site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3196 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 15, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What type of note keeping app do you use, if any? I recently started using Notion for work and I'm slowly grasping the possibilities. I'm also looking at using Obsidian in my personal life.

Any thoughts on how to use these tools effectively?

What type of note keeping app do you use, if any?

vim to take notes, git to save/distribute them, grep to search them, ssh to get to them from my phone if I'm away from a laptop or workstation.

Any thoughts on how to use these tools effectively?

In my case? Already be an expert with them for other use cases, so there's no extra learning curve involved.

I could go into more specific details, but I fear my readers might be less interested in "how to use these [particular] tools effectively" and more fascinated with me as a potential counterexample to the "opinion of someone with extensive life experience will carry more weight for me" heuristic @Southkraut just commented above. Sometimes "life experience" just means "figured something out from scratch decades ago and too stubborn to start over from scratch now", sometimes "children of his own" just means "short rations of free time".

Ahh to be a programmer. You truly are the ubermensch of our times.

Is there anything stopping you? The closest thing I've ever had to a CS class was the "Matlab and Fortran for Dummies" they made all the engineering students take, but by that time I'd taught myself BASIC (which was easy; unteaching myself the bad habits it engendered was harder...) and C from books, plus Perl and C++ from websites. And that was back in the Bad Old Days, when BASIC still had an excuse for existing as an "intro language", even if it was unsuitable for large applications. Today if you ask "what's the best way for someone with zero experience to get started" the answer is "Python" and if you ask "what's this bleeding-edge research code being written in" the answer is often "Python", so the onramp has never been more gentle.

You still want a CS degree on the team for some types of work (I was able to help my niece with her homework, right up until she got to graph algorithms...), but most of my co-workers are engineering or math or both; lots of places need someone who thoroughly understands the application domain and can code a little more than they need someone who thoroughly understands programming and doesn't know what they're writing it for.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats