Oh, another fun one: I once got an offer letter via Docs. The edit history included the original paste from another candidate’s offer letter, including their name and salary. Useful for benchmarking!
Yep. I do this because I explicitly do not want a third party to see my thought process. If I wanted the reader to see my edits and second thoughts, I would have included them in the final document.
Don't forget about typing patterns, that could be used to deanonymize you across different platforms (anywhere that you type into a webpage that runs javascript):
Yeah I think it'll be location dependent. FWIW I've got both by me and they're equally terrible as far as the availability and knowledge of their employees. Lowes edges out Home Depot a tiny bit for me simply because I've never been accosted by a sanctioned in-store roaming sales person for solar or siding at Lowes (yet!).
I get hit up for gutter guards every trip at my Lowe’s. I have a stationary woman hawking Generac and HVAC installs at my Home Depot.
I’d agree though, it’s department dependent. The electrical at my HD is an unorganized mess, but their plumbing section is world-class. Lowe’s is oddly flip-flopped. To Lowe’s great credit, their staff has those little tablets with inventory locations on them including all the top-shelf and end cap locations the website doesn’t show. Those usually save my trip, HD doesn’t seem to have an equivalent.
I've found it to be very datetime dependent. I walking the aisles on a late Sunday night recently and the only time I saw an employee was at the self checkout before I left.
That was true for a long time, but before that, Home Depot's customer service was terrific too. I think that's a cost that gets cut by a focus on shareholder value. Local hardware stores are still going to be better, with the caveat it may take a decade before they smile when you walk in.
I used to frequent a wonderful Ace Hardware with some regularity.
The old lady that always seemed to be behind the register eventually started greeting me by name when I walked in. (I don't recall ever giving her my name; maybe she remembered seeing on a credit card or something.)
After the pleasantries (which didn't seem fake at all), one of the greybeards present would appoint themselves as my personal shopper. I'd go down my list of demands that was only vaguely sorted by department: "One M8x1.25x80mm all-thread stainless Philips screw, a 16x20 furnace filter, a box of #8x3/4 sheet metal screws, and uh... what do you have for can openers?"
And then we'd make a lap or two of the store to get these things, and I'd pay and GTFO.
Purely anecdotal as well but it really feels like a quantity over quality thing between the two. It takes significantly longer to find someone in orange, but they’re as helpful as I can reasonably expect. Whereas Lowe’s employees tend to be both useless and annoying.
Opposite data point, where I live, there's lots of people working the floor. I'm usually asked if I need help at least once when I'm there. Maybe it depends on the store or whatever the umbrella org is.
Not exactly your main point, but where’d you go to learn calculus? I did the usual classes in high school but none since, and I’d love to develop a better appreciation for it.
Check out Mosaic Calculus and see what you think: https://www.mosaic-web.org/MOSAIC-Calculus/. It's a free resource and it takes an interesting perspective on calculus pedagogy.
I find 3blue1brown to be a great resource to build up good intuition about math topics, his videos about calculus and linear algebra are wonderful in particular. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDMsr9K-rj53... is his essence of calculus series, I found the visualizations made it a lot easier to grok.
I can second 3blue1brown as intro, but anything practical needs practise. Get your local 12th grade or undergrad math book which has problems to solve will bring more focus and faster learning. Have a list of problems to solve in your head while learning theory has been faster for me than just learning theory.
My suggestion is using Khan Academy if you want to better your math knowledge. It's really quiet good for that sort of thing. It was just starting to take off when I finished my degree. I wish it was available before then.
Learning stuff that doesn’t help in work(calculus is not helpful for 99% of software engineering) is really hard if you don’t base it in reality I find. Maybe it’s just me but I would never read a text book for fun so suggesting learning by reading a text book seems crazy. Calculus can be fun and interesting but the teacher has to actively try to make it so. The learning will take longer but you’re more likely to see it through and I think it’s more likely to stick long term too.
I learned way more reading crafting interpreters than I did in my compiler class for example.
That’s interesting because I can’t imagine learning a subject without a textbook. I have a hard time believing another medium would have the depth and density to get all the points across. Although it does depend on the subject matter and one’s learning goals.
But I also do read textbooks for fun… Now that I have a few decades of experience in a lot of these subjects I get way more out of the books. And I can start to understand more of the meta information. Like, of all the things the author could’ve used as an example, why did they pick that. Also, it’s hugely interesting for me to look at the homework problems and theorize why this particular problem was picked. Especially fun for electrical engineering books. But ya, I’m weird like that.
Yeah I think the context matters a lot there. I’m assuming it means “on a state by state basis”, which is true. But within my state, at least, family income, outside spending, and property tax revenues correlate very strongly with outcomes.
I've seen that too, but to my understanding it is less about the money and more about the parent participation. Wealthy school districts don't have any problem with finding volunteers for all sorts of activities, because one of the parents is frequently a stay-at-home parent.
This is true, but it’s also true that the money buys all of those extra activities and services. At my kids’ school, the garden program, music program, arts program, and teachers aides are all funded by the PTA. The field trips are funded by the students families so must be calibrated to their budgets. There are also volunteers associated with all of those programs, but they wouldn’t exist without the money.
A few (much wealthier) towns over, the district wide PTA raises millions of dollars yearly to support additional programs and facilities, and the district can offer higher salaries because of the larger tax base. Again, lots of parent involvement, but there’s also more to be involved in.
FWIW, the .net folks seem to have put a lot of effort into the native AOT pipeline in the last few releases. We have a large, non-trivial application with a fair amount of legacy code, and getting it AOT’d in .net 10 (targeting wasm, even!) was not an insane lift.
How is the WASM target looking nowadays? I tried it in 2023 and early 2024, and it was far from complete (JS interop, poor documentation scattered across GitHub issues, and so on). I still can't find a single trustworthy source of documentation on how to proceed. C# would look great at the edge (Cloudflare Workers).
In January my daughter had a pretty scary stomach issue that had us in the ER twice in 24 hours and that ended in surgery (just fine now).
The first ER doc thought it was just a stomach ache, the second thought a stomach ache or maybe appendicitis. Did some ultrasounds, meds, etc. Got sent home with a pat on the head, came back a few hours later, still no answers.
I gave her medical history and all of the data from the ER visits to whatever the current version of ChatGPT was at the time to make sure I wasn’t failing to ask any important questions. I’m not an AI True Believer (tm), but it was clear that the doctors were missing something and I had hit the limit of my Googling abilities.
ChatGPT suggested, among an few other diagnoses, a rare intestinal birth defect that affects about 2% of the population; 2% of affected people become symptomatic during their lifetimes. I kind of filed it away and looked more into the other stuff.
They decided it might be appendicitis and went to operate. When the surgeon called to tell me that it was in fact this very rare condition, she was pretty surprised when I said I’d heard of it.
So, not a one-shot, and not a novel discovery or anything, but an anecdote where I couldn’t have subconsciously guided it to the answer as I didn’t know the answer myself.
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