Help me calculate expectation

[7Wannabe5]

First: What is the probability that you're going to complete all 800 hours of study? You DO tend to get sidetracked. Don't you?

Day 7 of attempt to simultaneously learn entry-level systems administration, R, and review for actuarial exams. Horrifying result being that I somehow found myself watching KidRock video as escape/release mechanism, likely because having drunk sex with an SF on a boat dock in Northern Michigan is probably about the most opposite thing I could be doing instead. Why did I enroll myself in summer school?

On a more serious note, I noticed that I experience a good deal more low-level background anxiety attempting the programming exercises, as opposed to pencil and paper math problems, although they aren't any more difficult. Kind of like as I move along the continuum from thinking to doing I become more afraid of "breaking" something. For me, and this may be a generational thing, this anxiety is associated with being female.

[daylen]

Kind of like as I move along the continuum from thinking to doing I become more afraid of "breaking" something. For me, and this may be a generational thing, this anxiety is associated with being female.

Interesting. I rarely worry about the possibility of breaking things. Most of what I learned about computers was triggered by things breaking. Do you think you could change your perception to, "breaking things can speed up development, and fixing things decreases anxiety over time"?

[jacob]

Interesting indeed.

One of the main precepts of managing complex systems (like permaculture) is to avoid making irreversible changes. This is because in a complex system one does not know all the consequences of one's actions. This seems like a lesson Mark ("move fast and break things") Zuckerberg has to learn over and over, because apparently he is yet to realize that FB is more than just an app. How old is he anyway?

Of course complexity is relative here. For example, I considered early 1990s style computing pretty simple and didn't mind breaking stuff back then ... whereas to me contemporary run-time production systems (such as this website) are too complex to screw up which is why I finally outsourced it. I've noticed the same thing in software development (when I was writing the programs) ... that a program of sufficient complexity is no longer just the end point of some revision tree where I can backtrack and start over. The reason is that some of that program/structure has to exist in my brain as well and my brain doesn't have a reset button where I can go back to the mental patterns I enjoyed a few months ago. IOW, a complex system is more of an evolved journey.

That said ... of course it doesn't make sense to apply those hard-won life lessons when it comes to solving textbook problems ... but it is nevertheless a hard habit to shed.

FWIW, I sometimes^H^H^H^H...increasingly often wonder if there are problems I can no longer solve because I'm no longer naive and foolhardy enough to try Knowing too much can be a problem wrt creativity.

[Gilberto de Piento]

Day 7 of attempt to simultaneously learn entry-level systems administration, R, and review for actuarial exams.

Are you just trying three separate things to see which you like or is there a curriculum that requires all three of these? They don't seem very connected to me.

[BRUTE]

afraid of "breaking" something

would it comfort 7Wannabe5 to know that even professional programmers, with decades of experience each, constantly break stuff? including the systems that manages 7Wannabe5's money, credit score, SSN, medical records, tax info, drones flying around, commercial aircraft, modern cars..

if brute had to answer the question "how do professional programmers and software developers/architects ensure their code doesn't break?" with one word, the word would be "barely".

the entire industry is based on spit, duct tape, and hacking things together.

the question isn't "will it break?" (it will), it's "will it breaking bankrupt the company?".

[7Wannabe5]

Interesting. I rarely worry about the possibility of breaking things. Most of what I learned about computers was triggered by things breaking. Do you think you could change your perception to, "breaking things can speed up development, and fixing things decreases anxiety over time"?

So, since we are both XNTPs, your experience kind of confirms my gut that this it is not due to my inherent temperament, unlike my urge to explore the opposite too.

FWIW, I sometimes^H^H^H^H...increasingly often wonder if there are problems I can no longer solve because I'm no longer naive and foolhardy enough to try Knowing too much can be a problem wrt creativity.

I grok what you are getting at here, and it is very relevant to some of my hesitancy with my own permaculture project, but that's not the source of this anxiety.

For instance, the feeling I had when I downloaded RStudio was the same feeling that I had when I was 19 and I had to do a practical lab assignment in physics based on car mechanics, and I didn't even have my driver's license yet, because I failed the driving part of the exam twice. It's the same feeling that I had when I had to keep saying "right is tight, left is loose" over and over to myself when I worked on exercise sets in Mechanics 101 (I started out in college as a Mechanical Engineering major.) Kind of like if you had a bad dream where you were driving a fast car and then suddenly all the control mechanisms (brakes, lights, signals) became unfamiliar to you, and because you don't know what to do, you just fling your hands open and away from the the wheel and panel.

