Does it though? Balancing doesn't seem like an active cognitive process, like I don't have to think about not falling over to stay upright on a bicycle. All the little shifts of body weight needed to not tip over seem to be done automatically.
Not on a balancing ball. It's far far harder than staying upright on a bicycle. You have to stay focused and control several muscle groups. Not falling even for a minute is a very challenging task. Being able to balance for 10 minutes is basically elite level.
I got into dance a few years ago, and N=1 sure, but the big changes I observed as a result were improvements in proprioception, balance, sense of tempo, and I also gained the ability to deconstruct music in my head, and listen to different parts of it (e.g. only pay attention to the guitar or the drums or the vocals).
Like does this make me better at programming? Probably not. But the skills you gain do have other usages outside of dance, and honestly also kind of enrich life in general.
I remember when I was in high school when World of Warcraft dropped, like half the guys in my class got super hooked and would stay up late every night and phone in the school work every day. Their grades just never recovered from WoW, even some of the really bright ones graduated with barely passing grades.
Though admittedly WoW was a bit of a killer cocktail, because of the social pressure to partake in raids. That kind of game was also so new, like yeah there had been MMOs before, but nothing like that, so the "WoW effect" may admittedly be a relatively unique event in gaming history.
One the one hand, yes, you can absolutely amuse your life into ruins. 24/7 access to fun is the great affliction of our times. Video games are part of it, but so is netflix and social media. If you're spending 20 hours a week partaking in any of these things, that's 20 hours you aren't spending building stuff or honing your skills. It really does add up over time.
On the other hand, you do not need to join the desert fathers to be productive, in fact, taking a moment every now and then to unwind and do something mindless and enjoyable instead helps you last the course, and a break from work can be very helpful in allowing your brain to process what you're working on, often with new inspiration and ideas as a result.
The best approach is to structure your life a bit, instead of having this all-or-nothing mentality where you either always work or constantly binge on amusements, I have a particular day of the week I play video games and do stuff like that. Works great.
I’ve found that the periodic passive money-making activities in Grand Theft Auto Online are the perfect thing while I’m coding; every hour or so I’m reminded to empty various safes and acquire various items that are on cooldowns, which usually takes around 5 minutes and is a perfect little break to ponder whatever I’m working on.
>that's 20 hours you aren't spending building stuff or honing your skills
My problem is it always seems like I'm building skills to help some capitalist be more rich or make more money. If I want to build something to contribute to a community sans profit, there's the burdens of popularity if I'm successful.
I think people are afraid to admit that amusement is what brings them fulfillment. Having to work on something or build more skills sounds similar to a protestant work ethic to me, which was much more important when the essentials of living were not as assured as it is today (or you need to fit into certain social circles today).
I suppose it helps your personal character and having more things to talk about, but I don't know if worrying whether or not a majority of people I'd meet find me interesting because of my skill(s) is also a good selling point.
To be honest it's mostly persistence. I didn't know most of this stuff when I started out, at least not as well as I do now. Having gotten the opportunity to work full time on this for a year now has also helped.
1. I'm not sure what you mean. The code is open source[3], but the data is, for logistical reasons, not available. Common Crawl is far more comprehensive though.
2. I've got such plans in the pipe. Not sure when I'll have time to implement it, as I'm in the middle of moving in with my girlfriend this month. Soon-ish.
[3] at https://git.marginalia.nu/ , though still some rough edges to sand down before it's easy to self-host (as easy as hosting a full blown internet search engine gets).
1. Here are all RSS feeds known to the search engine as of some point in 2023:
https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/feeds.csv -- it's quite noisy though, a fair number of them are anything but small web. You should be able to fetch them all in a few hours I'd reckon, and have a sample dataset to play with. There's also more data at https://downloads.marginalia.nu/exports/ , e.g. a domain level link graph, if you want to experiment more in this space.
2. It's a constant whac-a-mole to reverse-engineer and prevent search engine spam. Luckily I kinda like the game. It's also helpful that it's a search engine so it's quite possible to use the search engine itself to find the malicious results, by searching for the sorts of topics where they tend to crop up, e.g. e-pharama, prostitution, etc.
Apologies for too many questions but resources on search engines are scarce . How do I visualize the link graphs or process them ? is there any tool preferably foss . Majestic seem to have one but it's their own .
I don't know if there's any real good answers. It's hard to visualize a graph of this size, but most graph libraries will at least consume it assuming you have a decent amount of RAM.
Malware authors typically focus on more common targets, like web browsers. I'm quite possibly the only person doing crawling with the stack I'm on, which means it's not a very appealing target. It also helps that the crawler is written in Java, which is a relatively robust language.
It's not as bad as you might think, we're speaking dozens of GB across the entire index.
I don't think stopwords as an optimization makes sense when you go beyond BM25. The search engine behaves worse and adding a bunch of optimizations makes an already incrediby complex piece of software more so.
So overall I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze.
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