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I've taught beginners both languages and have not noticed a difference.

The hard parts for beginners are identical -- e.g. for loops, functions, and finding the motivation to consistently practice.


It's very likely that Stripe initially pitched very cutting-edge, ambitious ideas to VCs. So, comparing seemingly "boring" mature company to new startups may be misleading.


The easiest way to get started is look around for others by themselves, then walk over and say hi. Realize they're likely feeling similar to you.

Every time you sit down for a talk, challenge yourself to sit near someone and introduce yourself. At lunch, find an empty seat at a busy table. As you do this, you'll see the people you met earlier and will feel more confident.

Also ask people if they know if anyone's gathering afterward. Nearly everyone will either invite you, tell you what they know, or be interested in doing something after too.


The NYT recently published a great article on how sugar affects the body: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/30/well/eat/suga...


"kill them with sweetness" getting a darker meaning.


Caltech's Honor Code is simply:

"No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community."

- https://deans.caltech.edu/HonorCode


> "No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community."

That's great, but I wonder why not just:

> "No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other person."


If you insist on following an honor code while competing against people who are ready to take an unfair advantage of you, you lose.


> If you insist on following an honor code while competing against people who are ready to take an unfair advantage of you, you lose.

"Unfair" is in there. If you are competing against a person who will pull out all the stops against you, then there is nothing unfair about pulling out all the stops against them.


So, tit-for-tat?


> So, tit-for-tat?

That's a reasonable reading, but I think that there is a difference between competition and punishment. In the heat of the competition, I think I am comfortable with the idea that it is permissible to meet the fierceness of your competitor with equal ferocity. If afterwards someone is found to have exceeded their remit and punishment needs to be dealt, then I think that should be governed by a separate ethical principle.


War crimes have entered the chat.


> War crimes have entered the chat.

Good point, but I believe war crimes mainly come when you substitute ‘a people’ for ‘a person’ in:

> "Unfair" is in there. If you are competing against a person who will pull out all the stops against you, then there is nothing unfair about pulling out all the stops against them.

But I did specifically mean a person, just one. (I also was envisioning, like, struggling for top spot in a class, not struggling to take San Juan Hill. But I'm not immediately sure I can sign on to an ethical principle that says that you are not entitled to respond to one specific competitor with as much fierceness as they bring to the competition, even when that competition becomes deadly.)


All good points. So how about the shifting alliances and goals of Squid Game ?


> So how about the shifting alliances and goals of Squid Game ?

I couldn't comment, since I haven't seen it, but I think the mandate of fairness makes sense even in the presence of shifting goals, and probably governs the extent to which it's reasonable to switch alliances.


So nothing would change since some Caltech members are also ready


How dare you suggest that?


Perhaps the reason we have tribalism is because Ethics Doesn't Scale.


Does this cover e.g. helping people in another class cheat?


Yes. At Caltech, you'd be socially ostracized by your friends if people knew you were cheating, or helping another person cheat.


That wasn't really my question. I was asking if the person helping other people in another class cheat would be violating the honor code. Not whether your friends would ostracize you if they find out you're cheating.


If you can't see that "helping other people in another class cheat" is violating the honour code then you might benefit from taking the time to do so.

> Failure to realize the consequences of a course of action does not justify it.

https://deans.caltech.edu/documents/24878/Honor_Code_Handboo...


> If you can't see that "helping other people in another class cheat" is violating the honour code then you might benefit from taking the time to do so.

I did, and I didn't see how. If Alice is helping Bob cheat, Bob is the one taking unfair advantage of others, not Alice. For all you know, Alice could be offering to help everyone cheat.

It's not like I'm saying something outlandish here. There's a reason most places have specific rules prohibiting assisting others with their violation. Even MIT goes out of its way to specifically call out "Facilitating Academic Dishonesty". [1]

[1] https://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/academic-integrity-mit/wh...


Alice is taking a small unfair advantage of every member of the community at once. A community and its practices is a form of commons shared by the members, so it's vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. If one member acts in a way that deliberately goes against the trust, that's inherently unfair to the rest of the members because it tends to push everything toward a breaking point. If her goal depends on the community's existence or function (which if it doesn't, why is she even around?), then whatever her goal, Alice has gone after it in a way that takes unfair advantage of everyone else's commitment to the system. Even if Alice's action doesn't cause a final breakdown, she's moved things in the wrong direction for her own purposes.


> Alice is taking a small unfair advantage of every member of the community at once.

Interesting take, I like it; thanks! Let me mull over it a bit... it's making me wonder whether the existence of any personal benefits (by Alice) are a necessary component of a violation.


Same reason as programming language flamewars. Coders assume their individual experience holds for every domain. Yet LLMs are good for some things, bad at others.


Facts still must be interpreted. It could be a fact that a credible source claimed X and a non-credible source claimed the opposite. A newspaper's job is to also provide this context, not merely the "facts" of what was stated.

Similarly, an endorsement could in countless ways not simply be partisan. For example, based on what is most predicted to help the country with X/Y/Z.


I believe this wouldn't be meaningful, since any size LLM can be trained on any amount of data.

You could measure how well it memorizes via prediction accuracy on the training set, but this wouldn't indicate whether it generalizes well.


Yes! Also, there's no need for a blog unless you have a passion for writing. You can just post past projects and make it like a more engaging CV.

- Making your website more unconventional will result in more variance of opinion. This can be really good if some people especially like it (ofc, others may especially dislike it!).

- I consider my website as controlling the top Google result for my name. Also, my email uses my domain. So people I email will also likely visit my website, which hopefully leaves a better impression than LinkedIn would.

- If I apply to something I care about, I can see in the logs that someone from there likely looked at it. So from that I can say it likely helped with grad school admissions, and certainly most clients have looked at it before hiring me (in fact many have mentioned it positively).


Merchants are able to price things to result in exact numbers, and some do especially if they sell individual items.

However, many customers (1) throw odd change in the tip jar, and (2) an exact amount might discourage add-on purchases.

In this case, an exact amount would certainly result in zero tips. The customer would need appropriate bills and wonder how much would be appropriate (since 15% of $60 is too much).


They do almost no ready-to-buy business; if you didn’t order it, it’s probably not going to be there. And few people are going to buy multiple cakes at once. And they don’t have a tip jar. Order cake three days ahead, walk in, pay for cake, leave.

So it very much fits the mold of “95% of sales are single items”.


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