I have to laugh at this. I worked in strategy consulting, where my coworkers were all MBAs from Harvard, Stanford or, in our office, Tokyo University. We had many cases where people had tasks of various sorts that they would handle with the equivalent of this screenshot-of-the-data approach. I, a fellow consultant, often groaned when I saw such things and wrote little utilities for them, figured out how to dynamically generate PDFs for their presentation data, or whatever.
At one point, the general mgr of our office, said that these things were so valuable to everyone, and I was so good at it and seemed to enjoy it so much, that he was wondering if it wouldn't make more sense for him to take me off of my own consulting cases and make IT projects my only case. Of course, IT people were thought of as lowly support staff for the elite consultants, so it would mean a pay cut and end my consulting career. This wasn't a warning; he was just thinking that this might better serve the needs of the firm.
That day I stopped being a valuable IT resource for my coworkers and reserved my dev skills for my giving myself a "sustainable competitive advantage" in my own work on my own cases.
If it helps, I'm over 65 and while I've seen it to an extent in other people my age, it hasn't happened to most of my friends and most importantly, as far as I can tell it hasn't happened to me.
Your father notwithstanding, I think education and awareness have a lot to do with who gets sucked into the fake news vortex and who doesn't. On the other hand, I've seen some of my friends whom I thought would know better post some real dingers at times.
Because though there might be building trades conferences, there are no hammer conferences. Oh, there will be tool vendors at the building trades conferences, there might be sessions on "Efficient Hammering Techniques Using Machine Learning", but there are no conferences about hammers. Don't forget about the blacksmith conference next week, they'll have hammer vendors, too.
I dunno, a Ruby conference kinda makes sense because one will mostly build web sites with it, so it's really going to be a "Building $FOO with $TOOL" kind of thing. But C is so widely used, it's like having that HammerFest 2019 with everyone from people splitting wood with a sledghammer to jewelers with their teensy little tapping tools. I just don't see the diamond workers drinking with the lumberjacks at the hotel bar after hours. :-) I jest, but it's mostly about networking anyway, otherwise just watch the videos online.
A modern vegetable farm or hothouse operation is eight times as hi-tech as your ruby on rails site. A maglev train and its infrastructure eight times again.
> We convinced our friends in the current Y Combinator batch to let us stay in a closet at their East Palo Alto home office for $600 per month. If we spent $1,000 a month we would have 25 months of runway, which seems infinite.
I'm all for frugality and cost controls, but this is ridiculous. It's things like this that brainwash a generation of fools into throwing their lives away at nonsensical ideas.
I'm not saying it's never right to put it all on the line and bet on your idea. I'm saying the vast majority of the time it's a terrible idea and doing something like this serially would make for a terrible existence.
Are you kidding? I would do it in a heartbeat. I'm not joking. Who wouldn't want to work on something awesome with all their heart with their friends in East Palo Alto for a couple years? Why not? What an incredible, amazing experience.
Ok, I can think of a bunch of people who wouldn't want to work like that. But for a certain type of person, that experience is more amazing than the cushiest "normal" job could ever be.
It was my dream since 17. It never came, because I never found anyone else in the midwest who was interested in starting anything. Everybody wants to work for someone else, or hates the VC ecosystem instead of playing the game. And what can you do alone? I should've moved to SF, even if it was into someone's closet.
The reason why we use words like 'web server' is so that we don't need to carry around a 5000 word description of a 'web server'.
Just as when building a car one would use a word like 'engine' rather than carry around a 5000 word description of an 'engine'.
By compressing highly complex machines into single words we're able to build much large machines by treating that complex machine as a single component of the much large machine.
Furthermore, I fail to see how whether one can describe nginx in 5000 words or less means that our industry lacks the vocabulary to describe components of more complex machines built from those components.
If your developer requires a 5000 word description of nginx to type
apt-get install nginx
then they are a tool and need to be fired.
Most of the problems with our industry stem from exactly this kind of problem, rather than look at the vast array of components that do the exact same thing they are about to implement, they use something like nginx to make nginx, except instead of installing nginx they made a 5000 line nginx config file to reimplement most of what nginx already does.
If you've ever seen
{ "key" : "23", "value": "Michael Jordan" }
then you know what I'm talking about in regards to the stupidity of this industry using components to make the component it already is.
This question is like when someone says they are intelligent then someone gives them a wrote memorization test about the agreed upon symbols we use to encode those words on paper. While memory is required for intelligence, not having memorized a particular encoding of a particular word is not an indication that one does not possess intelligence.
To be honest, this isn't the best list, it's a bit too blog heavy. I've started reading up on ML only recently but here are my recommendations. Note that I haven't went through all of them in entirety but they all seem useful. Note that a lot of them overlap to a large degree and that this list is more of a "choose your own adventure" than "you have to read all of these".
Reqs:
* Metacademy (http://metacademy.org) If you just want to check out what ML is about this is the best site.
