Agree. My personal take on this is a boring one: Like all things, it's a balance.
I'm introspective by nature (I'm sure many of us on this site are) and metacognition can be a very comfortable trap. It's a space where you can convince yourself that you can solve your life problems by spending enough time and effort thinking about them, the same way many of us approach engineering problems or other aspects of life. This is even worse in the era of AI, where you can have a helpful assistant to talk through your problems with and encourage analysis even further.
Turns out that's not true. You can spend as much time as you want thinking about your life, circumstances, emotions, experiences, etc. Eventually, you'll have to actually do something and go have some contact with reality.
It's helpful to examine your life and engage with your problems, but taking it too far is just another way of escapism. At least it was for me, YMMV.
When postmodernists describe language as referential and arbitrary, they are moving headlong toward nihilism when an "uh oh" borne of caution and self-awareness is in order. Language comes from the human need to communicate, which need none of us can erase; and to be aware of this is a step toward proper humility in the face of our contingency as beings. "Melancholy" and disaffection are likely outcomes if instead you cling too hard to egotism and insist on seeing yourself as a utopian reshaper of entire worlds.
Ok, ill tell you some of the funny parts... I've kinda enjoyed keeping the "secret" for long enough.
My aggregator is actually a giant grease monkey script. Grease monkey can just do xml requests cross domain. HTML is great for creating links that open in the browser and I don't want to be alt tapping from one window to the other. This also makes me uninterested in the <description> element which consumes a huge amount of space. I'm really discarding everything except [the pubDate, the headline, a link to the content chopped into the [sub] domain, and the rest of the path] It's a giant date sorted array of arrays. New entries are pushed into a temp array from which they are pop'ed and spliced into the right spot in the big one. I usually keep 5000 entries (2000 is enough tho) so nr 5001 is removed.
It stays small data that way! I can periodically post it to some simple php script that turns it into a static html document. If the oldest result is newer than the newest from the previous dump it dumps it again.
Every 20 seconds the table on the page is replaced with the updated results. I had it in real time but it moves to much to read and click on things. No need to preserve any dom, dom manipulation is slow, just feed a whole new table into the page as a string.
XHR requests must be async which is a terrible technology. You don't know how many responses you are going to get per second. It has some relationship with the number of requests you make but making a lot of requests there is no way to avoid receiving a lot simultaneously which, if you try do anything with the response text, freezes the browser. There is no time to do more than push them into an array.
Then I use a setInterval to parse them, how many depends on how far behind the parser is. setInterval delays if the browser is busy, parsing can be far behind. If it is to far behind the number of requests per second is dialed down.
Probably the funniest part is the parser
It starts with a regex exec in a do{}while() loop. It looks for things that look like pubDates, it compares up to 3 time stamps with the oldest pubDate in my result set. Most feeds never make it beyond that point.
Then it tries to parse the feed by the rules. It looks for the string <item>, if it finds that it looks for <title> etc
Lots of feeds are hilariously broken and invalid so I have an arsenal of alternative approaches in the correct order of likelyhood.
The funniest moment was when someone deleted their feed and redirected it to the website front page.... but I never noticed it. It tried to parse the "feed" in all ways it could and as a last resort looked for <a href=""> elements. Because it also couldn't find a pubDate of any kind, nothing that looked like a date, it took the /2023/01/03 part of the url and made a time stamp from that, inserted it into the result set and happily continued.
Feeds that are slow get suspended, lvl 1 is 24 hours, level 5 is a week, 5 weeks is the limit. I might try them again after a few more months.
In monitor mode each function has it's own tiny log window. The log() function is normally empty, modern js skips it efficiently regardless what kind of complex params are set.
At times I have benchmarking things inthere so that it choses the fastest approach automatically.
It can consume opml (any number pretty much) but I prefer using flat lists of feed urls.
Apart from the (optional) dumps the backend is just static files.
