Journal of the Week

10/11/2024 This far, the uncensored AI Image Generator (no limits in terms of censorship, apparently since celebrities are even allowed to be generated), that I like is: https://www.basedlabs.ai/generate

Apple Developer conferences now on Youtube accessible for everyone. Though I'm not currently involved, it's certainly a heads up, for learning all things Apple directly from the source.

10/10/2024 Received strange email about a settlement (something about Oracle needing to pay us). After a quick lookup, seems legit, so I signed up for it, maybe I'll get some $ about this case: www.KatzPrivacySettlement.com and this .gov validation of the site: https://www.cand.uscourts.gov/notices/oracle-class-action-settlement/
This court authorized a notice alerting individuals of a proposed settlement of a class action lawsuit, and directing them to a website, https://katzprivacysettlement.com/. 
All that's needed other than Name, Address, Phone, are the email included Notice ID and Confirmation Code, so the submission process was easy.

Apparently Fireship is a very popular if not the most popular Youtube Channel for programmers. And here's the article about it/them.

I learned that the threat of the domain postfix, io, going away is due to the British handing her last Indian Ocean territory, the Chagos Islands, back to island country of Mauritius, South East of Africa. There are 5 kinds of domain: country code top-level domain (ccTLD), generic (gTLD) such as .info, Sponsored (sTLD) such as .edu, .gov, Infrastructure (ARPA) and Test (tTLD). The last two are basically .ARPA & .TEST. So with this island not under the Brits, apparently there's a chance for io to be removed, because though io is a country code, but it's actually been used for tech pages (being treated as acronym for input/output instead of Indian Ocean).

A Heatmap for Software Engineer Pay/Salary in the US. I see that the NJ/NY area's highest pay companies are 1. Netflix, 2. Citadel, 3. Jane Street. Netflix's entry level (L3) starts at $220k, but interestingly Citadel's L1 engineer is paid $333k.

In-depth understanding of Bandwidth and how to test it, click here. This tool is recommended for network test. This speed test analysis knowledge is for both ISP and users.

10/09/2024 Individualism is not just a Tim Keller observation of New York. But it's also interesting noted by this article in other areas such as music industry: More solo artists now than bands like Spice Girls, Back Street Boys, etc.

10/08/2024 Planeterrella, a polar aurora simulator device created by Jean Lilensten. It demonstrates and educates how Aurora Borealis is formed.

What's up in the Sky of October:

After Dirk mentioned a couple of times already by last Thursday's Bible study, I had to look it up what was this comet business he's talking about. It turns out there's two comets expected for the general public in October. They were both discovered last and this year. The one we going to want to look at in the Northern hemisphere is C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) which will be at its best view around the time we go to Dirk's place for the annual camp event on the 18th. The other comet being C/2024 S1, is more suitable for the Southern hemisphere folks as it's too low to the South for us in the North though not impossible to view from before and after Oct 28 (perihelion day), in the mornings, perhaps better after Nov 8 for us. The C2023 will appear to us right after sunset, as the comet has already done its perihelion (part of orbit that's closest to the Sun) and leaving the Sun passing Earth, as show in this animated gif (and for C2024S1 click this for animated gif showing the comet already leaving the Sun) I've captured from theskylive.com (a very good site for great up to date graphical astronomy demonstration (for both ground and orbit visualizations).

I briefly attended the AAA Tuesdays Lecture series by Dr. Jean Lilensten, Research Director at the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics in Grenoble. The topic: The Hunt for Mars Aurorae and High Altitude Clouds. I forgot to switch audio devices in my own recording when I switched speakers so I am deleting my own recording. But his videos on similar subject and more can be found on Youtube. He's also known as the inventor of the Planeterrella, a mini aurora simulator. He is also well known for his books on Space Weather: Research towards applications in Europe ($168+!!! on Amazon) to Epistemology. Most of his books are in French.

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Vocabulary: Foobar

Computer programmers know foo bar are two anonymous standard variable names to choose from. However, some have said that they came from WW2's foul terminology: FUBAR (F-ed up beyond all recognition).

Posted in Computer Science, Vocabularies | Leave a comment

Relationship between these Antivirus terms: Symantec, Norton, VMWare, Broadcom, Carbon Black

Thanks to Google's AI search engine and wikipedia. Now I'm not confused and can steer clear of the annoying Norton's path.

