[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488891 (thanks mckirk!)
The reason I admire her isn't that. What caught my attention about her is that she has a sense of purpose. She has a purpose in life and has devoted her life to it.
I used to have one. My goal was to make the legal system cheaper and more accessible. And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot.
I hope I'll find a purpose soon. That's what I'm passionate about right now, finding a new purpose or a new way to accomplish my past purpose.
It was my first job after college and was fun building a contract negotiation platform, document assembling API, etc.
Learnt a lot but had to leave because something was missing & it wasn't working out.
The person who I worked with has the same name signature as yours: vivek durai
Maybe not to represent yourself ("anyone who represents himself has a fool for a client") but maybe useful stuff.
For example, in california, you have certain online privacy rights you can exercise, and it would be nice to have a form letter to enumerate and exercise those rights.
or how to fight a parking ticket, etc.
But in lawyering, people need defending cause they can't defend themselves. It's not preference, it's a need.
"There is nothing more annoying than when you think someone is wrong, but they think they are right". And here's the interesting part, it doesn't matter if you're actually right. This is why people need someone defending them. Cause the resulting optics from defending yourselves, coming off as ignorant, unrepentant, or downright evil, is so destructive.
Ofc it's even worse cause it often is the case that you are wrong, but still needs defending for lighter sentence (which you deserve, in truth). YOu can't do this on your own.
Tangential, but this is also why employees don't come to their manager to tell about all their small accomplishments and deeds that they think are underappreciated. You just simply can't testify for yourselves. Especially if you have some dirt on you, and who doesn't? We dont promote ourselves cause we know instinctively it will be received poorly. AND IT WILL. But if other employees go to the manager and say things they appreciate of you, then it's suddenly okay. If people catch on to this, we'll have a more healthier workplace.
Also, see my post history about acts. It may help you see the trees instead of the forest.
It seems the only way to make HN even better is to bring in people that HNers admirer and to interview them on here.
Speaking of nuns, I know two cases of admirable women (one English and one French), who left their studies (and one also left her then-fiancee) to live and serve in a religious order. At least in one case no-one could have predicted that, least the (MIT-educated) brain researcher fiancee.
If you'd like to connect, please reach out.
that suggests that everyone should contribute to that, which further implies that every contribution matters, no matter how small. you tried something, and it failed. that's fine. ideally others have an opportunity to learn from that, but even if not, at least you learned something, and you can use that learning for your future.
the goal is not to create the greatest possible impact, but to learn and make the most of the resources available to you. it could be something small like if you are a lawyer having one out of ten clients pro-bono or for a very low rate for people who could not afford a lawyer otherwise.
find an area/place/people that need help, and then help them.
You have no contact in your bio but I've run into this with founders a lot and you need to recognize that what you're going through is a period of grief and mourning. I recommend you look up some books on how grief is processed in breakups or deaths and see if you find points of similarity.
Kubler-Ross' "On Death and Dying" is a classic place to start, it's where the "five stages of grief" model was first introduced. Her version of it is a lot more complex than the pop culture, linear understanding that most people have. She mostly talks about the interplay between the five stages and how we ping pong back and forth in interesting ways.
Also, FWIW, I've found ChatGPT a remarkably efficient tool to "read" books in an area you're totally unfamiliar with and want a quick download. You start by asking it to give you a broad overview of a book/set of books and then dive into the areas you find the most interesting until you arrive at an actionable framework.
"Sounds like you're going through a period of grief and mourning. I've found computers to be a remarkably efficient prosthetic replacement for processing meaningful experiences with other real, live people."
It just breaks my heart, and fills me with despair, to see opportunities for human connection so giddily elided. Radio and television were bad enough. Social media has been bad enough. Now we're selling out the last bastions of compassion—grief and mourning—to be mediated by cynical corporate silicon golems? This is the psychosocial equivalent of a catheter and feeding tube. This is an induced social coma.
The wo/man is grieving, for heaven's sake! My advice would be to go have coffee with someone who has read the book! A real live flesh and blood someone. Several such someones! Possibly an entire group or congregation of mourners. We, the grieving, would really appreciate you dropping by.
They're not ready for me to tell them that, they need to be guided on the path to the path to the path.
I certainly found it helpful, even as a basic refresher of the field and I learnt a new thing which is apparently there is no single book that explicitly focuses on helping founders move on which feels like a business opportunity?
But also, you can see how I got to a useful place from first principles with the help of an AI. I stopped where I felt I was sufficiently interested that if I were in OPs shoes, I would have just bought the whole book and read it through and I did it in about 15 minutes although I admit I was cheating since I had an end goal in mind already.
I've left it for anyone else to go further in whatever direction and close the gap between where I ended and specific advice like you have provided.
It's kinda like watching Planet Earth about another ecosystem, with a strong focus on judgment-free ecology (ie there isn't good and evil, just different flora and fauna and otherwise interacting both with their normal food webs and with human outsiders).
It really tickles the environmental science geek in me. There's such a wonderful assortment of predators, prey, symbiotes, diseases, treatments, and thoughtful little touches everywhere. Beautiful art too.
------
That aside, I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm...
Simple pleasures, man.
Very creative, but a bit hard to believe. Perhaps the timescale of how long they were stranded there could have been increased a little bit.
Yet, on the other hand, they seem mystified by things like which plants are edible, or the yellow fungus on the computer circuits, or the intelligent mind-power beasts. Stuff that should be top-level knowledge, I'd think? So do they understand the planet or not? Clearly a lot is known about the esoteric workings of the planet, but weirdly the BASICS of the place are a total mystery to them.
And yeah, the biology of the planet is both supremely alien yet also amazingly perfectly suited to incredibly specific use cases: this creature doubles as a gas mask, this other one is a personal flying machine with handlebars, reach inside this one and it'll inflate into a personal balloon guaranteed to hold your weight.
If I turn off that part of my brain, I enjoy letting myself get caught up in the "LOST"-ish mysterybox-ness of it (LOST, in space!).
The trick/explanation/excuse I've been using is that we know our characters are explorers and experts, so maybe the life on this planet isn't as "alien" or "unknown" to the characters as it seems to us.
I've had survival training, I know how to identify certain useful plants or recognize tracks from animals in ecosystems I don't live in, so I tell myself that it must be like that from their perspective. Which lines up, seeing as the character's don't seem to react that strangely or shocked to most of what they see. Even one of them says that their goal is to not only survive, but _thrive_ here until rescue.
Highly recommend it, the trailer gives a good sense of the vibes without giving away too much.
https://www.theverge.com/23912922/scavengers-reign-review-ma...
https://www.polygon.com/23798021/scavengers-reigns-announcem...
I just looked over a couple of trailers. I think this makes my watchlist.
About the artwork... reminded me of Another World [0, 1] but with the better rez of today.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game)?use...
[1] Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjMf_bEfqIc
I was too worried about wasting loot then I finished the game with 20k gold and nothing to spend it on and thought "And nothing of value would have been lost if I had yeeted more people off cliffs."
Having his art style come to life as animation is beyond delightful.
If you are enjoying this I also recommend Blue Eye Samurai. Both are amazing.
Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't.
It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often.
Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exception of (hopefully) temporary setbacks like injury. Hitting personal records and milestones feels particularly good because you know you've earned it. It's hard! But it's also not so hard that I'm liable to get discouraged.
Lots of people prefer bodybuilding style training, but there's something magic about the barbell for me. Olympic lifts are also a lot of fun, but they're more technical and you need more gear and space.
Also it's much easier to quantify your strength progress (I have a literal spreadsheet), and it feels less vain than focusing on looks (not that it isn't a significant bonus).
Dunno. Feels good. I'm gonna keep at it. Two thumbs up.
This really resonates with me. Not powerlifting myself, but I have a strength training routine at the gym with the goal of improving my right knee pain. I have to take things very slow (increase by 1 rep each session, up the weight every ~2 weeks by the smallest possible increment) but looking at my graph this year is very satisfying. This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now
Yes that's exactly it! It's something of a refuge from whatever other chaos I'm dealing with. I get to feel good about trying and even better about succeeding.
The body is incredibly resilient, and given enough stimulus and patient consistency, it's pretty amazing how strong average people are capable of becoming.
I'm reminded of this quote from Socrates:
"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeking the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
I am not young anymore, but I'm not old, either, and I've come to the conclusion it's certainly better to start late than to never discover my limits at all.
Body progress is slow, but it feels wonderful to have something you can control, master, and is directly rewarding.
Kudos for sticking with it :) Good luck and keep building protections around that knee.
https://startingstrength.com/get-started/programs
One the "newbie (strength) gains" are tapped out though 5/3/1 is an excellent programme.
First of all, your statement is absolutely accurate. The weights involved can cause injury and can possibly be dangerous or even fatal when not handled correctly. On the other hand, exactly what is meant by "injury" can vary widely, so we have to be precise in our language.
Acute, serious injuries typically come about due to poor form, carelessness, failure to use safety mechanisms, or irresponsible selection of load. They are the most easily preventable type of injury, and unsurprisingly they are most common among novice lifters.
I address these risks by being deliberate about my form, consistent about my use of safety devices, and reasonable about loads and progression in my training. I also use a belt with proper abdominal bracing technique.
Chronic injuries, on the other hand, are much less preventable and much more common among experienced lifters. I've worked through several, including a soft tissue injury in my hips and a nagging tendonitis in my left elbow. Managing these types of injuries comes down almost entirely to sensible training.
Powerlifting in general is associated with a lower injury rate than other sports[1]. That's not to imply that injuries aren't a reality of powerlifting -- they are -- but more that I do not believe they constitute a good reason to forego the benefits of lifting.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07651...
It is ultimately a trade off. I don't know any long term powerlifter who doesn't have a ton of injury.
Ultimately, it isn't a good idea to load your spine with 400lbs+ over long periods of time. There is no mystery what is going to happen here regardless of "form".
That's a freak accident, and it's certainly turned out that stuff like deadlift hyperextension is not nearly as dangerous as originally thought, but "form" also means "keeping the bar path under control and in a safe range".
Just because most people have figured that out before they graduate to handling potentially dangerous weights doesn't mean it's not still a critical piece of the safety equation.
Can you describe your hip injury a bit more?
My self-diagnosis was some kind of muscle and/or tendon strain in my psoas / hip flexors. I squat very wide and deep so it wasn't a huge shock.
Net result was I couldn't squat properly for 4-6 weeks. I've added "prehab" stretches and it's mostly managed now, although if I go too crazy with volume I can feel it flare up.
citation desperately needed. Injury rates for resistance training is very very low. The far higher risk is in not training.
If you start juicing and compete to the absolute max, then maybe? Even then I am skeptical that the data supports this.
I don't know where this weird belief comes from, while the universal recommendation is to do both resistance training and conditioning to reduce a whole bunch of risk factors for health and longevity.
> What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?
Well, we train to make our tissues resilient, of course.
I neglected strength training for a long time because every time I tried to get started I would feel overwhelmed. Then I tried StrongLifts and loved the fact that it's just 5 exercises, but provides pretty much a full body strength workout.
The guy who developed the program has put a ton of effort into making sure it's detailed and accessible so that pretty much any question you could have is answered.
Just find a human coach. An app is not a substitute.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).
Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.
Also some exercises like the deadlift can't be done with an empty bar. Stronglifts would ask you to start with 95lbs which is too much.
To me your comment is toxic and reeks of a sense of superiority and elitism from your own experience. You labelled everyone who can't put 20kg to be someone having a serious medical condition. That's both untrue and disrespectful.
> As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement.
Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.
The StrongLifts program starting with an empty bar is not right. They should've started with a PVC pipe with the same dimensions as a bar to practice form.
My advice: find a coach and ask him/her to supervise you if you can afford it. If you can't, still find a coach for your first month doing these exercises and then switch to the app.
This assertion is contradicted by the hundreds of thousands of people (myself included) who have progressed beyond the beginner stage after starting out with the 20kg bar and without ever requiring the intervention of a human coach.
That said, I would have benefited from one. I had to completely deload and relearn my squat form because I was consistently leaning forward and de-emphasizing my posterior chain (now it's my best lift).
Speaking from experience, it's really pretty difficult to cause yourself an acute injury (i.e., worse than a nasty bruise) with 20kg if your form even resembles the squat, bench, or deadlift.
Granted, 20kg can be a big starting weight for overhead press, and if you're a petite woman you may initially need an alternative to the Olympic barbell even for the others.
Also, deadlifts are kind of tricky: a bare bar on the floor is a deficit deadlift. But a couple of blocks can solve this issue.
> mistakes in your form that you do not even realize.
form is entirely overrated in lifting. There's little evidence that a particular way of moving in the gym is more or less injurious, even if it looks funny. Efficiency is another matter, but don't nocebo anyone into not touching barbells in fear of "bad form".
And while coaching is surely useful, it is entirely unnecessary for a beginner who just wants to get started. You can make plenty progress for years without a coach, but it might be faster with one.
> And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.
this is also clearly untrue and way too generic. Even inefficient lifting is healthy. Youtube is all you need to get started. There's plenty dumb info there, but plenty good also
For someone seeking a better introduction to strength training, please take a look at the BoostCamp app
your joints and tendons can't do their jobs properly yet and you have no feeling for your skeleton and the correct positions of shoulders, hips and spine. your nerves will get pinched and your muscles will push to grow into their genetically intended position while you will bring nerves and tendons in bad positions due to habit.
joint strength, posture, bodyweight core training, 200 bodyweight squats in two sets, 200 pushups in 4 - 6 sets, 2 - 3 min hang from bar or rope (holding it as tight as possible all the time) and be sure you can roll forward and backward and wrestle with a big dog or young and strong child for fun on the ground without hurting yourself. now you can start lifting low weights.
Not for beginners, but very good if you want to think a little bit less which exercises you take for the next 4-6 weeks.
