I recently discovered https://whitebox.systems/ It's a local app with a $69 one-time charge. And, it only really works with "C With Classes" style functions. But, it looks promising as another productivity boost.
I'm pretty autistic, but the funny thing is I don't keep friendships because I get bored, not them. I was a complete recluse during most of my time at university. I decided I wanted to mate with women when I was about 25 so started to make myself more "marketable". The first stage is being able to make friends.
First thing is the way you look. People like you more if you're good looking. First step is to make sure you're in excellent shape. That means lean to the extend that you can see your cheeks, abdominal muscles and veins on your forearms are prominent. Get yourself a pull up bar and start doing chin ups and press ups every single day.
Then once you're in shape you find a clothing style that works for you. Stick to classic. Don't dress like a child. Wear smart and expensive shoes. Aim to always dress slightly better than you should be at any event, but just slightly. Groom well. Smell good. Grow a beard if you can but keep it very well groomed. Shave your head if you're going bald.
You might think this sounds silly so far, but looking good is very, very important.
People will compliment you on your appearance. Take the compliments. Thank them. Do not automatically compliment them back.
Second thing is to work on your personality. You will be smarter than 95% of people you meet. There's no doubt about it. You will know more and care more about most subjects that come up. Do not under any circumstances use this to "one up" people. The number one rule you need to keep in mind is to be positive. Do NOT tell people they are doing something wrong. Do NOT tell people you don't like something. Always continue a conversation in a positive way. If they mention a band you don't like, mention a band you do like. If they mention a technique that is suboptimal, mention a technique you have found works for you (not "is better").
If you employ this positive outlook along with a broad knowledge and range of interests you will be a person that people like. Hope it helps.
Also, if you are willing to try drugs, MDMA might help you. I wouldn't recommend alcohol or cannabis to anyone, but MDMA is worth it.
If you're interested in improving your social skills at work, you might also enjoy the book How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk.
Um, seriously, all effective communication techniques are based on basically the same principles; there's a book by a former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference) where he describes hostage negotiations with terrorists, and it all works in the workplace too. These two are significantly better than How to Win Friends and Influence Friends, which is mostly about sales rather than negotiations.
The closest I've found to making and keeping friends has been the FBI interrogation manual, which explains how police officers who would normally scare a suspect can get them to disclose intimate details of crimes.
* Paul Ekman's course on microexpressons
* Whatever came up when I googled resources on body language for shy people, people with anti social disorder or people with aspergers
This was in the mid 2000s, so I may have had more academic/professional results than you'd get now. I imagine results now would be cluttered with blogspam.
Also, a caveat is that I've seen some doubts expressed against Ekman's microexpressions theory. However, I was just using the course to get feedback on the expressions themselves and develop an intuition for them. The microexpressions in the course are the same as macroexpressions you'd see people make over a prolonged period. I haven't seen anyone say his facial categorizations are wrong.
So I did the course, and got feedback identifying expressions. That was one element. Then I'd also go through the other resources and practice things I was bad at individually.
For instance, eye contact. I'd have weeks where I just paid attention to eye contact during conversations. I used to not do any, so I focussed on making more. Then I'd pay attention to how people reacted. Too much or too little eye contact will weird people out, in different ways. So you can use reactions to calibrate. Then after doing it long enough, it becomes intuitive and you don't need to work on it consciously. Move on to the next item.
Another I remember was smile lines around the eyes. Genuine pleasure will make people smile with their eyes. Fake smiles are mouth only. So I'd pay attention to when people laughed, and check the eyes. Do this long enough and you get an intuition for real smiles vs. fake. Then you don't have to think about it anymore.
And so on.
1. Identify weakness
2. Devise way to get feedback
3. Focus on it for a bit
4. Once it becomes intuitive, move on to something else
If done correctly, you can learn to do everything at an automatic rather than an intellectual level.
I didn't find body language books that helpful, because they don't have focussed practice. I think something that categorizes expressions + asks you to correctly identify expressions is essential. Then something which just lists things involved in social skills, and practice them to mastery.
As a result I went from being far worse than average to better than average.
It is a difficult path to walk. I learned most of it intuitively as a young child. When I saw a gesture, it would trigger panic, almost certainly creating a self fulfilling prophecy. I also faked my body language to hide it from others, making me near impossible to read. As a young person (under 10), it was a social disaster.
