Whenever I’ve read that passage, I’ve usually considered his underdog-ness to be from him deciding to not wear even the king’s fancy armor, and from him being the youngest child in his family. So he looked even more dwarfed by Goliath than he would have had he worn armor, and since he wasn’t one of the elder children in his family (despite being a teen or adult), no one in the culture at the time was expecting him to become a hero–much less a king later! But him eschewing the armor in order to keep his agility and range of motion for using a sling makes total sense–I think King Saul was just miffed that his offer of his own personal armor was rebuffed 🤣

EDIT: minor correction

Thank you for introducing me to Wirth’s Law. I’ll be citing that whenever I write code that takes forever to run even on powerful compute 🤣

Interesting! My last biology class is a tiny speck in my rearview mirror, so I’m not sure that I’m understanding it the way your class meant for it to be understood, but I think that that makes a lot of sense. Too much of one kind of input to a living thing without an output to balance it out can be disastrous.

Those are good points! I can imagine positive feedback to be desirable in some situations and to some extent–a musician’s amplifier needs to have some positive feedback to amplify the frequencies they care about, for instance, but likely also needs some negative to cancel out frequencies they don’t want to amplify, either in the amplifier itself or in the sound booth. Or maybe for some chemical processes, where you always want to make more of product X, and you’re just adjusting the positive feedback to keep the production of X at a certain range of acceptable rates. It all comes down to the math and the desired output! My areas of work are mainly related to areas where negative feedback is desired, but it’s really very context-specific.

As for “more optimal,” I think I picked up the habit of avoiding that phrase due to grad school being my life for so long. A lot of my cohort was very controls-focused in their research, and several of the controls profs would correct presenting/proposing/defending students if they used that phrase, so we got used to either avoiding the phrase entirely or jokingly pointing it out if a fellow student said it. But in my full-time job now, things are much more relaxed with respect to that sort of thing. Maybe in a few years, I won’t hear those profs’ “can you tell me what you mean by ‘more optimal?’” didactic questions in my head when I encounter the phrase 🤣 And yeah, exponential growth is another good example! It’s clear in the colloquial sense, but my engineer-brain still thinks “wait a minute…” when I hear it!

Youtube Premium also includes Youtube Music, which allows downloading music-specific playlists for offline listening, but you’re stuck playing them in the Youtube Music app, AFAIK.

It’s the really cool bird from that catchy meme song! I love it! 😍

“Positive feedback loop” to indicate a situation in which circumstances feeding into each other result in more good things happening, or “negative feedback loop” to indicate bad circumstances feeding into each other to result in more bad things happening.

I have worked with enough controls folks to know that positive feedback in a control loop often leads to instability (bad), while negative feedback in a control loop can be used to stabilize the system (good). It just comes down to the math in the situation.

So people saying that they are in a positive feedback loop can, to a controls person, sound counterintuitive. E.g. “I’m in a positive feedback loop of working out, having more energy as a result, and working out more, making me healthier!” would be momentarily confusing.

I did grad school at an engineering/STEM-focused school, and the campus psychiatrist actually used these terms correctly when discussing anxiety attacks! As an engineer myself, that made my nerdy heart happy 🤣

Another control theory phrase issue: The phrase “more optimal” is incorrect and very well may earn the speaker an “umm, actually” from any controls folks in the conversation. Optimality is not a scale–either something is optimal (with respect to a specific metric), or it isn’t.

(EDIT: reducing verbosity)