@Exuma, this comment is ridiculously resonant with me, the part about 'learning transaction isolation for the 50th time' is very on point too.
Everything you said I pretty much feel the same way. I've accepted it as part of how I work, and the advantages are many (and valued by many) - but yes, interacting with deep experts usually ends with feeling a bit like a fraud. I feel like I maybe was an expert at whatever the thing is at some point in time, momentarily, but then I just shed the information as soon as the next thing needs to be done, and it just ends up as part of the background inference pattern matcher.
Certain things where I'm really forced to learn something deeply do stick, but I find my ways of thinking about that ___domain to be very different to most 'true' experts, and rely heavily on visual models and analogies with other concepts.
haha yes! What mentioned about analogies... I must use like 50 analogies a day. I also noticed I can use phrases like "always" and "never" and I can say them without a second of hesitation, because they are merely indications of magnitude in a predictive sense, not a literal interpretation. But to someone who must understand information deeply, they never use phrases like that because they operate based on observed knowledge and sort of "hypothesis testing" like a scientist.
It's fun to realize other people are out there who can relate. Thanks for your comment
I like how you've expressed this insight, and it is so true.
Becoming great at a particular technology stack means modelling it in great detail in your head, so you can move through it without external assistance. But that leaves an arena without discovery, where you just reinforce the same synapses, leading to rigidity and an absence of awe.
ADHD is quite badly named imo. It's not so much a deficit of attention but a disregulation. If you are interested in something then you can invoke an almost obsessive fixation on the task (hyperfocus I believe some people call it) which lends itself well to coding in certain conditions.
> If you could look for something like multiple accounts tweeting the same thing within 1 minute, in the past couple weeks, you could turn up some candidates for test accounts
I think this would turn up alot more results than you bargained for.
I think it could be easy enough to pare down programmatically. You'd have to search by adding things like:
* 5+ accounts tweeting exactly the same message
* Not using the mobile app
* Fewer than 10 followers
* Fewer than 10 following
* Liked fewer than 10 tweets
* Retweeted fewer than 10 tweets
* Accounts created within 24 hours of each other
* Account creation metadata is similar
* Account less than 1 month old
You could probably come up with more criteria to help narrow the scope and play with the numbers. I would bet that you probably come up with hundreds to low thousands of accounts fitting those criteria at most. You could spend an hour scrolling through them looking for something suspicious - and I don't think it would take too long to put this kind of thing together if you had database access.
One problem there is Wikipedia culture. Suppose you're a bona-fide content-area expert, fully capable of accurately conveying your knowledge in clear language that most people can understand. You might want to concentrate on creating the article.
Instead ... if the topic is not obscure and unpopular ... odds are high that you'll wind up jousting with dozens of inspired but unqualified challengers. The first time two of the paragraphs you've spent hours crafting disappear on someone's whim, you're probably going to stay gone.
"Anyone can edit"? In many cases, no. Take the 'Start-class' article 'performing arts', for example: how many people are truly qualified to summarize that enormous topic?
A-quality doesn't emerge from a melange of bits and pieces.
The spot where most alliance service providers have to start is IAM - controlling how your members are able to access mission critical services such as voice chat and text chat. This is usually done using the EVE SSO, which exposes an oauth2 provider that we can authenticate users against. Authenticating users is just the tip of the iceberg though, you also need to authorize the users to verify they're in your corporation/alliance/coalition, and reject their access if they leave the group ingame. We use the EVE API to query authorization data like that, but it's really the tip of the iceberg of what can be done.
The workflow for a new user joining a major alliance generally looks like this:
1. New user creates account on your central services site
2. New user uses EVE SSO to link their EVE characters to your central services site. This also gives us access to advanced EVE API queries that we can use to monitor everything from who the user trades with, what they own, where they're located in the game universe, and all of their EVEMail. This data is used by corporation HR representatives to check for spies (a whole other topic entirely)
3. If the new user is accepted into your corporation, the central services site needs to figure out that the users character's are now in your corporation and grant them services.
4. When the user navigates to an alliance service, they're presented with a _separate_ oauth2 authorization that uses our central services as a provider. This is how we can quickly integrate new services since oauth2 support is so prevalent.
That's all great for IAM, but it's a small part of the equation. Data federation is another big-deal problem. Many times people who aren't on our IT team need access to their corporation's data - we don't want to expose the EVE API keys of each user because of the high security risk, so instead we expose a plug-and-play proxy. All the user has to do is plug in the URL of our central services proxy instead of the EVE API endpoint, and they can obtain access to their users data without requiring each and every user to go through the oauth2 authorization process twice.
Another interesting mechanism we support is our tax calculator. Many EVE alliances implement an alliance-wide "npc farming" tax that has no ingame mechanism for enforcement. In EVE, corporations can easily levy a 10% tax on its members, but there's no ingame mechanism for an alliance to levy taxes against its member corporations. What we do instead is query the EVE API to find out how much each corporation is taking in in tax, then calculate how much that corporation needs to pay the alliance. We can even track payments using the journal API endpoint. The technicals behind this are fascinating - a months worth of raw, unprocessed tax/journal data represents 5-10 million data entries, and requires about 5000 queries to the EVE API. When you have to run all of that including alliance services on a tiny Hetzner box, things get interesting pretty quick.
If you wanna see what the EVE API looks like, there's a swagger documentation page here: https://esi.evetech.net/
Everything you said I pretty much feel the same way. I've accepted it as part of how I work, and the advantages are many (and valued by many) - but yes, interacting with deep experts usually ends with feeling a bit like a fraud. I feel like I maybe was an expert at whatever the thing is at some point in time, momentarily, but then I just shed the information as soon as the next thing needs to be done, and it just ends up as part of the background inference pattern matcher.
Certain things where I'm really forced to learn something deeply do stick, but I find my ways of thinking about that ___domain to be very different to most 'true' experts, and rely heavily on visual models and analogies with other concepts.