Mentoring requires a significant amount of effort when done effectively. I find it hard to believe that anyone would willingly offer to mentor in such a broad manner. It makes me quite suspicious that the author has a genuine understanding of what mentoring entails.
In my opinion, mentoring has become a trend and a status symbol. The current definition of mentoring does not genuinely benefit anyone except the egos of those offering it.
The author is offering 1.5 hours of meetings, as three 30 minute conversations. It's not nothing, but it's also probably not really the level of mentoring that can be super impactful. But it might make a difference to some people who apply.
I've had one amazing career-related mentor in my life. He probably spent 20+ hours per week for 6 months doing mentoring things for me. He worked VERY hard at this but his work was very impactful on me and I really appreciated it. He had support of his management, which was critical to being able to spend that much time on mentoring.
I've tried to be a mentor for Google Summer of Code before. It was difficult for me and required a LOT more effort and time than I had expected. Mentoring well is not easy.
Mentoring isn’t just about time; it’s a mental investment. The few people I mentor often come to mind frequently. I reflect on our conversations, even though the actual time spent talking is minimal. I take it very seriously and genuinely feel their progress as my own.
I don’t think I could mentor even 10 people without failing. You have to genuinely care about their progress.
Perhaps the author means coaching. That’s scalable. Teach people how to do something you’ve successfully done repeatedly. That’s something I could do even for groups.
Yeah, coaching and mentoring are totally different things. Coaching is more structured—you teach people a skill or process you’ve mastered. Mentoring is way more personal. It’s about actually understanding someone, their goals, their struggles, and helping them figure stuff out.
That’s why good mentoring is so hard to find. It takes real effort and emotional investment. You can’t just scale it up infinitely. But even a little bit of good mentoring can be life-changing.
Would you feel more comfortable about it if you re-framed it as "I'm willing to have three 30 minute calls with people about their life and projects to see if I can provide any useful tips?"
That's what this is, and I don't think it pretends to be anything else. I don't think it's worth getting too hung up on the "mentoring" language used here - especially since I'm certain there is no standard agreed definition of what "mentoring" actually entails. Or have I missed one?
I could definitely be out of the loop but I've never heard of the linked blog/newsletter, and there is no explanation of who it is, so the whole thing gives me a feeling of "uhm, why would I do that?"
I don't know anything about the author themselves, but the site is one third from the top of my pinned tabs in Arc, on my "not being directly productive" space.
They write good quality, thought-provoking content that I enjoy.
It isn't true at all mentoring takes a lot of effort. It really depends on a lot of factors. My 2 bosses at work are excellent at abstract thinking and mental models. They are usually able to provide significant ways of looking at things differently in just a few minutes of talking with them.
I will say they are hard to find. These aren't your average people.
It also really depends on where the mentee is. If there is a massive gap from where they are and where they want to go, that would be a large undertaking.
However, mentors don't have to expend all that effort. Even just a bit of help from time to time would be preferable to zero mentorship, which is where most people are today.
That was my first impression as well. Unfortunately I grew up with someone who offered "mentoring" when he felt the need to augment his own sense of magnanimity, and the only help that was given was that I needed to agree with his (always bigoted, usually horrifying) opinions about whatever was on his mind at the time. So whenever someone is openly offering mentorship, I immediately nope out.
I don't know anything about the author, but he doesn't seem like a bad person by any means, and this post is probably well intentioned. I just can't help but get an ick from this.
An oligarchy where leaders frequently change based mostly on merit, with a social ladder accessible to anyone, is as close as you get to social harmony. As long as everyone has a shot, society is generally happy. (Note that a functioning economy is also needed for this.)
Democracy is mostly a safeguard to kick out the Napoleons before it’s too late.
Also, if you have strong local politics (like in the US, UK, or Australia), you might see more impact from your vote, as opposed to countries where you vote for a party and they pretty much do what they want for their term.
How are you defining oligarchs? I feel like in practice this term is only used to describe Russian businessmen, so I’m not sure if everyone has the same understanding.
