In modern web development there are a 1000 things that are important, how to know them all? Sure in a perfect engineering specimen, you would be a walking encyclopedia of everything OSI model, every RFC ever written, Roy Fielding's PhD dissertation, Gof Patterns, DDD, functional programming, dynamic programming, ML, cloud computing, programming languages, etc...
The reality for average intellects(like me) is I keep studying and over time concepts and concept areas sink in. It's not that I feel like I will ever master anything. However, I know enough that I can go to a book or Google something to get to 'semi-expert' level for a task and then I probably forget most of it afterwards.
Also programming isn't enough. You have to be able to design cloud architectures, REST APIs, data access patterns and so on. I feel as though people who get into this industry are senior engineers at 5 years in, while I'm only feeling like that after 20+ years.
I guess more imposter syndrome, only alleviated in the moment when I merge my latest PR.
I'm autistic and I have a hard time recognizing social cues. However, I've always thought that this symptom of autism is too simple in how it's described in most literature on the topic and I wanted to see if other have the same experience. In my experience, I'm totally capable of learning and recognizing social cues. However, my ability to do so completely goes out the window if (1) I'm in a new social context, (2) I'm distracted by something (or caught up in something mentally), or (3) I'm anxious about something (which is nearly all the time). The problem for me is that in order for me to recognize social cues I need to be actively focusing on them and thinking about them at the time. So I may miss something completely in the moment, but 20 minutes later (after the interaction is over) I'll suddenly catch it. Or I'll pick up on subtleties as an observer of interactions between other people, yet completely miss those same subtleties if I am directly interacting with someone myself.
It's why some of the tests for autism that have you do things like try to recognize emotions based on facial expressions have never worked for me. I'm actually really good at reading emotions when I'm a passive observer of people and interactions. However, I completely miss obvious shit when I'm interacting with people in real time. Personally, I've always suspected that this is a cognitive load issue: when I am interacting with people and out in the world I'm usually so mentally overloaded that it's difficult for me to catch things in the moment.
It's a very strange thing to explain to people as it means my symptoms of autism are very much aggravated depending on the context. If I'm in a social context I know well, I can mask incredibly well, to the point of seeming relaxed, perceptive, and charming. However, if something throws me off, or I'm anxious, or I'm especially caught up in rumination, my symptoms are very exaggerated.
Curious if there’s any connection, or if it’s always been that way, or media and marketing are more adept at cognitive manipulation these days, or I dunno wtf I’m talking about.
I'm having a lot of stress lately and work is taking all of my brain energy. I don't have a lot left right now for gaming and it is really bothering me. But I need the distraction that I get from immersion into a good rpg or campaign based game. Many of the games are bogging me down though, so I am looking for something that does not make me think too hard.
I'm not sure if the game I am looking for even exists. It's not that I am looking for something easy. If it is easy but still requires a lot of reading and making a lot of subtle choices, I am still getting bogged down. As an example, tried playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker last night, and even those simple dialogue choices were giving me anxiety.
Inventory management is even stressful right now. What if I toss something out I need Wait, does one of my companions need that? Is it actually better than what they have? I get into a spiral with even this simple decision point.
I'm really struggling because everything I look at seems to be above the line for the mental energy i have at the moment. But I also need to get outside of my head in order to relax..
If you have any suggestions let me know.
(Edit: was mostly thinking PC game, but I also have a Switch if there is something that fits there)
There are probably several helpful answers, which I want to hear. The main thing I'm drilling down toward is decisions and the idea of a game's "decision engine." Games are about decisions and effects, after all. TL;DR, how does your design lend to satisfying decisions, given a combo of rules and content?
Content, distinct from a game or rules, is the particular PCs, NPCs, areas, items, and scenarios that a game gets played with. Modules, maps, enemies.
