nevinera

I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly.

Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish this complex task", "how do I recognize a place I've been before" (that last one is.. an interesting issue, because it turns out the things I use to recognize a scene are _almost_ sufficiently unique, but _not quite_; I occasionally get locations confused entirely because their streets meet at the same angle/distances, or the hedge and building are similar heights).

I.. don't understand how AI could be an "equalizer", unless we're talking about helping the 1% catch up to the 0.01%? This is one of the most direct ways to turn dollars into outcomes since _legal slave labor_, and the people in control of the machines have huge vested interests in ensuring that power _stays_ in their hands.

Power accretes.

I used the models with a good workflow, but found them less than helpful. But I think that if I worked in a less expressive language I'd be very enthusiastic.

Aye. It's not the smartphone that's the problem, it's the async notifications pulling you into social media traps.

I dropped those apps about 8 years ago, but started to do most of my _reading_ on my phone - when I pick up my phone and habitually open something now, it's a book of some sort. It's a good idea to have something to replace habits with, if possible.

DRY is _not a best practice_. Repetition is a "code smell" - it often suggests a missing abstraction that would allow for code reuse (what sort of abstraction depends on the language and context), but "blindly-drying" is in my experience the _single most frequent mistake_ made my mid-to-senior engineers.

My experience is mostly in Ruby though, so I'm not sure how well it generalizes here :-)

These types of posts are .. well thought-out, and usually posted by someone with relevant education. But they are not reviewed documents or journal articles, and you can _tell_ when someone is mixing in a lot of their own educated guessing with the research they've done. Which is the case here.

He probably wasn't intending it to be taken as authoritative source, but that's how most people will _read_ something like this after running into it on the front page of HN. And most of this is just.. guesswork.

First ran into this on persistent servers, where the deployed instance knew branch names github had long forgotten about.. Someone pushed a branch named "bugfix", and `git fetch` started erroring.

You get even _more_ interesting problems if part of your team has case-insensitive file-systems!

Indeed, if I were running that site, I would now implement the ability to turn on intentional non-randomness for _specific people_, and begin embedding messages in the sequences of comics, or selecting the same two comics 28 times in a row on occasion. Heck, stick the referrer in the session and give everyone coming in from _that blog post_ wildly divergent randomness characteristics :-)

While I don't really _disagree_ with any of this, I want to raise a point from the other direction - it's possible (and for some of us, absolutely necessary) to build software such that holding a large "structure of thoughts and possibilities" in your head is not required.

I find myself largely incapable of doing so, open-plan office or not, and have compensated by adopting development approaches that break problems down in consistent enough ways (into small enough pieces) that the structures I have to pick up and put down are never all that complex. Which is good, because they fall out of my head just all the time. ADHD, a very poor memory for detail, and a role that has me responsible for juggling many tasks concurrently would _destroy_ my productivity if this article were universal truth.

Don't get me wrong, I _hate_ working in an open-plan office. But the impact it has on my output is not because the interruptions affect my flow, it's because the constant social contact stresses the heck out of me >.<

I gained the most from gobase.org, just clicking through professional games. The tool you can review/replay games with lets you try to guess the next move - just let them play the first 10-15 moves and then start guessing. Don't spend a ton of time thinking, just _guess_. Guess over and over, and if you don't guess the move after 5-10 tries, have it tell you, try for a few seconds to understand why that might be a good move, and continue.

You should totally do the tactics and puzzles that you can find (that same site has a bunch), but there's a lot more strategic recognition and pattern-matching in go than chess.

I'm also interested to hear if there are better tools though in the last .. Christ, twenty years? I'm old now -.-

It's an awkward space - requiring us to pay them to put our profiles there is the main way to keep the content valuable/accurate.. but while that's fairly typical for hirers, it'd feel scammy to job-seekers.

I think there's room for such a service, but growing it into a viable model would be a real project, and probably not a distraction a business would want to take on except as a pivot.