mckravchyk

I use React and Svelte for different projects. I keep things really simple and it's rare that I need to rely on an external runtime dependency (build tools are another thing), if something is relatively small I will code it myself. I have also built my own state management library (not open sourced yet) that is literally exactly what I wanted out of state management, so I don't need to rely on gazillion plugins to make something possible, I just code it myself.

One change to one item in the global store will fire up subscriptions for every single item in the store. I don't care how fast those comparison checks are thanks to Immutable.js, it's still a big waste of CPU.

It's the "caveman principle" [0] at work. We are still biologically pretty much the same. Hopefully, it means that something like Metaverse will never materialize or that it will take the emergence of a Matrix-like VR first.

[0] https://associationsnow.com/2013/04/how-the-future-of-associ...

Regarding the effortlessness, I think it completely depends on the stage of the practice. I can relate to that, sometimes I do strain myself too much only to discover an effortless flow sometimes. But I understand that without that extreme effort put prior, I would not get that effortless flow. It's like yin-yang to an extent. Of course, someone who's very experienced will probably find it all mostly effortless, but to get to that stage in the first place, intense effort is required. If I was in a very anti-Zen state, like being "in my head" / feeling disconnected from my body - which I still get quite often unfortunately, as I work 60h/week+... if I felt like that and I really lacked momentum and I decided to take the effortless way, I would just not get out of it. I would be drowning in my own thoughts. I have experienced that so many times as I experimented with it. Only intense effort and intense focus could help me break through a major lack of Zen-momentum. Sometimes when I do have Zen momentum, if I put good effort and focus very intensely during the time I reserve just for Zen practice, just taking a walk and dropping any effort and just trying to be subtly aware makes sense all out of the sudden. But it drops without prior intense practice, at least that's what I have noticed on myself. I do hope to get to the point where I could just "ring the bells", but I'm not there yet and I would warn anyone new to the practice to stay away from shortcuts or anything involving effortlessness. It's an easy trap to fall into in the beginning. I fell into it after the first 6 months, when I made very good progress, I started to wonder, woah, it could be all so effortless. What followed is that I started taking the regular practice less seriously, and before I noticed, I got into the "thinking that I'm aware" thing - that set me back for like one year or more. It took me a long time to realize what I was doing and then to fix that.

> We know that the right hemisphere has entirely non-verbal modes of thought and generally sees the whole without breaking things into pieces--we don't have to put together some mystical oneness, but just tune into those aspects of our own being.

Agreed and not agreed.

I don't see any mysticism in practice of Zen for instance in particular, but there's something mystical about just being a self-aware being I guess. It's just so normalized, we take it for granted, and the practice can uncover that. If you take it purely as psychology (which it is to great extent), you still somewhat have this rooted in the "world of ideas" and not the "absolute reality" that you perceive in the moment (at least as how it's taught in Zen for instance). I.e. like scientist could try to find what the consciousness is, but even if we do get a scientific definition for that, I would argue it's more important to find out what consciousness is at individual observer level - something that could only be perceived/experienced and not described.

Also with the practice itself, any idea can become a baggage - whether it is neuroscience or some Buddhist teachings. Like understanding how the right brain hemisphere works is of no importance to the practice, if for instance Zen practice is a lot about full body awareness, external awareness and being rooted in hara. I know that it changes neurons in my brain but I can't perceive that in my brain, I perceive that in the spatial awareness (which is generated by the brain - but that's just an information, just an idea that I comes to me, that I perceive), but it's important understand that those practices were developed by people who probably didn't even know the role of the thing inside the skull.

I do use some of psychology / neuroscience to aid my practice though. At the basic level I understand that everything is a habit and gets automated away, including any advances in the practice. I take quite an athletic approach to it. I also discovered that understanding of Pavlov triggers can be of aid when trying to integrate the practice into the daily life. I think that new methods and technology could be developed that would make Zen practice easier for instance.

So I agree that we have tremendous advantage now and this can improve further as technology develops. The knowledge can be as much of use, as it can be an obstacle - it just depends on how it's used.

Exactly. I do it whether I have to wait for something or not. 1 minute break every 15 or 30 minutes to do a micro-meditation / try to bring back awareness of my body. Sometimes I do ignore it if I get really deep though. You might think that losing 4 minutes every hour is a lot, but much more is lost when the mind is too overworked. And the brain is working in the background anyway - and some ideas and solutions pop out of the void - but if you open email, Hacker News - that background thread is closed and a new background thread, unrelated to work opens when you work. Context switching is very unproductive and costs a lot of energy too.

Reminds me of a remark made about Michael Jordan by one of his coaches in his "Relentless" book:

> For all of Michael’s amazing moves and unforgettable moments, he knew none of that could happen without the fundamentals. Those basic moves he had practiced over and over and over since he was a kid made everything else possible. He didn’t work on being flashy, he worked on being consistent, and he worked on it relentlessly. Cleaners don’t care about instant gratification; they invest in the long-term payoff.

I also recognize something Bruce Lee said about martial arts techniques, that the techniques that are pleasing to the eye are not very good, that the best stuff that works is boring and simple, and one has to develop that taste, not unlike developing a taste for wines.

