The stock Touch Bar is an absolute waste of time. However when you use something like better touch tools and their TB presets it actually becomes pretty useful. If they were smart they would take some inspiration from those presets and actually make it useful.
The problem with the Touch Bar is it replaced the physical keys so I ended up having the Touch Bar fixed to what the physical keys were before. What I want is the physical keys AND the Touch Bar. There is enough space for it.
To add on to these great suggestions I'd also say speak to people. Go on Italki or HelloTalk. Caveman brute force a 5 min conversation if you have to but imo speaking asap is essential and using the resources above + a frequency list can get you through the the first 5 minutes of conversation very quickly.
I think a lot of language learns focus too much on vocabulary and grammar when starting out but they don't take the time to drill/ use the vocabulary they are learning in actual conversation. There is no point in passively knowing 1000 words if you can barely use 100 in an active conversation.
Another resource that I like but wouldn't recommend it unless it was on sale is the mimic method. Learning the phonetics and how to hear/create the unique sounds of your target language is really important but it's too expensive for what you get imo.
As someone who used to work in the medical field it can be a pain to even know how much insurances will reimburse for procedures. Especially when it comes to smaller / union insurance providers, health care providers have to call and wait for a fax or snail mail for a reimbursement table. This leads to balance billing or the provider just eating the cost.
On the consumer side I just found out about healthcare blue book and they have prices for just about any procedure.
As a former social worker I think most social programs don't work because they try to deal with multifaceted problems from a single point of action. It's like trying to fix a suspension bridge by replacing one cable while all the other cables are broken.
It would help some people but for most of the people I worked with money was more a symptom of their issues than a root cause.
Lets say we have a child who is in 5th grade who reads at a 1st grade level. Most programs will say oh well he/she just needs more education so they create after school tutoring. That's great but there are so many things that can be hindering that child's ability to read. The real root may be a medical issue, family issue, cultural issue, structural or a combination of one or more.
People aren't equations, you can't just input x and expect y.
>People aren't equations, you can't just input x and expect y.
People react in mostly predictable ways to certain environments and situations. We're largely deterministic state machines. This kind of mystical thinking devalues the importance of a scientific, objective, data based approach to solving human problems. We aren't an exception to science.
I'd like objective data that sustains your argument then. I think approaching problems, including social problems, as rationally as possible is important. I, similarly, believe that leveraging all available data is important. However, as far as social issues are concerned, American psychology and western psychology in general have shown themselves to be inadequate when addressing the universal set of humans and not the western set. We've seen evidence of this not only in western vs. east-asian psychologies but also in the psychological treatment of refugees from areas like Sudan. I appreciate that there might come a day when human psychology is a solved problem, but unless that problem is currently solved then it seems like leaving room for mysticism is more pragmatic because it permits us to identify, and adapt around, areas of uncertainty while still providing some amount of care.
Admitting uncertainty or having probabilities isn't unscientific, but saying something is outside the realm of normal physics with no evidence is. Sure, psychology as we know it may be flawed, but retail, advertisers, etc. have a pretty good track record of systematically achieving results based on predictable human behaviors.
You can't talk about a hypothetical world with a UBI without making assumptions about what programs we currently have that are lost to fund the UBI.
In the most "free market" version of a UBI vision, there are no government-subsidized social workers. If you are blind, deaf, learning impaired, addicted, etc you are at the mercy of whatever help you can find by paying for it.
But there are also visions of UBI that combine it with current social services, as opposed to replacing them.
Very good point. The assumptions I was implying were that a UBI would replace the broad, disjointed social welfare programs with a centralized, singular service that's relatively equal but weighted by need.
Read Mindset by Carol Dweck. She talks about what you experienced and how to overcome it. She also talks about how to shield children from that fixed mentality.
Even a list of facts can include bias, by which facts it includes and which it omits. There exists no unbiased source of news. Better to have information, along with documentation of any potential sources of bias, evaluate that for yourself with the caveats included, and give it appropriately discounted weight.
