justinmeiners

I think those are good points. I don't know much about comedy or entertainment but I get the same feeling that getting "chosen" matters more than your content.

On the other hand, great work doesn't happen by accident. Great businesses are a result of good management. Good products are results of good design. Those don't happen by accident, just like a great program doesn't write itself. You may not be a warren buffet, due to limited opportunities. But, you could leave someone like that penniless and nameless and i'm sure he could leverage his skills and knowledge to be "successful", even if not a mega-billionaire.

Marketing and sales is an important component which is left out (if you care about making money). That's also something you can deliberately work on and improve.

Do you think being good at something and successfully selling or marketing your work is like buying a lottery ticket?

Pg has a quote along the lines of "easier jobs that are hard to get fired from are worth more money." Of course not every public job is easy, rather often there are benefits involved other than cash

Absolutely. It's almost unheard of to work at a major academic institution without one. Becoming a professor is all preparation from 18-30, and then was an assistant you still have to grind and run errands to "earn your place".

I agree with you, but unfortunately our government is using them for that purpose.

The intent of that thread is to peer into his tweets to associate him with an untouchable "white supremacist", as opposed to any particular wrong doing. That's not even a description, it's just a reason to dehumanize someone.

> so I unfollowed.

I completely encourage that.

I'm not asking for his political views to be platformed, just that we treat them separately. In other words, it's not in bad taste to respect Nick for a Bitcoin opinion, even if what else he has going on we believe or even know to be incorrect.

> Just because somebody is good in one area that doesn't mean they have any authority in another

Precisely what I am saying. We can applaud Nick for contributions to cryptography without importing his views of other things. We don't have to weigh his political opinions at all.

> just wanting that people are decent human beings.

This sounds to me like "having views I like, because only undecent people would think otherwise". Do you have an instance of Nick being nasty or indecent?

Is he mean? Or do associate those views with mean people.

I just don't understand why everyone needs to be a PR polished suit. These people work on computers, not administer public policy. We can appreciate their contributions and ignore their quirks or the fact they don't have all the popular opinions.

That is true, but it still provides tons of examples of functors such as fundamental group and homology.

These sorts of interesting functors are not common outside of graduate math.

> hope he isn't

You wish he was more like you?

This is a good reason why he hid his identity. Any real person would be more disappointing then the legend constructed in imagination.

I suspect this is a reversal of cause and effect.

Did consumers demand subscription services? Or did vendors (led by Adobe) decide to change to subscriptions to get uniform cash flow?

At agencies I have worked at all creatives I worked with would prefer to spend $200-400 and have a permanent software license. Perhaps this isn't a representative group.

Houses, cars, etc are far more reliable and well designed than software. Think about all the extreme conditions cars continue to function in. How many people don't even follow basic maintenance schedules?

Another key difference is that in maintenance of your home, you have complete control. It's extremely easy to understand and act to improve or maintain it. When large software systems (like the IRS login) have problems, you are totally helpless.

PG benefits from self-confidence as well (certainly to a less degree). Being extremely self aware and re-questioning ones positions constantly doesn't seem to be a winning trait in business and promotion. At the very least, if it's being done internally you want to continue to broadcast consistent and confident messages.

Category theory is mostly useful for modeling computation theoretically and thus designing languages.

It's also not that helpful to learn unless you already know a lot of deeper math, like introductory algebraic topology, etc.

Doesn't shunting yard solve this pretty simply? Once you have an expression in RPN, building expression trees is pretty easy.