Just so you know, everyone is on the spectrum. There is a threshold that makes it clear if you are autistic or not and often relates to under/over sensitivity of senses. My son is sensitive to sound and light (as an example). He also struggles to string tasks together and can't organise anything. They're all common traits.
I liked Seneca's letters from a Stoic, and the miracle of mindfulness. There's also some helpful exercises in the four hour workweek (writing down worst case scenarios), and bits of the Black Swan were formative.
Of course, a big part of the latter two books was also structuring my life so I don't have situations where I need to deal with office politics as part of my livelihood. But I can confirm that the techniques do work for very real stresses I've had that can't be avoided.
I'm guessing it was on his own as there's not many any courses on emotions worth a damn.
That said, coursera did an amazing course on emotions recently by an Italian AI researcher, Jordi Vallverdú. I think it's been taken offline now, unfortunately.
"What Every BODY Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People", written by a former FBI counterintelligence officer, is pretty interesting, though not scientific:
Don't know about how the grandparent commenter learned it, but I had a similar experience when I went through Meisner acting technique classes.
Meisner emphasizes reacting to the scene partners, and its basic training includes perceiving extremely subtle nonverbal messages from other people---"reading behind eyes". After several classes, I remember walking streets and I saw every people's eyes were illuminated as if shone by spotlight, sending out messages. (I don't say I could truly read what they were thinking like telepathy---what I perceived might be completely off from what they actually thought. But for the purpose of acting, perceiving something and reacting to it is what matters.)
The book to read is "Sanford Meisner on Acting", but I believe you need to actually do it (with a partner, under proper trainer) to see.
"I think all individuals have to build social skills to bring to towards 'socially normal', and it varies from where on the spectrum they started".
That's my observation, too. When I was a teen I would completely rebel against any kind of conformity, especially against the idea of "socially expected" behaviour.
However by my 20's I ended up learning that sometimes what is socially expected is expected exactly because it's the smartest thing to do in that situation.
That's mostly about improving the reading of body language. Send me a message if you want to know more about the other aspects, probably a bit long to write here. Contact info it in my profile.
This is a fairly common, and I believe correct, use of the word "tag". The MSDN reference uses the term in a similar manner (as do countless other definitive resources and tools). Consider the first sentence of the MSDN's page on HTML elements:
> This page lists all the HTML elements, which are created using tags.
>> Overall, I am not convinced this will be massively beneficial. I don't trust Google's ability to execute at scale in this area.
Yes the team which literally created transformer and almost all the important open research including Bert, T5, imagen, RLHF, ViT don't have the ability to execute on AI /s. Tell me one innovation OpenAI bought into the field. They are good at execution but i havent seen anything novel coming out of them.
Not a course, but I would highly recommend Deep Learning with Python, by Francois Chollet, creator of Keras. Incredibly approachable book that covers everything from tensors and backprop, to mixed precision and multi gpu scaling, and includes time series, language, vision and audio in between
I work at company that uses AI to automate about ⅓ of the job of trained licensed professionals. Looking at GPT4 those licensed professionals are now completely irrelevant. It's going to take years to build the supporting software around gpt4 to completely eliminate those jobs, but today I am convinced that we are on the verge of massive unemployment. Today thousands of job types have just been made redundant.
What scares me is we are unprepared for the kind of change that a perpetual 20% unemployment rate is going to trigger.
jq is incredibly powerful and I'm using it more and more. Even better, there is a whole ecosystem of tools that are similar or work in conjunction with jq:
* jq (a great JSON-wrangling tool)
* jc (convert various tools’ output into JSON)
* jo (create JSON objects)
* yq (like jq, but for YAML)
* fq (like jq, but for binary)
* htmlq (like jq, but for HTML)
List shamelessly stolen from Julia Evans[1]. For live links see her page.
Just a few days ago I needed to quickly extract all JWT token expiration dates from a network capture. This is what I came up with:
https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/annotated-transformer/
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762
https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2329.pdf
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/colt93.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.03134.pdf
https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2012/file/c...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.06391.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.06965.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.03385.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.07122.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.01212.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.0473.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.05027.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01427.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.02731.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.01822.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.6903.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.5401.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02595.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0406077.pdf
https://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.p...
https://www.lirmm.fr/~ashen/kolmbook-eng-scan.pdf
https://cs231n.github.io/