hevi_jos

If you look at facebook, you see what people want other people to see. The pictures of good things,or beautiful places from travels, and so on, the only good stuff. The same with the anime.

This is not reality. Reality of friendship or anything in life like dating is good and bad combined. Sometimes is pain in the *ss to have a close friend or lover.

You probably want something that is perfect, and you idealize it from the distance. Friendship is not complicated, you just spend time with other people, not hard at all.

It is also a routine, you need to gain momentum, it will look hard to break you current routine(that is comfortable, what is called the "comfort zone"), but is not, write down an objective you want on paper and look it every day while doing a little every day to gain momentum.

How could I advice an stranger what hobbies should he adopt. I don't know you, your tastes, I do not know where you life, your country. This is your job.

in places like the US people is isolated by default, one way to improve is traveling to a country that is more social for a while like Spain, Argentina,or Brazil.

Youthful fun? Stop desiring what you don't have. I had fun when I was a kid but right now it is only memory. Only the present exist. And the past is not the future.

There are more important things in life than "fun", read "Man's Search for Meaning" of Victor Frankl.

You could have fun at any stage of your life, you don't need permission from others for that.

What usually happens is that what other people consider fun, is not fun for you and vice versa. I get pretty happy spending time in the Woods talking-discussing about philosophy with other people. Other people consider it boring.

US power distribution is way more distributed than in Europe, in which everything is planned and centralized.

In the US there are transformers everywhere, you can see a house and a small transformer nearby.

In Europe they have this big monsters that cost several million dollars and require a train to move.

In Europe transformers in the city use to be underground and you won't see anything but a blackout of power.

It happened in Madrid some years ago.

Old transformers are very toxic as mineral oil with aromatic rings is burned,which is carcinogenic. New transformers use Hexafluoride SHF6 that are smaller, innocuous and easier to control.

But it cost a lot of money to update your infrastructure.

New York also has experimental superconductor lines.

Persisting on working on something you don't want to do is extremely dangerous.

Thanks to Paulov conditioning you will be anchoring a bad experience to something you want to do. Linking a bad memory to work and reinforcing it with habit. Not good.

You can beat very weak procrastination with it. If the procrastination is serious(anxiety is great), you will be creating a strong trauma linked to work.

In fact you are probably referring to not crushing procrastination but reinforcing it increasing anxiety and going from avoidance(flight) to fight. This works(badly) and is the usual method of normal people for dealing with it, using deadlines(like frequent exams) as the tools that make them increase their anxiety.

A friend of mine had a very serious accident of his bike. He can't get on one without shaking and avoids them because of the trauma.

You will be doing the same thing with work, like the rat anticipating the electric shock, you will be anticipating the bad experience just by sitting down on your desk.

The anxiety those memories create will add procrastination to the already high level making impossible for you to work.

While you will be "in place", "at work", your thoughts will escape with fantasies evading work because the high levels of anxiety. Your productivity will be very bad.

Your linked page states that procrastination is voluntary, conscious, it is not.

Not procrastinating is in fact extremely easy, once you know how.

The book states that procrastination is caused by anxiety, and I agree. Perfectionism is just one way to create anxiety. Frustration, boredom, frustration are others.

We put off the task to avoid these negative emotions IN THE FUTURE. The definition of anxiety is anticipating something bad in the future, so we can avoid it.

Techniques like the Unschedule work extremely well for me and other people. Other things that work well is splitting the task into sub-task, writing everything down, recording the intensity of what you do.

You should never push against it. You will be fighting against yourself, if you push strong, so do your opponent.

Like with cancer, young people with cancer worsens much faster that old people, because cancer is stronger, your cells are stronger, because cancer if fighting against your own cells and body.

You should understand what creates anxiety, so you do not feel anxiety, so you do not procastinate.

My advice will be for you to take a notebook and start writing down what you feel and the thoughts that created those feelings.

More than understanding, it is a routine, we are used to think some way in a particular situation that makes us feeling some way, that loops again making us thinking, and feeling...

You have to change your routines, slowly, but without stopping and you will be able do materialize the great ideas you have in your mind.

One of the most important books I ever read, changed my life.

Procastination is created by anxiety emotion, if you want to get deeper it is easily explained in this animated movie:

https://archive.org/details/understandingstressesandstrains

Anxiety makes impossible for you to concentrate as it makes your attention to focus on the thread, like an herbivorous animal will stop eating for focusing on the lion.

It is an emotional block equivalent to pushing the brakes while the accelerator pedal. A car that could go to 200, will only go to 10. If you push harder, you break the car. If you know what procastination is,and know how not to block, you can at 200, and enjoy it!!

Anxiety is extremely useful for humans, this baby has none of it. Without the glass wall it will be a good idea that parents have it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSlrDi9So9w

Nowadays, the more relevant cause of anxiety is other humans, as we have exterminated most of the other predators, in circumstances like war. E.g Recently in Syria, you(or your family members) could die every single day, beheaded after being raped.

It in interesting that in the modern world, in peace, when most problems are not death threats, we increase the sensibility of anxiety making abstract things like not entering University, losing a job or a partner or just being humiliated while giving a speech or rejection, as "live threatening", causing procastination.

Probably you are just procrastinating. Procrastination has to do with anxiety emotion. Whatever creates anxiety, creates procrastination.

I have programmed for more than 20 years, but programming is never what I want. In fact it is an obstacle for getting what I want, like helping people.

You probably need real problems-challenges that you can solve.

I have created compilers because I needed it for something else. If I could get the same result with 0 programming I will do. In fact I proactively work to destroy programming in its current form in the future.

Programming is a dead end without something else as a goal. In fact, it creates a serious imbalance in your life: You spend most of your time thinking rationally(conscious mind), slowly,alone, static, in front of a computer(sit down?).

That is deeply abnormal for humans beings. We are designed for moving miles or kms each day, mostly use our subconscious mind(not thinking rationally)in a social way while hunting, fishing, collecting, making tools, pottery or clothing.

When you break the balance you don't need more of what created the imbalance in the first place. Spending your life only programming for me is the definition of a miserable life.

As I have to program, I will do whatever I can to restore the equilibrium, like going out each day, practicing a sport that requires coordination, meeting colleagues,friends and family regularly, meditating and never sitting down while in front of a computer(well I use a stool).

Hello Ralph.

It looks great but you should add some basic usage howto. It is obvious that you know how to use it, you created it, but other people do not.

The first time I used it it was very frustrating because I only created circle handlers, and said: This is sh*t!! Then I close the window and looked back at the sample image and saw square pointers, so I said: There must be some key that creates square pointers. After trying again I discover it creates square handlers by default.

This is the typical engineer mindset, after having spent years doing something they consider obvious what it is not.

Read "The Design of everyday things" for more design concepts if you are interested.

Innovation has always been trowing money in pipes dream, because by definition everything that does not exist is an idea, a dream.

Most ideas fail. The people that spend their lives doing something are the people that create worthy things in the end, because they learn from failures.

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." - Niels Bohr

There is this delusion coming from academics education that successful people are those that never fail. This is true in Academics, where all the knowledge is already known. But for a researcher or innovator you need to fail.

Even when most projects fail, those who do not gives enormous rewards.

In other news: After writing a program, developer finds bugs!!

With engineering problems are even worse than programming. you can expect setbacks on the field that you need to solve.

Those guys are working on solving those issues. This alone earns my respect.

Even if they fail, they will be taking more risks than those criticizing the project while doing nothing to improve the situation.

There is something called "Mindmaps", learn about it, it is very useful.

With mindmaps and using the "pause" button in a podcast you can take notes WHILE you listen or read that are minimal. The trick is that you do not need more than a few words-images-sounds in context to reconstruct all the podcast or video or book.

What is context? Imagine you have a screw and a piece with a hole on it. Where the screw goes? There is only one possibility. You do not need to store the info "where it goes". You can reconstruct it on real time.

With multiple elements interacting, reduction is enormous,in fact neurons work extracting connections of key elements. Take japanese "r, l sound", because the language does not make the distinction,a monolingual japanese could not differentiate between a "Ra" sound and "la" sound. The additional info is of no use so reural connections prune it.

You hear the additional info, but discharge it.

With context you could reduce information to remember more than two orders of magnitude(100-1000 times less).

What you do normally is forget most of what you hear. I believe re reading entire books or podcast is completely realistic if it is a good book that is important to you. There are not so many.

If you have read lots of books or podcast you know which ones are essential.

For me for example it could be "The C programming language" or "Structure and interpretation of computer programs". I have created a C and LISP compiler so those books are sacred. For Einstein, it was Newton's or Faraday's work.

I read books that I could reread 5 times and I learn something important and new every time. As I get deeper, I become a master that could understand concepts and ideas that myself as a novice could not grasp.

You use the words "benefit" an "umbrella" that are actually euphemisms for the military occupation of defeated countries after WWII.

A country does not benefit having another country occupying their land. Germany is the fourth manufacturer of weapons of the world, they do not need to be defended or protected like the world "umbrella" implies, they can do it on their own.

If the Germans-Europeans had to pay for all the cost involved in the occupation there will be no reason to have the US army on Europe's land.

Who cares about clock movements today?

When everybody has a GPS on their phone they have automatic synchronization with satellite atomic clocks. As a matter of fact there is redundancy with connection to cell towers and Internet that also syncs the clocks with atomic clocks.