I'm sorry you've gone through this. I quit a previous job with no other job lined up because of burnout. Fortunately, I could afford the 4 month gap in employment. My heart aches for those who can't.
It sucks that you had to quit. I was advising the same to my girlfriend because she couldn't bear with work anymore, until a friend told her that she should not quit and instead the company should pay the burnout because they put her in that situation. Luckily she didn't follow my advise and it's been in burnout leave for the last 6 months, with help from a therapist.
Try to sleep (or at least stay in bed) 10+ hours a day, consistently for a few weeks.
Wow this is exactly what i'm suffering from right now... I recently thought about applying to a more serious tech team at my company given i've slowly slipped into a basic DBA/PM roll.
But i'm worried it's only going to make it worse. What does the science or your peers say is the key to getting help?
That's the point of https://rationaldino.substack.com/ and this pseudonymous account. Separately I have other children who were impacted by COVID and lockdowns and are part of https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g.... That's also been hard.
All of this is made more complicated by the fact that I regard psychology as having a lot of pseudoscience in it. Feynman was right to call them that in https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. It took them 40 years to realize that he was right about the importance of replication. But they still haven't accepted the rest of what he said.
You can work through most of the worksheets online for free, and it helped me understand mental health better than I ever had. I think they charge $9 per month to download PDFs of the worksheets, which is cheaper than therapy with a professional confuser.
I am not affiliated with them, and I do not make money off them. I am a former customer.
It might be placebo, but since I stopped drinking coffee, I rarely have those intense feelings of anxiety.
People are talking about therapy and while I’m in therapy I find that it could benefit from someone who actually understands working in Tech/SaaS. Wonder if others here have felt this while talking to therapists and what they’ve done about it.
I've started realizing that I don't have much control over the external world, people or events, and only my perception of it can keep me sane or fix my mental issues.
This has effectively forced me to see my relationship with my devices with more scrutiny. I've repeatedly found that digital consumption, whether it is infotainment, knowledge, or mindless Reels or Shorts, has always led me to a more depressed and sad state.
A recent trip in the mountains without any cell reception even further confirmed this hypothesis for me personally.
I try to leave my devices and social media for longer durations, but the eventual FOMO and withdrawals that kick in always bring me back to square one of agony.
Events around a romantic interest recently also made me to rethink on how to effectively control emotions and feelings. The other person can do nothing wrong, but my mind can still feel tormented by their simple actions and events that unfold.
Unless I can achieve some sort of mental and emotional equanimity, I feel all my pursuits of learning and career would still not alleviate me from this joyless state of life.
It talks about different levels of thinking without going into any religion or culture.
PS: The YouTube channel seems to be related to dating, but this particular video doesn't have any of that.
I found great help by reading the (IMHO poorly titled) Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living
His approach is not religious in the usual sense -- there is no need to believe anything or pray to some entities. It is not in conflict with religions either. Gurdjieff is presenting the psychological and spiritual ideas that are behind many mystical traditions of religions in a way that is more digestible by the modern man, and possible to apply in modern life.
His own books are probably too dense to start from. A good starting point for me was the book series Psychological commentaries by Nicoll. Another popular one is In the search of the Miraculous by Ouspensky. You can only get the Commentaries as used, and they are really expensive, but you only need one of them to start with and PDF versions can be found online. One one book of the series will do, as they all are all composed of one pagers on recurring topics.
Drop me a note if you are interested.
- No Self, No Problem (Chris Niebauer) - Solve For Happy (Mow Gawdat)
> Events around a romantic interest recently also made me to rethink on how to effectively control emotions and feelings. The other person can do nothing wrong, but my mind can still feel tormented by their simple actions and events that unfold.
I struggle with this as well and in addition to the two books above I suggest you look into the works of Albert Ellis.
Like you, I’ve noticed a direct connection between media consumption and quality of life. Namely, if I get a dopamine release with minimal to no effort, my day is pretty much shot as I have little motivation to do anything I want to do.
This has led me to delete all social media, completely. I wiped all my accounts and walked away. I also leave the TV off during the day, which is still weird for me because I’m that person who works with the TV on in the background. I thought it was harmless, but it turns out, it’s not.
Basically anything that gives me dopamine without trying is gone, which in this world is mostly screens.
The more I experiment, the more I realize how important control of one’s mind and thoughts are. I’m now at a point where I believe that the only barrier between one and their goals is their mind. Giving up, doubting, lack of motivation, perseverance, persistence, confidence - it all comes from the mind.
Control your mind, control your life. It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds though :)
I got the bug about 12 weeks ago. I had never ran longer than 1.5 miles continuously 12 weeks ago. Now I’m planning my next Sundays long run. 12.5ish miles.
Im a heavy guy. My heaviest was 270, but I’m down to 220 now. I hated running my entire life. But I finally figured out how to run pain free and now it’s the thing I look forward to everyday.
It’s also tremendously rewarding to see such rapid improvement. When I first started I ran a 38 minute 5k, and 10 weeks later I ran a 25:44. I’ve almost improved my 1mi time from 8:30 to 6:30. Signed up for a marathon a couple weeks ago and gave myself 6 months to train.
Sub 4:30, here we come
Fwiw, here's some example exercises for Achilles: https://routineshub.com/public/1faae50e-8d36-4eec-84ee-ae3ef...
Aside from that, be very gradual in ramping up mileage and try to feel for wasted motion/effort/impact. There are tons of "form cues" people get caught up in, but just trying to be efficient in your use of energy to travel forward is what has been generally helpful for me in developing a stride that doesn't get me hurt. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Oh and #1 is listen to your body. I’m running for the joy of running. If something hurts I’m not gonna run, lol. Important to rest.
And this is why I don’t run.
I think it provides a few advantages to your running:
- it’s excellent cardio, so it’ll improve your VO2 max, which is hugely helpful for both running and living longer
- it’s low impact, so it gives your joints time to recover. Recovery is critical for an impact sport like running!
- the resistance builds leg strength, so it makes you more resilient on longer runs
Oh, and get a decent pair of running shoes, ideally from a store that knows what they’re talking about. Note that the best shoe for you won’t necessarily be the most expensive one - things like whether your over pronate or not are critical, so don’t go out and buy the latest carbon sole foodad just because that’s what the pro’s have.
You get pain through muscle overuse and the best way to fix it is to strengthen up. Running is pretty tough on your muscles and tendons, especially if you are not used to it, you ramp up volume too quickly, or your form isn't great.
Being stronger will help you go faster and keep going faster for longer as well.
Other quick tips:
1. If you get recurring pain then try increasing your cadence and shortening your stride length. To try target 170 steps per minute or more.
2. Run slowly. Easier said than done. Aim for a heart rate no more than 75% of your VO2max HR. You'll recover quicker in all respects and this will help to build up your aerobic capacity. You shouldnt be out of breath for most of your running.
3. If you have an anterior hip tilt then you'll get pain after a while. If you have weak glutes and core then this will happen, esp when you are tired. It will cause back pain and leg pain. Try to keep hips level - you will feel much more stable.
4. Weak glute medius will cause leg pain because you legs bow inwards during the stance phase. You see this when people knock their knees together when running. You shouldn't do this. Follow on effects are over pronation of the foot during strike as the ankle/foot needs to compensate for leg instability.
5. Weak calves might cause foot pain, especially if you keep your foot dorsiflexed during the swing phase. Try to keep feet/ankle reflaxed during swing phase. do some calf and ankle strengthening. The recover app has some good ones e.g. single legged calf raises.
Good luck!
1. Loosening up the hip flexors. There are quite a few good stretches you can do for this. Try these first: https://recoverathletics.com/best_exercises_for_tight_hip_fl...
2. Strengthen up the glutes. Try these: https://recoverathletics.com/the-best-exercises-to-strengthe... and https://strengthrunning.com/2019/04/glute-strengthening-for-...
Before you run, try some "glute activation" exercises to get them fired up and working properly before you begin your session. Doing a few single leg glute bridges is probably enough to get them going. Single leg dead lifts are also good, I find.
When you are running, try to focus on keeping the glutes engaged as this will keep the hips from tilting forward. You can feel when you hips are level because your body will feel much more stable - especially when running over rough ground - and you'll feel the power coming from the glutes much more.
Best of luck!
I had tried tackling each of these problems independently before and typically failed. Withdrawals, cravings, etc. are too much. But man I really fucking love running now and smoking, binge drinking and junk food just look so gross to me now that I know they’re gonna ruin my runs.
The brain is weird. I’m insanely grateful.
Also, check out your local running clubs on Strava. I know social running isn’t for everyone, but it’s a really good way to push your speed up. Every club I’ve run with has been psyched to get a new person.
Prioritize enjoying the run. Which you can’t do when your body thinks you might be having a heart attack.
Other things: 1. Foot/ankle strengthening. Lookup YouTube videos on how to strengthen feet and knees. 5-10 mins a day as you’re starting. If you’re going slow it’s low impact too. 2. Focus on form/don’t zone out. I used to run and try to “zone out” as quickly as possible to “ignore” the pain. Instead focus in and run a mental checklist of your form. Again, YouTube videos on good form (which often aren’t targeted/explained how to run that well when running so slowly, so be specific with your searches). 3. I moved to NRC which I liked a lot better than C25K. I like the mental coaching and found it very valuable especially in the beginning. Now I run without music because I like listening to my breathing, as if I lose focus on my breath that also hurts.
There’s a lot of other things that I now keep track of for funsies. But those will come naturally if you start to enjoy running for the sake of running. I’m not running for health, to lose weight, or to look better. I’m running because I really enjoy running. YMMV
Consider: how could humanity have survived millennia walking and running around before Nike and orthotics?
Also, going super slow at the start to warm up, picking up speed gradually. I look as the distance as the goal and not the time. After about 10 months I recently hit a 27:30 PR at 35 (quit smoking 2 years ago). There's hope out there.
FWIW I did it a few years back after coming back from an ankle fracture that had stopped me doing any exercise for 6 months. Looking at my Week 1 Day 1 activity on Strava my HR was ~105bpm when initially walking, but then up to 160bpm when running for a minute, and only dropped to ~130bpm when walking for the next minute. This see-saw repeated; up to ~160bpm when running, down to ~130bpm when walking. At the end it dropped from 160bpm to 115bpm over the course of the final 5 minute "cool down" walk. There's quite a "lag" between exercise intensity and HR.
My point is that if you're not regularly running then your CV system is inefficient, and so even walking may put your HR up quite high. If you stick at it it should improve.
I'm 47 and my HR when I go for a run is ~170bpm. If I go for a gentle run I try and keep it below 150bpm, but when I was just getting back into it I'd struggle to keep my HR under 165bpm even on a "gentle" run. As you get fitter (or lighter) you can do the same kind of runs with a lower HR than before. When I really want to push it I can average 180bpm-190bpm for a 5k (although it feels grim at the time).
If you get through a few weeks of C25K and you're still having trouble running for more than a minute or so at a time then I'd go see a doctor. If you're concerned/nervous about the idea of trying C25K with a possibility that there may be something amiss then go and see a doctor about it now.
(This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor.)
Also the mental health benefits cannot be understated, very glad I built it into my routine
Congrats on the weight loss and figuring out that you can be a runner. It's quite liberating. I was never a good runner even in peak competitive basketball conditioning in my late teens and thought I would never be a runner until a few years ago. Keep pushing!
(To the curious) Don't get bogged down trying to train for a marathon. Just run what you can, then walk, then run again.
I used to run before this latest bug, like a year ago, but I hated it. My only goal was to do a sub 30 minute 5k and I trained for like 8 months with 0 progress and was so dejected I quit. I would show up, run at a 10 min pace for as long as I can, repeat. It felt like shit and I didn’t get better. My growth happened when I just ran 4.5 mph until it was the _bad kind_ of uncomfortable (this is too much stress on my shins vs my legs muscles are building lactic acid). After two weeks, I upped the pace a tiny tiny bit. I spend most of my runs fighting with myself to slow down.
The science behind it is something something aerobic base and running economy. I’m absolutely not an expert, but anecdotally I’ve never had my life improve so much in such a short amount of time by just _running slower_
Run a quarter mile at 80% of full speed, then 50%, then 80%, then 50%, etc and play with the percentages and interval lengths to push yourself.
Consistency is the biggest factor for improving running. Run at a pace and distance you can handle every day, then do that consistently. Every day, ideally. It doesn't matter if that's 10 minutes for 1km, just as long as you're being consistent.
Where is your weight at? This is another factor
I don't have time in my life for taking long runs on weekends but enjoy thinking about when I did. The entire day revolves around the morning long run and then basically being unproductive for the rest of the day, and that's a luxury I can't afford. I began running regularly in 2009 and continue to this day, although I've had some setbacks due to running-related injury. I've run through Summer thunderstorms and winter snow. I love being outside in nature.
It's tough but we've been able to start a YIMBY group and encouraging people and organisations to make public comments or send letters of support. A good few didn't dare because they feared reactions, and rightfully so, because some who did (including me) ended up on the receiving end of some bullshit. All bark and no bite - for now - but not great for democracy.
Of course more descriptive word would be just xenophobia combined with copium addiction.
Ideally don't use rethoric that you fight against. It's not consturctive.
Italians have been "white" since the dawn of the construction of "race" in which "white" was even one of the options.
(They've been othered as "ethnic" in a way which closely mirrors othering on race-qua-race, and we use "racism" to describe both racial and ethnic bigotry, but while similar and sharing some features, the two things were not the same in the US.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism
Haiti codified "whiteness" into law way before then.
‘White’ is just a category invented by Anglos and other Germanics (including Scandis, Franks, excluding Slavs and Jews) to lump together the ‘good sort’ of light skinned people away from dark skinned people and the ‘bad sort’ of light skinned people.
