I completely agree. I've been thinking of replicating a mid-sized project written by a programmer that I respect so that I think a lot more about the model before comparing the code.
Politicians don't dole out cash and go pray that the voters will honor their agreement. They have a way of making sure that their bought votes are delivered to them.
Buying votes happens mostly in slums and other non-affluent areas. These are the places where the concept of privacy hasn't yet formed and everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Also, a politician is not expected to work for them his whole term. It is natural to see your local representative only during the times of election. So politicians have the two key ingredients to enforce an implicit contract. But the biggest weapon these politicians have is intimidation. Since it's not hard to mostly figure out the faction that refused to vote for the money they took, they can be persecuted and intimidated.
Of course there's no official source to cite this. My driver is very chatty and quite insightful about the politics in India.
Vote is secret in India. There is no way for politician to find out where your vote went except some guess work, but still people vote for the politiician who paid the money which is strange. There have been no news report about politicians taking revenge because people did not vote for him. If such news had come election commission would do something and media would not be silent.
This is exactly how I had assessed my situation. I had been largely depressed for the entire duration of my college, and no matter what I did I simply couldn't come out of it. However, with a slight improvement in the circumstances I could get back on track. But, it was just getting back on track and I realized that if the circumstances were to change I would be back to my state being depressed. I was so scared of going back to that fucked up state that I decided to radically change my thinking and behavior patterns until I could stomach the the nastiest crap hurled at me. Now I wouldn't say that I have any super powers even though it has been more than two years since I made that resolve, but I sure as hell am more happy and productive than ever in my life. Surprisingly, it's the practice of stoic philosophy (to me it means Karma Yoga, pioneered in the book Bhagwat Geeta, which bears uncanny resemblance to the stoic philosophy pioneered by Seneca and Markus Aurelius) that has helped stabilize my ever confused mind.
True that. I had been thinking on similar lines myself. If you observe the restaurant industry, an exciting menu isn't the only thing responsible for its success, sure it night help, but most restaurants will have similar items in their menu. The key is boring things like sustaining the business for sufficient time until it crosses a threshold of patronage and consistency in the taste of the food. So yeah, exciting things are overrated.
It's really irritating when somebody recommends a book that really interests me but I simply can't afford it here in India. My wish list is getting longer and longer with each new book costing more than the cost of a whole weeks worth of meals. Not one to download PDFs illegally or to read them on Kindle, which again is not guaranteed to be within my means, I greatly limited in my accessibility to paperbacks of my liking.
Precisely. I had been struggling to find the right balance between studying something deep enough that I can draw on this knowledge when needed but not going so deep that I get bored and nothing comes out of it.
Exactly. I had been wondering if my way of sticking to work related things while exploring stuff in my own time was the best way of learning, but due to the kind of free time I get it is the most optimal strategy. For example though I would love to complete SICP I just don't have the kind of time it needs, so instead I try to read as much as possible about OOPS explore languages that are exemplify OO design but aren't that mainstream like Pharo. This way I don't have to worry much if the knowledge acquired would be forgotten and wasted, whatever I learn I practice at least a part of it daily.
I'd offer a different take. SICP is pretty intense stuff in parts. Don't feel obligated to understand it all or to finish it as a full-read. Rather, when it gets tough, continue reading, but give yourself permission to not fully understand it. Skim it, whatever, the exposure will leave something. You can always come back for a second round. But, more importantly, also explore many different programming paradigms, don't just focus on OOP. Learn a lot about FP, FRP, Declarative. Whatever paradigm you use, it will make you think more openly about problems.
The most comprehensive and foolproof way is to grab the spec, read the algorithm and fiddle around a day. Sadly this is the only way of fully understand promises, promises already put a lot of cognitive load on your brain when you're using them, so having any other abstractions of your own (for remembering how promises work) is bad idea. IMO you're better off investing a large continuous block of time for understanding promises rather than reading some article here and there.
You have summarized most of my experiences and observations of my reading habits.
I have tried reading long novels and I have rarely been able to read them efficiently with concentration the whole way, at first I would well up with a lot of self hatred when my friends could read the same books in lesser amounts of time, remembering a lot of interesting details and hold very insightful discussions about it later. I blamed myself for not having better concentration, for feigning interest in books and hundred other accusation that were only partly true.
But, I persevered and found that I could read short texts, remember them pretty well, think about them for some days and largely absorb the idea. I changed my reading habits. I started reading short stories, essays, academic papers and smaller technical books, but providing a lot of to time to reflect upon the material just read.
I stopped focusing on the book count and purely on maximizing the amount of impact produced by reading something.
