946 karma · joined May 2, 2017
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Restraining myself to join in with just a single recommendation - Jan Jelinek's 'Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records' is the record I always post on these kind of threads and it always seems to land well with this crowd. It is probably my favourite example of the genre, and the production is so textured and the instrumentation has so many subtle aspects, it holds up very well to multiple listens.
Alright, two recommendations - the first time I clocked a 14+HR session was when I was listening through Skinshape's discography (comfy, catchy, mellow indie)
From that page:
> We prefer to use 0.0.0.0, which is defined as a non-routable meta-address used to designate an invalid, unknown, or non applicable target.
> Using 0.0.0.0 is empirically faster, possibly because there's no wait for a timeout resolution. It also does not interfere with a web server that may be running on the local PC.
Walking and talking are pretty ancient ways of taking stock and finding new perspectives. Talk to people outside your usual age range and social class. Get out into nature. These things usually help in ways I can't explain very well, but I find them vital to sustainably integrating who I am in here with where I am in the world. In my experience, major health crises of the mental kind tend to be down to this.
I would be very keen to read an essay on the same subject too. I'd also like to write one, although I suspect my attempt might not be to the same standard.
A commendable way to spend the remaining 40 minutes is to reflect on becoming so brave in the face of failure - of being wrong - that you seem almost foolhardy to others. Ideally, you want to be really quite wrong about many different things in myriad interesting ways.
How else are we supposed to manage the explore/exploit trade-off in the face of this galactic amount of information?
While the payoff of learning old > new is typically much higher (search: Taleb Lindy effect), I think matching your learning to the 'human api' is more important. For me, learning is very emotional: when I feel a sense of curiosity and intrinsic drive to know, I'll follow my nose, spend my time where it takes me. I want to spend this kind of energy in a certain way.
When I find myself with an instrumental cause or external need to know, it's most likely going to be because it's something typical, something old, in which case learning about it and being useful with it will require less of my spirit and drive to crack.
New language/tech fanatics tend to pressure through both sources (a la "look at our ingenious design breaking paradigms" and "it's so good your boss will want you to work in it (well, soon)"). Often the former argument is stronger, so it appeals to your curiosity - in which case you're best off searching for the useful kernel, followed by a swift exit in order to preserve your sense of discernment. Should you return there, provoked by your general interest, that ought to be your indicator of importance. How hyped you felt that one afternoon you learned about it after reading HN comments is likely not.
On the other hand, the 'should learn' brigade will tend to target the latter source of pressure (employability & centrality). If you find yourself feeling resistant to this and force yourself into it anyway, you'll easily burn out and douse your curiousity for the day. I've arranged learning resources to languages I find fundamentally dull multiple times, and made only very shallow dives into them.
When choosing what to learn, your built-in heuristics will tend to serve you much better than either a long list of common 'shoulds' or a tangle of overhyped 'musts'. Let natural forces do their thing in shaping what things will be presented to you: avoid paying much attention to the loud people where marketing, shills and zealots tend to roam.
My current approach is simply to have a notes folder with the title of a man page as the filename, I put a 'tl;dr', common commands section, and write down any quirks or complexities you only tend to remember when you've just been digging through things - am working on something better at the moment.
As for the thread, a very straightforward quote:
~
So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.
I'm quick to defend the belief at a 'meta level'. It seems good to pretend we each can make a difference, in the same way it's useful to pretend free will exists: if you act 'as if' such a thing is true, then you avoid the outcome of acting as if it is false, one that seems to me utterly terrible - 'you could have made a difference, but you chose not to'.
I'd rather bring important but optimistic goals down a peg than abandon them - thinking I may as well leave things up to Moloch [2] leads me to despair.
[1] https://www.restarters.net/about [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
If the latter, it could well be perfectionism getting in the way (shoddy existing work doesn't discount this possibility). Encourage 'iterated failures at any old sub-problem' perhaps? It's the only way I know how to deal with all three of those problems myself.
When I was starting out with small-ish programs, IDEs gave me performance anxiety. So I'd write in bits and pieces in Evernote or notepad, converting plain descriptions into code, and only merge it all into a single file ready for execution right at the end.
I'm a dropout from a great Philosophy course: I had pre-existing problems with substance abuse, and addiction vendors like Reddit and YouTube allowed me to pour away my attention in a similar way when the coursework load (and my stress) increased. Smartphones provide yet another vector for existing psychopathologies to play themselves out.
This vindictive industry damages social cohesion and changes destinies. I now sell second-hand phones in a major UK city, and my experience is that surveillance capitalism/the digital addiction industry is cleaving out a new underclass from the working class: as a child, your membership is determined by whether or not your parents are addicted to smartphones.
First off, many of the resources are written and submitted by people who have no place teaching others - and are writing almost purely to self-promote and have something to show to employers.
Second, even if some of the resources in there are of decently high quality, the probable best schema for how to use and integrate that resource is going to be bound up in a textbook written by Someone Very Important. Along with all the stuff you really need to know anyway.
Scrap that, three reasons. Finding and aggregating these kind of links for your personal use is of value: it develops your taste and sense of what resources to veto, and what to collect, and is a meta-skill applicable everywhere you have a search engine and some curiosity.
In '17 and early '18 I wasted hundreds and hundreds of hours collecting "the perfect" set of bookmarks for various things I want to learn, and my collection method has basically been to scrape these kinds of lists and apply a surface-level "ooh sounds cool" filter to what I pick up. Obviously, I learned very little doing this, and almost never open such links except as part of a half-hour flight of fancy.
Perhaps if you're of intermediate/expert-level, these factors aren't that important to you - if a couple of links are handy they've served their purpose. But you're probably not going to star the repo. It's mostly thousands of perma-beginners who should be opening textbooks and playing with fundamentals in a REPL who are starring this stuff.
I'm actually quite sure you have something interesting to contribute, but please, politeness is important here.
I'd add mental health/anxiety issues as another reason to avoid it. It can be a fine cognitive enhancer - but caffeine as a crutch will give you a limp.