This is a greassemonkey script, it detects feeds linked in the web pages you visit, displays an edit box with the feeds it found and it lets you export the list as an opml file.
The web pages you visit are actually amazingly interesting to you personally. Much more so than one would expect. Unsubbing the garbage goes much faster than finding interesting feeds manually one by one. If there is a lot of garbage it is because you've visited to many garbage websites. It's funny to reflect on.
Intelligence is manifested by the quality and timeliness of decisions. Talking has always been a faux demonstration of actual intelligence, for man or machine.
This idea of a 'small brain buffer' is why I love writing small atomic notes in wikis [1]. It lets me break problems down into simple pieces that I can later assemble upward in abstraction, rather than try to hold complex ideas in my head and compile them together in one big document. The buffer waxes and wanes, and I need to be able to adapt my writing process so I'm productive no matter where it is at the moment.
Skinner, “Intellectual self-management in old age”:
> You can be fully rested in a physical sense yet tired of what you are doing intellectually. To take appropriate steps one needs some measure of fatigue. Curiously enough, Adolf Hitler can be of help. In a report to the Nieman Foundation, William Lederer has called attention to relevant documents in the Harvard library. Toward the end of the Second World War, Hitler asked the few social scientists left in Germany to find out why people made bad decisions. When they reported that it was when they were mentally exhausted, he asked them for a list of the signs 'of mental fatigue. Then he issued an order: Any officer showing signs of mental fatigue should immediately be sent on vacation. Fortunately for the world, he did not apply the order to himself. Among the signs on Hitler's list are several I find helpful. One is an unusual use of profanity or blasphemy. According to that principle, at least two of our recent presidents must have been mentally exhausted. When I find myself saying "damn," I know it is time to relax. (That mild expletive is a sign of my age as well as of my fatigue; I have never felt right about the scatological language of young people.) Other signs on Hitler's list include an inclination to blame others for mistakes, procrastinating on making decisions, an inclination to work longer hours than normally, an inclination to feel sorry for oneself, a reluctance to take exercise and relax, and dietary extremes—-either gluttonous appetite or almost none at all. Clues not on Hitler's list that I have found useful are especially bad handwriting and mistakes in playing the piano.
I have to give it to Unsong, but that's a hell of a long favorite. My favorite bit in Unsong is the chapter where God gives an answer to the problem of evil, but there are so many other good bits in there too.
Meditations on Moloch is fantastic for sure. I also really love Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person. Oh, and Idol Words, a more recent one that I really liked.
I like Scott best when he's doing that particular weird brand of fiction he does, where he mixes sci-fi and philosophy and religion and kinda mashes them into a cool new thing. Unsong is the longest example of course but he's released lots of cool little one offs in that vein through the years.
For many years I recommended everyone on my team (that was interested in retooling their brain in a more functional way) read "The Little Schemer". My only caveat is that they read it without touching a computer. Like... read it on an airplane. While I had no interest in using Scheme/Racket/Lisp for actual work, I found that it brought so much simplicity to my thinking.
> Hey CM30, I feel you are using too much internet.
> It could be that this is what you need. Disconnect.
I can second all of this.
I feel like I'm seeing more people fall into the internet trap, wherein they slowly slide into a chronically offline lifestyle and lose touch with the real world.
Eventually, they surround themselves with more and more chronically online people who are in a similar bubble, making their situation feel common or normal.
As this all slowly consumes their time outside of work, they begin to unintentionally withdraw from real-world friends and activities. The constant strain of processing the worlds' news and social media drama leaves them too exhausted to go anywhere, but while at home the easiest thing they can do is reach for more social media comfort (I include HN in that social media definition, as we're here socializing in the comments).
It is possible to break the cycle, but it takes a bit of a push to get it started. Simply forcing yourself to reach out to old friends or go somewhere to socialize and pick up a new hobby is an easy first step. Or just set a goal to step outside for 30 minutes each day to do anything that isn't related to work or being online.