What happens is that with tech advancement the main utility of clocks had disappeared like photography killed the utility of painters as recorders of visual information.

Photography created impressionism first, then cubism and ended in absurd paintings like "White over white"(empty canvas)selling for hundred of thousands of dollars, color dots for tens of millions and so on.

People selling clocks will do it for different reasons that in the past, like signaling that you have so much money you don't care about wasting it.

The most efficient way to read source code is not to read it. :-D

That means you have a very clear outcome of what do you want from the code. You spend the minimal amount of energy in order to understand the forest before you look at the trees, and you only spend time on the trees that you need.

What I do is not reading, I execute parts of the code,and debug it, so I get the "feeling" of what the code does before I know exactly how it does it.

In something moves like a dog, barks like a dog, eats and moves the tail like a dog....odds are it is a dog. Humans identify things by global behavior much better that painfully studying a hair or something.

There is code out there that is not worth reading, as it is so complex. Take for example Tex, it was created to be so efficient in old machines, that is almost impossible to read without expending a tremendous amount of time. But understanding how it behaves is easy.

I use my own visual tools to inspect and debug the code visually in a high level way, for example instead of just a number I can "see" a point, that is 3 coordinates, or a polygon that is tree points and a normal vector. Without these tools I would be seeing individual numbers(or nodes in a tree)having to reconstruct the whole using my mind(not good).

Those visual tools are created in a fast prototyping environment(dear imgui) with debugging scripts in order to see more globally.

When I was a kid I joined a crackers' group. With them I learned very strong programming.

I decided it would be a good idea using the computer as a tool to understand financial markets so I started creating programs to play with outcomes and probabilities ... something like generic programming we will call today in order to augment your human perception using lots of data.

It started as a game but soon I made over 400% benefit in the stock market that year(with very little money). It seemed at the time few people were doing that. That made me regretting it because from my point of view you can expect a 10% increase reasonable from real creation of value. Values much bigger than this means you have just taken money from those that do not have the tooling(the normal people who "invest" in the stock market, and lose). The big guys, called the "sharks", never loose.

That made me feel very bad inside, while I was making money in the outside.

On the other hand, it drove me absolutely crazy. Emotionally this tool magnified any bump in the stock market making myself constantly alert, even having problems sleeping as the thing will work even by night doing things like analyzing the Asian or US markets while in Europe they were closed.

Imagine something alerts you in the night with an alarm, so you can study it for the next day,it can be any day, at any hour... when you are young you do very stupid things. That kind of thing was a torture of totalitarian regimes and I had chosen to do it to myself voluntarily.

One day I decided to sell anything and to extract the hard drive and break it with a hammer so I could not recover the program if I changed my opinion later.

It was a great idea. It gave me peace of mind.

I believe you are forgetting something important: humans. You are focusing in technology without people.

Technology without people does not work. Specially in China: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png Most devices in China cheap enough are compromised as they are manufactured by the Government, the channel is compromised. The apps are compromised, social media is compromised.

You can trust no body but your family, as simple as that, not even your family as the Government can blackmail them.

>How did André do this, with no tool but a pencil?

And paper, paper is the most important thing here. It is the extended human memory. The short term memory of human beings is extremely sort.

I use paper with color marker pens all the time for programming. Nothing beats paper right now. For doing the same thing on computers you need expensive gear like Ipads pro or surfaces and the useful surface is minimal.

I could use several A4s(normal paper size in Europe), A3s(double that), A2s(4 times that) A1 and A0. I increase the resolution using fineliners. It cost nothing compared with expensive gear.

When you are done you take a high res picture for archival. You can replot it if necessary or wacht it on TVs.

I believe what this startup does is impressive:

Train a series of neural networks in order to provide buzzwords at a fast enough rate to trick actual people with more money that brain to give them money.

Getting almost 30 millions with just vaporware is always impressive. I won't be capable of doing anything similar myself.

Well, it is very simple: Linux expert users do not represent the user base that RHEL is interested in.

RHEL is interested about that one guy or woman that actually decides(to pay them) and has control of the company. This person wants control overall of what people do with (her company) computers.

Desktops like Gnome have a very limited set of options, great for companies. More stable, less problems, people focusing more on work to do at the company.

I used to program KDE widgets for things like displaying the tides, the lunar phases, sunset times and so on. It was a cool thing to do and useful if I wanted to go fishing or to the beach. Marginally useful for work.

Working you need something that works, with the least amount of work and money possible. KDE is not designed for that.

I was raised in Europe, my pencils were always blue like those:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Pencils_... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2r0Y8HUTeMI/UQVsbzQceKI/AAAAAAAAB5...