If you want to get deeper into ethnic speculation, I suspect it’s because Slavs have historically absorbed non-negligible amounts of ‘other’ groups such as Turkic, Iranic and Mongol; and this sets them apart from the more insulated Germanic groups who perhaps feel it makes them superior. Look at Nazi views on Aryanism and how Slavs were considered impure (funnily enough, except Bohemians, Croats and Ukrainians for political reasons… there was a war on)
This flows directly into the less civil side of the discussion, which ranges from conspiracy theories of EU or WEF-planned repopulation to all out etno-nationalism. Our city has a rich history of voting literal nazis into the council. There's talk of storming the city council and all that.
Hitler considered the Slavs the be a "race" (an inferior one that ought to be enslaved).
"Stay home" as in "stay in a country occupied by an enemy country who wants to get rid of you"?
Sure. That sounds like a brilliant solution.
Some of these people don't have any homes anymore, literally. Some places have been pretty so extensively damaged that you're not able to live there anymore.
We need both, help for refugees that have nowhere else to go, and more dialog to end the conflict.
This applies to all conflicts.
It's different from software... so slow to get things done. But also really rewarding to see housing get built and policies allowing different, more affordable kinds of housing to be built. We just re-legalized SRO's here!
https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
BTW, the two groups that seem to be doing the most concrete work on housing are:
* https://new.yimbyaction.org/
* https://welcomingneighbors.us/
I've learned a lot and it's great to connect with people all over the US doing similar work.
Also a surprise like was Blue Reflection, if you watch its trailer it doesn't even look too dynamic but it was great fun.
I'm planning on going back and playing the Divinity: Original Sin games that Larian made before it. I hear they're fantastic as well.
They are. I'd play them in order -- the combat mechanics of DOS1 are kind of tough to swallow after the improvements in DOS2.
The DOS1 plot is also a bit thin, and you have to appreciate their brand of humor. But they are both great.
There were many technical issues with the release version, but GOG sells the game with unofficial patches integrated, which worked great for me.
Gaming is a great stress reliever and I make sure to make some time for it everyday. I mainly like single player games for my PS5 such as Horizon, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher and more recently Spider-Man 2. Sometimes you just need to be selfish and have you time!
Controls have gotten easier in my experience, at least on anything made for a mainstream audience. Recently it came up on a podcast with a game reviewer among the hosts that games nowadays seem to all have a setting where enemies can be beaten by looking at them angrily and how it's basically story mode at that setting, and how much that's doing for inclusivity and how many non-gamers they've seen play/enjoy such-and-such game.
More anecdotal, my partner started playing hogwarts a few days ago and wanted to set it to easy. The default was normal, and there's also "story mode" and "hard" available at opposite ends of the spectrum. She's terrible with wasd+mouse (her own words, but I concur) and wanted to go for easy but I encouraged her to go with the default setting, figuring that'll be balanced to be enjoyable for Harry Potter fans (who are book nerds, not necessarily gamers). So far, she's managed to beat everything in one try!
I'm surprised you experience the opposite
I retired, and my chronic burnout started to recede (slowly). I realized that, for me, the issue was learning and remembering new systems were introducing a cognitive load that I just couldn't handle on top of the load I was carrying.
I know that's not directly helpful, but it may be worth looking at whether you are showing signs of burnout.
I also find it rewarding after getting robotics and memorizing recipes. Which allows me to focus more on designing (I suck so bad at it but it's fun).
After a good few hundred hours I moved on to krastorio2 + space exploration. It's so much more complex.
Oh and multiplayer is a great addition allowing me to asynchronously play with some friends /colleagues.
I do want to come back to Factorio since it's an awesome game, but currently I cannot find the good timing for it.
Maybe I’m not the target audience. I also play console games, so most of my library are games that don’t overlap with console (so games that are probably designed for keyboard/mouse).
I played it for a bit, and there are definitely some good games on it (I finally beat Portal on it), but I just haven’t found any games that make me want to break it back out.
I read a book by the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo. The book got me thinking about how different our lives would be if oil were expensive. "Pretend oil is really expensive" is a good proxy for doing things that are "eco-friendly." Since reading the book, I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard. Everything from my socks to my vegetable packaging to my dog's toys to my floor is made of plastic.
I've slowly been adjusting my habits - such as checking whether clothing is natural or oil-based, buying food mostly at the farmers market, and eating in instead of takeaway. These little change have decreased my carbon footprint immensely.
I enjoy playing this game of "pretend oil is expensive" even though it's not because it's revealing problems we will need to tackle as a society. At some point we will run out of oil. When that happens, everything will be impacted. Travel, food delivery, and most of all healthcare.
It's not a zero-sum, though. Why does my cilantro need to come in a plastic bag? At the farmer's market, it doesn't come packaged at all.
[1] And, fire is basically reversing the process - releasing the sunlight that created the plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE
Everything here is hugely regional, but two answers spring to mind:
1) coriander is frequently sold in unpackaged bunches, typically larger than the packaged ones;
2) it's packaged in plastic because then it can be filled with some inert gas that prolongs spoiling, it's not completely obtuse.
(In the UK for example Waitrose sells it growing reared in Sussex, or packaged grown idk Spain or Monaco or somewhere; Sainsbury's sells it similarly packaged or cut and bunched of undisclosed origin.)
I don't share this to create a sense of guilt or scarcity. We have oil now and can get coriander and avocados in the Winter. That means it can be from a position of fun (and privilege) that we can explore alternative ways to eat. But, our ancestors still ate without 747s. Constraints drive creativity - and exploring these areas of low-carbon eating now can drive innovation that helps us cope with with a more low-oil world.
To be clear, I'm not puritanical about this. I still do takeout sometimes. And, I'm about to hop on some flights that will burn a ton of oil. (Ironically, one of those carbon-belching flights is to a dinner at Silo, which I'm looking forward to.)
Two of my biggest realizations have been:
1. There are many low-hanging changes we can make to reduce plastic, such as going to a farmers market, replacing a one-time use sandwich bag with a reusable one, or skipping delivery food (which often has more plastic packaging than actual food).
2. Low-plastic is often synonymous with quality. My cotton jeans, leather bag, and metal water bottle are all more expensive - but they are higher quality, have lasted for years, and can often be repaired. For example, my leather was an expensive $400, but I've had it for 8 years and counting - and just had it restored to look shiny and new. (Put another way: Plastic lacks wabi-sabi beauty).
My cotton jeans, leather bag, and metal water bottle are all more expensive - but they are higher quality, have lasted for years, and can often be repaired.
If you are re-using the jars, then that would have a lower impact, but if you're buying jarred butter and jelly, you're making the problem worse.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic...
Besides it's not hard to tip the carbon emission in favor of glass if the externalities of plastic (and fuel) were appropriately priced and not massively subsidized.
I don’t think there are any studies on the effects of regularly drinking gasoline or eating toilet paper either, but plastic, gasoline, and toilet paper consumption aren't exactly time-tested foods that propelled civilization forward.
My point: The "hair on fire" comments about nano plastic still hasn't been borne out by peer-reviewed scientific research. I recall on HN someone mentioned that a recent discover was that tyre dust is a large potion of micro plastics in our world.
It doesn't make sense to me that the plastic would be beneficial. It is either neutral or detrimental and I not that no plastic is neutral.
Not many have their hair on fire. People just want to make a conscious effort to avoid what common sense says to avoid.
Finding plastic in our blood doesn't seem healthy.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/micropla...
At Silo, wine causes a lot of headaches. Their solution is to use wind-powered transport ships. Then, they turn the waste glass into tiles. So, the carbon footprint is low.
If you can tolerate slow shipping, then the carbon footprint can be reduced. So, well-preserved food in glass (as opposed to, say, flowers in plastic) can have a lower environmental impact. Plus, glass can be reasonably reused or recycled.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/travel/wind-powered-cargo-shi...
"Three Dutchmen decided to take a step back to make a leap forward and established Fairtransport, the world’s first modern emission-free shipping company. Silo gets coffee via Fairtransport – it still has to be transported from the landing port, but it is a huge saving on energy. It’s a fine example of imaginative thinking. The small fleet of traditional sailing ships used by Fairtransport includes the world’s only engineless sailing cargo ship. The focus is on transporting special products which are organic or crafted traditionally – such as olive oil, wine and rum. In addition, the fleet is raising awareness of the huge amounts of pollution created by the modern shipping industry and is affecting positive change in the way goods are shipped around the world."
McMaster, Douglas. Silo (p. 71). Leaping Hare Press. Kindle Edition.
they turn the waste glass into tiles
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/recycling-glass-eigh...
I actually don't have a problem with plastic, at least in theory. Oil exists in the ground. I don't see an issue with pumping it up, using it for a bit, and putting it back into the ground via a landfill. I take more of an issue with recycling where plastic is shipped overseas and makes its way into the waterways.
- The form it is put "back into the ground" isn't the same form it was "pumped up".
- The landfill isn't the same location where we put it compared to where we sourced it (much deeper).
I'm not an ecologist, but both these differences have complex consequences for earth and us.
Everything from my socks
One way to think about plastic: Is there a reasonable alternative? For most plastic (food) wraps, the answer is (sadly): no. They are the best option to reduce food spoilage and only take a couple of grams of oil to make them. Plastic bottles for drinks? Most of them can be avoided by reducing your consumption, or reusing old bottles.
I’ve tried too, and I agree that it is very hard. I rarely buy packaged and ready-to-eat food products, which eliminates a lot of plastic. But still there’s so much plastic when buying grocery and produce. Buying grains or other items from loose bins means insects, lower quality and what not. I’m happier with the lower plastic though.
You would sort the waste and grind it down if necessary.
They could hover high enough to not be affected by the rupture of the lava lakes. Unless there is an open caldera like in Nicaragua.
Then you would just have to deal with the local communities spiritual beliefs, which would benefit from a financial incentive.
It is not known whether this problem is NP-hard, or whether it can be solved in polynomial time; apparently the question is open since the early 90s.
(The problem is also open for paths of length p mod q for any fixed p and q (fixed means they are constants, and are not given as input), whenever q>2. The problem is known to be in PTIME for 0 mod 2 and 1 mod 2, and to be NP-hard when the graph is directed. Pointers to related work here: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath)
In your right hand, take any collection of trees with 2, 3, ..., n vertices. These have a total of 1+2+...+n-1 edges, ie, n choose 2.
In your left hand, take the complete graph with n vertices. This, of course, has the same number of edges.
Conjecture: it is always possible to pack/embed the trees into the complete graph in such a way that all edges are matched exactly once.
The problem has been open for like fifty years, lacking a counter-example or a proof. One can assume Erdos thought hard about it at some point...
That's the question, isn't it?
This is why I hate the AI hype, because people do legitimately do this and think "wow it's so smart." When I explained the halting problem using Python to a student he asked "did you use ChatGPT?" No. Of course not...
I read the book alcohol explained https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcohol-Explained-William-Porter-eb...
Listened to the Huberman podcast about alcohol.
And realised I don't want to drink anymore.
It's really strange, I used to struggle having a single weekend with no booze. Now I actively just don't want to. I look around me and see people boozing and I think it's insane.
I'm 8 weeks in. I doubt I'll drink again. I really regret not realising much earlier in life how shit drinking actually is
I'm really hoping my desire to drink doesn't come back as easily as it went away.
But I am curious: why not just moderate your drinking? The dose makes the poison. Yes, it is true that alcohol is bad for you, but so are many things. If you limit yourself, you can enjoy it on occasion without doing too much harm.
I personally don't see utility in having a hardline approach to alcohol. You only live once. If you want to crack open a bottle at Christmas, why not?
According to the WHO, there is no level of alcohol consumption that is good for the health.
OP sounds like he doesn't get anything out of drinking anymore, so I guess he doesn't even want to crack open a bottle for special occasions. He's realised he only lives once, so he kicked the booze.
As somebody who's never drunk, the only thing I think I've ever missed out on is the social lubrication element, but that just made me find people who are more like-minded.
Also, the point in the book alcohol explained, really stuck with me. One drink feels good for about half an hour, it's then replaced with feeling of anxiety unless you have another. It's like borrowing money with a high interest rate, except you are borrowing happines.
Link for anyone who is interested: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/what-alcohol-does-to-you...
I didn't realise that weekend drinking was leaving me mildly hungover for days. Its like a filter was applied to my thinking where I could mostly only see nagatives in life. Though it's more subtle than this.
It was mostly neutral experience after leaving my teens since you grow a somewhat thick skin and select a bunch of friends who are not assholes about it.
Now in my thirties something came up that makes it unwise to consume alcohol and to the surprise of my doctor I could just check that point.
Best investment I have ever made for myself. Very challenging; especially socially. I eventually found social groups who share similar interests. First few months will be brutal; you can do it, it’s worth the struggle, good luck
This year I've churned through all the introductory level texts from Art Of Problem Solving. Yes, they're written for high schoolers and you need to have some humility to admit you might be missing or have forgotten some fundamentals, but the lesson strucutre really appeals to me. It's the only series I've found that respects the learner and really builds up knowledge one piece at a time.
Before I start the intermediate texts and the calculus book, I've taken a detour to "Linear Algebra: Theory, Intuition, Code" and it's sticking a lot better now than previous attempts on the subject. So that gives me some confidence.
I've bought a few textbooks for statistics, math, and data engineering - I'm in the middle of getting my life together in terms of habits and time management so hopefully I'll be right there with you doing what is essentially remedial math for someone in their 30s, lol. I know it will be exciting once I make space for it and get into a rhythm. Cheers!
Just like there are small farming collectives out there, I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers.
Something, anything to counter the overwhelm of ad and email popup-ridden "content blogs" and walled garden platforms sucking everything into their in-house LLMs.
You seem to be describing what I've known (since forever) by "Zine"[¹]
You might find something that grabs you from the list of exhibitors here: https://www.seattleartbookfair.org/Exhibitors Or look for similar events and check out who attends.
