Curated Tumblr

People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars.

I did this for my last company. We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants. I got a severance which was basically equal to what I would have been eligible to get from unemployment, which meant I didn't get any unemployment but at least I didn't have to pretend to look for work for six months.

I did it with no illusions about what my reward might or might not be. I just don't like being involved in any way with project failures.

I'm a pilot and flight instructor. When I was a teenager, I would neglect English and Math homework to read my private pilot textbook.

See, there's this guy named Edward Thorndike who described several basic principles of learning, including the Principle of Readiness. See, learning is an active process, takes effort to do, and effort sucks. So people will only endure the suck of effort if they genuinely believe they'll get anything out of it. Students will best learn a lesson if they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. No, "you'll never know when algebra will save your life" is not good enough. No, "Someday this might come in handy" isn't good enough. Because of quiz-based game shows with million dollar cash prizes, that applies to literally everything from Mayan architecture to the seventh season of Friends.

My lived experience with essay writing is it was almost always an exercise in pointless pedantry. Thirteen years of public school and five years of college, I was almost always graded on punctuation, grammar, spelling, and strict adherence to the MLA style guide. One of the few essays that was graded for content was in an engineering class I took. We were to research a notable engineering failure, where something bad happened and an engineer was at fault. I chose the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 cargo door and the two in-flight emergencies it caused. I cited the actual NTSB reports and the Applegate memo. Of all the essays I wrote for English teachers, I don't remember the topic of a single one, my memories of writing them involve "Okay when it's a periodical, the title is italicized, but when it's in a journal..."

When teachers answer "Why do we have to learn this" with "it's required for your diploma" literally don't learn it. It is a mandatory waste of time designed to either be a bullshit tolerance exercise or included because it aesthetically resembles academics.

That doesn't happen in aviation curricula because flying a plane fucking matters and there's a point to everything we teach. Under part 61, anyway. Part 65 is full of horse shit. I went to mechanic school and learned there's no such thing as an aircraft that's safe to fly. I build furniture now.

What were we talking about?

ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me

How bad is this on a scale of 1 to 100?

95 out of 100 This is catastrophic. Here's why it's a 95:

Landing Impact (40 points):

• Belly flopped onto a chicken farm
• Left wing occupied as a nesting box

Passenger Experience (35 points):

• Emergency slide covered in yolk
• Free eggs for all

...----

I think using ChatGPT for learning is okay, assuming the user is actually interested in learning. If you just want to get something done, you're absolutely cheating the task at hand, and your future self.

ChatGPT truly shines when you ask it follow-up questions on the thing you want to learn about and really "delve" (hate that AI ass word) into different aspects to internalize them yourself.

It's called git gudding now.

I am here to call out the natural/unnatural fallocy. It is silly. Can you really draw a line between the two (natural vs unnatural) in a way that is logical and still supports your argument?

My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he's smart and most things always came easy to him. He'd do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A's. But when something comes along that he's not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn't come naturally. It's a decoration on his wall.

I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn't come naturally, but he's continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it's something a person can get past.

I'm 39 and I want to be instantly good at things. It sucks. Good luck breaking your nephew out of it.

Teach him to fail. Those kids are afraid of failing because somewhere in life someone traumatized them so they don't like to ever fail at anything.

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee

Edit, in the same spirit: "The difference between a novice and a master is that the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried." - No idea who

Follow me for more Karate Kid-level inspirational quotes.

That's honestly how everything works. Nobody starts good at anything. If you want to be good at something, you have to suck first. You have to fail over and over and over again and learn a tiny bit each time as you hone your craft.

It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.