Language: English

I previously wrote: A long time away saying of Bruno Medicina ».

EN: Mozart, Beethoven, all the great geniuses, broke the rules and won. We like them because they had results when they broke the rules.
Yet the top students today are forced, in the institutional education system, to obey the rules. They perform well in spite of the fact that they can’t/shouldn’t break the rules.

I was recently faced with another thought: what if there are two stages in a person’s life – a formation period, in which the student should memorize things and follow the rules, and another period, in which the person can use creativity.

My personal thought on this idea is that it does have some value, I think I see where it’s coming from, but I tend to disagree.

If you can’t create at all, if, for one reason or another, you don’t have the courage to let your emotions go, sure, memorize and repeat.

But if you wish to create, and you’re a young person (in body or spirit) and you want to start not with following the rules, but by playing your own tunes, why not?

I think it will help you more in your development if you create, you get feedback, and now when you will learn something, you’ll learn based on your feedback.

Sure, it might hurt to create in a world of copy-paste-ers, sure, you’ll get burned a lot of times for not doing something perfectly.

But I do consider that this feedback will help you grow more than just by repeating and mimicking others’ songs.

Try, do it wrong, get negative feedback, learn better this time, with all your ears open, try some more, be better – I think this is the way to grow, and not „learn for 10-20 years, than you can start creating your own songs”. I don’t consider a latter option is a real option, but a fake one.

If I were to choose between:

• Taking a course online in order to learn a skill;
• Taking a real-life project but safe-to-fail project, and learn as-I-go the skills needed;

, I think that the latter option is the better (the idea is not mine, but I don’t know, at this point, who to credit).

Start, try, create, compose, and fail. Fail big and fail often. Try not to harm others when failing. But use the feed-back to be better, to learn easier, to become a better you – in my opinion, that’s the way to go, and not „try to memorize what others have done before you, and at some point, maybe, perhaps, you will be allowed to create”.

Citește mai departe

I noticed something about myself – after a certain hour, I’m much less productive.

In the first hours of the day (it generally begins at around 8:30 AM – 9 AM) and until around 4 PM, I’m productive. After 4 PM, I tend to be less so.

After 6 PM even less productive.

This doesn’t mean I can’t do anything after 6 PM, it’s just that tasks tend to take longer, and sometimes it’s harder for me to make connections between ideas.

What this does mean is that I like to put things which are less productive in the evening – talks, reading news, reading books, watching movies.

I do take some breaks during the day, while at home, like a small walk in the afternoon, or some physical exercises.

Some people take naps in the afternoon to allow their minds to get refreshed. I think it might be a very good idea, but for me, when I’ve tried this, I found it was difficult to force myself to wake up after around 20 minutes (you shouldn’t nap very much longer than this, otherwise you will not feel good).

Citește mai departe

What chess engines lack, in my opinion, is the ability to play the natural moves.

If I were designing such algorithms, yes, I would look for solutions to make the computer play better, but I’d also look for solutions to make it play like a human.

99% of the players playing chess can’t even dream of ever beating a computer at the top level. So, they change the difficulty of the algorithm lower. What happens next is that the computer plays either incredibly good moves, or very poor ones, but they all look artificial. A human won’t be either very good or very poor, but on an overall line. Playing against the computer is chaos. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be like this.

For example, a human chess player will always look at the last moved piece, but it might ignore a piece that is not in the center of the action. A human is also more likely to see one or two moves ahead, but not a lot. A human will overlook, at times, checkmate, while a chess engine almost never, even a weak one.

Citește mai departe

I’m amazed by life. People, things, happenings, events, movies, books, encounters, emotions, principles. And also the dark side, the fail, the fear, the lack of courage, missing ethics.

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

― Helen Keller, The Open Door.

And a video:

But it is! It is a daring adventure! I’m in awe! I’m surprised! Give me more!

Citește mai departe

A quote:

Murray Campbell of IBM was part of the Deep Blue project. As he says, chess computers do play differently. They make moves that sometimes make no sense to their human opponents.
„Computers don’t have any sense of aesthetics or patterns that are standard the way people learn how to play chess,” Campbell says. „They play what they think is the objectively best move in any position, even if it looks absurd, and they can play any move no matter how ugly it is.”

(via »)

Machines think in standard ways. In chess, they play so well that most likely no human can currently beat them in a 100 matches game.

Yet, their moves in chess look weird to humans.

What can you get out of this? If you find a good solution, don’t ask 10 people if they think your solution is any good, they will most likely refer to conformity and say „it’s not conform to what I think, thus is not valid”.

Instead, ask them how you can perfect the idea, how can t get better understood, how they would better resonate with that idea.

Citește mai departe

Sometimes I write a message at times such as Friday evening, Saturday mornings, National Holidays, things like that. I know the message I write won’t get read if I send it right away, so I use Gmail’s Schedule Send feature and send the message on a time like Monday morning, 8 AM, or things like that.

The thing is, if I write the message Friday, and it only gets sent Monday, by that time I usually forget that I’ve sent the message. It’s not on my working memory, anyway.

So, if I were to send the message right away, as far as I can tell, there would be a more likely chance that I’ll remember it.

That’s why „Posting in advance is not advanced posting” – it is, from this perspective, a bit silly, rather.

Citește mai departe

I like to read Hacker News. Lots of very cool information.

The thing is – there are loads of IT guys in the world and fewer online marketing ones. Both of the worlds blog a lot.

So, it may be so – from a large pool of data, it may be that HN can get some good articles.

Still, it makes me a bit envious of not being in IT. :)

I like „their” news better.

Citește mai departe