It works wonders! I build free-cameras and some other tools (all for offline games, of course) fully in Rust, and you'd be surprised how much you could do.
In one of them I hook into C++'s inheritance with no issue, just by understanding how everything works within the compiler you can do a lot.
I was an avid viewer of r/analog. I don't know if this was 'recent' or not, but every time someone post a naked picture, either good or not, it goes rapidly to Top posts.
Even though it used to had many comments like "This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman", the upvotes arrived anyway.
I think nowadays they mostly block the comments in those posts, but what used to be an inspiring subreddit that would pop from time to time in my feed, is not longer that interesting to me.
> “This photo is not interesting other than the naked woman”
My first instinct is to agree with this sentiment. There’s a lot of pretty mediocre photography that gets attention because “naked woman”.
At the same time, you could equally say “that landscape photo is not interesting if you take away the lake”. If you take away the interesting piece of a photo, yeah, it’s not interesting anymore. The fact is that people (but especially men) enjoy looking at naked and near-naked women. It’s a consistently compelling subject. It might be “easy” but it’s still compelling.
My dad was an amateur photographer for a while, and even got one of his photos published in the newspaper.
He said nothing improves a landscape picture more than having a person in the picture. I didn't believe him.
Later, I went on a trip to Hawaii, and took maybe 300 landscape pictures of its beauty. Upon looking at them at home, I realized he was right. The ones with people in them, even random strangers, were always more interesting.
Amazing photographers can shoot landscapes that are deeply compelling in their own right. Good photographers really can’t. There aren’t a lot of Ansel Adamses out there.
Weeelll, I don't find Ansel Adams's work very interesting. I have several coffee table art books, some of which have old west landscape pictures, and it's the people in them that make it work.
Something I do with my friends is look at Annie Liebovitz portraits and try to recreate the ones we like.
That’s totally fair if Adams’s doesn’t do much for you. Regardless, I’m in agreement with you that most landscapes are not actually that interesting without people in them. Humans are naturally drawn to images of other humans.
It’s like throwing bacon into an otherwise average recipe. Is it a cheap way to make it good? Yeah. But is it good? Probably. And very plausibly it tastes better than the more difficult recipe that lacks the bacon.
I've used it for fun to analyze some data of some community in real time without having to host anything on my side.
Doing data analysis in javascript feels a bit weird at first, but it allows you to write a bit more functional code than python which I ended up liking.
I dislike the plotting api but the pro of being automatically updated without me needing to do/host anything is cool.
I guess it's just as good as any other of the vendors you mentioned. I don't see why we shouldn't start with Apple but at the same time I don't think anyone opposes to the other companies being forced too.
At least I know I would like to run personalized software on my Switch without having to rooting it by other 'ways'.
LinkedIn I found has two very different purposes that often get mixed up.
1. Getting in contact with recruiters. Here you're basically inside the chat window 100% of the time, the only time you leave this is to connect with recruiters. I can speak from experience that this works, and will get you jobs.
2. Marketing. This is where you see the incessant posts from folks building "personal brands" but also folks marketing various products. While I haven't waded into that territory yet, I've spoken to many really good salespeople that have all said that LinkedIn drives leads for them like no other.
My takeaway from both of these is: "man LinkedIn is a goofy ass place but it works"
I have linkedin, but I never post anything (aside from occasional updates to my work experience section, whenever I switch employers, so once every ~4-6 years basically).
For me, the biggest use of LinkedIn is when recruiters reach out to me. My last 3 offers (a FAANG company, a very established publicly tradef “startup” dealing with storage, and a major hedge fund that was featured in the news a lot in the past few years) happened directly just due to a random recruiter reaching out to me in LinkedIn dms in the first place. Which has been extremely helpful to my career.
As for the other side of linkedin (the “marketing”/cringeposting one), i literally don’t need to even think about it, outside of just extracting pure entertainment value of it.
I’m pretty sure it is an alternate reality, fueled mostly by bot interaction. If you look at the comment history on a post, much of the time it appears to be flocks of bots posting “Very Insightful”, and often identically duplicated comments.
The posts themselves are usually strawmen meme-level content trying to fuel the attention economy.
I can only figure that there’s a lot of fake accounts trying to score remote jobs from North Korea or something.
Or worse, it's a biobot using the little palette of cringey prebaked replies you can post: "very insightful, thanks for posting", "interesting thought", etc.
The posts I see most often on LinkedIn are ones that try to capture a trope of "flipping expectations" that people associate with great business people. Silly, inane conclusions are made about everyday events so that people who are startlingly mediocre can cling to them as a differentiating factor.
Basic politeness is sold as the secret hack to become the next Steve Jobs. Boasts of frugality are made and used to explain why the poster will inevitably become ultra-rich (no avocado toast, no lattes!). HR people explaining the mostly arbitrary reasons they passed over anonymous candidates, seeking to be seen as oracles of career success. Tech people saying "Ten things that separate junior developers from seniors" and then citing meaningless things like the modulo and ternary operators, or the poster's personal favorite whitespace style.
Realistic advice is hard to find, probably because it's so general in its best form that material would run out quickly. I think of Rob Dahm's old video where he suggested, Lamborghini in the background, to "Find something that you're so good at it feels like you're cheating." Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
> Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."
This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.
Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.
which music skills? you can learn enough music theory and pop-song writing skills in a few weekends to pump out club/pop music. Sure, playing instruments is a skill that takes a long time to hone, but anyone can download openMPT or something and toss out music. If money comes in and they want orchestra, there's been things like the Vienna Symphonic Library and the like for decades.
i've written and recorded about a dozen hours worth of music in my life and i assuredly did not go to school for it. The quote is about education, not practice. It also mentions "half-assed job" which is what you get in "six weeks" of work.
LinkedIn has the single worst search function out of any job board or website in general I've ever seen. It's astonishingly bad.
The only hit I got from LinkedIn applications turned me down because the CEO didn't think I had enough activity on LinkedIn.
Frankly that's a huge red flag. If you're concerned about how a potential engineer looks on LinkedIn, you probably don't know or care what an actually good and skilled employee looks like.
Yeah, I think the "pro-linkedin" comments here are probably valid, with the caveat that eventually everyone will quit using linkedin if there isn't more substance on these things at some point.
The way it's headed, it feels like AI is going to be writing 99% of posts at some point, and who wants to be a consumer of that? IDK, maybe lots of people, or at least maybe lots of people will continue to consume it because of how good AI will get at fine-tuning to your eyeballs, even though the people know they hate reading it.
I mean, I love ffmpeg, I use it a lot and it's fantastic for my needs, but I've found their public persona often misleading and well, this just confirms my bias.
> We made a 100x improvement over incredibly unoptimized C by writing heavily specific cpu instructions that the compiler cannot use because we don't allow it!
2x is still an improvement, but way less outstanding as they want it to publicize it because they used assembly.
This reminded me of the guy that built a meme database using iPhone's OCR as well [1].
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
In one of them I hook into C++'s inheritance with no issue, just by understanding how everything works within the compiler you can do a lot.
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