It counts as another reference for whatever you’re writing at the moment

Never too old to learn. I think Python is a great beginner language. It has fairly broad applications, and easy to set up an environment (don’t have to download/install a thousand things, you just install python and can run the text files in terminal). I also learned by doing starting in late middle school/early high school. I always found YouTube videos to be the most engaging way to get started. I used to like thenewboston. Once I had a handle on the basic programming language, I would do easy programming challenges where you have to solve some sort of basic problem. The challenges helped me learn basics like taking in input, changing the input based on the various rules and conditions of the challenges, then outputting the proper results formatted in the right way. Also helped me to think about algorithms, etc. After that, I started learning programming through a textbook. This was helpful for understanding some of the more technical aspects, basics of memory management, what different variable types are really for, OOP, abstraction, algorithms etc. I found that leaving these advanced topics till after I had a working understanding of the programming language helped understand the concepts better, and helped me understand why it’s important to learn the concepts in the first place. I was using Java for learning most of this, which might also be a good place to start for you, but I feel like python has simpler syntax to start with. In the end once you learn one language, I recommend learning more and not being stuck to any particular language. Every language has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the commonalities and differences will only make you better in the long run.

Edit - now I use Go, python, JavaScript, R, Java, Julia, rust based on what I’m actually doing. It’s fairly easy to switch languages once you get used to basic syntax.

I have a question about rigid curriculums. This is mostly for high school. Many of my teachers had curriculums and syllabi that they had been using for years and kept them basically the same, and then there were the AP classes where the curriculum was determined by the AP exam. I felt that I learned really well in AP classes and we would get through much more advanced material in the AP classes than in others. And I also felt that the teachers who had developed somewhat fixed curriculums from experience taught much more efficiently than those who hadn’t. It never felt like the teachers were changing their curriculum for each class whether it was an AP class or not because most had their curriculums kind of figured out over the course of teaching for many years. And most of the teachers I had in high school were excellent. So my question is, why is it believed that rigid curriculums don’t work? Because in my schooling experience, whether the rigid curriculum was developed by the individual teacher or by an external organization (like AP), the class seemed to benefit from having fixed goals for the year.

During my graduate research, our lab space was next to the cell modeling department and I would catch a talk here or there. Always found it a super interesting approach because it really tries to make sense of what we’ve learned from traditional biology and generates really nice hypotheses/theories for testing out in biological models. I also love how you can apply so much abstract mathematics to biological systems for biologically meaningful findings. Most of these types of cell modeling papers go above my head, but I still really appreciate them from outside.

Cool! I used to work on molecular dynamics of viral proteins through computational simulations in undergrad, but had never heard it be called theoretical biology before haha.

The duck is theoretical biology? Like math modeling and simulation stuff?

No Microsoft Access is/was a GUI software actually meant to have databases instead of how everyone uses Excel/spreadsheets as databases. It is a part of the office suite. It works pretty much like traditional databases but has an easier to access GUI for non programmers I guess. I don’t think it’s used a ton nowadays except for legacy processes that haven’t been updated.

I think I want work to end an hour earlier in the winter because of how early the sun sets, and care much less about the summer. So however it’s done, it would be great if office jobs could happen when it’s dark outside and we could live our lives during daylight.

No the longer evenings are achieved by work starting and ending an hour earlier. And it’s literally easier to change the time zone than to change corporate culture.

Because women are often referred to as hoes in rap lyrics

All of that interest is from people making computers, or people who manage security. Not from people that use computers as part of their life/work (in contrast to those who’s work is entirely about the computer itself). From a usability standpoint, this type of sandboxing for every app is cumbersome and all it leads to is users finding unsafe work arounds. I used to be able to use my android phone much more as a regular computer than I can now. And I wanted to make a simple app for myself to allow me to automatically copy and catalog photos from my cameras sd card to an external HDD, and I literally cannot do this without jumping through a million permissions and API hoops on Android even though I never plan on publishing this app for others to use. It became such a pain to figure out how to get access to the folders I would need, I just gave up on the entire project. I essentially needed a tool to systematically copy and rename files, and it’s nearly impossible because of these nonsensical policies.

Sure except that we already have computers where every app uses the same folder structure, just with some files/folders protected with elevated permissions that aren’t accessible to every app. We already have a solution that works and every desktop OS uses. Why would mobile go for a solution that isn’t actually usable?

Buy PIA VPN. Look up a guide to setup Plex, radarr, sonarr, and jackett. You can get fancier once you’re comfortable with how everything works

It’s kind of wild how many PhD positions there are for so few jobs. Maybe they should just start limiting how many PhDs can graduate in a year in the country to however many jobs there are. Create some sort of stability in the market and limit the number of young people wasting 10+ years of their lives in a field where they may not be able to build a career. Similar to how med schools limit numbers to stay proportional to the number of residency positions.

Yeah but there used to be hope for affording a house after you finished and got into a tenure track position. But now there are barely any tenure track positions and even those don’t always pay enough for a house

On a larger scale, I think this points out the flaws in using a school’s “reputation” to evaluate how qualified a given graduate may be. If employers and the general public no longer gave the Ivies the consideration they often get, then where someone goes to school would not matter in the end. But even with standardized testing, and other performance metrics, employers (and others such as graduate schools) always factor in an applicants’ schools’ “reputation” when considering the applicant. Even though time and time again, it’s been shown that the school does not make a difference, it is the individual. The primary way in which the school influences a person’s success is in the implicit bias everyone has about their perceived reputations.

Oh that’s cool! Is this local for the Czech Republic? How does it compare to Google maps/navigation?

This has been my experience as well. I’ve been using it on my Honda since 2015, and have not had any problems except 2. Once it was just an old USB cable that needed to be replaced. The other issue was sometimes the Bluetooth doesn’t connect the right way so I have to turn off Bluetooth on my phone then connect the USB to my phone which forces it to connect correctly. The Bluetooth issue was recurring (once every month or two), but hasn’t happened for nearly a year now.

Pretty sure there’s an android auto API for music apps and stuff (that’s why Spotify and pocket casts and many audiobook players support it), but unfortunately there aren’t non-Google navigation apps (unsure if that’s because Google won’t allow them or because there just aren’t any).

They can’t do this with weed until the federal government makes it legal because interstate commerce is under their jurisdiction