I was surprised the first time I saw a yellow pencil, like the IKEA ones.

It has nothing to do with democracies.

It has to do with slavery by debt. Something as old as Roman Empire. The Jews created a cyclic system of years, with one, the Shemittah, the Sabbatical year to free people from debt for this reason.

If you want to know how the West has been doing the same (or worse) for a long time you could read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", by John Perkins.

Creators love to create, thinkers love to think, programmers love to program.

Most people do NOT like creating(when they can use something already created by someone else without effort), programming or thinking(it is slow, takes effort and gratification is not instant) at all.

It is not a critic on most people, in fact I have seen people spending months of work for installing or compiling a custom Linux like gentoo just because they can. Thinking on problems that will probably be a dead end forever or programming things that would have been done cheaper, better and way faster manually.

That is the reason Steve Jobs succeeded, he made what people (most people)wanted. Instant gratification like music on iPods. Simple solutions to problems people have(simple install). Making sure creators could live from their professional work(simple payment system).

There is a talk somewhere when Steve Jobs talk about him realizing people really demand things like Trash TV.

When you sell products you see reality, Alan could only see the idealism of Academia.

It is not that people do not want to improve themselves. It is just that most people do not want to pay the price, in effort, in time or focus. Just look at the Ads on TV: Lose weight with no effort with product X, in no time, while you watch TV.

In Spain the Catholic Church created a series of banks for lending to poor people, and investing profit in social causes. I think the concept came from Italy.

Those banks were called "Cajas de ahorros". Most people had their money there instead of private Banks.

The concept worked very well for something like 200 years. Until politicians changed the law to control the Cajas themselves.

After politicians took control,they did things like private lending at 0 interest to their friends and party(they even lent to one of the biggest party 50 Million euro and then totally forgave the debt!!) or putting their almost illiterate friends as counselors.

It took only 15 years after that to totally bankrupt all cajas in Spain, and now they are owned by private banks.

I would use the simple term "martyrdom".

Christian martyrs made suffering the goal, because there was a reward for this suffering after life.

With startups doing whatever nobody has done before is going to involve suffering. No doubt about this, just study the lives of Eintein or Newton, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk and you see constant fighting and suffering.

In fact, if for creating value you must clearly suffer, odds are that less competence to do it than in areas that people identify with pleasure like singing, dancing, fishing or playing footbal. This lack of competence can make your life happier than most people in the middle and long term.

But it is easy to confuse the part with the whole and believe that just because we are suffering, we are creating something of value.

"class traitor"?? Raising taxes on middle class(while high classes pay almost nothing) in order to pay low class benefits is not being a traitor on high class.

It is being their best friend, specially when they were terrorized by the Great Depression. They also removed competition on those small business that could compete with the monsters. Two birds with one stone.

Theodore Roosevelt was someone who actually went against his benefits and privileges fighting against big lobbies. He had a hard time doing it.

Distraction is not new. We love doing things with instant gratification and anything of great value comes from deep work.

What it is new today is that people are fighting against a football team of Doctors in Psychology, experts manipulators that have sold their soul to the "Man", Google, Facebook... in order to enslave people following their primal impulses for the benefit of those Juggernauts, and the manipulators themselves, pretty happy to receive a fat check for their services.

The first thing you need to do in order to become free of their extensive web of control is to be conscious of their unfair game.

If you try to fight , alone, you will lose. Those guys know much more about you and humanity that you could ever grasp. Theoretically they hire experts in human behavior. In practice they know what thousands of millions of people do for real. They hold the emails, they have cameras and microphones on people's rooms, they follow your GPS signal on real time.

If you want to be a creator, free of distraction, the winning strategy is not to play. Use digital services that you pay and own, and associate with other creators because alone you are too weak.

Those founders would have learn a lot for next businesses in the future. The problem is that they did it with someone else's money.

It is a good idea letting people to fail early with the minimal amount of money possible.

That was exactly the idea of YCombinator. Experimenting before scaling could be cheap.

Lots of people, specially Chinese. They can spend 1000$ for the real thing because they know it is real.

They go to Europe or US to buy original products, not selfies sticks of course, because if the stick does not work that well is not important. But they buy medicines, they buy iphones, they even buy cars.

If someone believe that something as easy to replicate like a stick should make him extremely rich, then he is going to have to face reality.

>Can Apple afford to spend more per product?

Yeah, Apple has sucked almost all the profit of the Smartphone sector for a long time.

It is just one thing: volume. Their volume is so great and prices so high that they get almost all the profit. Their volume also gives them terrible negotiation power with suppliers, they get the best there it is(like electronics), for cheap. The rest of the companies just fight for the spoils.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/04/17/apple-grabs-86-of...

Samsung while being the best in the competition, but is is very far from Apple.