Heavy rules add decision value because the GM and PCs have specific and concrete ways of doing things. Decisions are like answering a thorough question; you know exactly what kind of answer you're allowed to provide. However, you only understand what the outcome of your decision is (which is what really matters to you) if the game has low randomness and you had and used all relevant info (that info is content). Lots of people seem to make content for heavy rules, but it takes a lot of time.
Light rules add decision value because abstraction gives the GM and PCs flexibility. Decisions are like open-ended questions; you understand that your answer is more like your preference within the topic. However, if your preference is for a specific outcome, you had better think of an answer your GM will accept toward that outcome. There's unknowns in the abstract factors the GM considers (that is also content). Making content for light rules is fast and relatively easy.
Hard rules have numerical values, defined keywords, and mechanical ranks. When hard rules are balanced, decisions are like operating precision engineered machinery. There's elegance and rightness to it. If unbalanced, the decision value suffers a lot as options become sub-optimal. But each table might agree to not abuse exploits, because it wouldn't make their game more fun. It's also very hard to develop content for hard rules, but the kind of player to enjoy hard rules might be inclined to buy the designer's content.
Soft rules establish common practice with maxims, defined terms, and ideas. My favorite is, "Only call for a roll if failure would be interesting." These leave interpretation in the hands of the user. Designed well, they're elastic, giving tension to decisions and persuading you not to deviate without a hard 'no'. Designed poorly, they're mushy, collapsing and making things unclear when applied. These leave balance in the hands of the GM, who must decide when to apply them. The main benefit is that they're s
... keep reading on reddit ➡
Cognitive load: "the used amount of working memory resources". In lay terms, reducing it means freeing up mental space, allowing you to focus more on the task at hand.
For example, sorting your CSS properties alphabetically, or having a common variable naming convention. General time savers could also apply, as they reduce the number of things you need to think about.
There have been repeated comments, usually by younger folks, that older ones are less likely to jexit.
Actually, there are counterbalances to sunk cost, working in exactly the opposite direction, driving folks out harder n harder the longer they have been in. Let's call one 'cumulative cognitive disonance' and the other 'cumulative traumatic load'.
The longer one has been in, the more accumulative little bytes of information that counter the concept of the borg having 'THE truth' one encounters, even if desperately pimi and trying to avoid such things. That's cumulative cognitive disonance.
The longer one has been in, the more hurts and slights one has endured. Since the borg tends to sweep these things under the carpet instead of resolving them, the pain builds beneath the surface. Sooner or later this tends to produce cptsd. Often somatic displacement into physical symptoms follows. If not resolved back into the originating insults and resolved, these illnesses tend to be chronic, progressive and resistant to cure.
The older one is, the longer in the borg, the more of these two counterbalances have built up. So, especially for ones not in the favored inner circle of their congregations who accumulate a disproportionate amount of the counterbalance effects and less benefit for sunk cost, a jexit is not only likely but beneficial, sometimes lifesaving.
At least, this was so in my case...
This article discusses cognitive load and some of the mental challenges associated with taking notes, including the Split-attention Effect: https://hyperia.net/blog/reducing-the-cognitive-load-of-note-taking
Okay, let's say you get an email from someone named "Steven". What are Steven's pronouns? I'm gonna guess they're probably "he/him". Now, it's possible that Steven is actually a ciswoman. After all, I have known women named Michael and even met several cis men named Maria. So it's not like it's impossible for a ciswoman with "she/her" pronouns to be named Steven. Or Elliot (Scrubs!!!) And then there are ambiguous names like DJ, Terry, Shawn or perhaps names that someone would be reasonably unfamiliar with (my mother's name was Chassye, and I've met the occasional Dashonta or Luree). So I guess in those cases, you probably should include just if you wanna avoid awkwardness when someone gets your pronouns wrong.
