Taskmaster Series 19 lineup announcement
I am very excited for the new season, and think Jason Manzoukas' chaos gremlin energy is going to be hilarious and amazing on Taskmaster.
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Testing something
One of the features I love with Glowbug is how it can generate smart embeddings for content. Basically, I enter a custom tag of a URL and it generates special code which goes into the entry. Things like video embeds, social posts, etc. The majority of these are ones I have coded myself in the backend. However, there is a subset where I have found it is easier to make use of Iframely.
Iframely is a company which acts as a middle-agent for generating embeds. Currently they allow up to 1000 embed requests a month before charging you. Which is hugely more than I need, so it's a free service for me.
I make use of them for Wikipedia & YouTube embeds right now. Up to this morning, these domain checks were hardcoded. So, to add a domain (Iframely has several hundred websites they connect with) I'd have to modify the PHP file. This morning, I finally through together the code which lets me manage the list of domains which, if matched, are generated as embeds with Iframely.
So, now, I can add BoardGameGeek.com to their domain list and embed this:
No code changes, just adding BoardGameGeek to the database variable in the server.
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"The number of exceptional people: Fewer than 85 per 1 million across key traits"
A research paper which I came across. The abstract:
Cognitive biases can lead to overestimating the expected prevalence of exceptional multi-talented candidates, leading to potential dissatisfaction in recruitment contexts. This study aims to accurately estimate the odds of finding individuals who excel across multiple correlated dimensions. According to the literature, the three key individual differences variables are intelligence, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. Consequently, data were simulated using a multivariate normal distribution (N = 20 million), where the three variables were standardized (mean of 0 and SD of 1). The correlations were specified as: intelligence with conscientiousness (−0.03), intelligence with emotional stability (0.07), and conscientiousness with emotional stability (0.42). Cases were classified into four categories based on z-scores across the three dimensions: notable (≥ 0.0 SD), remarkable (≥ 1.0 SD), exceptional (≥ 2.0 SD), and profoundly exceptional (≥ 3.0 SD). Approximately 16% of cases were classified as notable, 1% as remarkable, and only 0.0085% met the exceptional criterion of 2 SDs above the mean. Just one case was identified as profoundly exceptional. These findings highlight the rarity of individuals excelling across multiple traits, suggesting a need to recalibrate recruitment expectations. Even moderately above-average individuals on these key dimensions may merit greater recognition due to their scarcity.
It's a lot of words to say that they measured base on three relationships between intelligence, conscientiousness, and emotional stability. And then they did simulations and analysis to determine that roughly there are 85 people out of 1 million who excel at all three of those.
I also like their definitions for each of the three aspects discussed:
Gignac and Szodorai (2024, p. 2) defined intelligence as a person's "maximal capacity to achieve a novel goal successfully using perceptual-cognitive processes."
Conscientiousness has been described as multi-faceted (DeYoung et al., 2007; Roberts et al., 2014), with facets revolving around work ethic (industriousness, achievement striving, orderliness, and self-discipline) and personal responsibility (dutifulness, carefulness, and dependability). These traits combine to shape a personality that values structure, achievement, and trustworthiness in both professional and personal spheres
Emotional stability, the opposite of neuroticism, reflects calmness, resilience to stress, and emotional composure in difficult situations (Roberts & Yoon, 2022).
An interesting insight about distribution of exceptional individuals in any dimension, including an example using height as an example. Good to know I'm "exceptionally" tall by these definitions.
According to the properties of the normal distribution, only about 2.3% of the population (23,000 per 1 million) is expected to score two standard deviations above the mean on any given dimension (Grami, 2019). To gain an intuitive sense of what this level represents, consider that the average heights for American adult women and men are 162.0 cm (SD = 7.1 cm) and 175.7 cm (SD = 7.5 cm), respectively (Fryar et al., 2018). A height two standard deviations above the mean would be approximately 176.2 cm (5′8") for women and 190.7 cm (6'2.5") for men. Male celebrities like Jim Carrey, Ted Danson, and Adam Driver, who stand between 6′2" and 6'3", would be considered tall by most, though perhaps only just barely exceptionally so.