Like Mr. Peterson, I believe that gender is not just a social construct, but it's frustrating when you can't demonstrate something that is in your brain in the real world due to, what I will call for lack of a better term, "tool anxiety."

Are you just trying three separate things to see which you like or is there a curriculum that requires all three of these? They don't seem very connected to me.

The purpose of the introductory IT certificate, which includes the mini-course on systems administration, was supposed to be that it would be like taking an introductory auto mechanics course before re-doing the physics lab which was based on auto mechanics. The other two courses of study are both serving the twin purposes of mid-life brain exercise and meeting my sub-goal of earning approximately $100,000 of income between now and 11/01/2020. Also, obviously, I am attempting to finally get some decent value out of math degree I earned almost 30 years ago, by closing a very long, brier infested, loop on my trail/web system.

would it comfort 7Wannabe5 to know that even professional programmers, with decades of experience each, constantly break stuff? including the systems that manages 7Wannabe5's money, credit score, SSN, medical records, tax info, drones flying around, commercial aircraft, modern cars..

Yes, I do find that personally comforting, although generally frightening. Also, I have already grokked the fragile and ad hoc nature of these systems. That's actually one of the reasons I am determined to move forward in my studies; pretty clear that some people have to do it else f*cking cataclysmic world-wide disaster. Kind of terrifying that I rank myself as absolutely incompetent in the realm, yet I am studying something (best practices in data tidying) that wasn't even outlined until 2014. I can't even come up with an adequate analogy.

[fell-like-rain]

would it comfort 7Wannabe5 to know that even professional programmers, with decades of experience each, constantly break stuff? including the systems that manages 7Wannabe5's money, credit score, SSN, medical records, tax info, drones flying around, commercial aircraft, modern cars..

I can attest to this. At least in my org, there's a lot of "well, we were testing this code change, and the build failed, but it failed after the point it'd probably fail if our code was broken, and we want to get this into the next release before feature freeze, so we're just going to say it worked." Code review exists, but usually it's just someone saying, "yeah, this doesn't look obviously flawed". And somehow we're a multi-billion-dollar company.

Often, it's easier to just fix bugs later than try and stop every one now. There's a reason they invented the patch release and the hotfix.

[jacob]

Good/safe/robust/correct, cheap/profitable/easy, fast/turnover/risky ... pick any two.

In this [growth-expansion] era, expect a preference for cheap/fast regardless of field (even in academia). If you prefer good, it's necessary to break out. If you stay in, keep in mind that #shitrollsdownhill and that QA won't pay well until we reach the next era.

[Lemur]

Message me if you've any specific questions in R. I'll do my best to try to help you out.

[FBeyer]

Have I suggested visiting https://stats.stackexchange.com/ yet?
You should. You really, really should.

Really.



You should...

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob: Gotcha.
@Lemur: Thanks, I might take you up on that.
@FBeyer: lol- Will do.

Might be the case that I need therapy more than tutoring. Very narrow ridge I sometimes walk between my fear of failure and my fear of success.

[fiby41]

It's possible to define, set up, and multiply two matrices in fortran90 using TWO lines of code. Try doing that in java/c++ ... I don't know how it's done in python

Assuming this isn't a rhetorical question and if so wondering why the IT developers haven't answered already

Code: Select all

import numpy as np
print(np.matmul([1+5j, 1-7.5j], [1-5j, 1+7.5j]))

Gave me (83.25+0j)
Alternatively

Code: Select all

print(np.dot([1+5j, 1-7.5j], [1-5j, 1+7.5j]).real)

Gives 83.25
Here we asked for the real value only because we found out in 1st example that imaginary is 0 anyways. But we can set it up to ignore imaginary values

Code: Select all

print(np.real_if_close(np.dot([1+5j, 1-7.5j], [1-5j, 1+7.5j] ), tol=10000 ) )

when they are close to 0 as far as tolerable. Or for readability

Code: Select all

A, B = [1+5j, 1-7.5j], [1-5j, 1+7.5j]
print(np.real_if_close(np.matmul(A, B ), tol=100000000000000000 ) )

It runs even when you don't specify ,tol= but I don't know what default value it takes in that scenario.

eta: Otherwise you could also use 2darrays if feeling basic or tensors if feeling fancy.

[JackMoore1965]

Good/safe/robust/correct, cheap/profitable/easy, fast/turnover/risky ... pick any two.

In this [growth-expansion] era, expect a preference for cheap/fast regardless of field (even in academia). If you prefer good, it's necessary to break out. If you stay in, keep in mind that #shitrollsdownhill and that QA won't pay well until we reach the next era.

A real good advice! "pay well until we reach the next era" i think is the best opportunity with it!