exasperation

David Epstein's The Sports Gene talks about several areas where it's a feedback loop between nature and nurture:

• One's starting point, of how much an untrained or unpracticed person is able to do something, is a big influence on whether someone even starts down that formal track.
• Simple access to training resources is a big determinant of whether a person will try those things. That's why pro hockey players tend to be born in the early months of the year, or why so many bobsledders are from Upstate New York.
• People respond differently to training, and how quickly one improves influences a lot of whether that person intends to continue putting in the work.
• People's ceilings are in different places. For many sports, being world class literally requires certain genetic coding: very long limbs, very accurate eyesight, very high Achilles tendons, certain biological adaptations for altitude or holding one's breath, etc. Someone who is only slightly taller than average will struggle to make it into the NBA, no matter how much practice.
• The internal drive to practice possibly has a genetic component, too.

But outside of all of that, it also matters whether we're talking about becoming a world class athlete or just a hobbyist. For weekend warriors running a 5k in a pack of thousands of participants who paid to be there, practice and training are going to be far more important predictors of their performance than any kind of genetic or innate talent. The genetic or innate bottlenecks might show up in the Olympics, but not the amateur hobbyist runners.

Digg was the site that originally popularized up-votes and down-votes that are so typical on online posts today.

No. Slashdot was doing that, and was popular before Digg launched. Reddit also launched before Digg was popular, about 6 months after Digg did.

Meanwhile, algorithms that ranked content based on user votes were taking over all the web 2.0 darlings, including Flickr's "interestingness" ranking system, by the mid 2000's. Even outside of ordering comment threads, silicon valley was enamored with the idea of crowdsourcing indicators of popularity, and building algorithms around star ratings (including offline stuff like Netflix's DVD by mail, OkCupid's matching ratings for online dating, etc.)

I see Digg's use of voting as merely reflective of the overall trends in the mid-2000's. They certainly didn't invent it.

computer science/engineering/STEM is the only thing worth it.

It's mostly engineers who make money. The actual sciences are basically a low paying career for how much knowledge it requires, and pretty much require much more than a 4-year degree to climb that ladder, or they just go into the same category as everyone in the humanities and the arts: go get a job that requires a 4-year degree but doesn't care what your major was.

Most of us have many different parts of the job, and like certain parts more than others.

A doctor may be passionate about actually solving medical issues but might hate communicating with difficult patients, dealing with paperwork and recordkeeping software, dealing with insurance companies, marketing his practice, managing staff, etc.

Programmers may actually love coding but hate dealing with customer requirements, or the office politics of sales versus delivery, or even the way their team is run.

It's like that everywhere. If anyone is only able to do work they're passionate about, that person is gonna have a rough career.

I graduated with a philosophy degree. I'm a lawyer now. So are a huge chunk of my classmates from undergrad.

Even the ones who didn't go on and get more schooling tended to find white collar work in some kind of business, same as the people who majored in business administration, finance, marketing, other business school fluff.

There are plenty of majors that are interesting and help students learn how to think, how to write, and how to research. And there are plenty of career paths that don't care about major, just want to see a 4-year degree for their entry level people.

A bachelor's degree isn't a vocational degree. It's ok to major in something you don't intend to work in, because at the end of the day more than half of college educated workers aren't working in their field of study. Part of the reason is because the typical 4-year degree teaches only barely enough to scratch the surface of what actually happens in industry, and those entry level workers need to learn a ton on the job anyway.

Here's a helpful chart of career outcomes by major. Note that many of these undergrad majors tend to be feeders into graduate or professional programs, and that a lot of the joke majors in the humanities and liberal arts have long term outcomes that are better than the sciences. Compare biochemistry to philosophy, for example. Both of those majors kinda expect people to go get graduate or professional degrees after, but the unemployment and underemployment rates are pretty similar.

Have a plan for getting a job. Whether that plan involves a specific major or not is up to you, and isn't strictly required. It's mainly engineering that provides a specific pipeline from undergrad degree to specific career in that field. All the others are much looser about which degree is required, or require additional schooling to enter (and once you have a graduate or professional degree, your undergrad basically doesn't matter).

Reddit seemed much more like a Hacker News/Slashdot interface in the early days. They were different from each other in 2005 but slowly started to coalesce into some common features that the other had first. Reddit had robust comments and threading (which I personally consider to be the defining feature), while digg version 2 had categories/tags. Reddit adopted subreddits and Digg adopted comments sometime in 2006 or so.

The pizza dough tastes better when allowed to rest and rise slowly in the fridge. Using a ton of store bought yeast for a quick rise is fine, but planning out the dough the night before is better.

Is the H intended to kinda look like a silhouette of a llama? Because if so, I like it.

When I learned how to drive, manual transmissions were higher performance and better fuel efficiency: side by side comparisons of the exact same model of car would show better 0-60 and quarter mile times, while having slightly better EPA fuel efficiency ratings, for the manual transmission.

At some point, though, the sheer number of gears in an automatic transmission surpassed those in the typical manual gearbox, and the average automatic today has 6 gears, up to 9 in some Mercedes and 10 in certain Ford and GM models. So they could start selecting gear ratios for better fuel efficiency, without "wasting" a valuable gear slot. There was a generation of Corvettes that was notorious for having a 6th gear that was worthless for actual performance but helped the car sneak by with a better highway fuel mileage rating.

And the automatics became much faster at shifting gears, with even the ultra high performance supercars shifting to paddle shifters where the driver could still control the gear, but with the shifting mechanism automated. Ferrari's paddle shifter models started outperforming the traditional stick shift models in the early 2000's, if I remember correctly. As those gear shifting technologies migrated over to regular automatics, the performance gap shrunk and then ended up going the other way.

At this point there's not enough reason for a true manual stickshift transmission. It's no longer faster or more economic, so it's just a pure fun. Which is fine, but does make it hard to actually design one for any given model of car.

There are some steep stop sign intersections in San Francisco that I've had to use the e brake for.

I love Chinese food so much. I've visited twice, and always make room for food.

My favorite street food is probably sheng jian bao, the pan fried buns with soupy pork filling sealed in.

In terms of a single standalone dish, it's hard to say. I like noodle dishes, like Taipei style beef noodle soup. Or Wuhan style re gan mian.

And for the type of meal where there's a lot of dishes on the table to be shared, my favorite dish in that setting is probably Mapo tofu. I did a food tour of Chengdu once and just everything Sichuan is so good, but Mapo tofu is just all my favorite Sichuan things in a single dish.