I like reading about food, so places like Omnivore books have specialty books or magazines that are not just recipe books. Though I do like cookbooks. https://omnivorebooks.myshopify.com/
And where I live, there's a book binders workshop on my street.
what do you like to read? i might have some suggestions
i also like forever magazine, the writing is better than little engines: https://forevermag.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_magazines http://www.erikakrousewriter.com/erika-krouses-ocd-ranking-o...
Golf is one of the only sports that can be realistically simulated indoors.
Golf is also one of the only sports where even severe lag has no effect on the accuracy of the play - just the viewing experience. Unlike FPS games in the cloud which become unplayable with even modest lag.
The golf simulation technology landscape today is pre-cloud. People running their own gaming computers with complex lash ups of open source software to connect their launch monitors. All pretty prohibitive to the stereotypical older tech-averse golf player.
Decades have gone by now. Who golfs? Who has downhill skis?
I imagine you could answer that question by going to a golf course or ski slope to see who's there.
How do humans interface with computers and data, from control to visual feedback.
How humans interface with music, perform it, read it, store it. How do birds interface with tones and rhythm?
How software interfaces with other software and hardware.
How humans interface with the world via symbols. I've been reading about Semiotics a bit, and find the field fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics?wprov=sfla1
Birdsong as code: https://youtu.be/OCYU0LtqRH0?si=4DwOKC3oZ6vE-w-y
Currently I'm reading Michael Pollen's "Botany of Desire" about how how plants interface/manipulate humans (spec: Apple, Orhid, Marijuana, Potatoe). There is a salacious passage on sexual reproduction strategies, involving bees ("flying penises") and this plant that "play resists" the bees entering — and then author Pollen ends his description of this interface by suggesting: many people might see this as the bee penetrating the coy defences of the flower, but in fact it is the flower manipulating bees.
I'm gonna give you the first recommendation free, but the next one'll cost'ya =D
Though he never called it such, a lot of it intersects with Donald Norman's work that he describes in "The Design of Everyday Things". Even the objects we intereact with are interfaces.
Drop me a line if you're looking to chat about it all.
I wonder if you know (and maybe have thoughts about) the arrangement of ancient Cusco, set up to be possible to navigate without any written directions (as the Inca effectively functioned without a writing system).
From Lynn Kelly's Memory Code:
> The Inca turned their major city, Cusco, into a massive memory space, the details of which were documented by the colonising Spanish. Radiating from the Coricancha temple in the centre were over 40 pilgrimage pathways known as ceques. The ceques divided the land into wedge-shaped political, agricultural and irrigation zones, each assigned to a specific kinship group. It is still unclear the degree to which the ceques were physical paths and how much they were purely imagined. To form a city-sized memory space, it does not matter as long as the pathways could be followed in the minds of the users.
I've been thinking about how memory intersects with navigation, and how both of these influence how we interpret the world.
I am noticing more and more how underwhelmed I am by the current status quo of human/computer interaction - everything seems so homogenous now, and after being heavily inspired by Alan Kay and Brett Victor, I'm sure there is a lot more to be done in this space.
A few months ago, an iced-rs maintainer[1] recommended I try Elm. So far, this has lead to:
1. A an MVP[2] of a curses[3]-like library for CHIP-8 derivatives (https://github.com/pushfoo/octo-termlib)
2. A growing interest in language design
3. An ongoing re-evaluation of my software development worldview
[1] 13r0ck / Brock on GitHub (https://github.com/13r0ck). Hire him if you get the chance. He has a rare blend of know-how, mentorship, and community management skills.
[2] Unsolved issues with octo-termlib:
1. Finding a license friendly toward beginners editing pre-made template assembly files (Maybe zlib + acknowledgement?)
2. Elegant & efficient syntax for ending screen X / Y parsing before all digits are used
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)
Economies die because of underutilized or wasted resources.
Our educations system is horrible at wasting everyone's time right now. Source: I've been teaching since the 1990's and learning in school since the late 1970's or 1980.
AI can fix most of that.
Example: It has been many years since I looked a C code and I never really understood much about the Linux Kernel, even back when I tried to contribute to it in the 1990's. Yesterday I started chatting with ChatGPT on how I could understand the code in the Linux Kernel. I made some progress towards a previously inscrutable goal.
I am teaching my students how to use AI to learn anything they need to know.
[0] https://byheart.io/ - it's a pet project so both app and website are rather basic. Btw guess what tool helped me create text content for website[1]
[1] It was ChatGPT
A fair balance of relax time but also enjoying the time off. There is so much I want to do and get excited for, but I still suffer a lot of procrastination related problems or else I feel like I could have done a tremendous amount more.
I feel like there is lifetimes of things I get excited about and want to do, but spend so little time doing them. :( It sucks
Would love to connect, maybe we can help motivate each other :). My email is in my profile if you're interested in connecting, same goes for anyone else in a similar situation.
Part of me is tempted to buy into the idea that the human animal just isn't naturally inclined to do more than a handful of hours of difficult or "productive" work in an average day. I honestly have no idea whether I'm normal or not, but I agree the pressure I put on myself probably isn't ultimately helpful most of the time. It's hard not to feel like others are getting way more done, and even harder to tell how much of what is presented is authentic.
Something that helps me get over that feeling of not-doing-enough is time tracking my work (using a tool like Toggl). After a few months you get the sense that a productive day for you is X hours of work, and that makes it easier to disengage from work once you hit that point in your day. Knowing what your "X" is per day also justifies taking a break at hour X+2 because you know that you're straining your body at that point.
Getting into contributing is not easy, I have to admit. It's like you're having a second job and no one has the dedicated resources to help you understand the internal architecture. All you can do is submitting the bugs, questions, pull requests and hope for the best.
When I was young I spent a lot of time blinded by rappers with their spinning wheels and crowds of hangers-on which drastically lead me astray — being from a single parented poverty stricken family in the London it wasn’t exactly hard.
Since then I have been through so many different stages to get to the point of contentment with whatever life throws my way.
Within this contentment I have found that the things I truly care about are (as cliché as it sounds) not the things which can be bought but the things which connect me to other beings.
The realisation and acceptance of the inevitable end of life has made me realise that we will all cease to exist within a generation, our memory will cease within two, our entire footprint within three.
From this I found my passion was not buying things to distract me nor was my desire to be remembered long after I pass. It is to enjoy the now, make others feel the love I never felt until I reached my mid 30s, lift people out of bad places where possible and do my utmost to appreciate this breathtakingly beautiful planet we call home.
Cheesy, I know
I can’t speak for anyone else (I don’t know your particular situation and do not want to assume anything) but I found that doing something for the sake of doing it was one of they key things that helped me overcome a feeling of being used/unappreciated.
In my personal experience and with a lot of introspection I found that the reason I had that feeling was that I personally had painted a picture of what gratitude should look and feel like when, in reality, we all express gratitude in different ways.
By painting that picture I had essentially built up an expectation as to what the outcome of my actions would be, and when that expectation failed to materialise the negative feelings ensued.
Something which I found massively helped with limiting my expectation was to have a mantra which I could repeat in my mind as a sort of short circuit to break the chain of negative thoughts.
The mantra can be anything, I went with ‘thank you’ as it is hard to feel anything other than gratitude when you are thanking someone/something
A mantra I use that some might find useful is:
"To the work you are entitled, but not to the fruits thereof."
Good luck on your journey!
It's one of these funny things, where during adolescence, stuff like this sounds really cheesy (or "cringe"), but then gaining wisdom through life is largely a process of slowly figuring out: oh, this isn't cheesy at all; serious people have been thinking and talking and writing about this topic for millenia, because this stuff really is core to the human experience.
Started as a small project on wanting to learn C# better and being interested about how much sensors collect information about us and how we could analyze that, but it really got out of hand. I've been working on it for a ~month (with some breaks), sometimes all day, built a lot of tooling (like webassembly & android app to tag current activities for ML training data) and analysis things for it and am nearing a burnout point :P but been fun and I've definitely learned a lot about C# and ML.
I just checked my manual tags in the training database and I've been on this for 197 hours and 37 minutes since since 12th of October. No wonder I feel like I need a break..
It’s been a journey. For about a year I was trying to do it all by myself.
Then one former band mate moved back, another reached out and we reunited to make new music.
This is gonna sound corny, but after that first time we got back together to jam, later that night I was in tears because it playing with them again was such a large emotional release for me.
Now we’re in a great place, we all want the same thing. We’re all in on making new music, no one is trying to make this a career or go on tour. It has to be fun, that’s number one.
> Now we’re in a great place, we all want the same thing. We’re all in on making new music, no one is trying to make this a career or go on tour. It has to be fun, that’s number one.
This is key. I've made more music goofing off than I did when I sat down to write a song seriously.
Been starting various projects to quickly figure out what I like and don’t like. Realized that I miss working on highly technical projects after working on consumer apps for a couple of years. So as a result been revamping my resume and planning my next steps in my software engineering career. There are some really cool companies out there in the space of databases and distributed systems.
As part of scouting for jobs built some little tools with help of LLMs to tailor my resume to job positions.
Also, rediscovered that I enjoy solving little algorithm problems after practicing with LeetCode. ChatGPT makes as if I have my own tutor to explain and hint when necessary, reminded me of university and study groups.
Would you like to collaborate on something along these lines?
In visual mode, move a line up or down: vim.keymap.set("v", "J", ":m '>+1<CR>gv=gv") vim.keymap.set("v", "K", ":m '<-2<CR>gv=gv")
In normal mode, replace all occurences of the word under the cursor: vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>s", [[:%s/\<<C-r><C-w>\>/<C-r><C-w>/gI<Left><Left><Left>]])
In normal or visual mode, Yank to the OS's pasteboard: vim.keymap.set({"n", "v"}, "<leader>y", [["+y]])
And there are plenty more that are related to specific plugins.
Also, I've remapped caps lock to esc in the OS. This makes it way easier to leave insert mode without leaving the home row.
Start with h, j, k, l, w, b, a, i, o, esc And go from there
There's a popular stackoverflow answer as a Vim (Vi) introduction, which I haven't read through but will link anyway: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...
http://vimcasts.org/episodes/ screencasts are high quality short videos, go back to the early ones for introductions to buffers and windows and things (more recent ones tend to be too many niche scripts and plugins for me).
This is ThePrimeagen's 0 to LSP, Neovim RC from Scratch. In this video he performs a clean installation of Neovim and goes step by step adding the things he considers essential. This was very important for me to acquaint myself with how things work, how to install plugins, how to define custom key maps. I remember the first times I tried using Vim, I couldn't figure out how to get Nerdtree to work. This video made me realize I just lacked the knowledge of how Vim config works.
This video was such a good start because It provided me with the tools to continue my exploration of Vim autonomously. In a week I was already able to install new plugins and tweak them using Lua config files the way I specifically wanted. It's such a cool experience!
Keep in mind that both the author of this video and I use Neovim, which is a fork of Vim. As a text editor they both function essentially the same. The difference lies on the config files and in broader UI capabilities by Neovim. While Vim uses Vimscript, Neovim prefers Lua, although Neovim is fully backwards compatible, so you can choose to use Vimscript for your configuration if you want as well. This also means that Vim plugins just work with Neovim!
The docs are also a huge source of knowledge for me. In the beginning I resorted to :help key-codes a lot when defining key mappings.
To learn the Vim motions, which is the most challenging part of using Vim, I suggest you find a cheatsheet online and refer to it all the time. One very cool plugin that will help you get comfortable with Vim motions is ThePrimeagen's VimBeGod: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/vim-be-good. It's a set of game-like exercises to practice the motions. This is also pretty cool and helped a lot: https://vimsnake.com/. It's a classic snake game where instead of using arrow keys, you use HJKL. And speaking of arrow keys, one thing I did very early on was disabling them (or, in reality, remapping them to noop) in normal mode so I was forced to move around the text using Vim Motions.
At first you will get frustrated because your brain will need some time to rewire in a way to absorb all the new abstractions Vim presents. It's a whole new logic of editing text. The most important thing is to stick to it and you will be surprised with how fast you end up picking things up. Of course, don't expect to be crazy fast in a few weeks. But right now, after a little over a month, I no longer feel that discomfort using Vim anymore. I suppose I'd still be faster on VS Code, but I really want to master Vim, so I'm sticking with it and I feel a constant improvement.
Not sure if you've seen this, but worth working through, sooner or later (no rush): https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/
A discipline I wished I'd learned earlier was don't let your vimrc grow too big. Instead, keep carving parts of it off into plugins. Track everything in Git.
```
set editing-mode vi
Control-l clear-screen
```
Also install vimium[0][1] to get vim movements and some useful keybindings in your browsers.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...
It allows you to jump parent comments in a Hacker News comment page using either left/right arrow keys or, in Vim mode, h and l. j and k will move the page up and down.
I've been looking for offline hobbies and recently got into solo board gaming, on top of playing games with my wife a couple of times a month. I work in gamesdev and I want to retain a creative outlet in the direction of gaming, because I just really enjoy it, but I also want to stop spending my entire life in front of a screen. So far it's been a lot of fun, I'm going to be printing play test cards later this week to start dialing in my first game.
If it goes well I plan to release it as a cheap print and play (PnP), and if it turns out to be boring I'll release it as a free PnP.
The subreddit is pretty active too: https://old.reddit.com/r/soloboardgaming
Seriously, though, there's a wealth of games for solo players! Some are made specifically for soloability, some have solo modes, some are older titles that have had solo modes written for them in retrospect.
It's a very interesting little niche and I think there's a ton of room for growth in it. I'm excited to be part of it as a player and to hopefully push the envelope a little bit on what can be done!
After seeing a friend with young kids post candid photos of his family for the last few years, I decided to give it a try. Purchased a Retina IIIc rangefinder camera (from the 1950s, preceded SLRs) and it's one of the most amazing purely mechanical, consumer-focused engineered products I've held in my hands. Got a scanner, successfully booted the Nikon Scan abandonware on a virtualized Windows XP environment, and saw my first roll of photos appear last weekend. Wife and extended family absolutely loved it. I've reviewed those 36 photos (standard roll length) more in the past week than the 1,000 family photos of the past 2 years on my cell phone. Excited for more.
