Damn, that sounds like an ideal place to live for me. I live in an apartment but also play music. I would love to be able to set up a drum kit (and maybe store an e-bike) and still be in my walkable area for cheap ish rent.
I'm not an expert at all but have also thought about this quite a bit. Neuroplasticity is definitely reduced in adults, but so is free time and exposure to novel inputs. As we get older, a higher proportion of experiences are routine or at least things we've seen before, and we have far less free time. We are also increasingly behaving based on biases we accumulate and familiar patterns and just not using the parts of our brain we use for learning as much anymore. I often wonder if it's partly a kind of atrophy and whether you might be able to restore some neuroplasticity by "practicing." A related idea that occurs to me is that as you get older and learn about the world, you tend to trade curious openness for useful heuristics to some degree just to make life easier and more efficient.
The easiest example for me is learning guitar - I started when I was 5 and got pretty damn good over the years. It would be difficult to repeat that now in my 30s, but at least part of that difficulty would be because I can't really devote 3-4 hours a day nearly every day to it like I did as a bored kid out in the country. To be clear, I'm sure the differences in neuroplasticity come from both behavioral and neurological differences. It's just fun to think about how much is set in stone and how much could theoretically be "exercised" so to speak, and how much of the neurological changes are actually due in part to the behavioral changes as we age.
Mine is a 2012 MBP. I am only just now seeing real performance issues; until about mid last year it worked as well as the day I bought it aside from some battery degradation (I put an SSD in it around 2018). Pretty excited to upgrade and hope I can get at least 5-6 years out of a new MBP. This was my first MacBook, and 12 years of use is pretty insane value.
Mine's a 2014 MBP, and even the battery is still mostly okay. My biggest annoyance at this point is because it no longer gets updates, it's not on par with my new iPhone and I've lost functionality like copy/paste between computer and phone.
I'm primed to agree as I like running, and running appears to increase mitochondrial function and density. It also appears to have some anti aging effects, which would track.
I'm generally someone who sees honesty as a virtue and have always been fairly open, at work and in my private life. I'm curious if you can expand on this a bit - i.e., why is it a disadvantage and what sort of pitfalls can it lead to? I've been in analytics for a few years now, and it seems like it has mostly been an advantage for me, but it's certainly possible I just don't know what I don't know.
Example - about 2005 I was a junior dev thinking I was about to make the cut to senior within the year, in a medium sized IT company. Let it slip accidentally to my boss that I used to install servers in racks in a previous role. Ended up being shoved into a "lateral move" into the systems engineering team because they couldn't hire quickly enough. Fast forward another six months and I get laid off after a migration to the cloud makes my team redundant. Expensive lesson, but lesson learned.
I’m not sure that your experience should be generalized to a broad rule against volunteering “any information about yourself to anyone in the office beyond what is required to complete your job.”
I used to work in finance. Volunteering personal information about myself led to a close friendship with the CFO of the bank I worked for. I did good work, but so did many other people. The CFO and I got along so well only because we connected as people — mostly based on our personal lives and shared interests. My relationship with that person rocketed my career forward.
I don’t mean to take away from your experience. It sucks. But volunteering personal information can be beneficial.
Your risk tolerance should factor into the decision. The story above happened very early on in my career, shortly out of college. Taking those risks, to me, at the time, was totally worth it.
> I’m not sure that your experience should be generalized to a broad rule against volunteering “any information about yourself to anyone in the office beyond what is required to complete your job.”
While I don't have IT experience, I can tell you as someone that both worked as an electrician and a FiOs technician that I also assumed that honesty reflects well on people and would be careful not to discourage it. I started at Verizon at like age 20 with that attitude and had no record and seldom anything to hide.
I learned fast that the policy of managers in both companies was, "Encourage narratives that honesty will always result in a better outcome to all employees... And for those stupid enough to believe it, punish them severely because only when they're honest do we know with certainty they're guilty."
First time I was questioned by management at Verizon, I made sure I was ambiguous in a way that made them think I was guilty. They said I was fired immediately and I said, "I'm fired? For what? I wasn't even in the truck. I told you what happened and I told you I was up a pole. The bucket truck was 2 blocks away when I saw it all."
Their faces turned white as they realized that I can tell everyone it's a lie and they can't just dismiss me as disgruntled for getting fired.
