I was in an Apple Store the other day for something unrelated. While waiting, I asked one of the employees if I should try the AVP. Their response was "it's cool I guess. Probably not worth the effort." Pretty telling.
Wow, it sounds like the quality of employees at the Apple Store has really taken a nose dive. I could never imagine anyone who worked there saying something like that in the past.
I actually think it's a bit of both. You select for things you like, and avoid things you don't. Then the algorithm says "I can help with that." The problem is that you can't tell it to stop even if you want it to.
Finding other sources of community and content that isn't centered around a feed is a good idea as well.
Author here. I agree that most people aren't actively looking to break out of the comfortable, algorithmically generated corner of the internet they read. I like a lot of the topics that are suggested to me. Youtube is spot on in a lot of its suggestions.
But I'm not sure that the "slice" of the internet I'm exposed to is the best one for me. Especially over a long enough time period. I'm in a different season of life than I was in high school or college. But there's quite a bit of "inertia" behind these algorithms that keep me coming back to the same content I read back then (5-10 years ago).
I don't think there's a good set of digital tools out there for saying "I want off the ride." Or at least "I'd like to ride a different ride for a minute."
I think if we want to enable self-educators, there has to be a better suite of tools available to those who want to be presented with diverse ideas.
I'll add that I believe there is a meaningful (perhaps not overwhelming) percentage of people who would be interested in getting exposure to things "outside their bubble" simply for the sake of self-improvement and better understanding the world around them.
I would put myself in that category -- at least up to a certain (limited) percentage of my media-consuming time.
If you really love learning about new things and picking up languages for the challenge (as I do) then you should totally continue soaking up any documentation you can.
However, do not let the latest trend dictate how you use your knowledge. Programming languages are just tools, and sometimes its hard to remember that it's all in how you use your tool that makes it effective.
Wow that is mind-blowing. I could not possibly imagine a world without words, especially the ones in my head. It goes against every intuition I have to believe in thought that lacks language.
For my part I know that I don't strictly think in words, or pictures, or any other such representations. I'm sharply aware of this because I'm relatively slow putting thoughts into words; so when I have some thought, I can consciously hold that thought in my head for a moment before the corresponding words come to mind.
For instance, suppose I realize I'm out of milk. It'll come to mind that I should go to a grocery this afternoon to buy more milk, but this intention doesn't form as a complete sentence in my head. It may literally take a couple seconds for me to recall the vocabulary I'll need to express this thought in words, but I can continue thinking about my trip to the grocery -- which one I should go to, what else I need to pick up there, etc. -- before any words have even come to my mind. So ideas and their linguistic representations are very distinct to me, and sometimes I don't even bother with the latter at all, because (for whatever reason) forming the linguistic representation of a though imposes a significant overhead on my brain. (I'm also dyslexic, for what it's worth, and I often wonder of these issues are related.)
My hypothesis is that for people with better functioning language centers than mine, words may come to mind so easily that the delay between thought and linguistic representation is imperceptible to them, hence they "think in words". But for people like me those words might come late or not at all, but regardless, I do think all the same...
Especially when I'm thinking fast thoughts - just assembling some concepts in my mind to see if they fit - I switch to English(not my native language) because it's words are shorter.
I don't think it's a dyslexia thing - at least not necessarily. As I wrote below, I also don't think in words, but I don't have any language problems that I know of (at least, I understand 6-8 languages, learned to read extremely early, and spell better than almost anyone I know).
I'm a bad speaker because I think so abstractly. I'm already thinking of the following concepts and their relations as I'm speaking, which is why I tend to stutter and pause constantly. I often find myself thinking in English because it has some representations my language doesn't, but there are things I can't conveniently express in English either. Because of this, I've been laying the blueprints for an artificial language of my own that would follow my line of thought. Synesthesia helps.
Really? I'm bilingual from childhood (and I've since learned a few more), and I seldom feel like I'm thinking in any specific language. Furthermore, I don't see how that could be puzzling to anyone - haven't most people had the experience of temporarily forgetting the word for something that they are very familiar with? A situation where they have a concept in mind, but have forgotten the "label" for it in their language? So why couldn't people think using these wordless concepts instead of with words?
(To me, thinking in words seems strange and inefficient. On the other hand, I often have clear and simple thoughts in my head that take me several minutes to translate into any language, because none of the words and expressions I can think of seem just right, so thinking in words seems like it would be useful for communicating.)
People think in different ways. I almost never think in "words" because I'm a visual thinker, but my girlfriend absolutely never grasps for a word. I assume the deaf have differences between language based thinker and visual thinkers or kinetic thinkers.
It goes against every intuition I have to believe in thought that lacks language.
I have met other people who share your intuition, but for me (native speaker of English with normal hearing) and for my wife (native speaker of Taiwanese with normal hearing) it is routine to think visually, with no words at all. We have multiple thinking styles, and quite a bit of our thinking does not involve words. I used to have the intuition that everyone can think visually, until I met people who self-report that they cannot imagine doing so.
You can probably get the experience of unworded thoughts if you stop speaking for a few days (or just reduce to very very few words only when necessary). There are religious organizations that do vow-of-silence retreats, or you could go camping alone or with just a couple of other people in a setting in which very little will need to be discussed each day.
They've been profitable since their very first quarter and, according to the TC article, they will likely make as much in profit next year as they've raised in the last three years.
The fundraising is almost exclusively used for acquisition, so what's the obnoxious part?
Yikes. There are a lot of people asking a lot of questions concerning the future of Tesla. Although I love seeing the technology making an entrance into the marketplace, the direction of the company has a lot of people concerned, myself included.
Don't get me wrong, I do not support hackers, but I feel like TechCrunch's game-like approach to this is a little immature. Nothing but a publicity stunt.