It’s definitely an expensive hobby considering the price of film, processing and high quality scanning - but still I love the process. Maybe since it is slow and you can still easily make mistakes shooting film. Makes me think a lot more about them somehow, very wholesome hobby to have.
Ever heard a pair of speakers that didn’t sound like hearing a recording of an instrument, but rather hearing the instrument itself? Me neither, but it’s apparently possible.
The DIY speaker/audio hobby is highly specific but also fortunately has a lot of informative available online. I’d recommend diyaudio.com and partsexpressforums for anyone interested, I have more resources if curious.
Also, if near Boulder, CO, I've got some CNCs if that helps you build stuff.
Re build logs, I have seen quite a few on diyaudio.com as well as reddit's r/diyaudio and r/diysound (which I frequent much more often). Are you more curious/interested in the enclosure hardware (woodworking) side or the driver selection and crossover building side? Because if you're curious about learning to make crossovers there are a few threads specific to that on diyaudio.com.
Yeah, full-range drivers + tube amp. I built the tube amp and speakers so it was not really expensive at all. (Maybe $500 or so all told — so not audiophile expensive by any means.)
Also your website's pretty nice and the moongame seems very interesting but its performance in firefox is around 2fps, which is bizarrely slow (Safari on my iPad was smooth).
https://youtu.be/zdkyGDqU7xA?si=UOPff5nJLD4d_iTn
https://youtu.be/EEh01PX-q9I?si=1deXn9OU1rvy2pJ2
edited: Thought DIY Perks did the big speakers, found them on Tech Ingredients.
Thanks for the links, I think I've seen (parts of) both videos but now that I have learnt a lot more I think I'll pick up more info.
Btw there have been a few valid criticisms of these speakers, although it's more of a "they aren't really the best in the world" rather than "they're shit" type of critique. I think ASR forums or diyaudio.com might have a few thread(s) on it.
If you're curious for a speaker build there are lots of excellent speaker kits and resources online that are (much) better reviewed.
- The utility of randomness: returning from a machine learning conference in Italy where I had a pretty random (if you do not believe in fate) conversation with a stranger, where suddenly more people stood around and joined in. It basically started with me commenting on one poster "Isn't it amazing how useful randomness is, given there is no pattern/structure in a random sequence, and it costs me nothing to make up?" What I meant is how can something as arbitrary still be useful. Suddenly we started collecting examples: randomized algorthms like the random walker model behind PageRank, Random Forests in machine learning, random numbers for perfect encryption (one time pad), Pentti Kanerva's "Hyperdimensional Computing: An Introduction to Computing in Distributed Representation with High-Dimensional Random Vectors" (thanks to an anonymous Finnish bystander, for I could not recall Kanerva's name at the time) etc. Today, I found a book that studies how random people's travel decisions are: Ennio Cascetta (2009) Random Utility Theory, Heidelberg: Springer.
- hypergraphs: graphs have been very useful representations for so many things in work and life, but they are only for expressing dyadic relations between nodes, whereas their generalizations, hypergraphs can express n-ary relations between nodes.
- how to bring people back to a culture of books & libraries: I collect books and I read a lot. As I teach/lecture also, I often ask my students about their reading habits, and find it shocking that many have never been to a library, and most do not read books. I would like to contribute to changing that (seems harder than finding out whether P = NP?).
The former is libre and gratis, runs as a standalone or plugin and in the browser!! and is based on the latter.
The latter has a libre and gratis standalone version, the plugin version is non-gratis.
Take your time with modular. It’s easy to get carried away and overspend. Each module is deeper than it looks and you really benefit from getting to know each one.
Edit: and, of course, VCV Rack is the best.
I started getting in to this at the start of the year. Already had an old, dusty MicroKORG and MIDI interface to use it as a controller, but recently splashed out on a bigger controller as the Korg's tiny keys were hurting me - plus, I wanted something bigger to get better at piano!
A couple of free soft synths I'd recommend are Surge XT, and Vital.
I worked in music tech for a few startups starting in 2000, have written a few instruments (VSTs) and dabbled in making noise (some call it music). specialize in cutting edge dsp, but i just like applying it to PHAT SOUNDS. :D i'm a much better sw engineer DSP enthusiast than an artist, but can still hold my own.
Get ready for so much fun. Making music gets infinitely more fun once you start to build all your own tools =) Do you code? If you can code even a bit..
It's not my day job anymore, but send me an email if you'd like to know more, I guess I'm finally old enough to pass on some shit...
My kid is too young for tech so far so I haven't fully dived into the issue yet, but one thing I've already done for him to start him off on the right foot is set up with a Proton email account on the family domain name.
It's great because family members have been sending notes for him to read when he grows up and we have been cc'ing him on baby pictures, medical records, and vital stats. And when you think about it, our email accounts are the foundations of our online identities, so it's kind of messed up that we normalize surveillance of our children's online activity from Day 1 by setting them up with inboxes from Google, etc. and you owe it to your kids to give them privacy and, eventually, agency.
I'll turn over the keys when he's old enough (of course I'll probably make a backup of things first)!
I have heard the argument often (form older folk, mainly) that it's ok for kids to be bored. Kids _should_ be bored sometimes etc etc. And while I agree with the spirit of such, to an extent, it was easier when I was a kid because there wasn't so much competition from the outside world for my attention. If I had nothing to do, I'd have to find something to do, and the only options were 'good' things that weren;t commercially orientated attention-thieves made in the mould of services intended for adults. Now, if my kid is bored, they know that they can watch pretty much any TV program ever made, and chip and change at will, they can play games on my phone, they can play games / youtube on their laptop etc etc and half the kids at school are watching Squid Game and playing Fortnite, so it's pretty hard to justify saying "no you can't do those things" unless you are willing to present some fairly compelling alternatives. Kids love attention from their parents, and hanging out with other kids. And on the plus side, giving your kids attention is normally pretty fun if you can make the time to do it properly, imho. Often hard to do though.
But of course there's also nothing wrong with thinking about and doing this kind of stuff even if it never turns out to be very useful, if you enjoy it, that's enough :)
I'm really enjoying having a different type of challenge than I'm used to. Mostly approaching it with Duolingo and Anki vocab cards with moderate success so far. We both have our own careers, kids, various responsibilities...so I don't get much time to practice with her. And practicing memorization at the end of a long day is tough, so I'd love to hear any tips you all may have to improve my memorization techniques and mnemonics.
Been learning Korean to speak more with my girlfriend’s family, especially since we’re going to Korea soon.
My biggest waves of improvement have come from reading aloud the Talk to Me in Korean books.
I’ve found that getting the structure of the sentences has helped me and then I learn vocabulary by using what I interact with on a day-to-day basis.
There’s also a Korean slang book by Talk to Me in Korean which is really great too! Helps break out of the “learned it from a textbook” sound.
The Refold guides, YouTube channel, and Discord server are good resources for language learners with busy schedules.
Watch Korean kids tv shows on Netflix with Korean & english subtitles (I use language reactor chrome plug in)
Real life Korean conversations for beginners by Talk to me in Korean is good.
When you get to an intermediate level (TOPIK level 3ish) the iyagi podcast is GREAT.
Ive been going through the sejong institute practical Korean textbooks. You can get them for free online. They focus on understanding and expressing youself in spoken Korean. The audio examples emulate Korean speech much more than other Korean textbooks I've used.
The sejong institute also to free Korean online courses with weekly zoom lectures.
How to study Korean, sells anki flashcard decks with audio attached. The lessons are free. They're quite dense but are BRILLANT as a reference to grammar you have forgotten or want to know in more nuance.
Vocab-wise when you do flashcards have two for each direction KOR<->ENG. Learn the words for 3 days before putting them into an Anki deck (e.g. 30 words a day, but every day 10 words 'graduate' to the anki deck)
I find Anki good for keeping words memorised but not learning them. When you are looking at the korean word play the audio, it helps SO much!
Remember Korean is one of the hardest languages for a English native speaker to learn. There are times when you will feel you're making no progress. Then one day you will realise you actually understand what you MIL is saying. Have a sacred time every day where you do some Korean. Ideally at least an hour, anything less you will not improve quickly enough to re-motivate you, or thats at least how it was for me.
Good luck 파이팅!
only a 0.5cm change in saddle position can greatly improve comfort already.
A bike fit and correctly setup bike helped me a lot, especially on longer (100km+) rides.
Built a single speed out of a cheap, used frame with some spare or cheap parts and it has been going strong with little maintenance for 14 years.
Also have a long-tail cargo ebike that I got this summer and already have over 500 miles on it. It can be faster than driving a lot of times on top of being more fun for me and my kids.
And to top it off a full suspension mountain bike (2018 YT Jeffsy) which I get out on about twice a week and is really great for my physical/mental state, and has a huge skill ceiling so there will always be something to strive to get better at. Just got back from a weekend off riding an area with huge granite boulders and slabs with a few friends. Really fun to attempt features that made us a little uncomfortable and build skills/confidence.
• diving into plant law; writing a series on plants and property
• research clamping mechanisms and jigs for woodworking with handtools
• sadly smitten with all the genai advancements
• plotting multiple "chaos for social good" projects
• trying to figure out therapists can be so attuned to feelings while staying neutral
• promoting tiny blogs and the "small web": https://blogs.hn
• converting gendered restrooms to all-gender restrooms (with or without permission)
• easy legislative templates and meetups for removing billboards from your municipality
• low-powered and repairable permacomputing hardware designs
• tools for improving home ventilation
• software for retrofitting walkable infrastructure into existing towns and cities
I believe, for a long list of reasons, that families with stably married mother/father are the best way to preserve humanity and that they are most stable without wandering eyes. Avoiding having wandering eyes, or wandering loyalties, in turn, is helped when we make it easier for people to manage and direct sexual attraction to keep it within marriage, rather than otherwise. This includes avoiding porn or behaviors that are like porn to others. I want to keep my thoughts clean and faithful to my wife. I hope others can make that easier and less work, rather than often putting things in my sight that make it be more work.
...I'm going to have to get back to you.
This reads like you find people besides your wife attractive, but rather than recognizing this as normal and healthy, you vilify and repress it. But you see (part of) the responsibility for avoiding your thoughts with others, and expect of them to act according to your needs and wants.
The thought of people of the other gender using a toilet near you is sexual to you and you don't like that, but this is a you problem.
Also, I don't know whether your "stably married mother/father" is just heteronormative or deliberately excluding same-sex couples, but if it's the latter, your "belief" is demonstrably wrong. [1]
That's how I feel about "I know it when I see it". It's the kinks of the proverbial seer.
I have learned for myself that God exists, that he cares, this life is not the beginning or the end, that our choices matter, and that the commandments he gives us (like the 10 commandments, as an example) are to help us get through this life and prepare to receive the blessings he has promised based on our choices.
I have written more of why I know this, at my web site (in profile).
All the best to you.
Interested to see what you have in mind
For me, at the moment, it is internet governance. Kinda like getting involved in local city council politics, but at internet scale. There are so many ways to get involved it is confusing... and it often seems so abstract for an everyday dev, especially if you are just a frontender like me. I have been interested in governance for a while, but had my first participation opportunity at the UN Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto last month, and have been slowly blogging some of my learnings:
https://micro.chadkohalyk.com/2023/10/30/attending-the-inter...
It has motivated me to interact more with the IETF and W3Cs. Like local politics, this stuff actually is important... even if the entire community does not participate.
My main focus for the past two years has been solo fingerstyle guitar, especially classical. The two full pieces I've learned so far are "The Water Is Wide" arranged by Yenne Lee[1] and "Home" by Andrew York[2]. I've almost finished memorizing "Tango Azul" by Nemanja Bogunovic[3], and I'm working on learning "Autumn Leaves" also arranged by Yenne Lee[4], and "Blackwood Lullaby" by Justin Johnson[5]. And I've learned a bunch of short studies and pieces, a recent favorite being "Vals Frances" by Francis Kleynjans[6].
In addition to playing, I also attend classical concerts put on by the Minnesota Guitar Society[7] and do a little bit of volunteering for them, primarily editing full concert videos for their YouTube channel (which, sadly, are mostly taken down after a brief viewing due to contractual stuff).
[1] "The Water Is Wide" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufc2HY9F2U
[2] "Home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajTcwJBbw4
[3] "Tango Azul" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZgTsKrluE
[4] "Autumn Leaves" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxGT5z6d-GA
[5] "Blackwood Lullaby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC58eXL-MJY
[6] "Vals Frances" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSNmwn54vEI
I got hung up around country 55, feeling that I hadn't found my "editing voice" and have had difficulty finding the motivation over the last year to edit and post my most recent 41 countries worth of content. I want to say that part of it is because I'm overwhelmed with how much there is to go through? I also get in my head and have to consistently reassure myself that I'm ultimately editing this for my future self/family to watch, and that I shouldn't necessarily be optimizing for viewership (though passive income through travel vlogs would be nice.)
There's a definitive, "what's up brand gang, immranderson here!" blueprint that could be followed, but I have no interest in ever doing something like that.
This immediately made me think of Jake from Bright Sun Films. (Was that actually what you were alluding to?)
How they have kept the same frame shape and size and design, but vary the colour scheme in special editions making it more of a consumer product than a cyclist product - like Swatch watches used to be, and with the stylised logos. I could argue why it's a great product and why it's a bad product.
I have no idea why; I have no commute. I don't use much public transport. I already have a bike. I wouldn't fit well on one. I have no need of one. I've never ridden one, never seen one except in passing, but I'm obsessing over them recently for a couple of months. (Likely some avoidance / dream that $product will improve my life involved).
The Kwiggle[3] is a more interesting design, a standup bike that's even more portable.
