Last year I took some time to solve the 2020 Advent of Code problems. Most of the problems were easy - the second part of each problem usually being slightly harder. I needed a couple of hints to get me through a couple of the problems when I felt I was missing a piece of the puzzle but I only did that twice - for problems 13b and 22b. However, for problem 19b I refused to cheat and pushed through until I got to the solution.

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There are attributes that you may possess that could be considered virtues that transcend the familiar ethical virtues, in that they will make you more successful in any venture regardless of its ethical motivations or outcomes.

Strength is the most obvious. A strong person has the power to perform a good or evil act with more magnitude than a weak person. And if they set upon a venture, their likelihood to succeed will be predicated on a certain threshold of strength.

There are other less obvious virtues. (Jump to list)

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It’s no longer a secret - I’m leaving Silverpond.

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On Saturday I helped run a one-day Haskell workshop for the members of the Melbourne Alt .Net user-group. This idea had actually been in the works for close to two-years but since I’d put on a Haskell workshop at Compose :: Melbourne at the end of last-year, it was a no-brainer to repurpose the material and finally get this event done.

Organising and running this event was a pretty smooth exercise overall, with the only real work required being a gathering of volunteers to help assist, the tweaking of the materials, and obviously running the workshop on the day. The venue was graciously provided by SEEK and we ran the workshop in their lunch/presentation area with the crowd of roughly 50 fitting comfortably in a relaxed atmosphere.

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evening4u - "sailing"

Something counter-intuitive occurs when you take someone versed in sales and in development and ask them to do both on a project. There are two forces at play that are very productive if they can be resolved - narrative forces, and the scientific forces. Sales tells a lead a story where the lead is the main character. This doesn’t focus on the obstacles to engineering the details that the story entails by design. Sales is about driving desire. Of course, the pitch must be achievable at least in part otherwise reputation will suffer, but the constraints of the story need not be made explicit to the lead. Development on the other hand focuses almost entirely on uncovering the constraints of the solutions described. The tension between vision and realisation can be a very productive driving force for a business, but only when managed carefully. The division of roles aids in this management in ways that are very difficult to manifest in a single person.

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Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen - "Mengerism (All symmetric 3-units)"

Enumeration can serve as an invaluable intuition pump.

Often you will come across a gem of an idea, this seems to have merit on its own and deserve exploration. For example, you may observe that good musicians have a certain set of personality traits. It’s worth expanding on and testing this idea. There may be something to it. It’s a valuable piece of knowledge to spread, however, there’s much more to be gained from ideas such as this with the application of a little abstraction.

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Tejvan Pettinger - "Cycling"

Constant interruptions kill productivity, but the take away from this should not be to become a hermit. Hermits may be very productive but they lose touch with the rest of the world. When they emerge with their hermetic results, they find that humanity has moved on. That their results interest nobody, that other people have already produced better results, and worst of all, that they have lost the friends that they used to have who would have listened to them regardless of these other downfalls.

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Danny Choo - "Free Ticket To Japan"

Here’s another dumb idea of mine:

Create a proxy that turns ascii-casts into streaming WebM video.

This will allow you to embed your ascii-casts in sites that only support video or gif embedding!

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - "New Evidence for Water at Mercury's Poles"

When you come up with an interesting hypothesis:

• Look at the field where it applies.
• Look at what assumptions the hypothesis breaks.
• Enumerate all possible hypotheses that emerge from those broken assumptions.
• Look at why your hypothesis is the best of these options.
• Why not test the other ones too?

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Jon Bunting - "funfair action"

In the post Action, Perception and Theory of Mind, I laid out a few ideas about discussing actions, observations, perceptions, theory of mind, and how they relate to interpersonal and inter-group dynamics. The text was kept quite abstract, but now I would like to use a few concrete examples in order to show how to take advantage of these new concepts.

