>But I can’t look up in a book how precisely psychotherapy fixes depression.
Well, you can for CBT. CBT goes by the assumption that a lot of depression comes from negative thoughts and it tries to change the way you think and therefore the way you feel. And CBT is the most scientifically backed up form of psychotherapy. So it looks like that works.
Sure, we don't fully understand the brain yet, but we are making progress.
>And when every other aspect of your life is being increasingly optimized by and for others, it is a small revolutionary act to be inconvenient.
That hit me. People often ask me why I do things so "inconvenient". Why do I not order everything online? Why do I not regularly order Pizza, but literally go into the restaurant (alone)? In short: Why do I sometimes (not always) take the long, hard route? Why do I scroll through the Gigabytes of Music on my HDD, to search for little gems, then to just let spotify recommend me the next best thing?
I think the answer, for me, is to just live in that moment and enjoy it. People often complain that they don't have enough time, but there is plenty of time, you just have to use it. Yes it can be inconvenient, but it feels liberating for me, even if it's on a very very small scale. Be more inconvenient.
I really love that quote, too. A few friends and I have been talking about going back to "dumb" phones again, just because they were more fun. Same vein.
I tried that too, but it's just not practical. Even just going without gApps is difficult, but doable. Having some sort of encrypted messenger (like Signal) seems kinda necessary in times like these, especially to communicate with others who do not have the same mindset.
My solution is to have as few Apps as possible (I mainly use my smartphone just for texts and calls) and """just""" stop using it all the time, even just leave it at home on purpose sometimes. My screen time is well under 1h per day and that feels really good. I even resist having my mail accounts on my phone, which has two reasons: Not checking it all the time and a little bit security, since no one could access them if i'd lose my phone.
Oh, also one main factor for me was music. I am just very very sensitive to noises around me, especially when programming, so I need to have my NC headphones on while at work. Otherwise I'd go crazy.
Normies used to use IE. Then their techier friends asked them if they have used FF or Chrome and they moved on. Don’t underestimate the impact of local experts on the choices of people who don’t care/have time to explore.
Because both were a lot faster than IE. Nowdays almost everyone uses Chrome, Safari or Edge. Because Firefox is rather slow given the current competitors, not because the others care more about privacy (Also because that's just what their devices come with)
The "normie" internet is some kind of hell, but they seem to be content.
"We" need to do more / better to educate them!
I tried to implement pi-hole for some extended family members. They asked me to turn it off within a week because they couldn't watch advertising videos to earn a new 'life' on candy crush (or something closely resembling that).
I can't relate to "normies" anymore, it's too late for me...
Techies care enough about ad blockers that they will install Firefox on normies computers, just so when their normie friend wants to show them a youtube video, they don't spend 15 seconds watching some absurd commercial.
Ad blocking is at least as big a deal as speed in terms of browsing comfort.
I assume you don't have to click them anymore nowadays?
Should be fairly simple to find a correlation between ads shown to users and products sold, no?? I guess tracking solves this case.
Also as others said, there are quite a few people who still click them or click the first ad-links in google searches
I think there are not many people that have few distractions. It's a (very very hard) decision to force yourself getting rid of them or ignoring them. Distractions are everywhere. At some point you have to resist and move on.
I'd say that's what the README page is for that you can create and gets shown at the top of your profile.
I summarized my most important projects, the languages I know and some other simple facts about me. Mainly because i have a lot of "trash" on my gitlab which is just for personal use (I am always unsure if i should keep that public anyways)
I always linked my gitlab profile in all my applications. If I had any code on it which might be relevant to the position I also mentioned it in my cover letter. Barely anyone ever mentioned my gitlab projects or ask things about it. Just this one guy, he was confused that my master thesis was stating I handed it in in 2021 and asked why i didn't have a job yet. Thanks to this man I found out there is a typo on the cover of my thesis, because i handed it in 2022.
It was kinda embarrassing, but I also felt joy that there are actually people out there who look at my stuff. The job didn't fit, but it was still a good experience.
