Polymath Engineer Weekly #83
Deliberate Practice, OTP, Black-Scholes-Merton, Constraint Solvers, Jiu Jitsu, German
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Links of the week
The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice
Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.
Erlang is a kind of two-tiered language. At the lowest level, you have a functional subset. All you get is a bunch of data structures, functions, and pattern matching to modify and transform them. The data is immutable, local, and side-effects are rather limited if not unnecessary. At the higher level, you have the concurrent subset, where long-lived state is managed, and where it gets communicated from process to process.
▶ The Trillion Dollar Equation
The most famous equation in finance, the Black-Scholes/Merton equation, came from physics. It launched an industry worth trillions of dollars and led to the world’s best investments.
Planner Programming Blows My Mind
Picat is a research language intended to combine logic programming, imperative programming, and constraint solving. I originally learned it to help with vacation scheduling but soon discovered its planner module, which is one of the most fascinating programming models I’ve ever seen.
A Deeper Understanding of Jiu Jitsu
Like chess, once the sequence was initiated there was no way for the opponent to escape. Ultimately, the secret of mastering the art of BJJ is not in learning hundreds of individual techniques. It relies on understanding the game of Jiu Jitsu and working on your personal way of grappling, your own game.
▶ Why German Sounds So Aggressive
German sounds harsh and aggressive. Why?
Book of the Week
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
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