[1] e.g. Everyday Cycling's video "What makes it SO SPECIAL" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6bmuJ98Zc8
I also have no need for one, and now can't stop reading about them.
No, seriously.
As a life long loner/introvert with high anxiety, I kinda discovered recently (after a long marriage/divorce/several years of not dating) that dating is actually kind of amazing.
I never even knew this side of myself. I actually enjoy talking to random people about random stuff. Even if it doesn’t lead to a relationship, making any kind of connection with someone is deeply satisfying.
I kind of wonder why I didn’t do this for the last 40 years.
Anyways, if you’re like me, I really recommend pushing through your awkwardness and anxiety and just try to make connections with people. It’s one of the best things I’ve experienced.
I feel like I spent the prior 40 years denying myself of a basic human experience. I’m glad that’s over.
It’s pushing me out of my comfort zone. For example, leading me to improve my math skills in order to understand some of the concepts and notations that are used in research papers. Also gives me some context into learning C, a language which I consider low-level as a web developer, and it’s been fun to have to think about things like memory management, along with other things I don’t generally need to consider. It gives me an appreciation for when I’m writing high level code like Elixir or JS, etc.
Compression, which I’d say is an application of information theory is just really interesting to learn about for some reason.
- Book called Compact Data Structures by Gonzalo Navarro https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compact-data-structures...
- Ben Langmead's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@BenLangmead
- MIT Open Courseware https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-02-introduction-to-eecs-ii-dig...
- Stanford lectures https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv_7iO_xlL0Kz2nU05COp...
It feels great to have a direct output from effort put in. The combination of physical and concentrated mental effort leaves me feeling refreshed after a good practice.
My siblings were raised the same way, but somehow my older sibling devised her own passion from it, independent of parental pressure and she played it much longer than I or my younger sibling did.
It's a great skill to have, and sometimes I find myself whistling old orchestra tunes that have no searchable lyrics (bzw. John Playwright's Newcastle lived in my head for 15 years before I found its name via a music contour search).
One day I will pick it up again. Without the fear or the dread, and just play for happiness.
Learning an instrument as an adult has had its advantages that I’m learning for myself and no one else. I’ve accepted that I won’t be the next great violinist, but want to be good enough for me.
I sincerely hope you do pick it up again! Or maybe trying a new instrument for yourself.
Finally found the trifecta of an engaging lecturer with recorded lectures, an excellent textbook, and a solid set of exercises.
I was so sad to see he died shortly after the course was recorded. He has a gripping/heartbreaking chronicle at https://itila.blogspot.com
When I hear/read people who say that they're passionate about a javascript lib or a programming language, it sounds really disingenuous to me (or like marketing bs, depending on context). Although they probably mean well, in most cases.
I suppose I can't really illuminate this point, but I suppose for me it's about figuring things out and making something? Maybe a bit like maths, but if you play your cards right you have something to come out of it with.
Programming is an appealing activity in a variety of ways if you're working on something appealing in an appealing context, otherwise it's just a tool like any other, therefore the tools are just tools and constrained somewhat to the appeal a tool can have, which isn't negligible, but isn't something I'd apply the word passion to; much like how I wouldn't describe using a computer as something I'm passionate about, or hiking poles or headlamps or skateboards or knives for carving unless my craft is knife making.
I enjoy the process (usually) of writing Swift and learning new things along the way, but the part that draws me back isn't the act of programming, it's derived from the problem; resolving the problem is often just as interesting sketching something out on paper or thinking about it, just like maths. Serious game developers probably get into it having what they'd describe as a passion for gaming or something, but 6 months away from their computer and I'm sure they wouldn't miss writing arbitrary c++ or wasting their bodies away in front of a screen for 10 hours a day quite as much, it's just often a necessary implementation detail.
I just finished Poverty, By America. It's really moving and seemingly well-researched and honest.
I don't know if I'll stick with it. I don't have a good track record of sticking with social activism stuff. Deep-down in my bones I know however that poverty is wrong and really doesn't need to exist at the levels we have collectively accepted as "natural".
In my case:
* Switch to a bank that supports poor people rather than exploits them (overdraft fees are a racket). Beneficial Bank and Amalgamated Bank look viable.
* Boycott exploitative companies and be vocal to friends and family about it. Support equitable companies.
* Support affordable housing development in my neighborhood.
* Join a group dedicated to the cause. Maybe People's Action.
* Keep educating myself to be able to persuade others effectively.
* Form real relationships and community with poor people.
* Participate in local government (just participate, not necessarily serve).
Stuff like that. You get the idea.
I have been captivated by all aspects of waterfowl, dog training, being in nature, finding public lands accessible to me and preparing the game for consumption - and it keeps me intrigued in some capacity throughout the year.
Plenty of the techniques do bleed over (casting, retrieving commands) but I can't recommend any single program as I'm unfamiliar. What I can recommend through experience is that picking one program and sticking to it ended up helping me in the end. Studying multiple different retriever programs allowed me to try different techniques when I ran into speed bumps with my pup, but the programs will usually start doing minor things in the beginning that lead into advanced concepts in the end.
https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Pontryagins-Principle-Optimal-...
Explains optimal control theory and the pontryagin minimum principle from a geometrical perspective rather than the confusing derivation from calculus of variations that is more typical. Also explains it at an "Engineering" or applied math level rather than at a mathematical foundations level so the results are more usable.
[ I'd describe this book as the "Div, Grad Curl and All That" of Optimal Control Theory if that makes sense to you ]
Right now in the state of Ohio a father has 0 default rights to his own children, even AFTER paternity. Ohio is a "mothers rights" state meaning that be default the mother has 100% custody so it is always an uphill batter to get time with your kids if the mother doesnt want you to.
The other big thing this year is walking, it’s simple exercise that has helped me lose 30 pounds since July 1st.
On my 5th batch and it's an awesome hobby. Very easy and inexpensive to get started, the process is slow-paced, but not glacial, not hard to follow, but with a depth to it if it's your thing ... and then you get to drink the result!
Dandelion, eh? Consider sharing on /r/mead, you will fit right in :)
Grab some Dansk Mjød of you find it; they're doing some of the most interesting stuff right now.
I have been passionate about programming for a long while, figured it out at 14, slowly kept going upwards doing online courses, ended up doing CS in Uni at 19, did an industrial placement where I felt like I grew tremendously. At 22 it felt like my fuel has ran out, I had a terrible final year in Uni, Covid hit, I was terribly burnt out and I have not felt as passionate at my job since.
I'm just now slowly getting back into actually loving computing and delving deep into the things that I didn't have a chance to so far, like IoT projects, functional programming, compilers etc. I'm also really lucky to be working for a company and in a team where it's understood and accepted that we don't run at full capacity all the time, and given freedom to put as much as I want on my plate for a while.
I think, I feel, I am out of this rat race of fighting for that next promotion, learning that new language, earning more money, wanting that ${THING}. No, I am not a monk, nor do I want to become one, but I am passionate about how to be content and grateful for whatever I have; I am relatively at peace for a good while since I started to train & reinforce my brain to behave this way. Thanks to Almighty.
Everyone is passionate about the project, you can feel the care that’s being poured into the ecosystem.
Am working on some large scale authorship attribution stuff on the side and have an Arty A7 that I want to make do something besides flash purple LEDs but I have some health bullshit that's killing my motivation. But I'm working on it.
Can you tell more about it? I've done something about it in my master's and PhD, but I'm away from this area for some time and don't know the actual state of the art...
I have no academic or professional linguistic background so it's definitely not state of the art, but it works reasonably well and from what I can tell in the literature the fancier methods work slightly better but have significantly worse performance. The beauty of the cosine delta is that I can put the vectorized representations of each author into something like hnswlib (InnerProductSpace) or Milvus and get really fast comparisons.
Source: it me.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aHfK8EUIzg [1] https://xd.saul.pw
My immediate guess on how to model it would be to create reified constraints for the wordlists of different lengths (the constraints in chapter 22 of https://www.gecode.org/doc-latest/MPG.pdf). For each square, use standard logical constraints to check if it is the start of a word (previous square a black one, this square not a black one), and how long the word is (using backwards counting of runs). These can be used to trigger the reified constraints above.
If the word-lists are short-ish enough, then an alternative for the above model would be to model the whole words using MDD or regular expression constraints, with an added control variable and setting all values as don't-care for the false case.
I my case, the black square positions are unknown, so the question instead is: "Given an empty crossword grid and a word list, does there exist a template allowing a feasible assignment of words for the grid?" Your intuition of how I modeled this is mostly correct, I used custom TABLE constraints for the words, that can be triggered on or off depending on the values of boolean variables.
I used CP-SAT to model this, and if you're interested in the technical side of things, I've discussed it in great detail here: https://pedtsr.ca/2023/generating-crossword-grids-using-cons...
It turns out that there are many weird complexities to take into account when the black square positions are unknown.
Another way to do it directly is to embed the control variable in the table, with a full set of all possible tuples for when the control variable is false. This, however, gives a large blow-up of the table size, especially for wide tables/long words and might be too expensive. Using compressed/smart/cartesian product tables or MDD constraints if the system supports it would solve this (OR-Tools does not, AFAIK).
As for the Gecode model, my idea was that the way to model the words using separate element constraint for each letter could reasonably be extended into a model for reified words by changing the element constraints to tables over the triple <control variable, index, letter> in the above way. The benefit is that one would not trigger the combinatorial blow-up one gets for the above with a full table over the whole word since it is only a single letter.
In a related case, I used reified extensional constraints specified using regular expressions in https://github.com/zayenz/cp-mod-ref-2019-patchwork to optionally place polyominoes on a grid.
PS: I remember meeting you during the poster display at the CP2019 conference at UCONN. We discussed the difficulty of finding solutions for the Nmbr9 game because there were too many propagators. It's a small world!
The implementation of a regular constraint can in essence be an MDD propagator (the implementation unfolds the automata into a layered graph, which is mostly isomorphic with an MDD), however it will depend on the implementation how efficient it is. In particular, if the original finite automata is already of an MDD shape with layers, some implementations (including the one in Gecode) will create too many nodes by creating all nodes for all layers.
Fun, didn't make that connection. Yes, it is a small world.
Even with an initial sloppy mockup I found the wife loved playing pinball. So I went all in and built a new gaming PC, bought a 120 Hz TV just for a stand-alone pinball cab build.
(Oh, and found that using the previous gaming PC and a few other things lying around I could also build a mini-pinball-cab — so I have that one coming together as well.)
I find Python to be useful but excruciatingly verbose, particularly when you get to using NumPy and Pandas. I like the syntax of Fortran/MATLAB/GNU Octave so here's to hoping that Julia can take over some of this workload. I also use R extensively (and love it) for data analysis; glad to see Julia's capability in this space also.
In my ignorance, I used to see knowledge of knots as this complex, hard to learn thing, but one thing I've been learning is that the more common, practical, knots tend to be fairly easy to tie. There's just different knots for different purposes.
The decorative ones can get very complex, though.
What are your favorite knots?
I've tried to learn a number of knots. I find that tying knots is a good way to keep my hands busy while doing something else, like listening in a meeting.
I favor the diamond knot, constrictor knot, hangman's knot, alpine butterfly loop, and Japanese square knot.
I'd say my favourite one is one I come up with based on a Sheepshank, but (to the surprise of no one) was in the book as #1148 (Bell Ringer with two hitches). My use case, however, is as a double-noose to carry bags. Once tied, you can tighten one loop by loosening the second, then tighten the second by pulling the standing part. I tighten these around the neck of the two bags beneath the knots, then use a Marlingspike Hitch in the standard part with a piece of wood as a handle.
I started about a year ago. Prior to starting I had never owned a car or done any sort of mechanic task. My first oil change was on a friend's car before I actually owned a car (getting to his place with a jack, jackstands and other tools in a rental mechanic bike was an experience in itself).
Getting into that hobby was a key factor in my battle with depression. While I've not recovered my pre-covid energy, I'm in a much better place.
Since then, I've done minor operations on 5 cars, and lots of things, including non-trivial operations (suspension overhaul, gearbox replacement) on the car I bought to be my "test dummy" (though it's by no means a beater, I bought it running and driving, it's just 20 years old with a fair mileage).
I would definitely recommend that hobby, especially if you already own a car and have a space to do it (living in an appartment, I had neither and still figured it out)
I also started a Youtube channel of filming myself doing those operations, but I'm not that passionate about it. I'm still on the fence of whether to stop or continue it. While I'm proud of it, it's a time sink and the few bad comments (it's the internet after all) leave a bitter taste.
I played electric in high school and developed some chops in jazz band. Loved it, but like many others, dropped it completely in college. Years later, I moved to SF for a FAANG and had an impossible time developing a new friend group; I wanted to reignite my old love in a new style, so I filled the time with weekly lessons with a well-known teacher in the area.
Fast forward 8 years later, that hobby’s turned into an obsession, and I’m now playing at a fairly high level. Am studying privately with a conservatory professor (not SF), who’s trying to get me to join for a Master’s degree. I’m performing regularly at public events & retirement homes, streaming most of my practice sessions on Twitch/YouTube, posting progress clips to other socials, and even built my own metronome/practice journal app to track time & organize notes (mujoapp.com). I love it all dearly as a lifelong and infinitely-deep hobby.
All socials:
Capricho Arabe by Francisco Tarrega:
https://youtu.be/l3203CvetCs?si=Zf4BmjsvWo3BGi15
Sales pitch for Mujo:
I'd been writing reviews on Goodreads for years so it was kind of a logical next step. Also have found it interesting to learn how to edit videos and improve my confidence in speaking.
PS there is a review of Gerald Weinberg's "Are Your Lights On?" in there, so it's tangentially related to coding. Currently reading Code Complete.
I’m also writing my own tools in Elixir for playing around with LLMs. Currently exploring ways to efficiently chunk documents/code/webpages so that I can create embeddings for them.