I think the definition of “oligarch” is being stretched a little in the article, so I’m using it for my argument. Is Elon Musk an oligarch? Is Zuckerberg an oligarch?
My point is that as long as those at the top rotate and everyone has a shot, whether they’re called oligarchs or not doesn’t make much difference to the common person.
This is a pretty bad take. Many countries weigh population of voting regions. The idea is that the people in a smaller region with its own needs doesn't get its priorities relegated to oblivion just because no the same people live there than in a big city.
Not weighing votes by population alienates the rural voters.
The college vote has little to do with population. It might have started that way, but it seems to be more about artificially inflating one side of the vote these days. (To be fair, redistricting has been abused for this effect as well, although on a smaller scale.)
It makes it so it is possible to lose every popular vote, yet still win the election "by a landslide."
What other countries are doing this? I can't think of any.
I see your point, and the Electoral College may need some updating (there’s also gerrymandering, which is problematic). However, I’d argue that the “popular vote” is not the best approach.
For huge countries where people’s lives are very varied, I think you need something to equate regions to others. The ancient Greeks tried direct democracy, and it didn’t work. The Founding Fathers knew this and called direct democracy “anarchy.” Not far off from the truth if you ask me, and the Greeks are a great cautionary tale on this.
Representative democracy, strongly coupled with local representation and a two-party system (yes, yes, I know) is where it’s at. The two-party system forces local reps to align with the bloc that most represents their interests ahead of the election. If you look at Europe, many citizens vote for a party only to see them make alliances and concessions with other minority parties that they wouldn’t have approved (e.g., Spain with independence parties).
Many things need updating, but I think it’s a mistake to forget history and assume that the U.S. political system was just randomly put together. There’s a lot of interesting history to dig into there (for example, the Federalist Papers).
>The college vote has little to do with population.
You do realize the majority of electors are allocated by population, right?
Specifically, the Electoral College mirrors the allocation of Congress with D.C. added at the same allocation as the smallest State as a special bonus.
This is a rare example of Android catching up to iOS. I was skeptical when the “handoff” family of features started to roll out on iOS, but I’ve become reliant on some of them. It’s very convenient and for the most part “it just works”.
This is very good. I can't put my finger on it, but it seems more important than a mere "gimmick." I noticed that if you click on a topic already explored, it won't open again. That's cool, I'd make it snap back to the pane where it's open.
Kudos! This is an interesting perspective on how we really need to put a little more effort into the UX of LLMs.
It is a nice UI and invites you to investigate more...
But the problem, as far as I can tell, is that it's inviting someone to explore what's bad about LLMs (or what LLMs are bad at).
IE, LLMs are useful for doing things an individual could do but doesn't really want to. I have one friend who uses ChatGPT for boiler plate nondiscrimination policies and another who uses it for random villain descriptions and it's famous for boiler plate code.
But using LLMs for discovering new specific things (this app's seeming purpose) seems like a recipe for disaster. For example, I started looking at counterfeit bolts and ended up with the thing hallucinating an instance of "sword net" (real) that in 2018 targeted counterfeit fasteners (no refs on Google, Brave or DuckDuckBing) with the slogan "Secure the Foundation, Eliminate the Fake" (no refs similarly).
Edit: obviously, the system is confusing counterfeits generally with counterfeit fasterners (a more specialized issue, having less to do with intellectual property as such). But if drill distinctions like this are inevitable and this is what makes LLMs actually not useful for this sort of exploration.
> I can't put my finger on it, but it seems more important than a mere "gimmick."
Let me see if I can articulate it.
You know how a human conversation can have multiple threads? And ten minutes in, you find the topic has totally changed and you're trying to figure out the original topic? Sometimes you can get back to it, sometimes you can't, right?