There is a feature I am not sure enough people know about that makes this slightly better.
On Firefox you can add tags (ctrl D to bookmark plus comma separated tags). If you then type the tag in the search bar it will show all the bookmarks with that tag.
I found it incredibly useful to find bookmarks, instead of a polluted bookmarks bar or a strictly organized tree of bookmarks.
I love selfhosting. Right now I have this in my personal docker-compose.yaml: NextCould (3 installs, each their own MariaDB instance), HomeAssistant, Mosquitto, Vaultwarden, an Nginx served static website, Unifi controller, nzbget, Samba, librespeed, Wireguard, 4 MineCraft servers, AdGuard home, FoundryVTT and Traefik as reverse proxy for https (it's all 1 yaml file, everything! At least, excluding the HA config etc). All on a 16 GB RAM, corei3 based server. Home Assistant tells me it is consuming about 30 W right now (and generally stays between 30-35W). That's about 70 eur a year for multi-terabyte personal cloud, and docker-compose makes managing it very easy (docker-compose pull, docker-compose up -d). Over the past 2 years I had only one issue (I had to pin Mariadb to 10.5 or NextCloud complains).
Oh, the initial costs are of course quite high, including all disks I'd say about 1000 eur, so it's quite the hobby (I have a nice Fujitsu motherboard (3 y/o) and Fractal Design case (12 y/o), it saw 3 builds now, I started with a super cheap atom based board, then a Pentium dual core, and now the corei3 system that can handle a lot more disks, the nvme root drive makes it so fast.) I wonder about my next system. I also have a corei3 based Nuc (as htpc) and that thing is also very fast, silent and energy efficient. And it has nice and fast external I/O. Not sure yet, but my current system will last at least another 5 years.
My father has a Synology NAS and for some time I thought that would be my next system because I'd get tired of the associated sys-admin tasks at some point (I started with a Gentoo system and there were no containers, meaning you have to set up php-fpm, then mariadb, then download Next(Own)Cloud, then update it regularly, pff and the migrations to other systems...). But docker-compose really changed that for me, I think the Synology would be more work.
Btw, a nice podcast on Selfhosting where I got a lot of inspiration from: [0]
10 years ago flux inspired me to start down this path as well.
All the lights in our house automatically lower their color temperature and brightness at sunset every 15 minutes from 5000k to 2700k and 100% to 10%. SmartThings and the community created Circadian Daylight Coordinator have made this pretty straight forward to accomplish.
I don't have data, but anecdotally I can say it makes an appreciable difference in overall comfort.
There are three undisputed independent developments of writing: Sumerian, Mayan, and Chinese. Egyptian may or may not have been influenced by Sumerian; Indus Valley Script may or may not be writing; and Andean quipus (essentially knotted strings) raises interesting questions about what writing even is. All other (known) writing systems developed out of knowledge of these priors.
The development of writing systems seems to be pretty clear, especially because we can use Sequoyah's documented development of Cherokee script as a check. Writing seems to start as logographic: each character starts out as representing a word, often as a stylized representation of that word (for example, draw an eye to represent the word 'eye'). To represent words that don't have easy representation, a rebus system develops: you use homophonic puns (so an eye might also stand for 'I'). This lends itself to a simplification to a syllabic representation, one word for each possible syllable. And usually, it stops there (although note that 'syllable' usually comes out in writing as a consonant-vowel pair, rather than a full syllable).
It's with the Semitic languages that things took an interesting turn. Semitic languages have an interesting feature in that you can get most of the sense of a word even if you drop the vowels. And the writing ended up switching from consonant-vowel pairs to just consonants (what we now call an 'abjad'). Greek opted to adapt this by adding letters for vowels and formed the first 'true alphabet'. Sanskrit opted instead to use reliable markings on consonants to make an 'abugida'.
Chinese never developed their logographic system into a syllabary, although this was probably partially driven by the fact that Chinese itself had most of its words become monosyllabic at the same time. Japanese did continue Chinese script into two full syllabaries.