[1] https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing
https://www.google.com/search?hl=eo&gbv=1&q=heartbeast+%2Bsi...
I also really enjoyed One Year Bible with Bill Creasy. It doesn't get too academic, which may be a downside if that's what you're looking for, but I found him to be very engaging: https://www.audible.com/pd/One-Year-Bible-Audiobook/B00G5OEH...
And, although our theologies diverge quite a bit, I found that the Bible Binge podcast is pretty entertaining. It "translates" Bible stories into modern pop culture references: https://faithadjacent.com/show/theclassics/
These combined with the experience of exploring the natural world in my kids' school's makerspace, has made me come back to making sensor tools for the people - would love to hear from others how they use sensor data for change: https://supermechanical.com/pickup
Used the money to buy some more things like a microscope and sewing machines, but realized that it had failed before and will fail again because there isn’t enough humanpower to guide the kids in activities. So I’ve enlisted a couple of other parent volunteers and we’re trying to figure out a sustainable program. One step is to make the space (a corner of the library) look cool to attract current and future parents. Think I’m going for a satire of a corporate lab, with snaplock linoleum tile and a steel worktable.
Working in ad-how volunteer groups is a new skill I’ve been learning since we started at this public school. Very valuable, but not a personal passion!
See if you can partner with an high school STEM class to have elder students mentor the younger ones. Things like this are required Service credit at our kid's school, it works wonderfully and also if they're around enough the little's look up to the big's. It helps strengthen the character as community & individual
Kids can also take stuff from the shelves to work on themselves, but we need to make activity cards to give the ones who are less sure of themselves a self-guided path.
I'm riding an early-70s Schwinn road bike in an hour or so, and a modern modern mountain bike Saturday. Bring it on!
It's really time to get out of the introversion bubble again.
I recently made this webapp: https://foodchoices.app
Trying to build something for businesses like thrift stores, vintage stores, secondhand stores, used furniture, consignment, etc. I started working at a vintage shop a few months ago after leaving my SWE job, and it's a pretty analog industry. No updated inventory, digital presence, business intelligence, etc. (not for lack of usefulness or lack of trying, just because digitizing hundreds or thousands of unique one-off items is really labor intensive and not ergonomic on existing tools). Hoping to build something purpose built for the use case that can also make shopping secondhand more accessible to end consumers.
Feel like the social stigma against "used goods" is dissipating, and shopping secondhand/vintage is seen as a viable or even preferable option b/c of cost, uniqueness, cyclical nature of trends, or sustainability efforts.
If anyone has any thoughts or tips, I'd love to hear them!
Noise cancelling headphones, breathing exercises, generally no social interactions. So wonderful.
About to goto the range with my 22lr for some group therapy. 2inch groups at 50yards.
The wealth of Czerny exercises is so much more engaging than the Hanon that have been inflicted unthinkingly on students for generations. Check out the Dohnanyi exercises for something wild and different; the later ones, not the first ones that focus on (potentially harmful) finger isolation.
I built a bad fence, a less bad gate, and a little shed. A lot was learned, they have issues but damn I’m proud of my creations.
I don't work things I don't have the knowledge to do safely (some electrical work for example), or things I feel I don't have the knowledge to do correctly and there's risk of really bad resulting issues (I don't touch load-bearing walls for example).
Although I've played sports my whole life, this is the first sport where I have really dedicated myself to training my skills and studying how to get better (as opposed to just playing pick up games all the time as I did with basketball). The volleyball community is exceptional. My wife and I moved to Arizona a few years ago, and we now have an extensive network of friends, all of whom we met through the sport.
About a year ago, my friend who played at a very high level in Iran decided to try out for the semi-pro team here in Phoenix. I was going to watch the tryout, but he encouraged me to try out as a libero (defensive specialist). I was originally a hitter, but it is exceptionally difficult to play in the front row at at the professional level when you are 5'7".
To my surprise, I made the team. The starting and backup liberos are significantly better than I am, but in the past year I have improved tremendously from being able to practice regularly at a high level.
Although it is growing fast in the US, there isn't nearly the same interest in volleyball as there is in mainstream sports like basketball or football. This means that very, very few people in the US make a living playing volleyball, but it also means that someone like me who never played in college has access to volleyball at a very competitive level.
I've also been able to help grow the sport by using my skills as a software developer. I threw together a little website for the team using a bootstrap template and it looks significantly better than our old website. Check us out at http://www.ascensionvolley.com and take a look at our YouTube channel!
This is the focus of my latest venture. Market is global. Our first installation went online earlier this year. All self-funded so far. Working on raising a round to scale.
Fully deployed, in the US alone, we can free-up enough energy to support over 30 million electric vehicles without having to build a single new power plant of any kind.
Yes, applied to YC multiple times as we were developing the technology. Rejected every time. My guess is that the combination of an older solo founder and a complex hardware/software model just didn't pass the filters. I get it. Hardware is hard. We are past the YC level of startup funding at this stage (need ~$5MM), so that's no longer an option.
Still in stealth.
There are several papers/books in math, economics, logic, philosophy, etc. from the past 200 years that I've been interested in reading but have never had a structured plan to go about it. I've occasionally just read random stuff.
This year I started a project where I write some thoughts on a handful of papers/books from 100, 150, and 200 years ago. Here's the result from 1923 [1], and I'm nearly finished with 1873.
Organizing the reading like this has kept the scope manageable and the project fun. Hopefully, it's something I'll continue into the future.
I maintain https://cuetorials.com and am heading up the CUE sig-infra group for the time being
A good buddy of mine had been itching to get back into the hobby that he played as a teen but I wasn't interested in it. Until I got the Ultimate Starter Box from my game store as it was basically calling out to me.
It's been an incredibly fun (and yes, expensive) hobby.
The people are great, especially in my local area they're suuuper friendly and welcoming to new people. They want cool people to play with and enjoy the hobby with so there's little gatekeeping that I've actually run into.
Learning new skills (assembly, priming, painting) and learning the rules has been really fun as well.
My passion for coding has been at an all time low, so it's good to have something to channel my passion into.
Surfing -Finding remote point breaks and surfing northern latitudes with nobody around.
https://www.surfline.com/travel/canada/british-columbia/regi...
The holy grail is undiscovered long point breaks.
Would love to give an LLM a dataset of satellite images and tell it to discover more waves containing similar attributes.
I'm tired of being productive and "on".
We have cookies.
In Melbourne I see a lot of cleaning websites that use stock photos of people that don't racially reflect the cleaners working for the agency. I want to flip that upside down and have encouraged my cleaner to put a photo of himself on the flyer (he's Sri Lankan). I think this will show any potential customers that he stands out from other cleaners and is proud of his work and who he is.
Last week there was a guy in social housing who killed himself after similar, and since then my social housing manager has been in touch to look at doing something - sad that it takes a death before someone investigates.
Best of luck.
'epoxy granite' is a thing
i think castings often come out closer to net shape than weldments and thus need less final machining, but i could have that backwards. they both shrink as they cool, but weldments don't need draft
i wonder if sand bonded with sodium silicate could provide vibration damping at a much lower cost than cast iron or epoxy granite? you'd want to use much more sodium silicate than you normally use in foundry practice to get a continuous silica hydrogel phase without air-filled porosity, and as with epoxy granite, you could make the members much thicker and probably heavier than you would with steel or cast iron in order to achieve the same rigidity. and sodium silicate should make an excellent bond to either quartz or carborundum (or other silicate aggregates like basalt fiber)
i think people also care about rigidity because side-loading induces tool deflection, which hurts precision, not just because of chatter
but i don't know anything
On the weekends I now wake up at 5:30 and drive to remote places to take photos during sunrise. I spend a lot of spare time researching lenses and watching videos with tips on things like composition.
I was never a morning person before.
For now I completed one course on Coursera and am planning on finishing the specialization with 6-7 courses. Also trying to learn some statistics going through ISLR on the side.
I considered grad school as well but I don't have much of a shot. So I've been applying to software roles at biotech companies to break in that way. I'll make my own grad school with free online resources:)
I'm scratching an itch, hoping to get a chip made to implement the biggest waste of transistors ever, per George Gilder's call. (A cartesian grid of LUTs, clocked as to avoid race conditions, a Turing complete system) It might be a way to make a cheap PetaFlop computer.
Here's my github repository where I have an emulator written in Pascal
https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid
Here's a writeup on the idea, from a computing language perspective, on the esoteric languages wiki
I got a bachelor's degree in geophysical engineering about 10 years ago and never really used it besides programming, GIS, and data visualization.
Ham radio lets me do a lot of the things I loved about geophysics. Wave propagation, being outside, electronics, talking to satellites, remote sensing. Driving around being cool with a radio lol.
I'm just getting started but I'm really glad I got licensed. Especially in case of emergencies. I hope to practice and get to a point where I can help with public events or during emergency situations.
It's an incredibly handy tool and worth looking in to the local ham group and repeater network in your area. I just sold the vehicle that I had my mobile radio previously installed in. I need to install it in the new vehicle so I can go back to chatting with the local HAMs on the way to work.
Sadly as I moved from Colorado about four years ago the community isn't as large where I'm at now as it was there.
Edit: I've been reading HN for a long time but for some reason today I felt I'd finally create an account to respond to this.
God's blessings!
- https://airsequel.com - SQLite hosting platform
- https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteDAV - WebDAV server for SQLite databases
- https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteGPT - Call ChatGPT directly in SQL queries
I'm a big fan of Logseq for keeping track of useful information and tasks and stuff, but the file-based (or Git-based) syncing has sharp edges, and the actual Logseq Sync feature has a proprietary backend, so I've been enjoying figuring out how the protocol works and building an OSS implementation.
Actually, my machine WILL NOT run unmodified unix, nor do I plan on porting it, I want to write my own, single-user system for it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mi-Cocina-Recipes-Rapture-Cookbook/dp...
Also moon phases (?)
I'm interested in this space too-- it'd be great to get in touch and discuss (my contact info in my profile).
I think I'd do anything with a friendly team
I would never actually trade or anything like that. It's just fun to scrape data. Historical option chain data isn't really publicly free/available so I wrote a scraper + analytics on top of it.
Obviously it's all gambling but I see why so many people are attracted (addicted?) to it (Robinhood traders)
If you lose 100% of a $100 out-of-the-money bet 7 times but then hit an 800% ROI... you break even, right?
Example: https://www.ft.com/content/312e9b3c-a5e0-4eff-8b9a-8637696d2...
I don't think HackerNews supports enough Markdown to show tables but... tell me what you think about that.
But there is quite a lot still to be done. I would like to turn some of the art of making Tabla into the science of making Tabla.
While you are training under a master, it's hard to have a favorite player, because you are also learning the style of your Ustaad. And doing that requires making that your favorite style, because that is the best way to imbue the master's style in your being.
Regardless, I still felt I owed him a great deal of respect because he took his music very seriously. He was legitimately a virtuoso at Tabla. Truly an amazing player. And I was committed to practicing diligently. Since life in the US didn't permit me to study all day with him, I spent a lot of time finding recordings of performances on Youtube to learn from. As I mentioned, my favorite performer other than my teacher was Anindo Chatterjee. My teacher also knew of Chatterjee and enjoyed his playing as much as I did. Since he was from a younger generation, I don't think he was bothered by my trying to learn from watching other players while I wasn't practicing with him.
Anyhow, nice to see mention of Tabla on Hacker News :).
Today, there are many more ways of making money as a player, and everything is recorded and ready to be copies, so people care less about style.
But I do care about it a little bit. My Ustaad had a very clear style of playing, where he made every note clear and distinct. So now, I don't like listening to some of the super fast rough styles that some players have. It is a legitimate style, but I have been trained to not like it.
Anyway, very nice to meet a fellow player on HN.
Completely agree with you on this point. I find that there are very few players that I actually enjoy listening to. Many players rush their playing and don't follow a clear rhythm or sound clear notes. Tabla is such a difficult instrument to play properly. Seems like it really takes a life time to become a good player. Sort of heart breaking since American life makes it hard to bring that kind of devotion to art (not if you want to be financially secure anyway).
Originally I was interested as a concept for a story, but as an atheist who was a very devout Christian for a long time I really wondered if there is some modern twist on the structure of organised religion and replacing a traditional meta-physical source of knowledge for a real world one (or group of them).
It has essentially turned into a framework of ritualism based around core concepts of various religious structure...with the ability to 'hot swap' your 'god' or 'AI' or 'book' or whatever source of wisdom you seek to lead your decisions.
It is much more complicated than I thought, but it is super interesting to me and while I have nothing that yet really helps me any better than normal reason based skepticism...I do like the ability to engage in tribal style ritualism in a modern context.
I've been trying to name it but so far all I have come up with is Algoruspicy (Haurspicy using algorithms) or Nexialism (Connection based philosophy)
Anyway, I’m curious about your approach and always interested in discussion about these topic, drop me a line if you’d like to discuss ! Email is my username @ my username .net
And biotech/biohacking! (not the supplements flavor that calls itself those things but actually isn't at all)
Just started playing pick up futsal at the local YMCA. I’m pretty unfit right now but really enjoying it. I’d played football (soccer) as a youth and wanted to get back into it. Found the futsal pick ups and jumped in. A lot of fun and really good work out. I’d never heard of futsal until now. Similar to indoor 5 a side. Would recommend it to anyone wanting to play some competitive sports.
"How to write a letter to Cared-Abouts:"
1) Gratitude (solo)
2) What I'm working on / towards
3) Anything exciting / worrisome
4) Thoughts on wordly problems / solutions
5) Transactional / accounting stuff
6) Questions
7) Gratitude (together / partnerships)
Sometimes it's just "doing the dishes" or ceasing to be difficult, "because I can."
Grateful for your passion.
This summer I finally bought a GoPro to capture our motorcycle tour with my girlfriend – have been thinking about getting one for years but never did. Well, since then we have been on three city trips and I enjoyed recording those. Since then I edited and finished one of them, and it is such a joy.
