jfaucett

> From what I gather, aerobic exercise...

That was my impression as well after doing some research in this area a while back. Although I looked specifically at longevity and cardiovascular studies there was a peak benefit at about 2hrs per week after which virtually no more benefits were observed.

Here's what I try to do:

1. Start with the intuition. (The big concepts i.e. for BigO trying to figure out the best, worst and average number of steps it takes to run a function as the input size grows). Make sure everyone gets the big picture, core concepts, and intuition before moving on.

2. Use as many graphics and visual aids as possible.

3. Let people work step-wise up to getting the full solution i.e. get them to just sort one element in a list. Then change the algorithm to sort two elements, etc..

4. Start very easy, I mean very easy (like sorting a list of 1,2 and then 3 elements), then let people slowly step up in difficulty until they implement full algorithms and data structures. Also make sure everyone can at least describe, draw, and sketch out solutions that may not necessarily be precise but cover the "gist" of what the algorithm is about.

5. Use Stories: If you can tell them stories with algorithms / data structures its even better. (For stacks I like using the example of the professor grading essays on his desk, or a person browsing the internet, for binary search I like looking for a book in the library, etc)

6. Use Lots of Examples: When explaining the mathematics be sure to have exercises/examples which let them play a lot with the parameters (RStudio or jupyter is nice for this), make sure each expression is clearly broken down and clarified. Also having positive examples (for how it should work) and negative examples (for common mistakes and when things are incorrect) can help improve understanding too.

hope some of these tips help. Good luck!

> until you need to upgrade, then you have months of no business value delivery and need to bring...

This is not the case in my experience. I've upgraded pretty decent sized apps (hundreds of models,lines of routes, etc) and in my experience it would take a couple hours a day spread out over a few days a month and then I was done (for versions: 3-4 and 4-5, never done 3-5).

I would say most of the problem is making sure everyone on the team just keeps all functionality as-is. It can be tempting for team members to refactor as they go through but this then becomes a huge time-sync. Anyways, thats my exp on rails but I have no other frameworks to compare it to.

Has anyone migrated a massive app from some PHP Framework like Symfony or from a java framework like Play, or any framework with a large code base?

I have had to upgrade massive systems that were not done with any framework and full of one-off solutions with in-house developed libraries and it was an absolute nightmare, but I'm sure this depends on the language and team. However, in general I think an open-source library used by millions or even hundreds of people is going to have better documentation, bug coverage, support, etc. than something done in house, just IMHO.

So I guess my question would be, what does the alternative look like?

> 1. we aren't all rich ...

Its hard to discuss any of the things you mention since it all depends on what particular system you are looking at. If we constrain ourselves to the US system we're still going to have massive differences even within states and within counties within states. That doesn't mean many of the subjects you mention aren't issues, but you're confusing a state with a cause IMHO.

We could make ourselves all almost perfectly equal tomorrow by destroying all wealth and living as hunter-gatherers again. That wouldn't solve any of the problems you mention though. So clearly, inequality is not a fundamental issue underlying all these problems.

Personally, I think the major factors will vary depending on the context and problem domain. For access to healthy affordable foods, it could be something as complex as subsidizing or taxing various agricultural products, or as simple as removing all subsidies and tariffs and letting cheaper foreign made produce flood the markets.

With your third point, that certain people attempt to use power - which is a function of many factors not just wealth - to manipulate the laws and the system to their own advantage is something that is remarkably well documented in the political science and sociological literature. I'm not sure what the best approaches are towards mitigating this. Certainly, high degrees of transparency and accountability as well as a swift and well functioning judicial system would be my first guesses at the largest factors, based on my experiences with South American and European economic data. Personally I think the more checks and balances i.e. decentralization of the concentration of power mechanisms (i.e. ability to tax, ability to imprison, etc.) the system allows for is another key factor.

> If everyone is rich, prices just rise to the point where everyone isn't rich anymore.

Rich and poor are always tied to purchasing power which itself is tied to productivity, efficiency and innovation within an economy. (as well as the traditional price theory, demand/supply, etc.) I used rich/poor because those are simple terms everyone can understand more easily than PPP or Genuine Savings, etc. (however, wealth is a better term I should have probably used in its stead)

For instance, the phone you can buy and hold in your hand today for $200 is vastly more powerful than the most expensive IBM mainframes of just 20 years ago - A CEO of those times could not even afford the simple phone many refuges have in their Rucksacks these days. Are they rich because of this? It depends on what particular measurement for "rich" you are using.

To answer your question. Yes, ceteris peribus if everyone gets more money instantly (i.e. money supply increases) all prices will rise accordingly and there is a net null effect, however, and this is key, if that increase is in wealth i.e. capital assets, productivity, everyone is better off and prices will increase according to traditional demand-pull.

> We are social animals who evolved in small communities

I agree with you. First, historically speaking, large disparities have led to revolutions and countless atrocities. Also our neural cortex isn't so highly evolved that it doesn't bow to the will of our chimp brain most of the time anyway, which is just to say we have a plethora of evolved intuitions and feelings. However, just because we have some innate biological sense of right or wrong or good or bad, that doesn't necessarily mean we should advocate for that in a normative way.

