The editorial / opinion pages of both NYT and WaPo ruined them for me. Thinking people want to read provocative, thoughtful perspectives that may challenge them, but the people and the positions in those pages are by and large, utter trash. Notice I didn't say anything about politics of left or right - I think there's trash there of both sides. We're talking people who are not good writers, who add nothing to public discourse, and who I would say spread a lot of at best half-truths and ill-informed ideas. So, I can't see paying for either one even though at least some of the journalism outside those sections is at least ok. Frankly, I think they both ride their past reputations and the fact they have survived by being in major urban centers while their past competitors (IE: small town newspapers, etc) have died.
> The editorial / opinion pages of both NYT and WaPo ruined them for me. Thinking people want to read provocative, thoughtful perspectives that may challenge them, but the people and the positions in those pages are by and large, utter trash.
It sounds like you're emo-quitting over published perspectives that might be too challenging for you.
Oh for Pete's sake go back to your mom's basement you troll. Have you looked through your comments on this thread and others? You aren't adding to the dialog here, you are just being a jerk. No, I don't find the opinions of these writers challenging rather I get tired of having to go find sources that show just how munch bunk gets published. My beef is that I expect better from what are supposed to be journalistic leaders.
WaPo's opinion articles are by far the worst thing about their paper, and some of the writers are worse than others (Thiessen is a master of bad faith arguments and dishonesty), so I've been avoiding reading them. I wish they had a way to permanently hide them in the app.
The WSJ has equally horrid opinion pages, as does my local paper. Editorial sections are basically trash in general, avoid them like the plague and your experience will be much better.
Editorial sections are “clickbait” even before that was a thing. They’ve always existed to fire people up and sell papers.
The WSJ deserves its own special place in hell. Once upon a time 20ish+ years ago, it was solid business and economic news. Then they decided to do a redesign to be more general news, and then Murdoch came along and turned them into the comics.
I don't give The Economist a pass either. I started reading it in high school decades ago. Over time, they've moved away from deep journalism towards more of a weekly recap. If I want to know what happened this week, frankly I can get that from Twitter or Apple News for free. What is lacking is the kind of forward, somewhat out there perspective. There are still little bits of this with The Economist, but its a shell of its former self. I'd also remark that they have an angle on the world that I find at time ethically questionable.
I think that describes all opinion writers. I (almost) never read them. If you are reasonably well-informed about an issue, almost every opinion article is transparent nonsense and manipulation.
The only exceptions I've seen are Will Bunch, who writes for one of the local big city US news publications but seems to get wider distribution (maybe syndicated?), and The Bulwark, a conservative (in the actual non-Trump sense) publication that is actually intellectually honest. I think there's another that I wish I remembered atm.
My son, also 13, just went through a program at school where they built a basic website from scratch, then did some python, then some java. They had some kind of teaching environment, a bit like a code.org or Swift Playground. When I would look over his shoulder to help, he was certainly coding an answer, but the way it was set up was so contrived that I can't really say he learned any of those languages. He learned a set of contrived functions nominally using those languages that he assembled in order to get the right answers.
I share this as preamble to why I recommend Swift Playground...it will get them going and be somewhat self directed. They will feel like they are actually achieving a goal rather than just typing text. And, if they take it to the next level they will be able to transfer their knowledge into "real" apps.
Second to this would be Python, because it's a great teaching language. That said, I think it's about the curriculum you put in front of them even more than the language.
In this thread there are a lot of people overlooking that even someone who is financially disciplined can lose it all very quickly. Their own health or the health of someone close to them can drain those dollars quickly. A marriage goes sideways and you'll be lucky if the lawyers don't take it all. A few bad stock bets... point is, sure compound interest might make you a "millionaire" but it's a long way from those first millions to actual financial security, and LUCK plays a huge role.
Thank you for this - you put into words very well all of the problems I had with that book. In fact, I found myself very frustrated with the authors, wondering if they had any familiarity with all the rest of the decades of work that had been done in related fields outside Google.
From 2008-2018, I went all over the world handling incidents and attempting to teach companies how to do the kinds of things the author is talking about. It was multi-diciplinary and very demanding, both in terms of technical and organizational (political and communication) skills.