Korean is the other independent invention of an alphabet: Hangul. Although Hangul is arranged as a succession of blocks representing full syllables, so it can also be viewed as a systemic construction of a syllabary rather than an alphabet.
I mentioned Sequoyah's development of Cherokee script: he knew of writing from the Americans at the time, and even had access to a Bible (although he couldn't read it at all). And his own documentation of his development does expressly indicate that he started trying to build a logography, realized that there were too many symbols that had to be created, and instead simplified it into a syllabary, which was much more conservative in its character count. (And the influence of several character shapes came from that Bible, which is why Cherokee script looks like someone started with Latin script but had no idea had it worked--here is its character set: ᎠᎡᎢᎣᎤᎥᎦᎧᎨᎩᎪᎫᎬᎭᎮᎯᎰᎱᎲᎳᎴᎵᎶᎷᎸᎹᎺᎻᎼᎽᎾᎿᏀᏁᏂᏃᏄᏅᏆᏇᏈᏉᏊᏋᏌᏍᏎᏏᏐᏑᏒᏓᏔᏕᏖᏗᏘᏙᏚᏛᏜᏝᏞᏟᏠᏡᏢᏣᏤᏥᏦᏧᏨᏩᏪᏫᏬᏭᏮᏯᏰᏱᏲᏳᏴᏵᏸᏹᏺᏻᏼᏽ)
Best not let any linguists hear you say "representing concepts to representing sounds". All languages represent sounds as far as I've ever heard from them, and the idea of "representing concepts" is regarded as a remnant of some very broken ideas. :-)
As far as I (a non-linguist, although I've read a bit) know, there are roughly three ways of writing: alphabets, syllabaries, and whatever Chinese is (logosyllabic?).
Alphabets have one grapheme per (roughly) phoneme and have(AFAIK) developed once: Proto-Siniatic, which led to Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.), Phoenician (which developed into Greek, Latin, etc.) and a few others. Every other alphabet is a direct or indirect descendant. They typically have <50 graphemes.
Chinese is kinda-sorta syllabic, but the language has a great many one syllable words which have a grapheme mapped directly to that use. On the other hand there's things like "coral" (IIRC) which is two syllables and is written with two characters each of which are not used anywhere else. It, its descendants, and any other similar languages if there are any, has some many thousands of graphemes.
Syllabaries have one grapheme per syllable and are the most common form of writing, to the extent that it's pretty clear that they're the normal version of human writing. They typically have a few hundred graphemes.
Mayan and cuneiform are a couple of weird cases. They (AFAIK) are mostly syllabic, but with some logographic-ish parts like Chinese. But the number of graphemes are pretty firmly in the syllabary range.
Tl;dr: Writing is weird and the writing I'm doing now is very much so.
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girifriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers" and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them
any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
I've always kept a text file or spreadsheet of things to do, priorities, etc... My biggest problem isn't keeping a list and getting organized, it's remembering to look at my list. I tend to space out for days working on a problem and forget to look at my list.
I've experienced a big productivity boost by using the desktop background of my 43" monitor as a whiteboard (blackboard actually). I have an jpg the size of my monitor that I jot things down on as text on the image. I can store meaningful small images the trigger my memory to do something. I've become so used to visually thinking about what I'm doing that I switched my text file todo list to markdown so I could store images in it.
It's surprisingly quick to keep my large jpg open in paint and jot or paste things to it and then reset it as the desktop background. I learned later this is called a "vision board"
Still, I'm so bad at spacing out that I need more than looking at my vision board monitor all day, so I use the Windows system scheduler to bring up a daily, weekly and monthly html file that reminds me to do things.