But like, come on. If your name is Ronald, we probably don't need you to explicitly state your pronouns. We can safely assume that Sandra is a "she/her", and if they're not, then I can see why you'd wanna include pronouns. But I think it should be like this:
Obvious male name belonging to a he/him = no need for pronouns
Obvious female name belonging to a she/her = no need for pronouns
Ambiguous or uncommon name = include pronouns
Obvious gendered name belonging to someone who does not match the obvious gender = include pronouns
Working in a foreign country where they probably have never seen your name = include pronouns
I feel bad saying this cuz I've added a "he/him" to my email sig and I use it a lot in my working life (zoom calls and stuff) but I feel like my name is a fairly common male name that no one could reasonably get my pronouns wrong.
I'm not opposed to doing this. I voluntarily added my pronouns to my work stuff, in spite of slight jabs from coworkers who tease me for it (they're all old school backwards types who believe in binary gender). So I support doing it. I'm just wondering why I do it.
For the record, I am not a backwards, old school gender binary type. I understand that gender is not the same as biological sex, and I've had a relationship with a trans woman, and I support people being who they are and I've even marched alongside LGBT folks at rallies before.
I just think the pronoun thing is sorta silly.
Also, someone is gonna have to tell me how to type a Delta on my phone in case I need to award one (I suspect I will).
I am always surprised at how religiously people follow their beliefs when it comes to infrastructural choices, team setups, workflow and pipeline designs, etc. Monoliths vs microservices, you build it you run it vs separation of concerns, and all the endless debates.
I found Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais' Team topologies talk really refreshing in this respect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haejb5rzKsM. The focus for any SRE/Ops/Platform team should be to optimize your setup and workflows to reduce cognitive load on developers and eventually enable self-service i.e. REAL you build it you run it. Independently of following your specific setup religion.
Manuel Pais in particular focuses on internal platform as the key layer to allow developers to interact autonomously with the underlying infra, without needing to understand all the low level stuff that goes on under the hood e.g. helm charts or kubectl. He's hosting an online session in a couple of weeks as well on the topic. I think reduction of cognintive load really is the key to a good setup design and what most sre/devops should focus on.
So my family (my mother, father, me (22M), and two brothers (20 and 16) and I used to really enjoy playing board games together as a family. For a long time it was kind of an unstated fact that the 20 y/o and my mom would win. They generally wouldn't rub our faces in it though, that was until a few years ago when the 20 year old started developing a really big ego. Playing games with slowly got less and less enjoyable, because my brother and mother stopped being gracious winners. On the occasion someone else would win, they would call it a fluke or say it was random chance or something else to discount that win. It all reached a head during quarantine when they were talking to each other, within ear shot of the rest of us mind you, my mom tried to convince him to play a two player game by saying it would be fun without the 'extraneous' players.
Since then, my youngest brother, my father and I have refused to play games with them. My mother and middle brother are saying we're easily offended and sensitive and calling us poor sports. But it just isn't fun anymore.
They brought it up again today, due to Thanksgiving, and we told them we might consider if they apologized. The brother did not, my mother kind of did - it was a really weak apology. She said she was sorry we were upset by it, but that she meant the 'extraneous' remark was more saying the game was simpler without us. I told them I'll only play a game with them again if they both apologize without any buts after.
AITA?
I’m running a user web facing application. It’s essentially a ticket management system with an industry twist. Things have been going really well. We have improved business metrics quite a bit, but at a cost.
I just talked with the general manager. The team they are running used to like their job. Now that it’s running at tech speed, they have been attached to a fire hose and held accountable through metric analysis.
I feel that this is a human resource issue. They are not hiring enough people and whipping them to go faster. But it seems to be falling on us that the system is failing somehow.
So here I am wondering what can be done. On the one hand people have a job to do and some times it’s not a fun one. On the other hand I want to do what I can to make their lives better. Since the task load won’t alter I’m trying to ascertain how to assess and improve the cognitive load needed to process tasks. That way it takes less to get the same work done. The fear is that slack will be taken immediately, but I’m doing what I can.