One of the core observations I made was that few companies were willing to actually get better. Rather than figure out what skills they lacked organizationally, or how to improve their processes, or how to align their goals and teams, or any of the lessons they could have learned, it was way easier and cheaper to just keep on status quo. SRE as a practice, a position, a skill - whatever it could have been, it instead failed to really exist apart from maybe a hero here and there who chose to care about it. SLOs (or whatever name might have been used) did not exist to actually measure or inform anything. They were a kind of placebo - come up with something that looks measurable, find a way to make sure we always score well, and make sure there is a wall between these metrics and anyone's compensation / job performance.
An example of this, at a very prominent health insurer. I identified issues that could have been solved for, let's say well under $10MM. Rather than do any of that work, the company threw about $50MM in new hardware at the problem. In another case, at a national name Pharma company, about every two years I went back out to do the same basic consulting engagement, because they lacked the leadership to develop the skills in house or to figure out how to align their teams with the work they actually did. Still another case (prominent bank), they had this serious problem that blocked their commercial lenders from doing their job... they finally called me in after about a year of fooling around, I got the problem fixed, rolled out a bunch of tooling and training, but I guarantee they never used any of it... again - problem outright blocked key bank personnel from doing their job and yet it took them a year to do anything about it.
So... I guess what I'm saying is that yes SRE work can be fun and rewarding, but it's just not something most companies have the maturity to really do. I read the Google SRE book way back when, but I didn't find it particularly insightful. Likewise, I'm not really sure what to take away from this blog - for me, it doesn't answer any questions about a clear path forward and leads me to believe not much has changed since I left that kind of work years ago.
May I ask - did you have a previous background in music? When I think of my own experiences and those of not only my kids but other musicians I've observed, two years is really just a starting point (IE: you should not have expected to have any degree of proficiency unless you already have considerable musical background)
No, I started out with violin, then moved to piano, did nothing for 5 years, then played saxophone for 17 years and then stopped for a couple of decades.
The big difference between violin and say piano is that with a piano if you hit a key with a certain velocity it will make a certain sound. Over and over again. On the violin it isn't nearly that simple and just forming the tone will take a long time (in a way you never stop getting better at that).
A fun illustration of this with violin is this TwoSetViolin video [1] where they and 8 non-violinist musician friends play a game similar to "Telephone". They split into two teams each consisting of one of the TwoSetViolin violinists and 4 of the others.
Each round one of the violinists plays a simple melody for one non-violinist member of the other team. Then that person takes the violin and tries to play it for another non-violinist member of their team and so until the last non-violinist plays it for the violinist on their team. If the violinist can identify the piece their team gets a point.
Oh that brings back some painful memories, hilarious though, and some of them are surprisingly good! (and some are just horrific). The most clear memory I have from those days is that during one of the lessons one of the violin teachers dogs keeled over and died. I think she blamed me for that...
It also makes me wonder if I would be able to get any sound out of a violin today.
That's a really interesting observation you make, and one where I'll have to think on it for a bit. One of my thought exercises on this is to think about Glen Gould vs. Simone Dinnerstein's interpretation of Bach's Goldberg Variations. There's something I like about the way Dinnerstein hits those keys that is different to my ear than Gould.
There is the myth of 'touch', the problem with the myth is that the piano was designed with the very explicit goal of eliminating it, just like it's predecessor, the harpsichord.
I wish I knew precisely where in the Blue Mountains the supposedly largest fungi resides... I live near that area, hunt for mushrooms there, and it has never been my observation that there is anything unique about the terrain or conditions that would be particularly beneficial for mass fungi growth.
I think most people in this area have a pretty general idea where it is... While I am at best an amateur mycologist, where drdec below has me angry at his/her sarcasm is that as a human being, no, it isn't at all obvious why the world largest fungi would end up here rather than say in the WA / OR / BC cascades, or for example in the Olympics in Washington State. Those areas certainly have more of the mushrooms that we prize for human consumption, have longer seasons in which those fungi are available too (I'm hypothesizing due to moisture). Remoteness could be a factor (IE: less human contact), but those areas have plenty of very remote terrain as well. Further, I think it is a really interesting question as we contemplate the effects of climate change in these areas.
