Around 10 years ago, my friend and I were working on an assignment for our intro to programming course. The assignment involved controlling an LCD screen with an Mega 2560 board.
Finally, after many failed attempts and a few too many coffees we managed to complete the assignment. I left a comment in the code “// We did it!!!!”, and we called it a night.
The next day we tried to demo to our TA and suddenly our code wouldn’t upload. Tried multiple PCs, multiple arduino’s, and had multiple TAs look into our code. No idea.
Finally one brilliant TA heard our story and deleted the comment I left. Suddenly the upload worked! Turns out anytime the bootloader saw “!!!” anywhere in the code it would drop into debugging mode and cause the upload to fail. Even if it was in a comment! That bug gave me major trust issues working with that 2560 that semester haha
Exercise has some huge physiological and psychological benefits [0]. It won’t immediately cure serious mental illnesses, but it definitely doesn’t hurt.
Anecdotally, my mental health is much better with a good diet and some physical exercise every week.
I love the fact that you call out exercise in its other forms. Physical labor is… exercise. Getting out and about and doing things can be exercise. It’s not just hitting a gym. I got in my best shape by avoiding the gym. There’s so much marketing around it, everyone trying to make money, when the reality is all you need is you. Calisthenics requires no upfront purchase. Only a time commitment. Lifting weights is cool too if you have them or want to buy them. Running is great too if you’re into that (or like the resulting “runners high”). I found sports, martial arts, and getting physical in my shop is plenty enough exercise to keep me in my current size jeans for the foreseeable future.
I really recommend everyone to listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast [0] on Dopamine and how it affects motivation, focus, and satisfaction.
Many people see Dopamine as just a pleasure chemical, but it actually directly influences motivation and focus. We also all have a somewhat set amount of dopamine in a day, so participating in activities that release a short peak of dopamine (drugs, masturbation, etc) means that we have less dopamine, and therefore less motivation for the rest of the day.
I was also recently in a low motivation rut, however after making some lifestyle changes I feel much more motivated throughout the day. I stopped getting high, cut out all porn, and added 2 min of a cold water at the end of my regular shower. It was tough to start, but 100% worth it.
For me, being around friends and family and keeping myself busy helped the most. Keeping up with my hobbies, hanging out with friends, and focusing on work kept me sane. Not sure if it was the healthiest method, but I tend to get a little self destructive when my mind is left to itself.
Avoid the "what ifs". You cannot go back in time, and it is unfair to yourself to constantly question what you could have done different. