Founder of the Pathologically Small Faces, a loose association of individuals (a band, you could say) who are interested in the modern trend for the human skull to grow too small to contain the full set of 32 adult teeth.
I wish that I knew what I know now,
When my sutures were younger.
Can you be more specific? I wasn't sure if I'd got the idea across there but maybe it seems narcissistic/sycophantic anyway. I'm not married to the idea at all, but it is something that's occurred to me. Also not sure about Peterson himself recently, especially with the video on Trump's character leaving out anything about the bad business deals and Trump University stuff.
No I guess there must be some people for whom it isn't obvious. I was kind of assuming the intended audience for the advice was people who are interested enough in diet to look at a book on nutrition, for example, not people who just eat junk without thinking about it.
But yes for those people I do think the "eat food" thing should be emphasised and laid out in more detail, maybe. Hard for me to have an opinion there as I just can't put myself in the shoes of someone who eats that kind of stuff.
This advice has always come off as paternalistic to me, like the emphasis is on people just not being able to control themselves or something.
The first part is obvious.
The second part smuggles in a fundamentally incorrect take on the "eating too much"/obesity problem, namely that it has something to do with willpower: including "not too much" in the advice implies that we need to be told not to eat too much, but that a diet that naturally induces overeating is otherwise OK.
The third part is arbitrary and unfounded, and if you ignore it you can ignore the second part as well: get some good fatty meat on your plate and you can safely eat to satiety.
This is just wrong as far as I know. How are you defining complete nutrition and where did you get the idea that you can get it from an all-plant diet but not an all-meat one?
I've advocated something similar. Don't just describe the tool at a high level (people often seem to go into marketing mode) - tell the story of what problem it was designed to solve and the trade offs you made along the way. Makes it much easier to place the tool and available options/modes/etc in context and quickly decide whether it's a good fit for you.
No, there is actually a fascial connection that runs all the way from the tongue to the big toe I think. The idea is that tension or misconfiguration at one end of this connection could affect the other end. So in this case, maybe modern narrow footwear that causes the big toe to point inward has an effect on the tongue.
If you've ever tried walking long distances with even a slightly ill-fitting shoe, or carrying something of an awkward shape, you'll know the kind of thing I'm talking about - in order to function under load for long periods without incurring damage, everything kind of has to be coordinating perfectly. Maybe over months to years, especially in early development, confining the feet to an unnaturally-shaped space could have a measurable effect on oral posture.
(The relationship with tongue posture is possibly two-way - lack of chewing and/or proper tongue posture causes the upper jaw to develop narrower, which eventually prevents the tongue from adopting its ideal position suctioned to the roof of the mouth. The tongue not being there causes further narrowing and downswing.)
Haha, yeah I can see why it would sound like that if you haven't experienced similar issues. I would disagree on 99% of people not having tongue posture issues though. If you look at the structure of a lot of modern people's faces, we have an "adenoid" face - narrow, long midface, lack of pronounced cheekbones and eye support. The hypothesis is that chewing is an essential part of proper jaw development, and modern soft diets don't make us do enough of it.
Thanks for the comments. I wasn't expecting this to get on the front page (although that is why I posted it, obviously) and kind of wish I'd spent more time thinking about what I actually wanted to say first. If I'm 100% honest I was mostly trying to get clicks, which is always a bad motivation and I am generally deliberate about this kind of thing, sorry about that... I don't actually feel bitter, or particularly burnt out, with software specifically, it just feels like it's not the career for me at the moment. The general point about it often being misunderstood is something I've wanted to articulate at various times though.
It certainly wasn't meant to be dismissive, can see how it would come across like that though. I kind of rushed this post out, and really should have stopped to think more about what I wanted to say and how - wasn't expecting it to get on the front page. I don't even think "burnout" is the right topic for it, it probably just seemed like the closest title that would get some interest.
I had a similar-ish realisation recently when writing a business plan - having the ability to program felt like a massive advantage (for e.g. writing a dynamic cashflow forecast) but programming wasn't the main goal.
I think it applies to an extreme degree in programming - but probably in eng. & STEM fields generally as well. Something about having to care a lot about very small details, and especially when the big picture is not something you particularly care about. But yeah, I don't have any experience in other fields so maybe it's not that unique - I guess it was driven mostly by the experiences I've had with people not getting it, and being frustrated with me that I wouldn't "just work a well-paid coding job for 5 years".
To be honest I've just never really liked programming for work, and have felt kind of trapped in it as my only source of good money for a few years. So there's probably some bitterness there that I don't mean to offend anyone with. Even at what on paper seemed to be a great job - fully remote, annual retreats, great teammates, etc - I just couldn't resist the desire to work on something that was actually mine, in some fundamental way. So maybe "has no effect on the world" isn't the right way to put it - but that's how it feels. I guess it's in the sense of, if it wasn't me doing it, it would get done anyway, or something. And at all the companies I've worked at at least, my job as a programmer has been totally interchangeable with other people. I think my main skill as a programmer is writing really clear, solid code - line managers/clients have said this so it's not just my own bias - and you get a little kick of dopamine whenever you check some code in and someone goes "great!". But then they go "OK, now do that again, forever". The Jira tickets never end. You never get a big payout. That's been my experience anyway. Maybe having equity would significantly change the calculus.