So gurus of the software. Do you have a method for assessing cognitive load? Since that question is ambiguous and likely only to be answers with opinions, is these best practices for running a high volume ticket system? I’ve used plenty of them before and they all seem to end in people endlessly bitching. Is it possible to make the experience using the system a good one?
I’m afraid the answer is the end users are hard to deal with and it’s easier to blame something everyone has in common.
Myself? I'd enjoy more chances to dress up (maybe some mods for the PC version will allow for that), and I'd also like more character customization (like specific directions to take your character level ups so very rarely are team builds the same), as well as maybe a home base that you can decorate with pets (I love all the cats so much) and knickknacks.
Is it worth while to read through the footnote on p 64-7? Softcover edition.
I have a type that defines all possible keys for an object, and based off this - there can be objects that use a subset of these keys.
My first thought was to just make the parent type Partial, but this then allows for any other type of key inside the object, plus no type safety on the
type FieldKeys = 'productId' | 'items' | 'total' | 'userId' | 'vendorType';
export type GenericFieldShape = Partial<Record<FieldKeys, unknown>>;
function handleProducts<T extends GenericFieldShape>({ ... }: HandleProductsProps<T>) {...}
// Adding extra type, and also misspelling a key:
type SubsetItemOne = {
producId: string; // incorrect spelling
total: number;
extraItem: string; // not in the FieldKeys
}
const result = handleProducts<SubsetItemOne>(...) // no errors
Is there a way we can restrict to just a subset of the parent type without resorting to Partial, or losing this safety?
Here are the problems I am concerned about:
I am supposed to solve, then check for extraneous roots. I'm not exactly sure what I should include for the extraneous roots, perhaps the y-values?
Anyways, I managed to solve all of them, excluding the extraneous roots, of course:
-
x = 86
-
x = 5, x = -3
-
x = 6
Any help appreciated. Thanks.
Hi all, I need some some advice/input on this line of enquiry. So, I am considering looking at the validity of the IELTS listening exam in relation to cognitive load.
The premise of this idea is based on the exam’s requirements to read, and then ‘hold’ the questions in mind, while simultaneously listening for the answers and recording these on the provided answer sheet.
I’m questioning if such an exam is truly a test of ‘language competence’ as it is marketed as, given the levels of cognitive load required for reading and maintaining the task questions, of which there are ten per section, listening to and extracting the relevant information from the accompanying audio, while also manually recording the answers to task.
I would suggest that given the task requirements, the working memory of participants would be overloaded by the necessity of holding 10 questions in mind, while listening for the answers within the audio and simultaneously recording these. This would result in pertinent audio information being missed as a result of ‘inattentional deafness’ due to cognitive overload, resulting in incorrect answers/ missed responses.
I would appreciate some input, theories, and advice as to what I’m ‘missing’ here and if this line of thought seems plausible.
Thanks.
The goal of the study to verify if there is a correlation between cognitive aspects and development tasks. The study is focused on two days.
Participants will have to complete a series of cognitive tests and a series of software development tasks.
As far as cognitive tests are concerned, as a first test, participants will listen to a list of 15 words and repeat the words they remember. For the second test, participants will see a coding key containing nine abstract symbols, associated with a number between 1 and 9. Next, they will encode each symbol to its corresponding number, in the order presented and without skipping any. The third test will show a series of arrows and participants will be asked to indicate the direction of the central arrow by clicking on the right button.
As far as software development tasks are concerned, you will resolve bugs and you implement new features.
The total time of execution of the experiment is about 90 minutes.
Participants can win an electronic gadget.
To register for the study please fill in the form https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=8h-x5H1IbEe1XjIjBvQVPhzWOsdTg1hImySwTThIVA5UN1ZNNEQyUzlUUEY3UkVaNEFWUjNETjhNVS4u
In order to keep things a tad simpler, I would like to check (if/then/else) within a PSADT app whether the current hostname is a member of a number of a couple collections. Is this possible?
That way we can keep to one deployment for a given item, but handle the edge cases that need small, special configurations.