Edit: by random chance if anyone wants to help with a title card graphic/logo, that’s the one gap I have in capability for this toy.
- Breathing: fuel yourself with fresh energy out of thin air. The Wim Hof Method (WHM) really just changed my entire life. I found finally a method to stabilise my bio-rythm aka constant up-and-downs.
- Cold Showers: In combination with WHM it's one of my biggest physical improvements. I was always the guy who complains a cold climate. Now it just doesn't matter anymore, I don't get sick as easy and my body feels great!
- mindfulness: value the moment, keep it clean from other topics that doesn'tfit in right now. Matches perfectly with breathing/yoga exercises.
- build up my second career as life- and social counselor to help others getting their life sorted: https://gedankenfrei.at
Just hit me if you want to talk, I love people and social interaction!
How would you know?
If you've never heard of it X4 is a space sandbox game with an emphasis on trade. I can't remember the last time I was this captivated by a game. It combines a lot of things I love - simulation, automation, optimization, statistics, space combat, slow but quantifiable progression.
That and cellular communication. The g-protein coupled receptor[0] is basically an all-purpose biological switch. Combined with other messaging pathways it is used to build complex logic into cell message/response networks.
[0] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gpcr-14047471/
Finding and listening to good music while working on my own first EP.
Writing about video games and whatever comes to mind on my website, as well as playing old classics, indies, and AAA giganto-games.
Writing to friends regularly.
Global land subsidence mapping reveals widespread loss of aquifer storage capacity (October 2023)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41933-z
Scientists map loss of groundwater storage around the world
https://phys.org/news/2023-11-scientists-loss-groundwater-st...
- Learning to use Emacs better
- Common Lisp
- Clojure
- Getting better at chess
- Rubiks cubes and solving them faster
- Indie gaming and fighting games at the moment
But I’m super happy with the result and have a bunch of geeks with recording nodes setup a long distance apart. Localizing large explosions show that it’s possible to localize to a carpets even when some of the nodes are almost 5 away.
For those interested, here is the project:
One node almost 5km away. Another more than 2km. One more than 3km. But they all converge nicely to a small area.
When ChatGPT/LLMs became accessible, I started playing around with OpenAI's API with the goal of "encoding" some of my expertise into the AI so it does the work for me (specifically how to write founder stories for my customers).
The result is https://storypitch.ai and it's already generating revenue.
But I have to say it's both worrying and fascinating to see AI do my work for me.
Go is a surprisingly pleasant language for building websites, especially for indie hackers, yet the tooling is not quite there. I'm trying to get the developer productivity for building websites in Go to be on par with building web applications in Node.
With ESBuild and Goja maturing, we're pretty close. Go is still just missing a few important connections needed to the frontend ecosystems (e.g. React, Tailwind, etc.)
Let me know if you're also interested in this space!
Besides for the absolute mayhem, the planning, driving, and engineering that goes into these competitions are insane.
Some fights to give you an idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORDg67i70IU
Really hoping for tombstone to come back next season re-engineered to be the top dog again.
I'm trying to document the process of setting one up in such a way that I can do a teach in for my friends at my local hackerspace.
In the process I've determined I would like to write my own k8s enabled application (likely a daemonset for checking for a specific hardware device and configuration on each bare metal node, and storing that data in a way for k8s to use and reference later).
I've been working on this any free time I get, since September, each weekend sees a flurry of activity then I spend the week daydreaming about it.
Modifying and calibrating my 3d printer(s), chasing speed while maintaining print quality.
Using CAD more seriously, trying to challenge myself with more complex projects and models. Current project is to make a CoreXY Plotter from an old 3d printer I just disassembled.
Wanting to get/make a CNC Mill/Router to finally have the ability to work on some bigger "cooler" projects. ex. I have a custom PC case model that I've been working on, and can't wait to build for the upcoming rig upgrade.
In particular the open source Visual Pinball engine and the amazing content made for it and community around it. https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. Also vintage pre-Windows computers and retro video gaming. Home computers in the 80s and early 90s were so unique, diverse and interesting. Each had strong opinions about what the future of personal computing could be, expressed in their own hardware, software library and community of enthusiasts.
Here's a link [0] - just don't do the breathing exercises anywhere that passing out could cause problems; like when driving, in water, etc.
Consider that perhaps being motivated automatically isn't always the best thing. Auto-motivation can make it harder to choose a good and worthwhile direction, which motivates you on its own merits to something above self-interest.
Maybe you could afford to let your self-motivation lie fallow for a while, if that's what you need to do. Put your brain in a jar, and do something helpful and physical.
Maybe none of this applies to your situation? I do find it an interesting topic as well though.
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=579886644&hl=eo&gbv=1&...
In this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550758
... i posted links to other HN discussions on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508
Plus, there's an awesome community around the game and the arcade so it's been nice to meet new people that way.
Pretty sure we call those pages :p
That, also combined with other hobbies such as VR (Eleven VR), 3d printing (printing/designing table-tennis adapters for the VR controllers).
I've started with the Vangoa EWI-100, which is an affordable, silent, and good enough MIDI EWI (electronic wind instrument) device. I have also been learning some of the technical details of MIDI. I sometimes use it alone, and sometimes with a Cocos Reaper with free VSTs. I have only been doing this for 4 days, but I am already enjoying it a lot.
If I continue to play it, most probably I will upgrade to a better EWI.
Which country will achieve the first crewed lunar landing of this millennium?
Which country will set up the first permanent moonbase?
Which country will achieve the first crewed martian landing?
Which county will set up the first permanent base on Mars?
etc.
I was surprised by how much progress in space China has made. They have a permanently inhabited space station. They are planning to achieve a crewed lunar landing by 2030. They are planning to complete a permanent moonbase by 2035.
I’ve launched many blogs over the years, but they were mostly a hobby and consistency was lacking. My goal is to change that now, by writing every day about some things that interest me while improving my skills in multiple languages.
It’s been roughly two months since I began and this is something that truly inspires me at the moment. Everyone can benefit from writing down and sharing one’s knowledge from time to time.
Has been over two months since I started to germinate spores on agar plates and am about ready to move to a fruiting chamber.
I'm writing a Go package to read them: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dolmen-go/sqlar/sqlarfs
So, I joined Toastmasters. Went along for a few taster sessions and signed up. Quite apart from improving my speaking skills it's actually a lot of fun. I'd recommend it.
We always intended to do it, but life and Covid got in the way, now the restrictions are gone we are spending as much time as we can on the slopes, we are fortunate enough to live "near" a large indoor ski slope with actual snow on it and there's a real online and offline community vibe around the venue.
Love the speed, the acceleration, braking, leaning, the sound and the smell of it and getting over that second-guessed fear of death every time I get the bike out.
Also love the dynamics, physics, maths of it and the skill and absolute attention it takes to control.
Actually my job is just a means to support my motorcycle addiction now.
Not sure why you got downvoted so much, everything you said you were doing is perfectly legal. I guess some people got their sensibilities triggered (pun intended) about 22 talk. If that's the case, they should probably grow up a bit.
Life has gotten in the way, so I haven’t been consistent with practice. Have also been procrastinated by jumping between books (Dominic O’Brien, Harry Lorayne, Nelson Dellis, others) trying to compare methods.
I’m recovering from a knee injury so I’ve had a rough time keeping my mind occupied without being online all of my waking hours. It’s been a ton of fun painting based off of famous impressionist works, pictures I’ve taken over the years, and from my imagination, and it’s definitely given me a fun new way of looking at the world!
I have recently started recording Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 2 using some DAW and orchestral instruments from my digital piano. It is not easy to make sound good, and a major undertaking since even the first part is 10 minutes long. But it is a fascinating process to me. I hope it turns out ok.
There are a few solutions which use tesseract type OCR and a few which are human assisted template based, but I figure with some linguistic clues it should be possible to automatically solve.
1. Improving my health / fitness.
2. Learning Korean.
3. Financial freedom through my business (currently growth has flattened...).
How about you?
Thanks for your interest!
I'm digging deeper into the architecture of those open source tools—how they work under-the-hood—and not only at the superficial surface (deploying the stack and tune some parameters).
It's been great so far! It has a lot of complexity and physicality, which I enjoy.
Some of the sickest, gnarliest grind metal music ever. Super creative, relentless drums, awesome production. Just so nasty. Trying to learn the album Pollinator on guitar at the moment. Guitar player has tabs posted on his instagram
Also building "drones". I create a glider and slap some propellors on it, then race it once a month in a local club.
I'm still wondering if I can process this data into something useful.
At this moment, I am feeling passionate about seeing my wife.
After that it would be robotics, navigation, space, underwater exploration, random stuff, I'd be a tinkerer, have a ranch somewhere
I'd have totally forgotten to post again, even though I also considered doing it at some point.
I feel like battlebit is laudable for getting 254 players in sync at a 60 tick rate
Leave contact info to beta test and explain why you'd be a great initial user. Limit 20 people.
Building a modular synth from scratch.
- Health & Fitness (lose your health and you have nothing)
- Electric scooters (so fun!)
- Hiking
- Reading more books
- Playing more Chess
- Keyboard layouts
- Baking
- Penny whistle
And I'm guessing first step here will be getting rid of scooter? :)
Only half joking here - health and two wheelers, especially ones with engine, does not combine greatly.
I know personally three people that had serious life changing accidents driving motorbikes, I was a witness to two serious crashes (guess who get out of them without a scratch - the one on bike or the one in car).
Even I had serious bike accident that damaged my health quite greatly. It may be just me getting older - but I seriously am afraid of using any kind of two wheeler in any traffic.
earth.fm is now at 700+ recordings
Please don't be so wreckless in your passion(s). And:
HODL
I have a heatpump, but why?! /s
None of the stable coins have gone through a full thorough audit done by a reputable company, thus it's safe to assume they are not fully 1:1 backed and thus it's a ticking time bomb.
30% interest rate sounds like a pyramid scheme. If something sounds like a scam, then it probably is a scam, since it's crypto, then it's most certainly a scam
Tokens should be viewed like stock. The team behind the token has a pool to fund their network / app. Different products in the decentralised finance space (DeFi) incentive usage by handing out their tokens (stock) to people who provide value to their product. In DeFi this is usually by becoming a liquidity provider (LP), providing your own assets to their protocol in return for a fee and incentives.
This makes logical sense for the team, because the most common metric for valuing an app is "total value locked" (TVL). The more TVL an app or network has, the more usage and value it has, which typically translates into increased value for their token.
There are way too many protocols to list. Checkout Velodrome as an example of a very high APY protocol https://app.velodrome.finance/liquidity?sort=apr&asc=false
Everything you described about LPs, TVL, and token value; you are just describing the mechanics of the ponzi scheme, not describing the way in which it isn't a ponzi scheme.
If you are getting "interest" over 20%, what you are doing is extracting that money (which isn't real until you turn it into fiat, btw) from the people in the future who lose money when the scheme inevitably crashes; they are transferring their future losses backward in time to you in the present.
That's fine as far as it goes, if you're aware of what's going on, ethically comfortable with it, and make sure to get out of the scheme early enough to not yourself be one of the people left without a chair when the music stops.
But from your comment, I think it seems like you aren't one of the people cynically taking advantage of the scheme, in which case, you are actually one of the marks.
It is simply not possible for a scheme that is above board to pay over 4x the prevailing global interest rate, without significant risk.
I’ve been in crypto for 13 years now, I’m sure any day now Bitcoin will hit 0 and you’ll be proven right, and all the yield farms and defi will collapse, sure sure.
I didn't say anything about Bitcoin. But yes, all those yield farming schemes that are paying double digit "risk-free interest" will eventually crash out and leave some set of people in the red. It has happened over and over again, it's just that new tokens get set up and re-start the cycle.
By the way, the point defi enthusiasts make about how that's just the same way interest in the "legacy" financial system works already is also true. The only difference is that the existing financial system takes its current interest payments out of future growth in real resources and productivity. And this is why double digit interest rates are extremely rare; because that rate of real growth is difficult or impossible to sustain for long.
But thus far, defi remains a closed purely financial loop, without creating any real non-financial growth, so it's all zero sum, just pitting current speculators against future ones.
You can't pay the rent or utilities with them, you can't pay with them at the store or anywhere else.
Meaning unless you can convert your random tokens - that are not accepted almost anywhere in the real world - to good old USD/fiat, you virtually have nothing.
That's the failure, smart contracts do not ensure you get real USD dollars out off the system, the ones normal people accept as legal tender.
What gives?
You can downright reject anything crypto currency related because it fails basic economic theory. There has never been a financial instrument that gives risk free 10-30% yields. No economy has ever grown at that rate. If it is a company what real products or real services does it provide? Where's the value add?
Exactly, there isnt, it's a plain old pyramid scheme hiding behind mumbo jumbo jargon that only impresses the mentally challenged.
Made this orrery a week ago: https://youtu.be/FGdjk5fY87s?si=t9nwZI8YXxy4Bi7D
And presently working on a world clock inspired by the xkcd 1335 commic.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a0fsV9Ektf3GVnP0Nqqn-Trw https://share.icloud.com/photos/029ulUc8TnmvZwqfb2OI5xgIw https://share.icloud.com/photos/052VuJUFynystXHS-qHBO3dJg
TLDR: Rewind the disease movie to see the inverse pathology; then create a forward universe implementation of the reverse universe inverse pathology. If this takes a patient to some H’ with distance(H0, H’) strictly less than the limit of detection, they are cured.
(for example, continued taking pills is detectable, so you have to actually fix the underlying issues so patients don’t need pills or ongoing treatment)
Thus, I propose the definition of “cure” vs “treatment” is a matter of *functional purity*
learning to design and build mechanical joints and stuff.
will need to learn welding asap.
I like to keep things nice and declarative.
2. Chess
3. Programming