Article doesn't really match the title, it's more of pulpit sermon on what the author thinks newcomers need to know about learning.

But, it feels a bit random, like a mix of feel-good motivational things they want to blurt out, but very short on concrete advice. Not sure it's really useful for anyone.

I agree and have an idea for something, if not prescriptive, illustrative. Keep an eye on the RSS feed and thanks for reading.

I’m no expert in string theory but with all the bagging on string theory I tried to get to the guts of what's going on without as much "opinion". I did watch this great video which interviewed a bunch of scientists working on various aspects of string theory, and overwhelmingly it seems there's still a lot of interesting questions to be answered (even if string theory doesn't describe this universe), unfortunately I can't seem to find it at the moment.

I think the main thing is, even if string theory turns out not to describe reality, it shows that quantum mechanics and general relativity can be reconciled within a single, mathematically consistent framework. The tension between the two is gone and it's actually needed for physical correctness. Simply knowing that such a reconciliation is possible is already a meaningful result.

String theory emerged from attempts to quantize gravity. I think the most interesting thing is that when a relativistic string is quantized, a massless spin-2 particle inevitably appears in the spectrum. This particle behaves exactly like a graviton, meaning that gravity is not introduced by hand but instead arises naturally from the theory.

Competing approaches may possibly be all compatible, much like different interpretations of Quantum Physics.

The main difficulty with experimental tests is that the relevant energy scales and distances are far beyond what we can currently probe in the laboratory. This is not a weakness unique to string theory, but a general problem for any theory of quantum gravity. The Planck scale is simply too extreme to access directly with present technology.

As for experiments that depend on both quantum mechanics and general relativity, in principle these would involve situations where quantum coherence and strong gravitational effects are both important. Examples include black hole evaporation, aspects of early-universe cosmology, and possible quantum effects in curved spacetime. These are extraordinarily difficult to study experimentally, but they are what motivates the search for a theory of quantum gravity in the first place.

even when americans are dying or suffering, as long as someone foreign isn't killing them, the consequences don't seem to matter

True for most countries except israel, Israel has killed american soldiers even. From the very beginning of their state. Look up the USS Liberty incident. They bombed the warship with mirages to make sure their cold blooded murder of an arab coastal village wouldnt be investigated.

Friendly fire happens all the time. Israel handled it about as well as they could have, by apologizing and paying reparations. It's also been 58 years now since the accident.

American soldiers have also killed thousands of American soldiers; should the US punish itself?

israel has killed many americans, they dont seem to pay any price for it

No. I would get rid of "should" to "could" but it actually would warp the open source world once money is involved. People would start optimizing what they do to try and get a slice of the pie.

I was on IRC really early, 91, and it was great, there wasn't that many people on there and it felt way more international and you naturally ended up talking to people from all around the world (I'm from NZ). I even did two overseas trips to meet all kinds of people in real life and experiencing all kinds of slices of other peoples worlds. As more and more people got on the internet people ended up talking much more with locals (except for special interest groups). I'm still in contact with one of the very first friends I made on IRC (who is in the US) and have met them multiple times over the years

I didn't do IRC until early 2000s but I felt a lot of curiosity about being online with other people: were they from an opposite corner of the world? What was life like there? How interesting that we can talk to each other!

Just the act of getting online to seek out others was super niche, so I feel like it was a bit of a "finding your own tribe" experience for me.

Same. I randomly had time off and someone in IRC noticed. I traveled from the US to Germany to hang out with them. Their brother was involved in BMW racing, and we hung out at Stuttgart for a few weekends in a trailer. Some of the best weeks of my life.

You didn't happen to hang out on #C++, did you?

I worked in a large company in the 90s and it really felt like Scott was spying on us with the comics he wrote. Such a great comic strip, and I liked his book the Dilbert principle. I followed his blog for quite a while then things started going off the rails a bit and I stopped following, I also ended up in smaller companies and Dilbert felt less relevant and I haven't really been following what has been happening with him. Kind of glad I didn't. I'm appreciative of the years of humor Dilbert provided in the 90s.

this is not really a good guide to Message Queues, it's really only talking about them in context of one use of them. It doesn't really talk about the message queue at all and the basic differences between various message queue implementations. Your local AI chatbot is going to give you a much better overview, just take the title "Message Queues: A Simple Guide with Analogies" and it does a much better job

I think all kinds of libraries are becoming redundant. Unless the library solves significant technical problems its likely AI will generate whatever you need. Even tailwind itself is kind of unnecessary, I've used it a lot, but recently been just using AI to generate raw css on side projects, I feel it works pretty well. Tailwind is really a developer convivence, it made things pretty fast to style, but now I don't really think it has anywhere near the advantages it did. If you aren't writing tailwindcss but generating it, almost all the advantage is gone. Only thing it kind of provides is a set of defaults / standards

that's a good thing, many a time I've discovered some real gems by people telling us about alternatives

super useful when you have an application, i.e. not a browser, that is making api calls that you want to inspect.