To me, whether books like Cal Newport's cite scientific studies is beside the point. The goal of reading a book like "Deep Work" isn't to gain objective knowledge of results in psychology, but to get some nuggets of wisdom that help you manage your own life. Call it "self help", "wisdom literature", or whatever; it's ultimately one person's perspective on what sort of attitudes help us cope with life and how the world squeezes us. Take that for what it's worth.
What good is a nugget of wisdom if it's false, and how do you know if it's true or false without a factual basis?
Don't say intuition; our intuition sucks. Don't say the need doesn't require some scientific standard of proof; if it's false, it's a waste of time or worse, gets a negative return on the time.
The issue is that most validated scientific results aren't directly applicable as life advice. It's better to be aware that applying them always involves some subjective interpretation, and that's not always better than some heuristic gained from experience.
I would qualify this by saying yes, put the source code in the book, but only if there is something to learn from reading the code. That used to always be the case, but now there's so much boilerplate required for libraries and frameworks that it's obviously a waste of space to put it there. But if reading and understanding the code is part of the learning process, then yes, it should be inline as part of the experience of reading the book.
Honest question about two-pane file managers: I understand that dual-pane is useful when you need to see the contents of two folders for copying and syncing multiple files. But for me, that seems like a minority part of my usage. More commonly, I have multiple tabs for different projects, and within those tabs, navigation is mostly up and down the folder hierarchy within each project. Opening the source and destination folders in the panes every time I want to copy seems like more work than just copy, navigate, and paste.
Can anyone enlighten me about this? Is it just my poor organizational skills?
When I don't need to copy files even when navigating in a single panel (and just ignoring content of the second one) still have advantages.
- I get a free ls when I navigate directory structure, and with the keyboard shortcuts I can move much faster.
- If the panel is ordered by time the moment I open the folder I see most recent files (in some cases I only care about recent files when opening a folder). If ordered by size you see your biggest files first, etc. And all of this is stateful, you don't need to run a command to identify biggest/latest file, do something with it and then go back to check what as the second biggest/latest file.
- it is easier to check content of the file or an archive
- two panels also work seamlessly with ssh/ftp/archives/etc. You don't need to remember separate commands to copy files from other sources, you will use exactly same pattern for navigating and copying files.
I also understand that people who mastered shell don't see this as a big advantage. But it really helps when jumping between mac/nix/windows.
Well, you don't have to use the two pane mode if you don't want anyway. You can switch to single pane mode, use the second pane for file info, use the second pane as a directory tree in the manner of a "regular" single pane explorer, etc.
To perform your "copy, navigate, paste" task while in mc's single pane mode you could either:
a) tag files, pop open the second pane temporarily, navigate and copy.
b) tag files, swap the panes in the background, navigate and copy.
c) tag files, use the bindings to copy them to the inbuilt command line, navigate and copy. Using the "quick cd" dialog would probably speed this up.
d) any of the above with inverted target and source movement.
e) probably a thousand other more sensible ways than the three or cheat-y six I just thought of ;)
If you are moving many or large files, the two-pane mode allows you to see the state of the move in real time. You can also see name conflicts more easily rather than wait for a popup. Sure, you could open up two tabs or two windows, but that is more cumbersome than a single window for the task.
I agree with that. I guess my question is: do you always use two panes to copy? And does your file manager have something like tabs for different contexts where you would not necessarily be moving files between them?
When you hit F5 (copy) or F6 (move) you typically get a dialog with the destination of the action where the other pane is pre-entered as a default so can just hit Return to start, but which you can also override by typing something before hitting Return. You can type whatever relative or absolute destination you want without having to navigate there explicitly in the other pane. For up/down one directory I personally type .. or the child-directory, if the destination is further away it is often more convenient to navigate there in the other pane.
Moving a few files, no. But a professional move, say something that is going to take more than 30 minutes due to speed/size issues, yes i would use a two-pane tool. Another case would be if the destination had a dynamic ammount of free space, such as to a running server. I would use two panes so i could abort before filling the destination.
It's very interesting that he is strongly for the use of computation in math, but strongly against using computer logic systems to formalize proofs--see opinion #184. I'd love to hear other people's take on this.
I saw how pro-computational he is from the one time I heard him talk. One of his most repeated phrases was, "you write a little computer program...", meaning as a way to enumerate some set of objects or calculate the size of something.
I also came here to put in a word for Resilio. It's the fastest and most hassle-free thing I've found that doesn't require a server. SyncThing was always very slow to reconnect and update for me.
I've come to appreciate Aldi; my wife's nose for bargains has helped me see that they hit a sweet spot of lowest price/sufficient quality for many items.
However, their days of being genuinely cheaper than other options may be numbered, as the market balances out. I see the new stores in my part of the US trying to emit a more upscale vibe, and I've seen instances of individual items being sold at much higher prices than you can get them at in bulk at Costco.
They have been doing the same in Germany over time. Their stores used to be a lot more cramped and dingy, but other discounters like Lidl eventually started upping their game in an attempt to poach some of Aldi's market share. This led to several rounds of ugprades over the last 15-20 years. The result are stores that look much more upscale, and they are selling more brand-name and generally higher quality items than before while still offering the same cheap staples. But they seem to have compensated by increasing their operational efficiency. For instance, nowadays all of their staff are wearing headsets for radio communication, which was not the case a decade ago or so. So I wouldn't want to bet against their ability to keep prices low. They are essentially to brick and mortar retail what Amazon is to e-commerce in terms of optimising their operations to the last detail.
It might be the mid term effect of the original founders having left the show (they died) and the next Generation being less stringent in their business strategies.
Great article that captures and organizes a lot of information that's not so easy to find with Google. I've spent many hours tweaking the Freetype antialiasing settings and interpreter version to get font rendering "just right" on Linux. Now that I know about this article, I might give it another go.
BTW, I just noticed that the Firefox UI isn't picking up my RGB subpixel settings. Does anybody know a fix for that?
> Advanced math that isn’t necessarily useful in your college career is absolutely essential to teach high quality thinking.
You've put into words something I wish I could tell everybody. The impact of achieving a level of rigorous logical thinking through math classes goes far beyond "Will I use it in my job," it makes a fundamental difference to the way you see the world and think through every decision in life.
What's so unfair is that, in my experience, whether a given student in average circumstances successfully attains this in either high school or college is, essentially, a crap shoot depending on the combination of teacher, student motivation and support, and any number of other environmental factors.
This is a really good question. When you write generic code in a language with higher-order functions, type signatures can get pretty hairy with type variables and quantifiers flying around (forall a. a -> foo a). In a functional language with type inference, it's mostly managing those for you, and you can (usually) just write code in a natural way and it automatically is polymorphic, but in a safer way than dynamically-typed languages.
When I was in college in the 90s, my friends and I would occasionally watch old Gumby reruns just for laughs, and we were frequently floored by how surreal it was. Gumby definitely had a weird vibe, and the animators weren't afraid to experiment. I can imagine it making some strong impressions on a child's mind.