Here we use the same Two-Body Problem from the other post, but instead of nameless parties, I use human names. Instead of abstract actions, I use concrete actions, and instead of amorphous bodies, I use companies. This scenario is going to be studied from a “Value” perspective.

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Mel Stoutsenberger - "signals"

Signalling is the conveyance of information outside of the direct in-band communication channel.

Example: Candidate at an interview for JPL went to Harvard.

This signals that they may have some grit, connections, a good demeanor and interesting traits.

Of course, this signal could be misleading, but this isn’t meant to conclude the investigation of what the signal implies. It’s just an early step in the process.

Now the cooler the signalling attribute, the stronger the signal, right?

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alexanderward12 - "Rachmaninoff"

If you want to practice mindfulness, then give page-turning a go. Ask your musician friends if they would like you to page-turn for them during a practice session. It’s not hard to get the hang of, but it demands very high concentration none-the-less.

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Wynter Bracken - "Torley on Piano"

Fantasizing is often looked down on

• As distinct from day-dreaming
• Attributed to mania
• Unrealistic

… but, You can remedy some of these issues.

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Magnus Larsson - "Downtown Vancouver Sunset"

I’ve really like the idea of Categories. They boil down one of the most essential aspects of programming - “composition” - into a concrete interface, and with their laws, give rise to logically intuitive behaviour. Categories start out extremely simply, with only two laws, and two operations, but the subject quickly becomes highly theoretical through many ideas about sub-categories, transformations between categories, isomorphic behaviors, etc. Still, just using the basics is very satisfying!

While categories may be intellectually stimulating, there was a question asked recently that I thought I would be able to easily answer, but the more I thought about it, the more I was stumped…

“How can a Category instance in my program save me from writing at least a little code?”

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T4LLBERG - "Weapons"

This is a set of notes summarizing the trials and tribulations involved in getting a small Haskell application building, running, and scaling in the cloud on a budget!

The outcome is that the app still isn’t running, but we are on the bring of having it running on AWS through Elastic Beanstalk. Stay tuned for Part-Two, where I’ll speak in more detail about the final step, and guide you down the happy-path towards building and running your own Haskell services in the cloud…

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Nahid V - "Fallen tree"

I started writing this post in an attempt to capture certain ideas about how value is projected, and how those projections can be misconstrued. Halfway there I began to realize that I was instead creating a kind of embedded language for discussing the perceptions of actions in general. This post will, therefore, focus on the idea of action perception, with some examples. I will soon write another post to get back to the original topic viewed with the help of the ideas discussed here.

Let’s talk a little about the title.

Most of the interactions in our day-to-day lives are just that - actions. These actions occur between people, groups, objects, or are self-inflicted. We mostly limit our conversations about these actions to remarks about their circumstances, and the details involved in their construction and execution. However, if a tree falls in a forest, and it is not perceived, does it still make a sound? It is important to keep in mind the contexts and interpretations of the perceptions of actions that occur.

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There’s a story about some of the old Bell Labs offices that is told by Richard Hamming in his lecture You and Your Research ¹ given at the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar in 1986:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.

He continues…

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The standup is a mainstay of modern agile development teams.

It evolved as an attempt to keep meetings short and regular:

• We want to facilitate communication
• Meetings attempt to do this, but are unstructured, and go on too long
• If we stand when we have a meeting, peoples legs will get sore, and the meeting will have to be kept short
• Stand-up meetings still go on too long, and lack structure, but now our legs are sore too

The thrust of enhancing communication is to ensure that everyone knows what other members of the team are up to, and what the current focus is. This ritual is often paired with Kanban style card walls so that tasks and progress can be represented symbolically and made visible. This can be beneficial, but doesn’t necessarily have to be part of stand-up itself.

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I write a lot of convenience scripts day-to-day. These usually take the form of a visualisation, text-processing, html-generation, you get the idea. In the past I would usually have the convenience script also perform the action that I fundamentally wanted to achieve. For example, I wrote a small python script to plot two columns of CSV input and then display them to me called plot-columns.py.

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