code to whatever style you configured at the click of a button even if it was a complete mess to begin with, as long as all the curly braces are correct.

    Also, in any decent IDE you will very rarely need to actually count curly braces, it finds the pair for you, and even lets you easily navigate between them.

    The inconsistent way that whitespace is handled across applications makes interacting with code outside your own code files incredibly finicky when your language cares so much about the layout.

    There’s an argument to be made for the simplicity of python-style indentation and for its aesthetic merits, but IMO that’s outweighed by the practical inconvenience it brings.



  • I haven’t used a different browser in a good while, so I’m not sure that these issues don’t exist elsewhere, but here’s a few:

    For a very long time after the rework, reordering tabs was not possible. Only recently was this added again. But there seems to be no acceleration, so moving an old tab to the front takes forever. Even worse, this feature is still not available for private tabs (since you can’t select those at all).

    Quite often when I switch to the tab overview, it doesn’t automatically scroll to my current tab so I need to do that manually.

    I’m also not a fan of the “jump back in” view that shows up every so often instead of the content of my tab. Why they would assume I’m interested in anything besides what I intentionally opened is beyond me.

    Creating a new tab is more cumbersome than it needs to be. I think you were able to do that by scrolling to the right on the address bar of the rightmost tab. A dedicated button would be even better.

    I think it’s a great browser, and pretty much the only one I use, but in my experience everything does not work perfectly.