> You have to actively invest in improving your soft skills (and investments pay back immediately)
I wonder how much of this can be qualified with "after you've been hired".
Between two university graduates with equal skills in technical interviews and splicing linked lists and recursive-descent parsing and whatever, if one has better soft skills, you hire that one.
The question is what you do between one who is better at soft skills and another who is better at doubly linked lists or group-by queries or docker orchestration or whatever tech you're asking about in the interview. Empirical evidence suggests you hire the second person and support and expect them to skill up once they're in.
If you have spare time at uni, working on both soft and techy skills is great, if you have to trade off opportunity costs, the advice I hear a lot is invest on the technical side first.
> If you’ve been relying on Markdown and occasionally fighting its quirks, AsciiDoc might be the structured, fully-featured alternative you didn’t know you needed.
No, I'm afraid it's the format I know I don't need. At least not for the kind of things I usually use markdown for.
Readme files, technical documentation, moderately complex websites with templating and rendering engines - markdown works just fine. Sometimes with a custom `|||warning\n...\n|||\n` thrown in to render something in a box with a red border.
I get that there's a market in the space occupied by TeX, Typst (underrated IMHO), and possibly MS Word or Quark Express (for non-techies). Libreoffice is great in theory but, again IMHO, "eh" in practice. That market is generating book-length documents with all the cross-references and other features that needs.
Asciidoc is Markdown's big brother? I'll carry on playing with the little brother, thank you very much.
Also the whole page is an ad for their own editor tool. $9.99 per month so you don't need to use your own editor and unintuitive tools like (gasp!) the terminal.
My worldview is there's a big market for WYSIWYG editors, and a big "market" for FOSS editors and tools, but not too much in between for simple text editing.
I can't think of many scenarios where someone does care about the backing format or explicitly wants to write raw asciidoc, but doesn't want to just use asciidoctor or other free CLI tools.
With apologies for wading into culture war topics - there are three year olds who will absolutely scream their head off at someone trying to get them to wear a dress because "I'm not a girl!!!"
A lot of people say this, but I think it's the wrong word in an important way.
I'll give you P(autistic|rationalist) > P(autistic), but beware the base rate fallacy. My guess is you're focussing on a proxy variable.
To show some important counter-examples: Temple Grandin, famously autistic and a lot of people's idea what autism means - not a rationalist in the sense you mean. Scott Alexander - fairly central example of the rationalist community, but not autistic (he's a psychiatrist so I trust him on that).
EDIT: also P(trans|rationalist) > P(trans), but P(rationalist|trans) I'd say is fairly small. Base rate fallacy and something something Bayes. Identifying these two groups would definitely be a mistake.
I think when you look at these types of groups that become cult or cult-like, they often appeal to a specific experience or need that people have. My guess is the message that many trans and autistic people take away is fulfilling for them. Many people in these communities share similar traumas and challenges that affect them deeply. It makes them vulnerable to manipulation and becoming true believers capable of more extreme behavior.
The more common pattern is a false prophet cult where the influential leader is a paternal figure bringing enlightenment to the flock. It just so happens that free labor and sex with pretty girls are key aspects of that journey.
It doesn't mean that "all X are Y" or "Y's are usually X".
> BS, as a non-white kid growing up in 70s and 80s Britain I never felt this. The author thinks people can only identify with characters like themselves, which is condescending.
Indeed.
I know there has been criticism of Watership Down for gender roles that would apparently make it unappealing to girls - missing the point that Adams originally made it up for his two daughters who loved it so much they forced him to write it down. Also as far as identifying goes, the characters are RABBITS.
And the railway children, a story also mentioned in the article, has that scene where the children steal some coal from the railway yard that the family otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to keep their home warm in winter.
I doubt anyone at the university was involved, or is in trouble. I rather suspect that the university was told "put this on your network and don't ask too many questions".
There are a lot of questions here that also apply to teaching CS. Do we want our graduates to still know the old way? Perhaps for job interviews and days when GPT is down and for problems it can't solve yet.
The "no AI without understanding the solution" rule is a start here.
I can also understand the fuss better in indentation-is-structure languages like python.
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