So this is gonna sound like an r/relationship advice post but I already know exactly what they'll say and I want deeper than that. I'm friends with a girl, and right now where I'm at is in lockdown and we message a little bit everyday. Now, sometimes she's slow to respond. Because I can see her activity I know she's on so it's not a matter of being busy. That's fine- I don't expect her to respond right away but im just eliminating "maybe she's busy" explanation. She's openly told me she doesn't have a lot of energy to respond right now, and I asked her if she wanted to space and she said "you confuse me- I never said you were the problem". When a family member died and I asked her the same thing after saying she had low energy she said yes- so it's not necessarily because she's afraid to be honest.
Now, a large part of Reddit would say "if they dont have time for you why have time for them". Which has some truth, but friendships are always easy when things are going well. It's sticking through the hard times that matter. So I'm faced with a dillema- am I telling myself that staying the course is what I should do because I don't want to lose the friendship or am I being strong when the other person is going through hard times is bearing responsibility and I should stay the course?
https://preview.redd.it/mpnxcm8bak581.png?width=782&format=png&auto=webp&s=62c48702d11849aba9e48da576734d978b77242c
I am reviewing algebra for physics, and I have forgotten some of the intuition behind extraneous solutions. Example problem: x^(1/3) + x^(1/6) -2=0 Find all solutions. So you make x to the 1/3 x^1/6 and then square that. Then you let W=x1/6 so then you have (W)^(2)+W-2=0 Then you factor to (W-1)=0 and (W-2)=0 and isolate W, let W=x^1/6 and you get x=1 and 64. x=64 is not a solution after checking it. I understand Extraneous solutions arise when going from a=b to a^2=b^2 because you can make -2=2 a true statement that way and when you multiply both sides by a variable. I guess I don't see where the extraneous solution is generated in this particular example. You rewrite x^1/3 as x^1/6 squared but you don't actually carry out the operation when you factor right? This is probably where I am misunderstanding.
Research shows that cognitive load for keeping track of things that need to be done in a family is disproportionately gendered. This is not a dynamic I want for my family, especially with a baby and a new house on the horizon.
Unfortunately, not wanting it doesn't undo decades of cultural conditioning.
I can be an effective planner when I have a goal, but outside specific constraints (e.g., work) I'm generally oblivious as to what goals I should be working toward. My wife is on an entirely different level: she is constantly thinking of things that should be planned for, well before they are enough of an issue for it to have made it on my radar.
I want to be more like her, so we can share that burden, but I can't figure out concrete steps for how to get there. I've found many articles identifying this as an issue, but have not found any useful strategies for how to address the problem!
After a lifetime of only being concerned with and addressing the problem that is currently in front of me, how do I train my brain to be more future oriented?
Tl;dr:
There are plenty resources about how to plan (i.e., for something concrete).
How do I learn what to plan?
Over the past decade and a bit, I've been taking students. Throughout those years, I've discovered something. Cognitive Load.
What is it? Well, simply put, it's how much you have to think about things. It also plays a huge role in the life of a practitioner, and especially a student/new practitioner.
As we perform common activities, we develop subconscious routines that aid in performing those tasks. Think about getting into your car. How much do you have to think about closing the car door and putting the key in the ignition. If you've had the car for a while, it just kinda happens. If you're in a rental for the first time, you need to find the doorhandle, figure out where the key goes, etc...
The same is true in EMS. When you're a student, everything is new. Not only are you expending brainpower to manage a call, but you're also having to think about things like "where is the BP cuff?" "Where in the kit is that thing I need?" Etc... These things increase cognitive load. They take direct concentration and effort, which can cause interruptions in flow. Increased cognitive load makes decision making more difficult.
There is a fix. Take a breath, keep working on your routines, and in time, these things become second nature. ABC/LOC, Vitals, scene safety....these things that you do every call start to take less and less effort. So keep your head up and remember, it gets easier.
