Who can blame readers for supporting an author they know can produce good output that they enjoy. Maybe there are good books by other lesser known authors out there, but then you have to take a risk with something new.
Up until 6 months ago, I had read probably 3 books in 10 years. 6 months ago I started reading again.
I started with Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, books 1 and 2. That set a high bar.
Next was the Dune trilogy after I saw the movie. Overall it was good but a bit heavy for reading before bed, I often didn't manage for more than 30 mins before starting to drift off, whilst with Kingkiller chronicles I could easily read 1+ hours. I gave up on Dune book 3, I'll read it on vacation some time.
Then I tried Ready Player One, which opened up a whole world of realizing that books can be really bad, just like other art forms. I feel like I've never read a bad book before this (despite not reading for 10 years, I did read a lot as a teenager).
The first 25% of the book relies 80s references every other sentence, clearly the writer is trying to nostalgia trip the reader into enjoying it. Then after that he is describing playing a video game. People bemoan how there is a big cultural shift towards watching people play video games, but here is even worse; he describes a super boring boss battle involving an 80s arcade game. Every chapter I read, I got more annoyed at how bad the book was, until I realized I could just abandon it.
And now I just started Sanderson's Mistborn #1: The Final Empire, and it feels good to be reading something quality again.
I think it's easier to recall the "idea" of each algorithm, than visualizing the flow of the code. There's normally also some key implementation detail that's helpful to remember.
Quicksort - pivot - i <= hi
mergesort - merge - auxiliary array
When I started practicing DSA, I would code these algorithms from scratch ever week, to try and memorize them. Then as I did more general leetcoding, I realized that these are just solutions to problems, and there's no need to memorize the code exactly, just knowing the key idea is enough.
People dump on leetcode because they think it's memorizing solutions to problems, but it's not practical to do that. It's more like memorizing one sentence per problem, than memorizing a page of code. And when you see a new problem, you just adapt one of the "sentences" you memorized for a similar problem.
But if you've never looked at an efficient algorithm for dependency resolution, it's going to be impossible to come up with a good solution for a related problem in an interview.
> I realized that these are just solutions to problems, and there's no need to memorize the code exactly, just knowing the key idea is enough.
Right, my pictures are what the code is supposed to do, not the code that is executing it. Then I can just take pieces of it and compose it with other things, you need some kind of intuition to do that, for me that intuition takes the form of pictures.
But yeah, the trick to solve leetcode properly is to not solve leetcode, but to learn to get better than leetcode, that way leetcode problems will feel trivial for the rest of your life.
Having seen amazing movies on Prime, when I struggle to find anything decent to watch, I blame it on the fact that Prime is only listing a small fraction of movies that exist, not that movies are dead.
The author seems to wear his extreme disorganization as a badge of honor. Also from the article:
> having 500 tabs open in mobile Safari, which I always do, doesn’t hurt my system performance at all because the tabs are freeze-dried when I’m not using them.
When you have so many open tabs, there's no difference between a "freeze dried" tab, and just an entry in your browser's history. If your system performance on desktop is hurt by having 37 windows open, the solution is to just close all these windows. I guarantee you're not going to miss them.
Well of course there's a difference between a "freeze dried" tab and an entry in the browser's history. The latter is just one line in an undifferentiated m(a|e)ss. The former is right in front of your face, one click away, maybe with an icon in view.
No. If you have 500 tabs open in any program, chances are the one you're interested in is not in view right in front of you just a single click away. There's, at a guess, a 95 percent chance[1] you'll have to scroll around and look for it. And if you're going to have to do that anyway, you can just as well do it in the browser history as among open tabs.
___
1: It's probably not exactly the same in Safari / iOS, but gotta be the same ballpark: In Firefox / Android I can see fewer than ten tabs at a time. (Hm, that number must have shrunk in a recent update.)
Apple aren't doing this to eliminate malware from their systems. Probably just gearing up to the point where it's impossible to run any application that Apple isn't getting a cut of (or is free).
Realistically, malware only affects a tiny fraction of users, and only a further tiny fraction suffer demonstrable loss from it.
Malware in the past has been an enormous problem, with huge numbers of average users affected. To say that we don't need protection against malware because it's not a major problem now is circular reasoning, and ignores literally decades of effort to bring the problem under control.
For a certain generation of adults, going to visit your non-technical parents socially meant budgeting extra time to eradicate the adware of the month. It was a constant problem affecting large swaths of users, and fixing it was beyond the technical ability of most people.
fwiw, you can disable almost all of Apple's enhanced security features easily on macOS systems.
Their whole design is incredibly neat and well done! If you like these features (or just don't care) the default install does make attacker's lives harder.
But if you disagree with these features or just don't like them you can just boot into recovery mode, authenticate with your password and disable almost everything for macOS.
And if you just like the hardware you can do the same and install a custom kernel like Linux or *BSD and do whatever you want.
You can even have triple boot into one macOS with full security enabled, another macOS install with everything disable and a third "macOS" which actually is Linux.
They spend a lot of effort and engineering time to make all this possible.
Up until 6 months ago, I had read probably 3 books in 10 years. 6 months ago I started reading again.
I started with Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, books 1 and 2. That set a high bar.
Next was the Dune trilogy after I saw the movie. Overall it was good but a bit heavy for reading before bed, I often didn't manage for more than 30 mins before starting to drift off, whilst with Kingkiller chronicles I could easily read 1+ hours. I gave up on Dune book 3, I'll read it on vacation some time.
Then I tried Ready Player One, which opened up a whole world of realizing that books can be really bad, just like other art forms. I feel like I've never read a bad book before this (despite not reading for 10 years, I did read a lot as a teenager).
The first 25% of the book relies 80s references every other sentence, clearly the writer is trying to nostalgia trip the reader into enjoying it. Then after that he is describing playing a video game. People bemoan how there is a big cultural shift towards watching people play video games, but here is even worse; he describes a super boring boss battle involving an 80s arcade game. Every chapter I read, I got more annoyed at how bad the book was, until I realized I could just abandon it.
And now I just started Sanderson's Mistborn #1: The Final Empire, and it feels good to be reading something quality again.