At the end of it, the paper is defining the rules for a randomized sampling based on informed perameters. I don't consider it earth shattering. The main thing I enjoyed was the insights to the three factors and the data support or disproving relationships between then.
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My Progamming Language Journey
This post by Ruben Schade walks through his history with programming and the languages he's used. It inspired me to do the same.
QBasic - I did some very early programming with QBasic, but never really unlocked anything with it. I did it because I liked computers and it's what I was supposed to do as someone who liked computers.
HTML - I learned HTML in the early days and I would wager it is the most used language over my lifetime for programming.
mIRC Scripting - This one takes some explaining. In the old days we used chatrooms on a network of servers called IRC (Internet Relay Chat.) It's still around but it's very small these days. Honestly what people are used to in Discord and streaming chat, is basically built on and modeled after chat on IRC.
mIRC was a shareware bit of software which allowed you to write scripts and create "bots." They could do simple things like moderate you chatroom, do simplistic games, run file sharing services, etc. I really got programming with mIRC. I could write something and immediately use it in chat with friends. While I knew and used HTML and enjoyed it, this is really where I feel I became a programmer.
C++ - In high school I learned C++, but honestly I had had a taste of programming for the Internet with HTML and mIRC, and that is where my interest was. C++ and using it online were, at the time, not easily connected and so my interest waned.
Javascript - I didn't immediately dive into it. The history and journey of Javascript is from small functions for the web to the behemoth it is today (which still boggles my mind.) But I didn't really get into Javascript right away. In my mind it was later in high school.
Smalltalk - My freshman year at Georgia Tech, the CS intro course used Alan Kay's Smalltalk. A variant of Lisp. Python caught on as the intro language in the next year or two. Smalltalk was interesting but ultimately again the usage was through a specific lens and it didn't grasp me.
PHP - I don't remember exactly when I picked up PHP. But it has been my go-to development language of choice for web backend programming. Warts and all.
SQL - Around this same time, I also began learning SQL queries. It was entirely to be supplementary to things I programmed.
Java - I only have vague memories of this as a language used for courses. My recollection was it hitting harder on trying to drive object-oriented programming and programming basics. I didn't love the language.
C - I don't remember the exact courses, but I learned C and used it for several courses. I remember doing team projects to make a Tanks game and also a variant on Lemmings that were fun.
Lisp - Full Lisp came later, in a course with Thad Starner. I had actually seen him on TV before the class because he was on the vanguard of wearable computing. For his course, we used Lisp and I recall again, enjoying it, but it was delving deeper into computer theory and again not what I grabbed onto.
ASP - As I recall, I used this for my college internship with Lonnie Harvel. And is my only contribution to a published research paper with 'Using student-generated notes as an interface to a digital repository'. Basically GT was on the forefront of video recording lectures as a resource for students, and we had nascent technology to recognize words in the audio of a video since there wasn't a transcript. So my research was working on ways to take the notes students might write and figuring out ways to tie them back to the video's audio. My core idea was to look for proper nouns and more complex words which would be easier to identify in the video and likely to be relevant to the student.
After college, I didn't immediately go into programming as a career. It became a side hobby mainly. And that hobby time was centralized around websites with PHP, HTML, Javascript and CSS.
ASP.net - When I got back to programming as a daily job, it was largely about ASP.net programming before transitioning back to PHP with Drupal work. I haven't gone back to ASP/ASP.net programming since then.
Kotlin - I learned this briefly back in 2012 as I recall, exploring Android app development. I used it for two app projects to learn and then dropped it.
Python - Honestly, the recency of this language is because I wanted to try it out. I decided to begin learning it for fun and have come to use it a lot more for desktop based projects.
As far as I can recall, that's the list of programming languages I've used, if I missed any there were small one-offs over the years. These days my programming is basically entirely PHP, Python, HTML, Javascript, & CSS.
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Automated Archives for January, 22nd 2025
This post was automatically generated.
Chess For the Day
Record: 2-0-0
Net Elo Change: +10
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- January 22, 2024 (2 posts)
- January 22, 2023 (4 posts)
- January 22, 2021 (15 posts)
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