> "Become a famous pop star or sports hero." - as improbable as ever.
It's even more improbable. For both of those, your starting to see more and more of the current generation that are children/nieces/nephews of the already famous. They have the financial comfort to pursue it, and the family connections in the industries.
And for sports, the level at which you have to be competitive is getting younger and younger. So much more sports science/nutrition going in at the middle school/high school level.
Those were two fields that seemingly were still meritocratic, but that is fading fast, if it ever existed at all.
> And for sports, the level at which you have to be competitive is getting younger and younger. So much more sports science/nutrition going in at the middle school/high school level.
For endurance-based sports, online coaching has really accelerated this as well.
For skills, you still really need in-person coaching.
An app for supplementing learning in my masters program [1].
I'm currently in enrolled in the MCS Online from UIUC. My first course, Natural Language Processing, has been interesting, but it's a coursera-based course. This means the lectures are pre-recorded and mostly just the professor reading the slides. It's hard for me to stay engaged and really learn the material. So I started with a series of claude prompts that took the lecture slides and created a pre-watch summary, and then helped me drill the concepts after each lecture. I think converted those into a platform where I can upload notes/lecture slides and have it generate quizzes. It starts with recognition(multiple choice) questions, and eventually moves to recall(short answer) once you prove mastery of a topic. It also generates flashcards from failed answers. It extracts topics from the uploaded materials, and tracks mastery over time. Mastery rots if you don't touch the platform/topic for a while.
I'm not sure if I'll every productize it in any way, but I could see a world where it's used by people prepping for the bar, med boards, various continuing education stuff. Right now it's just a fun platform to build on as I explore the current wave of technologies. Building a framework for evaluating different LLMs for best price/accuracy. Adding a RAG pipeline so wrong answers can point back to source material for further review, etc.
I'm looking at moving from backend engineering to a more MLE or agent pipeline role, so this is giving me something more than school projects to build on. While also helping me do better at school.
I have it propose several approaches, pick and choose from each, and remove what I don't want done. "Use the general structure of A, but use the validation structure of D. Using a view translation layer is too much, just rely on FastAPI/SQLModel's implicit view conversion."
I had a lot of with Code Crafters. It's a paid platform, but they give you a basic walk through of different technologies, with full test suites. For example, you implement some basic Redis. It doesn't spoon feed you what to do, but breaks it down into manageable chunks.
I went to college late, so I rushed through. Which meant I didn't take the time to really engage with non-CS classes. So I'd like to go back for that. Especially the below masters, which should attract folks with similar feelings.
We're using CodeRabbit at work, and it has been pretty positive overall. Especially once we turned off the poems and sequence diagram noise. Useful enough that I'm looking at paying for it for side projects when I am the sole developer.
That makes sense. A lot of these tools seem to become useful once the extra noise is turned down. I’m actually building and testing a quieter review approach myself and trying to understand what really helps in day-to-day use. would you like to give it a try?
Back of House: schedules are pretty much set. The only time things change is working around someone being out.
Front of House is famously a giant pot exceptions. Mix of professional waitstaff and folks who are just picking up some shifts to finance their passion/true focus(art, music, non-profits, teachers). So you'll need to work around some fun priorities.
How do you flag special events? This will require extra people on a Monday that is historically forecast-ed to be slow. Large parties is a specialist skill in a lot of restaurants. Pretty much any server can make a large party work, but normally a few of the staff really shine with that kind of work, and you'll want them staffed.
Respect everyone's availability/time-off: FOH usually has a good mix of full-time and part-time. And a lot of people are willing to pick up an extra shift with some head's up. And that's both part-times going full-time for a week, and full-timers working extra shifts. People have preferences around working/not working doubles and clopens. One of your full-timers requests a few shifts off next week because their band is playing the next town over. The human process is just to ask a few people who are working if they want to pick up those shifts. Often the person taking off will have found someone to cover for them before requesting the time off, so you'll need that input. Often the GM/AGM making the schedule has all of the human parts in their head and just works through it.
This is super helpful — thank you. Here's how I think they can be solved:
1. Flagging special events by pulling from the booking system so the schedule doesn’t assume a “normal” Monday.
2. Tagging staff by skillset (large parties, wine, expo, etc.) so the optimizer doesn’t just fill slots but matches people to the right shifts.
3. Flexible availability instead of binary availability — things like “prefer not,” “can pick up if needed,” “no doubles,” “no clopens,” or “I already have a cover lined up.”
4. Transparent fairness — showing why someone got (or didn’t get) a shift, how hours were distributed, and what trade-offs were made so it’s not a black box.
5. Built-in shift-swap handling, since FOH often sorts coverage themselves before the manager ever touches it.
It's even more improbable. For both of those, your starting to see more and more of the current generation that are children/nieces/nephews of the already famous. They have the financial comfort to pursue it, and the family connections in the industries.
And for sports, the level at which you have to be competitive is getting younger and younger. So much more sports science/nutrition going in at the middle school/high school level.
Those were two fields that seemingly were still meritocratic, but that is fading fast, if it ever existed at all.
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