We are working on this problem at Newslines. We collect news into timelines, comprised of just-the-fact summaries. We are looking for more contributors to bring us up to date with our Donald Trump newsline http://newslines.org/donald-trump/
It is important to make a distinction between what has been reported, and what is true. Nothing is added to our site unless it is sourced from a credible source and all news from even credible sources that has anonymous sources is tagged as "Rumor/Unsourced". So let's say a credible source reports, using unnamed sources, that the national guard is going to be deployed to round up illegal immigrants. So we would write that as "According to the AP, the national guard is going to be deployed to round up illegal immigrants" and tag that as "Rumor/unsourced". Then when the next report comes out we say "The White house denies the report". And if another report came out about that issue we could tag them, and link them together as being the same issue. You would then be able to follow the timeline of events as they were reported. Contrast this to a newspaper which will massage the information you read each day, and to Wikipedia, which will remove the earlier reports to give you the truth. Problem is the general reader won't know what is kept in and what has been left out.
As for pushing a narrative, that is a form of bias that can be eliminated in the main by extracting the facts from articles. Consider two articles, one in the New York Times ("Trump's Florida rally shows he is unfit to lead" and in Breitbart ("Trump's Florida rally show's he is the best person to lead our country"). While both of these are highly partisan, the fact remains the same: Trump has a rally in Florida.
That said, our tools aren't perfect, but we can build on them.
I applaud the effort but reckoning "credible" seems like a tough proposition. How and by whom is the list of "credible" sources curated.
I wonder if there's some way to come up with content quality metrics for news based on pure reporting of as many of the facts available. Maybe something similar to the stack exchange type system.
You are right. It is very tricky to determine which sources are credible. The National Enquirer broke the John Edwards love child story, despite not being a credible source. And on the other hand we see credible news sources distort the truth to fit the narrative every day. However, the first stage is create systems that let us add news events and reporting in an objective form in which it can be assessed (we have done this already), and then to work on systems that allow us to assess their validity (work in progress). I think something like stack exchange can work, and it will be interesting to experiment to see what works.
I hear you. I want more facts, less opinion, and a good list of verifiable sources out of my news. Suffice it to say, there's precious little of that to be found anywhere.
I think this is preferable. If everyone was more upfront with their bias, then it becomes incumbent on the reader to get a complete view. Sure, plenty of people would just read what they want, but that's ALREADY happening. At least there would be less denial about it.
I think it doesn't really matter. Programming is not a physical impossibility for a vast majority of people. Like I could train for years and never be able to bench press 400lb because of genetic limitation but learning to program doesn't have that limitation. Learning to program like most skills just takes time, effort and dedication. I think if you fail at it either you weren't as interested as you thought or you may have been trying to learn a language that just didn't vibe with you.
Programming also seems like the only profession people just assume they can pick up in a year. No one wakes up and says I'm going to quit my job and become a doctor, or a professor, or lawyer in 3 months to a year. If they are making that type of career switch they go in with the expectation that they will have a lot to learn and it is going to take more than a year of concerted effort. Not everyone is going to become a software engineer at google or apple but there are plenty of well paying programming jobs.
Sorry for the long post I just get frustrated when people want to look at others failures as a gage for their own capabilities. Believe in yourself and put in the work, the results will come.
“He who who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right” – Confucius
I see your point, but I think you may have missed mine. Let's say there are ten successful older programmers interviewed. Seven of them went to coding basecamps, two of them went back to school, and one of them was entirely self-taught. I, as someone who wants to be a developer concludes that going to a coding boot camp is the best way to become a developer later in life.
The problem is that there might be 1000 people who attended boot camps and went on to work in McDonalds for every one who got a developer job — 0.1 percent became developers. But maybe only ten of the self-taught people work in McDonalds for every one who got a programming job. It would be smarter to self-learn in that situation.
But, if all you ever see are the successes, you have no way to decide which is the best course of action.
I don't think that's true at all. I suspect many people don't have the obsessiveness, attention-to-detail, memory, and perseverance that a programmer needs to fix a hard bug. And not many people would enjoy a job that requires sitting motionless in front of a computer for long hours. (I love it, though!)
You have to figure out your why. It also helps if you have something to remind you of your why every day like a picture or saying. Then it become a mantra. I started learning to program at 25. In my earlier years I wasn't very motivated but then I was faced with my mortality and that can be a pretty great motivator. You only live once so why not try to make the most out of every day.
I was a diehard android user for a long time and I switched when the 7 came out. Ios has some annoyances and it is clearly not built for a phablet sized phone. However the battery life I get with the 7 plus makes it all worth it.
