3,794 karma · joined March 4, 2009
[0]: https://craigmod.com/roden/091/#digital-reading-in-2024
Prev discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37171294
Grateful for YouTube and enthusiastic to pay for premium.
Wow, just realized it passed its 21st anniversary last month. A few iterations throughout the years, but the current form is basically 13-ish years old, regularly updated.
The Go templating of Hugo is extremely confusing for most non-Go people. After using it for years I still constantly look up how to do simple conditionals.
11ty is a very competent, "good enough" generator. We used it to build this site[1] for CERN back in 2019 from scratch over the course of a few days.
On "hygiene" — quoting from Clayton Chirstensen's "How Will You Measure Your Life?":
“Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices,” he writes. Critically, it turns out that compensation is also a hygiene factor (as opposed to a motivational factor): “You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.”
“If you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. *The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.*”
On motivation:
"Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth … The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance."
Many are perhaps realizing they may have decent "hygiene" in their work life, but "motivation" adjacent factors have been dragging, and continue to drag.
My gateway drug was ANSi art, and that whole scene. I made connections when I was 13 to folks who ran the groups, folks 6-10 years old that me, and was offered my first internship in the Bay Area through IRC. I drove across America in a beat up Honda Civic where the muffler fell off halfway there. But that was it: Through a bit of weird gumption and blocks of colored ascii, I was working at a design agency in Silicon Valley. Everything kinda barreled forward from there.
I think about this quite a bit: Unevenly distributed opportunity. There are a lot of smart, creative, emotionally intelligent folks stuck for lack of opportunity, and it seems like if you value GDP growth or general societal forward momentum on a whole, then maximizing access to those opportunity footholds should be a first-order priority of society.
Anyway, thanks IRC, and the folks who maintained / maintain it.
Typographically I found it interesting that the country was attempting to shift away from Cyrillic to a more romanized (??) written form; i.e., "Qazaqstan."
Almaty was surprisingly cosmopolitan, walkable, felt eminently livable.
Took the train to Baikonur. Walked on the launch pad, visited the old control rooms. [0]
The whole way: Kindness and gentleness were the two words that kept bouncing around my head. In the middle of nowhere folks were driving sensibly (as opposed to, say, in Morocco where I felt like every car ride was a dice roll). I saw two cars have an accident in Almaty — the drivers calmly stepped out, shook hands, and discussed the situation.
Nur-Sultan was, however, miserable — built for cars, human antagonistic, artificial layout, depressing architecture.
I'd love to get back to Almaty.
Hoping for swift and peaceful resolution on all this.
Also, yes, therapy, although this can be expensive. The difficulty in explaining therapy is that until you've committed to it, the benefits / aspect of it as a tool aren't super grokable. You may need to try out many therapists. They're essentially a pair-programming decompiler. You and this technician work to make sense of the machine code of your mind. Incidentally, therapy also helps realign friendships since you can use therapy to deconstruct personal / social / work issues, and use time with friends to build / elevate one another. Many folks misconstrue a friend who "listens" as a form of therapy; it's very much not. A good therapist will be a master pattern matcher, and will help you build habits to extract yourself from negative loops.
Speaking of negative loops: personally, I found removing alcohol from my diet to be one of the simplest and most profound overall quality-of-life upgrades. I wish I had done it sooner. (I did it around ~29.)
And don't worry too much about investing. Open a Schwab / Etrade account and put $100 in it. Just break the "investing seal." Treat it like a little savings account to start with. And then slowly add to your portfolio. The critical step is making the account. This will allow future decisions to flow more easily.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/10/fame-pres...