To retain knowledge and my considerations for my future self and teammembers I create a document before each major task and update it during the task. The headings are: Goal (why are we doing this), Crux (what is the most important consideration, what will make the biggest difference), Current situation (where are we now), Steps (what needs to be done or what is done to reach the goal. The steps can contain specific details on how to get the step done) and Learnings (what did we learn, what are key insights). The files are named YYYY MM DD Taskname. Looking at the directory gives a sense of history. It’s a delight to find a document like this when doing the same task a year later. It also helps to delegate tasks to other teammembers.
I had the exact same problem. Even all the http servers had a lot of .net boilerplate to get started. A lot of that should be abstracted. I built an http server library that abstracts the .net parts. https://wiz.run/
The hello world server:
open Wiz.Server
open Wiz.Context
open Wiz.Route
let myHandler ctx =
ctx |> sendText "Abra Kadabra Kalamazoo!"
let myRoutes = [
get "/" myHandler
]
genServer()
|> setRoutes myRoutes
|> run
Focusing on the data and getting everything into 1 happy schema can eliminate problems you didn't even know you were allowed to disregard.
Success with these efforts is unlikely in larger teams. You need to put the most wizened chef in your data modeling kitchen and have them serve the business stakeholders until they are leaving 5/5 reviews on yelp. Design of schemas by committee is how you wind up with N of them and up to N^2 bullshit protocol/mapping/service layers for communicating between them.
You can iterate this problem space with Microsoft Excel. You do not need to write any code to figure out the most difficult part of most software products.
- my desktop has today's and yesterday's working files, everything else is auto-cleaned (you may want 5 or 7 days depending on nature of file work)
- when i need something, I "lookup around that date in my stack" because I find it easier to find things by time than by trying to re-imagine what I'd named it.
- when working somewhere where i create more content then I consume, I group by weeks not months: "archive/yyyy-ww/file" (given ~520 folders per decade, you may, or may not, want "archive/yyyy/yyyy-ww/file" depending on your file system's speed at iterating dirs)
- turn week numbers on your calendar, and you can directly open any folder for any week you did stuff.
- no brain power needed!
More about usage:
Method works beautifully even if you prefer topical folders like project-name or finances or whatever, and computer search is fast/easy at still showing you everything made in a given month no matter what folder it's in.
Seeing files by when made visually 'bundles' files made around the same time (e.g. several days' or weeks' work on the same project). Update dates for new versions and a find by name for the rest of the file name will show you all the versions you have, sorted.
This is infinitely superior to the standard workplace practice of "Title Whatever v3 (tim edits B) jfk (copy).doc".
Thanks to the date prefixed name, if I email files, backup/restore them, or otherwise round trip them to some other file system (looking at you, most NAS, SANs, and object stores), I don't lose the metadata of when created, meaning I can still sort round tripped files by name reversed and see files by recency or clustered by when made.
If I can't find by looking around the date, I can always fiddle with search to find things.
I now get unhappy any time a file doesn't start with a date.
Pro-tips: Apple Shortcuts supports ISO 8601 by name for dates and time. On MacOS I use Hazel to maintain this w/o touching it: https://www.noodlesoft.com ... On Windows I use powershell, Linux perl.
The one thing you should understand is the average programmer is not a good programmer.
The reason is simple.
The average programmer is a newbie with little to no experience.
It's like a pyramid or a triangle. There's more area or volume at the bottom than at the top.
Every year, more new people arrive at the scene.
New programmers are easily fooled by "shiny" objects.
So, whatever place you join, there's a high likely hood that the culture at the place is dominated by what is considered popular, with little to no regard to what actually works well.
It's different at each place, but almost every company I've been too has things setup in a way that's very painful and frustrating to work with. Every thing takes many steps. "Compiling" javascript takes 3 minutes. "Hot Module Reloading" takes 30 seconds and refreshes the page 5 times. You have to jump between 4 different repositories to fix a small bug. etc etc etc.
If you are experienced and notice that things at your company are broken, you either try to advocate for fixing things or just leave out of desparation. So the organizational culture continues to be dominated by people with very little experience.
