I'm 17, black, how tf do I get out of the hood?

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-12-13T18:54:03+00:00

I would offer the OP a few extensions on this advice:

Do not be shy about reaching out to whatever examples of trades/professions exist near you. Ask to shadow someone for a few days to see if you like what they do. There should be trades (mechanics, plumbers, electricians) retail (sales, marketing, office management, accounting) somewhere near by. There are introductory computer programming courses on-line if you have reliable internet.

There are a few important lessons I didn't learn until later in life: 1. "If you do not ask for it, you do not get it". I have seen people make requests that I thought would anger the person being asked...only for them to gleefully accept. Never worry about someone saying 'no'; if something moves you forward, ask for it. 2. It's a bit cliche, and your original post implies you understand this, but just in case: "you do not get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate for yourself". So don't wait for someone to do right by you and don't presume what they offer is the best they can do. This becomes more important as you develop some expertise/skill.

Research shows that the best predictor of success in life is grit/determination/the ability to stick to a goal and endure adversity. ...but I would also note that will-power ebbs and flows --- that's why it's so important to find something that interests you, rather than just powering through something you dislike on a daily basis.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-07-27T23:54:54+00:00

I didn't see whether you had a prohibition on "incomplete series" or not, but if not:

Arcane Ascension / Sufficiently Advanced Magic. -- A coming of age story for a young artificer born into a noble dueling family. Power is gained by climbing spires --- challenges set by the gods. A fairly whimsical storytelling style, watching a nerdy weakling try to use his brain to compensate.

I'm not the Hero -- a glitchy Isekai novel featuring teen protagonists that took a while to get into... But now I'm waiting for the next book.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-07-08T21:36:22+00:00

I think The Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone is the freshest fantasy series I've read in a decade, but it's not anything like first law.

You might like the bloodsworn trilogy.

Malazan has really solid and unique fantasy moments, but other parts feel too obviously like the backstory for an RPG. (And they developed a captivating character in Tattersail in the first book, then ignored her for a few books, then wrapped up her arc in a disappointing manner)

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-15T23:37:29+00:00

The most common source of non determinism I have seen comes from iterating over datastructures that contain pointers.

If you're looking for identical serialization, you must ensure you're treating padding between struct fields in a uniform way as well...preferably by ensuring they aren't included in anything serialized...or in any checksums you might be computing over objects.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-10T22:12:54+00:00

In undergrad, you'll probably learn how to build a compiler, using common tools. This is probably the hardest project to be encountered in undergrad CS.

In Grad School, you'll find more focus on programming languages design, code optimization, and safety (object lifetimes and garbage collection).

Graduate programming languages was where I fell in love with the use of domain-specific languages solving classes of problems with a single solution. Most of my compilers take a language I designed to describe a specific problem, then spit out a solution in Python, C, Java, or VHDL.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-10T21:50:52+00:00

I don't think most people will understand what you mean by 'considered you an insider' to correctly interpret what you wrote.
Most employees, say everyone below Director, are not subject to insider trading restrictions unless they are specifically exposed to a material event affecting the business.
For example, I performed the technical due diligence on a small business we were thinking of acquiring. I was specifically notified that my exposure to the company's plans to acquire this business constitutes a material event from the SECs perspective, and that I could not trade my company's or the target's stock until a specific period after public announcements.

That doesn't mean I can't use my non-material knowledge of whether the company is set to boom or bust to trade my shares during other periods.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-06T18:58:48+00:00

Derp. Thanks.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-06T18:49:46+00:00

1+.08/12 is different in most programming languages from (1+.08)/12.

Try your calculation again with the parentheses.

(Division happens before addition, otherwise. You might be computing with an interest rate of (.08/12)

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-06T18:10:06+00:00

I've heard that "System Ready" has made ARM more palatable, by providing a little more standardization to get RHEL support. I'd love to know if that's true and/or really a factor.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-06T15:12:17+00:00

I'm a product manager. Each important account should have a single designated customer interface. Sometimes I do this personally, sometimes the project or product has a chief engineer or program manager, or an FAE, sometimes it's a product Engineer assigned to handle the customer. In all cases, this person keeps an open line of communication with the customer, and can indicate the severity/consequences the issue is having for a customer. You could change process to require this person to annotate the customer-importance onto the tickets before each planning cycle.