That was kind of my point. If we are going to build a better society I think it is important what normative values we strive for since we are not completely controlled by our impulses and those values will certainly have an effect on the systems we design and the relative effectiveness or lack thereof.

What I think people like the author who are arguing about inequality are missing is that inequality is not the fundamental issue or put another way I think that tackling it is the wrong goal to have. For instance, if we are all rich, it doesn't matter if some even richer people can have flying cars and homes in the sky. In fact, I would prefer this scenario to a perfectly equal situation in which everyone lives in the same abject poverty or almost as bad, we have a crawling rate of innovation and don't get around to making market ready medical devices, human-AI biosembiotic interfaces, etc. for another century or so.

Our goal should be to increase wealth in general and ensure that the median wealth per capita increases or steadily increases for various segments of the population. Ideally, you would have faster median expansions in lower income segments of the population but in my mind, even if the top %1 had an increased wealth per annum of say 0.05% and the lowest had a lesser increase of 0.02%, I would still prefer that (assuming we've controlled for PPP, inflation, etc) than a system where the poorest increased at 2% a year, the richest dropped -2% and our overall economic productivity declined or stayed roughly the same year after year.

Overall, though I agree with the author in that too much emphasis (in the news at least), is put on GDP. Its still a useful indicator of productivity in an economy and from an investment perspective, but there are as he rightly mentions many qualitative properties left out of this one measurement. Which is kind of always the case is it not? Every time we measure something it measures a specific thing which we decide to interpret in a particular way, its funny how often we generalize that act to areas for which the original measurement was never designed.

> Every time - every single time...

Just thought I'd provide some counter data here. I've built small services in Sinatra, which did not warrant the usage of Rails and never had to change anything, having them in fully functional operation for years.

I could have built these little apps in Rails, but I did not need it, never did, and my code/deployment/etc. is cleaner and smaller because of it.

Also these services have always been quite small (a few endpoints or functions), which is what I think Sinatra is best for.

The primary utility of money is this: it is the good that best lends itself to exchanges for other goods.

Its been clear to me for some time now, and I'm not alone in this, that as the properties of Bitcoin have moved further away from its primary function as a useful unit of exchange that its usage would decline.

There are other crypto-currencies which are now much better suited as a medium of exchange, which ones people will prefer as time progresses remain to be seen, but unless Bitcoin takes a major corrective path, I would be quite surprised to find Bitcoin in that final set of widely utilized currencies.

Yes. For me the greatest remaining mysteries are more in this order.

1. Nature of Life (we are still nowhere near understanding how it arose or how living organisms work in all their intricate detail).

2. Nature of Consciousness - what is consciousness, how can living matter instantiate it, how can we quantify it, etc?

3. Origin of the Universe

4. Why do we seem so alone in the Universe?

5. Resolving Quantum Mechanics / Gravity

6. Understanding Time

> why is it `nobody.wants.to.read` but `no.body.wants.to.write`?

Made me think there's also a big difference in what nobody prefers reading vs. what nobody prefers writing.

    No:
	Body:
		Wants:
			To:
				Write:
					- YAML

vs.

    <No>
        <Body>
            <Wants>
                <To>
                     <Write>
                         <item>YAML</item>
                     </Write>
                </To>
            </Wants>
        </Body>
    </No>

vs.

    {
       "no" : {
          "body" : {
              "wants" : {
                 "to" : {
                    "write" : [ "YAML" ]
                  }
               }
           }
       }
    }

Which would you rather write?

> Usually oppressing a major marginalized group with blunt, heavy-handed approaches only serves to intensify local support.

I think that is at best fragile as a general statement. I would argue that increases in local support are dependent on other factors besides heavy-handedness or harshness, and that these vary on a case by case basis. For a plethora of counter-examples see:

The history of the Jewish people, Native Americans during colonialism, the anabaptists or the calvinists in European history, the Muslim populations after the conquest of Granada.

I'm amazed at how much this person's philosophy for learning mirrors my own. Even down to the details, building habits, pushing yourself to the edge always, deep focused flow based work.

What I would add is you should feel a little bit of stress from the difficulty of the task. As an example, recently, I did research and in an unknown field both for the first time. I was a little tense, it forced me to focus every minute. If I didn't know what a formula or term meant in a paper I had to figure it out, because I had to be able to evaluate and possibly implement it.

I had to look at papers and evaluate them on their quality b/c I was using those to mold my own. I made many,many mistakes and failed hard many times. It was often very unpleasant (like running when you're fit but still not quite getting enough air on the last leg). But I kept pushing through. At the end, I learned more on this project than I had in a very long time.

Anyways, hope my experience can help someone else to push through and see the light on their project.

> On the other hand, cost will eventually limit the parallelism side of the trend and physics will limit the chip efficiency side.

Anyone working on chip architecture care to give their opinion on the next 10-20 years in chip design? It would really interest me to know if chip designers think Moore's law will continue, since that is probably going to be a big factor in the timeline for AGI.