Obviously it's not quite the same when you can see prompt history, but the conversation is still pretty linear. This pre-empts that problem by letting you fork thoughts.
counterpoint: the forks dont retain any of the context that led you to them, nor does returning to an earlier branching point retain the discussion that occurred down a separate "rabbit hole". therefore it is in some ways decidedly less human that the linear approach in use
They do? When going into “weight” coming from “aerodynamics -> flight” it only talks about weight in the context of flight and plane design. I would actually like an option to “snap out” of the current topic.
The dotted underline is usually reserved for indicating alt text or hover content, actually. In this case, I think it's fine to be dotted, since it's not a true hyperlink, but combining that with it being the same text color is just bad from a semantic POV. It's made worse by the fact that the author apparently decided to make visited links blue. (Edit: apparently it's "active" panes, not visited, but semantically similar)
@maxkrieger if you're reading this, please consider making unvisited links blue, to conform to the universal semantics everywhere else on the web, and make visited links either purple, or black if you really want. (edit: or some different color for active panes. Green?)
Q: I'm a student of visual communications and asked myself why links are blue. I found some answers that might be, for example blue is a color of learning, but I'm not sure what is right. Is there any reason, why links are colored blue ?
A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents, and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of style sheets which use different colors.
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena" browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area."
You can try one of the Quickstart guides on that page. Just type in "San Francisco" in the search bar on the map on this page: https://overpass-turbo.eu/ and then run your search query (drinking fountains by default). The bounding box should be whatever is in view of the map on the right. Then you can click the Data tab to see exported XML.
This is very cool! I compiled it on m2 with no problems.
Istambul is an excellent choice. I enjoyed watching the algorithm take for ever to find a route from the most northern part of the river to the other side :)
I think it’s more that we routinely see very poor and mentally ill people in the US get zero support?
It’s not a great stretch to go from there to assume they don’t have any social security at all.
If it’s available but many people cannot or do not know to make use of it, is it really social security? If they do make use of it and it’s still not enough, does that change things?
It's a nation of ~360-370 million people including undocumented.
Have you seen the horrific conditions the poorest people of Europe 'survive' in? The ghettos of Eastern Europe are every bit as bad as the worst areas of Baltimore or St Louis. The bad areas in and around Paris are hyper minority poverty with zero upward mobility and extreme unemployment problems (thus the annual large riots). People in rural Western Russia live in third world conditions on $20-$30 per month; they live like nothing has improved in a century. To say nothing of the Ukraine war, which is now part of their living condition (for Ukraine and Russia). You realize how poor Moldova or North Macedonia are? The level of education and outcomes among the bottom 20% of Europe is every bit as bad as the bottom 20% in the US.
It's exceptionally difficult to provide a median (or median+) first world outcome to so many, perhaps impossible.
Not sure how relevant it is to compare the poor in the USA to the poor in Europe.
The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations: https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric... Although averages are a dangerous measure to use and I guess the article is wrong for other reasons (I think it is talking about consumption). The study and article are in response to the crazy OECD poverty measurements: "OECD measure assigns a higher poverty rate to the US (17.8 percent) than to Mexico (16.6 percent). Yet World Bank data show that 35 percent of Mexico’s population lives on less than $5.50 per day, compared to only 2 percent of people in the United States."
I'm in New Zealand, where we have some social support for the unfortunate. Disclaimer: I'm very ignorant of conditions for the poor in the US and Europe.
> The state of California alone has spent $24,000,000,000 on homelessness
should very probably read "paid $24 B over 5 years to third parties on programs claiming to 'fix' homelessness"
This would include urban architectures and installions that seek to deter homelessness making sidewalks unsuitable for tents, benches unusable for sleeping, removing access to water and public toilets, etc.
Such things would not count at all as "support" for the homeless.
Regardless it seems remarkably ineffective and one has to wonder, as with military spending, how much goes to end use and how much is $$$ profit! for the contracters.
What would $24 B of affordable public housing look like, employing the homeless as labour?
You believe yourself to have a proper understanding of what's what with the United States? If so, I'd be quite interested in hearing how you went about acquiring an accurate model.
The drawback is that it can become monotonous. However, there’s the “For You” view and the curated news section to mitigate this.
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