My objective was to figure out whether their "always be honest" mantra they preached to employees had even a shred of merits. All I did was explain it in a way that didn't mention that I was not in any way in the vehicle, but performed hand gestures that would imply I was. The whole meeting was being typed out for records sake and I knew the fact that I wasn't, once revealed, would render them helpless. Especially because the policy of documenting who had each vehicle meant to go after employees, could also be used to demonstrate that I wasn't guilty, even if they chose to lie.
Another thing to consider is that the outcome (which is the one I wanted) resulted in me having them by the balls. I could repeat it to them as retribution in front of other employees with records to back it up and even in front of higher management to demonstrate how grossly incompetent they are.
Okay, this is a useful example as it's salient for me. Especially as a relatively recent pivoter into tech, I've been willing to jump on whatever is needed and generally am able to figure things out and make it work. In my current position, at a small SaaS with layoffs and churn, this has led to me basically owning 3-4 roles' worth of tasks. Mostly completely unrelated to one another and very stressful due to the constant context switching. I appreciate your perspective here, this is something concrete I can work on.
A huge part about whether honesty hurts or helps is the framing that revolves around it.
In this case, it's a matter of social expectations driven by the timing of that honesty:
* If someone is a completely unfiltered person and says the information audaciously and openly, the interviewer may simply see they have nothing to hide.
* On the other hand, if the person looks anxious (which could literally be nothing more than PTSD), then awkwardly blurts out the information, they may be interpreted as having more to hide, making that honesty appear worse than it is. Ironically, that was probably the optics that got my felony in the first place.
LOL, agree. I can't think of one without the other. South Park is absolutely iconic - incredible that they've done what they do for so long with as much consistency in quality.
At great risk of sounding completely ignorant, this approach is basically what I thought the point of machine learning was - cleverly using feedback loops to improve things automatically. The thing that sticks out to me as particularly cool about FunSearch is the use of programs as inputs/outputs and the fact that they managed to automate feedback.
I'm pretty naive in terms of granular understanding here as I am barely proficient in Python, to be clear, but when I daydream about things you could solve with machine learning/AI, this is the approach I always think of and I guess is how I thought it already worked. Load it up with the best information we have currently, define the desired results as clearly as possible, implement some form of automatic feedback, and let it run iteratively until it produces something better than what you had before.
Is this a case of "well no shit, but actually implementing that effectively is the hard part"? Is it being able to quickly apply it to a wide variety of problems? I guess I'm trying to understand whether this is a novel idea (and if so, what parts are novel), or if the idea has been around and it's a novel implementation.
The important thing is "how do you change X so that it heads towards the goal". And "how to do it quickly and efficiently".
Otherwise the description is the same as "select randomly, keep the best, iterate".
The goal is also complex. You might be thinking of "find the most efficient program" but that's not what we're doing here iiuc. We're trying to get a program that makes other unseen programs more efficient. That's hard to define as a goal.
They did remove the worst results from the group over time, the others was just uses a seed to generate new examples from instead of starting each function from scratch.
This was perhaps my favorite line as well. Maybe a bit of a goofy example, but I think this is why I have enjoyed my weird discord community so much for years now. I don't really know these people, and for that reason I can be and express myself in a way that's not bound to the social identity I've already built up among my "real friends." I've told those people things I haven't told anyone else, and I've developed parts of my personality there that I sometimes bring with me back to my "real life." It's an interesting thing.
I have no idea how strong (or not) this trend is, but I broke into tech from a nontraditional path without knowing anyone. First job at a local company, so possibly some hometown advantage, but my projects and willingness to learn / being personable / general competence conveyed seemed to be what got me hired there. Second job - different company in a different state, no connections at all. I was hired even though I was fully remote until I moved (I had wanted to move to that city to begin with). Wasn't a huge deal as they are fairly remote friendly and I only go to the office once a week now that I live here, but it was still a disadvantage compared to local applicants.
It is certainly possible that I'm just lucky or good at interviewing, but even if this trend is largely true, I hope that people won't be discouraged from applying to roles they find interesting and think they could be a good fit for just because they don't have any connections.
I think one of my greatest professional gifts, especially since getting into tech, has been that I'm naturally personable and can get along well with pretty much anyone. It doesn't have to - and usually doesn't - get into personal stuff. I'm just sorta jokey and lighthearted while still getting my shit done. It has only been a benefit to me, personally and professionally.
I can't see how making people more comfortable talking to and collaborating with you could really be a negative, but everyone has different priorities I suppose.