That has certainly been a major aspect of it in the past - feeling like I don't have enough autonomy to decide on the best approaches etc - but I think now I probably have too much of a high-level "what are we actually doing here?" kind of uninterestedness for even that to make it work.
Maybe if we could go right to the bottom and start getting everyone to be a bit more computer literate, so the software didn't have to be so complicated, or something... I don't know.
Yeah, I think there's this idea of programming as something you 1) know how to do and then 2) can just sit at a computer and do some typing, and it happens. It's hard for outsiders to understand just how dependent it is on being engaged and in a position to direct your full mental attention to abstract problems for long periods.
I've often thought we're doing something fundamentally wrong by treating programming like any other office job, or even like a "production" type job like manufacturing. It's of course nothing like that - as you say, the mind doesn't have the same recharging characteristics as the body. I get the feeling people maybe compensate for it by having a lot of downtime in the day where they're kind of pretending to work, but I would find that maddening. I'm either working or I'm not, in which case I want to be free to do what I want without someone looking over my shoulder.
Yeah this sounds a lot like me. I find it hard to imagine what kind of personality _could_ tolerate a software job. Maybe some people are more amenable to accepting the company's mission as part of their identity, and can therefore find the inherent satisfaction of doing a good job. But yeah, I always found the meetings and coordination aspect to be quite taxing.
Yeah, it's probably a personality thing in large part. I find that the sense of my creative energy being wasted on something pointless disagrees with me so much that I'd rather do almost anything else (I actually find jobs to be a great source of inspiration in that way - ideas for better things to do keep springing to mind - although not great for productivity on the job).
I do think there are different types of "work" though, and the worse programming jobs have some of the worst combinations of attributes - inherently pointless but require intense mental effort.
Yeah, true. I learnt to avoid those pretty quickly thanks to my fairly disagreeable and risk-tolerant nature. Still had some not very good experiences though.
I think for me at least, the difference between "programming for fun/own projects" and "programming for work" goes deeper than the difference between say a company with neutral/bad values and a company you might be passionate about mission-wise. At the end of the day, as the software guy, your job still consists of:
1) taking instructions from someone else on exactly what to build, and how (choice of framework etc)
2) working backwards from someone else's code to figure out what they were thinking and how to modify it to the requirements/add a new feature/whatever
I got into programming because it was a great form of self-expression. I've had some great jobs that related to my interests, e.g. adding variants to Chess.com, but at the end of the day that was still someone else's project and I was just the guy they were getting to build it for them. The inherent satisfaction wasn't there. YMMV though obviously, but I like to use an art analogy: if you're a painter, you'll always be frustrated and demotivated painting portraits of people's pets -- even if it's for charity, or you like the person, or whatever.
Haha, that's actually something I've been doing for years as well. Had jaw issues from underdevelopment and premolar extractions since 2011. Only discovered that it was a known thing and started getting treatment in 2023 though.
Yes - basically I encountered all of the example situations on the page and knocked up the initial version in a day or so (originally for the "PHP API" scenario specifically). I did add some extra features like setting your own namespace/logging key and controlling visibility, but in the end they didn't really match the use case - "one person doing ad hoc debugging in an unfamiliar environment" - so I stripped them out.
I was thinking about the commit mask thing recently but imagining it as a part of Git, or an extension.The project I'm on at the moment is a big legacy codebase that requires a bunch of dev-only code changes for:
- functionality (setting API urls; forcing certain screens to appear; overriding config values that come back from an XHR)
- quality of life (skipping delays; turning sounds off)
It would be great to be able to toggle and mix and match these patches locally without risking committing them. A combination of stashes and branches kind of works, but the ergonomics isn't great, especially when there are conflicts.
I was wondering if that was a thing but no. It does have a little panel for more advanced operations and a toggle to invert them (roots, logs, exponents etc) but seemingly no reciprocal.
There was some interesting discussion around what data structures you should store at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40933110 (Engineering principles for building financial systems).
Yes! I was just thinking of this. My thinking started along the lines of tech workers getting together to apply for jobs, discussing who would be best for each role etc, so instead of each role getting 100 varying quality applications it gets just one reasonable application that the company can take or leave.
Then I made a couple of obvious leaps and realised I was quickly converging on existing ideas like unions, and then guilds.
Does anyone know why guilds stopped being a thing? One possibility that comes to mind is that having a third party (the guild) involved in the employer/employee relationship would make things awkward and it might eventually seem unnecessary as the relationship developed -- although this would be a pretense obviously, as the employee is ultimately disposable as far as the company is concerned.
Obviously unions are popular, but they don't seem to go very far in terms of being involved in the whole process of work -- deciding who is going to work where, what the terms will be, etc.