So yeah: Investing a few minutes in writing up a personal readme which gets shown on my gitlab was worth it. I can recommend!
You need to distinguish between filtering and interviewing.
Most interviewers will not discuss your public work because they want to be unbiased and have the same discussion with multiple candidates without any other factors other than your performance in the interview itself influencing their assessment. They are doing the right thing.
Where a portfolio can help you is in getting you from application to being invited to interview, which can be a challenge when there are many applications for a role.
In some cases it might also influence a hiring manager's or hiring committee's decision as a tie-breaker between you and another candidate who did just as well as you did in interview, but I believe that's less common.
I haven't. Because (free, as in free beer) chatGPT is extremely slow, I have to make a rather extensive proompt to get the result I want to, and then I still have to debug most code.
That's not very convenient, atleast for now. I got so used to search engines by now, that it only takes a few keywords to get the expected result. Be it a SO-answer or a documentation page. And as people have mentioned, chatGPT was learned on the stuff that's on the internet, so if there will never be any new stuff, because people just use AI, then it will not learn and won't answer your new questions. For some edge cases I might try AI here or there, but usually it's not for me.
Hell, there comes even an example to my mind. I recently just asked chatGPT what a single-issue 5 stage pipeline on a CPU actually means. I wanted to know if, especially, the "single-issue" meant that only one instruction is present in the pipeline at a time, or if a new one gets shifted in on every clock cycle (if there is no hazard). It just couldn't answer it straight-forward. It was also kinda hard to find the exact definition on the internet. I found it in a book from the 90s which was chilling in my book shelf (Computer architecture and parallel processing by Kai Hwang). Hint: Single-issue just means that only one instruction can be in one stage at a time, but still multiple get processed inside the pipeline. The keyword is 'underpipelined'
Yes, someone tested it on GPT-4 for me too and that actually gave a quite decent reply. Still, there are always some cases somewhere where it messes up.
I'll just keep an eye on AI progress, but will probably not make it my goto for some time. Maybe later (whenever that is)
> I haven't. Because (free, as in free beer) chatGPT is extremely slow, I have to make a rather extensive proompt to get the result I want to, and then I still have to debug most code.
That's because you are comparing asking ChatGPT to write full code to searching for a question on Stack Overflow and adapting their answer (which is comparing apples and oranges).
Try using ChatGPT like you use Stack Overflow instead (i.e. the question is "How would I record an audio stream to disk in Python" rather than "write me an application / function which...").
As an aside, try "How would I record an audio stream to disk in Python"" in both GPT4 and searching for an answer on Stack Overflow and see what has the better answer! (Clue: GPT4, and if you don't like GPT4's answer just ask it to clarify/change it)
>Try using ChatGPT like you use Stack Overflow instead (i.e. the question is "How would I record an audio stream to disk in Python" rather than "write me an application / function which...").
That's my point though. I get, that it can produce quite good results, if you are specific enough. And for some applications it makes sense to take your time and describe that as much as possible.
Most of the time I just need some small snippet though and usually I can get that with just a few keywords in my favorite search engine, which is way faster. So the conclusion is: There is no one or the other. They should be used complementary, or atleast that's what I am doing (as in use the search engine for quick hints and chatGPT for some more verbose stuff 'write me a parser for this csv in awk'.)
Personally ChatGPT generally gives me a quicker, better, simpler and ad-free result for the snippet (At least with GPT4).
Plus I can ask follow-up questions in a context-driven way ("Can I do this without importing a library?").
I'm aware that different people will have different feelings on this though and personal tastes will differ, but while search engines stagnate I suspect the needle will continue to shift towards AI.
Well, you can for CBT. CBT goes by the assumption that a lot of depression comes from negative thoughts and it tries to change the way you think and therefore the way you feel. And CBT is the most scientifically backed up form of psychotherapy. So it looks like that works.
Sure, we don't fully understand the brain yet, but we are making progress.