If you are not experienced, you may just think that the "suck" you have to deal with on a day to day basis is just what progamming is like, and you might well decide to quit programming. It's hard not to think so when you have never seen a better version of how things can work.
I think you're halfway there. The problem is not the feed view—that's a matter the client can handle. The problem is the feed itself. It's the wrong data structure.
Around the time that the phrase "social media" started getting bandied about, the Internet went from topic-focused indexing to person-focused indexing. Makes sense, because topic indexing mirrors the real world. Anywhere you're physically present can be considered a small topic-indexed island. When you're at the grocery store or the post office, the collection of people in that space is an (ephemeral) aggregation over a topic/interest. So is a house party.
When you're at a house party, there is no person-based index that anyone who's there can consult to cross reference the other house parties that the host or another guest has been to. (And there's certainly no index that people who are not even at the party can consult.) At best, you're limited to a view that consists of the house parties where you've seen that person in the past or heard that they attended.
Like I said, topic-based rather than person-focused indexing is the way the Internet used to work. The only aggregation of all my posts across all mailing lists is the one in my mail client, on my machine. It's one not available to the general public. This is a good thing, because person-based indexes are an invasion privacy. We'll probably eventually find proof one day that they cause cancer (of the conversation).
I think people building out services are stuck in a metaphorical rut that retards their vison. As projects crop up to try to address the "surveillance" and "tracking" that the media reports Facebook is doing, these would-be pioneers keep reaching for the same wrong data structure that ultimately sabotages the intent. This happens because they look at their forebears that they're trying to displace, but Facebook, Twitter, etc. have poisoned the well of thought, so people end up recreating alternatives built on the same flaws. I look at this and see it in the same way that I see people who have only started programming in the GitHub era—and a bunch of people who predate it but have had their vision clouded by what they've been keeping in their immediate environment most recently. They cannot conceive of a way to host code repositories or any development model that doesn't work the way GitHub does. (Which happens to record activity in the same type of data structure—although it does so in a way that it's presented to anyone who asks for it, with even fewer privacy controls than Facebook or Twitter.)
There is value in being in an Excel spreadsheet, sending a link to someone on Teams, everyone in the channel opens it and you're all collaboratively live-editing the same spreadsheet, some using desktop Excel and some using web Excel, and you add a comment to a cell and @coworker in it, and something inside Office Cloud emails them a notification.
Quietly, Microsoft have turned a world where EditPad was a hot new thing, to a world where a few people could open the same OneNote notebook if it was on a local fileshare, to a world where Office365 is all of your company sitting inside a collaborative cloud-based Microsoft Office environment where everything is connected to everything and you can embed any kind of Office program into Teams channels, access all of them over the web, notify coworkers through the Graph, sync files through OneDrive, search accross all your employer's data with AD based permissions, and do similar with other companies using Microsoft tools, and it's all pluggable with things from Adobe and Trello and whomever, and you hardly have to set anything up for it, no web servers, no database schemas, no daemons, etc.
And it's completely passed the Linux world by. Head-in-the-sand "nothing has changed in computing in decades I can edit text files any way I like" obliviousness that there's any other world out there.
Teams is horrible software, sluggish, buggy, RAM hungry, and yet it could be the greatest strategic success of Microsoft for the 2020-2030 decade. Much more impactful than Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022. It's more immediate than Outlook email, simpler than any VoIP phone system, easier to search than any network fileshare, simpler to setup than Exchange, and yeah you're doing the "no wifi less space than a Nomad, lame" response because "chat programs existed before", and you're wrong to do that, it's more easily remotely usable than any VPN client, pluggable, connectable, bot-scriptable - and right there in every company that uses Office365 unlike (Slack, Discord, Zoom, et al). It's what they tried for with Skype and Lync and LiveMesh and SharePoint 2007 all merged together and they've done it this time and that should make you pay attention. Any ordinary employee who can use Microsoft stuff can use it, it doesn't need an Org Mode tutorial or a `git init` or an email from IT telling you which server address to put in which settings dialog, or a signoff to buy from yet another SaaS vendor.