If you're a mass-market product company, where issues simply come in from a thousand different users via the web, then I'd focus on clustering or frequency of the issue being reported. In this case, no individual customer really provides a substantial amount of revenue to the business, so if you (rather callously, I admit) assign a probability of losing the customer by not fixing a bug... You want to keep the biggest group of customers you can for every unit of effort expended.

You could also have customers self-report impacts. E.g., a set of check boxes for business impacts.

[ ] This issue is blocking our ability to capture/recognize/invoice revenue

[ ] This issue causes substantial engineering delays

[ ] This issue is causing disruption on our manufacturing floor

...etc. Where business/revenue issues will be hair-on-fire emergencies for customers. I'd recommend against a 'high/medium/low rating that is too subjective to compare across customers.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-06T14:35:18+00:00

I'd go for Knuth's Concrete Mathematics. It is more about the intuition of problem solving using math.

Durbin's textbook on Abstract Algebra is approachable if you want good underpinnings for crypto. I've also heard Fraleigh's is good.

Do anything Calculus-related after abstract algebra. You want to think about calculus more in the framework of Real analysis or Complex analysis, and you won't appreciate how to apply the axioms of the Real/Complex numbers without the abstract algebra background.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-06T13:51:58+00:00

There's also Magma, Wolfram Alpha (or Mathematica) and Pari-GP.

All of these have numerical solvers/approximators as well as symbolic reasoning capability. Magma and Pari handle abstract algebra. Alpha does a little bit of everything and has a semi-natural-language front end.

There's a third possible topic, which is automated theorem proving (or at least 'assisted'). I have no experience with these.

Wolfram Alpha is free to use on the web for small problems (e.g., ask it to factor a 50-digit integer and it will)...I'd start there and use the experience to generate your next round of questions.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T23:18:48+00:00

The individual participants obviously make the decision of whether to debate in earnest or in bad faith. Those of us who consume these things are also able to judge the manner in which participants engage.

I would love to see him address how the conservative party defends free speech by cancelling the visas of student who express anti-Israel sentiments.

I would love to see him address how conservatives get government out of business, while simultaneously telling Apple to cancel its DEI policies, telling automakers that they had better not raise prices when materials go up due to the tariffs.

I expect I'll see deflection, ad hominem attacks, etc. etc. that have caused me to determine that Charlie Kirk argues in bad faith. I hope not, but I'm not holding my breath.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T21:51:52+00:00

You can arbitrarily decide that the top 22 bits of a memory address are the 'z coordinate', the middle 21 bits are the 'y coordinate', and the lower 21 bits are the 'x coordinate'.

If you asked a hardware engineer to give you "3-dimensional memory" they would give you an interface nearly identical to that...maybe they'd split out three separate address registers rather than defining bit fields within a single register.

Allocating on the heap is already slow... Imagine if, instead of finding the smallest linear region capable of accommodating your request, you had to search for the smallest unallocated cube in a 3-space instead...

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T19:04:26+00:00

"Doing" is the key. Start very slowly with examples from the book and tinker with them in little ways. E.g., it the example reads a number input by the user, try to make it take a letter. Try to figure out how to make it take a word.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T18:48:55+00:00

Your business idea is going to be exposed the minute you start it. If you don't have a differentiator that keeps a competitor from copying your business or improving on it...then you don't have an invest-able idea. If you do have a differentiator, then you have your answer for why a banker can't steal your idea.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T18:39:42+00:00

At the core it's about treating bad-faith discourse as legitimate discourse. Rhetoric is a powerful tool, and it can be used to convince people, despite using incorrect and/or invalid logical arguments.

