> It seems impossible for me to recommend someone do this stuff without having that lifelong level of understanding and context and passion.
Your lifelong learning and passion are a key part of your identify, and most probably the reason why your friends respect you and trust you enough to approach you about software.
Unless your friends are trying to replicate you, it won't be necessary for them to develop the same lifelong understanding as you. If all they want to do is to learn about software, they could just learn a little bit about it, or as much as they can given their late start. That might still satisfy them.
If you want to be a good friend, it's important for you to distinguish between their ambitions and your passion. Try to see things from their point of view, and only share as much information as is necessary for them to be able to see the next step of the big picture.
For example, if they don't already know any programming languages, you could just tell them that there are different languages that suit different applications, and ask them what they are interested to work on. Don't talk in detail about the merits of particular languages because they won't be able to grasp these details yet.
If they say they just want to be able to program Excel, or to write an app to help their grandmother remember something, then you just need to tell them about the tools that exist for those applications.
Don't tell them too much. Just point them towards the right starting point, and tell them they are welcome to bring more questions to you as they arise. That will keep the conversation relevant to them, and avoid the difficulty of having you talk for too long about things they can't understand or appreciate yet.
Sounds like you are comparing the experiences of an American eating out in America with the experiences of an American dining in foreign countries.
Some of your experiences were negative, and others positive. But none of your foreign data used a native diner, so, it’s difficult to correlate the results with the topic of this discussion, which is about the effect of tipping on service.
Yes it seems to mean "unconventional" rather than against some established orthodoxy such as Catholicism.
That lowers the bar considerably, plus it opens it up to things that are merely unlikely: Man Utd will win the premier league this year, world war 3 will break out in Ukraine, Trump will be restored.
By "hobby photography" it sounds like you mean SLR hobby photography. Of course, hobby photography has boomed off the charts with phones.
Meanwhile, professional photography is nearly an extinct profession.
Over the last 20 years, as print publications were replaced by online, the professions of journalist and press photographer declined to the point where they now hardly exist.
Say you are buying a car at pre-tesla days. There is plenty of competition in the market and there is no clear market leader. You need to buy because you have to buy a car. The features never add much to anything and you make your decision based on recommendation and the reputation.
Now, you are making cars and you want people to buy more car. How can they do that? Upping the speed of your average consumer vehicle? Making it more mobile? Making generic upgrades in comfort features? Essentially adding units to existing features isn't a viable sales strategy. They can do nothing to have an uptick in car sales by just adding units to the features they offer.
Now you have the entire camera industry. Since the advent of decent mobile photography, you don't have to buy camera, so the manufacturer are already in a bad position. Then as far as innovation they are just adding units to existing features. More megapixels, better low light capabilities, higher FPS and that's about it. There isn't any effort or innovation in delivering something that is featurewise a new concept. There isn't anything that warrants someone to buy and carry it.
> it must have been diseases the Spaniards brought that permanently wiped out the whole Amazon civilization.
The Spaniards didn't go deep into the Amazon. It was possible to hide from them in the jungle, which is thousands of miles deep.
The whole Amazon civilisation was not wiped out.
It took a giant hit in the early 20th century when the automobile industry required rubber for tires, which it got by enslaving and brutally murdering indigenous Amazonians.
Then later in the 20th century vast tracts of the Amazon were converted into coffee farms. The habitat loss decimated indigenous Amazonians, but it hasn't wiped them out.
> The Spaniards didn't go deep into the Amazon. It was possible to hide from them in the jungle, which is thousands of miles deep.
Diseases spread quickly among populations. By the time the spanish showed up, the incas were already in a crisis in part due to european diseases, which were brought there by trade.
There absolutely weren't big amazonian civilizations by the early 20th century, and there hadn't been any for a long time by that point.
Not sure what you mean by "big Amazonian civilisations".
It's full of trees. People traditionally live in small villages.
There are no roads.
The Inca didn't live in the jungle. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was in the city of Cusco. The Inca civilization arose from the Peruvian highlands.
You have a great deal to learn about the prehistory of South American civilization. (So do we all.)
Before old-world explorers showed up, the Amazon population was on the order of 100 million. Most of Amazon jungle was, essentially, a big orchard. We find remains of elevated causeways tens of miles long, evidently for getting around during flood times, and levees and berms to retain water long after the flood receded. The dominant trees today all show evidence of domestication.
10,000 years ago they were already well along with their tree breeding program. The Amazon basin never froze, so people living there were able to start civilization well ahead of people in temperate areas. The main mystery is why it started as late as it did, and not 100,000 years earlier.
Jungle is what we have left of the Amazon flora that has not been cleared for pasture or oilseed.
An orchard is a collection of trees cultivated for their product. Their orchards, unlike those we keep, had a mix of different, complementary species. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest, approximately British Columbia today, also farmed trees this way. Those orchards are distinctive in maintaining their characteristic species mix, untended, into the present.
It is hard to say how much of the "modern" avoidance of multi-cropping traces back to biblical injunction. Nowadays people are likely to blame mechanization and difficulty of making machines compatible with such a practice, but that might be a sort of "just-so" story.
You will need to exercise your google-fu to bring up publications, mostly in the last 10 years. I suggest starting with "pre-columbian amazonian civilization".
But there were people, and tropics, and people in the tropics. Africa, for example, and Sundaland (mountaintops of which are now Indonesia).
We don't know there weren't people in the Americas then. We have good evidence somebody butchered a mastodon near what is now San Diego, what, 130kya? Might have been H. erectus, they really got around. Any way probably not H. sap.
The charm of Eliza is that it was simply a Rogerian therapist who didn't try to be intelligent.
Eliza's talent was in getting you to express yourself, free from inhibition. That doesn't require “intelligence”, but it does require the art of listening. There's nothing dumb about that.
Sure, the overall technique of asking vague open-ended questions to elicit a response might not be dumb. But it's hard to argue that ELIZA-style chatbots are intelligent in anyway. They deliberately had no understanding at all.
Your lifelong learning and passion are a key part of your identify, and most probably the reason why your friends respect you and trust you enough to approach you about software.
Unless your friends are trying to replicate you, it won't be necessary for them to develop the same lifelong understanding as you. If all they want to do is to learn about software, they could just learn a little bit about it, or as much as they can given their late start. That might still satisfy them.
If you want to be a good friend, it's important for you to distinguish between their ambitions and your passion. Try to see things from their point of view, and only share as much information as is necessary for them to be able to see the next step of the big picture.
For example, if they don't already know any programming languages, you could just tell them that there are different languages that suit different applications, and ask them what they are interested to work on. Don't talk in detail about the merits of particular languages because they won't be able to grasp these details yet.
If they say they just want to be able to program Excel, or to write an app to help their grandmother remember something, then you just need to tell them about the tools that exist for those applications.
Don't tell them too much. Just point them towards the right starting point, and tell them they are welcome to bring more questions to you as they arise. That will keep the conversation relevant to them, and avoid the difficulty of having you talk for too long about things they can't understand or appreciate yet.