Outlook will let you make a new Teams meeting from the same place you make a new email. When you write the recipient's emails in the To field, LinkedIn profiles appear for the names you hover over. There were no Zoom plugins, no LinkedIn plugins to install. I don't like it, business people love it. Office quietly gained the ability to search text in pictures, and handwriting. And it is cheap with a lower case c, Office, all of it, desktop and web, and cloud file store, and integrated services, for the price you might pay for a Zoom or a Dropbox or a 3rd party single-purpose cloud service license.
It's not exciting, it's not going to convince anyone who hates Microsoft to switch, it's not great quality software, but Microsoft have not been resting on their laurels; they have been cementing their place in the heart of business IT, putting down roots, and building things people want. It used to be the case that if you wanted Microsoft Excel, other things were polished but nothing else was quite the same. Now it's more likely the case that if you buy from a competitor you get a pile of janky sluggish cloud awfulness just the same, but from another vendor and it's more expensive and less interoperable. Now to make a good all-purpose Excel competitor it needs Windows and Mac and iOS and Web versions and cloud file storage service and good integration and start from $0 for personal use.
"Microsoft doesn't know what they're doing" is not the right response.
About 3. One of the coolest attitudes I saw was from someone (autistic, but that doesn't matter) who approached every problem as something to love, to cherish, to appreciate. Now I'm reading a book about the early days in Bell labs. I feel through the pages how much fun they had with finding issues, finding things to improve, finding out the future. I think there's so much to gain if you can find a positive approach to problems. Also in real life!
^ put this into a .reg file, run it, and never see those bullshit web search results again. Have been doing this first thing after a fresh install on every PC.
Honestly the best project management I've seen was a well maintained document listing high level projects, with named owners. Every week or two it got copied up and trimmed by the tech lead, and we would talk about it for 20-30 minutes.
For junior people, we'd pair them with a more senior person to help break down work but other than that there was very little overhead.
A negative interest rate is the most natural solution.
Money is just a way to reresent a bar tab. You don't own the money because money is a claim to the labor of someone else. It is essentially a debt.
People want that debt to last forever even though that is impossible as people age and die or their productivity is lost through unemploynent.
The truth is that your money is rotting all the time. By cutting spending they run into the illusion that their money can buy more things.
But money only starts rotting when it is actively used. So there is a delay between the current purchasing power and the decline in purchasing power after you have spent it.
Negative interest rates merely eliminate the delay. They aren't taking anything away from you that existed in the first place. They are taking the part that wasn't real to begin with. They are shattering an illusion that many people believe in so they want to shoot the messenger.
There is no store of value. Just 7 billion hard working humans. If they don't work your dollars buy you nothing. Currencies are worthless, it's the people that give them value.
Event scheduling I do in "remind calendar" for Linux with a little notify-send.
Most everything else in my life organization-wise, I use http://zim-wiki.org for. I just go through them and file them in ideas or todos.
I try to avoid using my phone as much as possible. The rule of thumb there is -- if it's not a real human communicating to me directly/individually or as part of a small group, I should try to just use the computer or not use it at all.
I'm introspective by nature (I'm sure many of us on this site are) and metacognition can be a very comfortable trap. It's a space where you can convince yourself that you can solve your life problems by spending enough time and effort thinking about them, the same way many of us approach engineering problems or other aspects of life. This is even worse in the era of AI, where you can have a helpful assistant to talk through your problems with and encourage analysis even further.
Turns out that's not true. You can spend as much time as you want thinking about your life, circumstances, emotions, experiences, etc. Eventually, you'll have to actually do something and go have some contact with reality.
It's helpful to examine your life and engage with your problems, but taking it too far is just another way of escapism. At least it was for me, YMMV.