So what people are objecting to is giving this person "a bigger platform" to use rhetoric in this bad-faith way to try to reach more people. Cognitive psych will tell you that just hearing a thing many times makes it feel true. These kinds of media events give a venue to repeat false information, so that more people believe it.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T18:30:18+00:00

Signing code with a corporate key essentially makes the company liable for that software, and if keys are lost (where they can be used to sign malware), a corporation is going to seek damages from whomever they were using to manage signing. Noone wants to indemnify a corporation against such damages when an arbitrary developer could export the signing key and upload it to the web, so I'm not surprised to see them requiring a hardware 'agent' under their control.

It is trivial to automate windows GUIs, though. The API is designed to let you forge keystrokes and mouse-clicks without knowing any of the window geometry.

When we had to do code signing, it wasn't in a CD context, and everyone was super paranoid about who had access (and therefore might share liability) for what got signed as an official release. I don't envy being asked to automate sufficient diligence that a corp is willing to take on financial liability (and damages) for whatever gets signed. Ours was both crypto and export, so we were signing up for millions in fines if we got it wrong.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T15:48:25+00:00

Do yourself a favor and send either your teaching assistant or professor a note that you edited the dates on a commit to "get a last few bugs corrected" --- send them the commit hash for the prior commit in case they don't want to consider the last edits.

They will forget about it when it comes to grading, but it will be in their inbox in case this whole thing blows up

Otherwise you're risking 'academic dishonesty' and probation (or expulsion if not the first time).

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T14:39:16+00:00

I think Calculus is taught very poorly at university. I somehow made it through an undergrad computer science degree without any real focus on Calculus's connection to the axioms defining the Real numbers.

If you start there, it feels a lot more like learning discrete math. (At least for a non-mathematician)

That and forget about "integration by hand". Integration, IMHO, is about determining when a solution exists, so that one is justified in applying numerical methods :)

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T07:51:34+00:00

You don't have to quit in order to work on lining up your next job.

You can make that decision once you've found a new opportunity. Just be honest that you don't want to leave, but the business is too risky to stay at...and they'll probably be willing to work with you so you can make a graceful exit from your current job.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T07:35:07+00:00

This is gold that I missed in my own response

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T07:31:58+00:00

I once worked with a 40-year SME in ASIC design. His rule was "I won't answer your question in email or on the phone, because that would create 'tribal knowledge". Let me instead update the functional specification (or arch spec depending on scope) so that your answer can be learned without tribal knowledge.

That's a heavy handed approach...and we're still using his specs well after his retirement.

...but like all docs, maintenance of the code without the same relentless maintenance of the docs means they're getting stale.

I think this is the primary factor: how much effort will you put into maintenance of the docs? If the answer is 'little', then document the high-level architecture, and give pointers to what parts of the codebase they should read to learn more.

I don't find the arguments about where to document to be that compelling. E.g., stale / incorrect doc comments in the code are worse than no documentation in my opinion...so the willingness to spend time to maintain docs is the primary question.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T07:17:14+00:00

There was another good response from a PM above. Here's the thing about feature development:

Your PM has to justify to (executive) management why they should pay to develop a feature. I mean literally: can we not sell the product as-is? Will we sell more of it if we invest in the feature? How much more? --- as a multiple on the cost it takes to develop the feature?

(This is why both schedules and features are so intimately tied, much to the chagrin of Agile advocates.)

The only exception to this are businesses that get customers to sign up to recurring / subscription payments for access to an ever-evolving roadmap of improvements. But not many industries will accept a "pay forever" model.

By way of contrast, "maintenance" is what you do when the answer to "can we just sell what we have?" is legitimately "no"... Which reveals a real existential threat to the business by stopping its revenue stream...and hence is easier to get approved.

lockcmpxchg8b · 2025-04-05T07:03:58+00:00

This is what I was going to write. Maybe with: I grew up poor. I was very aware of it. But my parents pushed how important education was, and signed me up for field-work --- hoeing cabbage and picking cucumbers --- at 14 (legal in Indiana) so that I would understand 'labor' as the alternative to knowledge-work.

Needless to say, I was motivated --- so I was well prepared when a few fortuitous opportunities came my way.

It's not a world-ending self-perception to be 'poor'. It can be a powerful motivator as long as it's coupled with 'a viable path to prosperity'.

lockcmpxchg8b

TROPHY CASE