Carbon Black

  • 2002 founded by Bit9
  • 2019 VMWare acquired CB
  • 2023 Broadcom acquired VMWare

Norton Antivirus

  • 1998 When Symantec Antivirus for Mac (SAM) was renamed Norton Antivirus (NAV) which was eponym of Peter Norton Computing which was acquired by Symantec in 1990.
  • 2019 Broadcom acquired Enterprise Security Software Division of Symantec, and Symantec was itself renamed NortonLifeLock.
  • 2022 NortonLifeLock merged with Avast and renamed Gen Digital Inc.
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List of Standup Comedians who are smart enough to deal with the woke culture as well as other kinds of hecklers

Andrew Schulz

Sammy Obeid

Kvon

Steve Hofstetter

Shahak Shapira

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Vocab English of 忠孝不能兩全

Loyalty does not always go hand in hand with family.

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Knowledge and Wisdom

I've already several entries related to this subject, so this shall be the main entry in addition to them. This is an investigation on the distinction between wisdom and knowledge. Particularly from Proverbs and perhaps an attempt to distinguish OT & NT wisdom.

Words in OT Hebrew for Wisdom:

חכמה chokmah: most common. Especially in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Words in OT Hebrew for knowledge:

דּעת da'ath: most common, starting with the tree of knowledge in Gen 2:9. Most used in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

ידע yada: Lev 4:23,28. Possibly interchangeable with דּעת (Deu 1:39). Though not as prominent as דּעת, but also used much in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes: Proverbs 1:2, 4:1, 4:19, 5:6, 10:32, 22:21, 24:12, 27:23, 30:18; Ecclesiastes 1:17, 3:12, 3:14, 7:25, 8:12, 8:16-17, 9:5, 11:9.

Words in OT Hebrew for Understanding:

בּינה biynah:

To be continued...

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Vocab: 养兵千日,用兵一时

养兵千日,用兵一时: I don't know the best English term for this yet, but it's basically: always be preparing, even if the use is for a short moment.

Popularized by Stephen Tong for me years ago. But now I came across it again by Mr. You criticizing Kamala Harris not able to handle things at the last moment.

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Journal of the Week

10/02/2024 Amex savings has dropped annual interest APY from 4.35% in 12/14/2023 to 4.10% today. If it's lower than 4% I'll need to consider new approach.

10/01/2024 Came across the introduction of Japanese Christian singers/song writers (Contemporary style), Saluki & Misa Kamiyama, by the NY Japanese United Methodist Church in their newsletter. It's too far for me to attend anyway.

9/30/2024 It seems that this has become a trend: GenZ population has a reputation for being challenging to work with and difficult to manage. It's not new to me, but I have always wondered due to the culture I've seen at work as well as in churches or any social spaces. It's just a generalization, not everyone's like that. One of my goals in evangelizing is to tackle this problem at some level.

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Tips for Getting Tech/Developer jobs

I filtered them from someone else's experience:

  • Referrals aren’t everything. You actually have to be good too
  • Projects and experience matter just as much as interview performance.
  • Rejection is just redirection. I ended up landing a great data science internship role instead here which was a much better fit.
  • Don’t pick Java for the coding round. It slows you down dramatically. Always pick Python!
  • Actual practice some competitive programming before interviewing at FAANG. Use resources like NeetCode.io to truly gain a competitive edge in your big tech interviews
  • be less attached to interview outcomes. I was so attached to the outcome that I slept very poorly the night before the interview and that wrecked my interview performance. This lesson was very good when I interviewed at Facebook later in the year where I did get accepted. After my second rejection from Google, I went 5 years in a row without experiencing a single job interview rejection.
  • Maybe mobile development wasn’t my thing and I should pivot more towards data engineering.
  • The grass isn’t always greener. Just because Airbnb stock dropped so much in 2021, that didn’t necessarily mean I was in a bad position
  • Sometimes the interviewer fails you for reasons beyond your control and you need to take that signal and be grateful that you didn’t get hired at that company
  • Job hopping is really good to grow your career early. It looks worse as you go from early career to mid career though!
  • Not all companies value impact over tenure. Some companies prefer people to make less impact over a longer, more sustainable period of time. This was something that really nudged me in the direction of startups and initially put the idea of DataExpert.io into my mind!
  • The entrepreneurship journey I am on is different but still really good. Not giving one organization so much power over my life is a good thing even if it comes with a different set of challenges.
  • Interviewing out of FOMO can be a bad idea especially if your values do not actually align with the company
  • Don’t let interview rustiness impact the interviews at the jobs you want most. I should have interviewed with some other companies before OpenAI to refine my pitch instead of going in cold after years of not interviewing at all.
  • Don’t post April Fool’s jokes about joining a company that you’re currently in the interview process with; it might go extremely viral and hurt your chances!
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Defining Pride

The shallow defines it as "thinking one is better than others" ~ This came from the Bible Study on Proverbs at GCC.

Tim Keller gave a better one: "The need to think one is better than others".

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