I found the quote:

> “Some martial arts are very popular, real crowd pleasers, because they look good, have smooth techniques. but beware.They are like a wine that has been watered. A diluted wine is not a real wine, nto a good wine, hardly the genuine article. Some martial arts don’t look so good, but you know that they have a kick, a tang, a genuine taste. They are like olives. The taste may be strong and bittersweet. The flavour lasts. You cultivate a taste for them. NO one ever developed a taste for diluted wine”

In response to;

> The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity

I don't agree with your example by the way. There are many variables. For example, the former may be lazy and undisciplined with his life in general, but is faithful regardless for whatever reason (it's also easy to imagine that monk-like discipline is not necessarily always the only factor that keeps men in committed relationships from cheating). The latter may just consider polygamy as a lifestyle choice for a certain period of time but be very disciplined with his life nevertheless. It's not correct to derive assumptions about one's discipline purely based on the type of relationships one engages.

If you have been wondering how much data a uri hash can store. Firefox can handle up to 1M characters, Chromium much more. I did not test Safari and mobile browsers though. This game is at 12k encoded and is far from hitting the limit. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16247162/max-size-of-loc...

Complexity or not, it's incredibly useful. To me the development experience is just superior, you feel more in control. No one likes building the app only to see "Cannot read properties of undefined" and then needlessly scratching head what's wrong. I have done a large refactor recently and it was such a breeze, with TS pointing out pretty much everything that needs to be fixed to complete it. Coding new features and sometimes it just works after the first build. TS is obviously the inevitable future since it offloads the stuff that the computer can do better and frees up the mental energy for the more creative stuff. The code is also more readable, when the types mean something there's less need for describing function parameters for instance, since you have a complete type definition of what that param represents and any comments made on those types are re-usable across functions.

I agree that there's much more type wrangling when developing a library vs. typing regular app code. I don't mind it all though.

I'm looking to develop a self-hosted, open source Node.js web app mainly to upgrade my resume (as well as to scratch an itch). I considered SQLite to be the perfect choice - the software will be mostly used locally in a single user setup, so that saves RAM and even if someone wanted to host it for many users it would still be able to handle a lot. Plus, the package will be so much more portable, with SQLite it can be distributed via npm install, rather than a Docker image. I initially wanted to use one of the "real" databases concerned that an interviewer may look down on it, but decided to scratch that idea and use the right tool for the job. Your comment makes me reconsider that choice. I think I will do SQLite anyway, because it's something I want to use myself and I also will be applying as a front-end, rather than full-stack.

Wouldn't it be at a big risk of being destroyed by a meteorite ?

Surely that's a good point and it would definitely help, but just because something is open source does not necessarily mean that it will stay alive in the way you describe it - especially redesign or new features. Patches is the best the user of an abandoned app could hope for.

My point was mainly in the context of Electron desktop apps, an abandoned, proprietary Electron app would probably run for at least 5 years * without touching it after it's abandoned. Further from that point patching it so it works would not be that hard. On the other hand I imagine an unmaintained C++ desktop app could decay pretty fast if it depends on some external lib so here a proprietary app could indeed be very hard or next to impossible to patch.

* I did not consider security patches though, if an Electron app processes potentially untrusted third party files and / or connects to external services, it may require security patches and that would be also hard / impossible to patch, I agree here - though updating its Electron binary could go a long way with security, which is not that hard.

Edit: Ok, I guess there may be issues with Electron too. If Electron binary is kept up to date, Electron deprecates some APIs regularly and that could break it. So it's either that or running a very old Electron instance - which may or may not be fine, depending on the app and how it's used.

> Except I can still use discontinued open source software like Atom.

The same thing can be said about desktop proprietary software, so long as it does not rely on a cloud service to function.

> Try installing an older version of an app on an old iPhone. The app store won't let you. You might be able to jailbreak the phone and track down an older version of the app, but it's a pain and Apple makes it as difficult as they can for you instead of just letting you download the version you want from their store.

iOS is an extreme situation, but we are talking about desktop apps here, desktop OSes don't have these kinds of restrictions.

That said, open source have this edge that if it's just too obsolete for the dependencies, you can hope someone would patch it if it's popular enough. It would be harder to patch a proprietary app. That may not matter as much in the context of Electron apps as the web platform is pretty stable. Not sure about the Java thing Jetbrains IDEs are running on though.

I think the biggest danger here is that you can severely underestimate the time needed to complete it, both in terms of the learning curve and of how much the project itself may be worth. The project may take 2x just because of the learning curve and needing to build scaffolding you would otherwise have, so unless it's super niche you may consider using a lower hourly rate to account for the learning curve - or don't, because you will probably underestimate it anyway.

I don't think I would do it without making a related side project first where there's no time pressure and can pause anytime - and I don't really care if it takes 300h or 900h because it's a side project. I don't even have to finish it.

Once you exceed it some of the content will go to swap, which is going to slow down the system (and wear an ssd faster). 400MB is not that much though, for me Code usually takes at least 1.5GB RAM.

Somewhere out there, there could be people making 300k/year, responsible for Youtube "continue watching?" modal not hiding when you press Space to unpause the video. It's been like that for years.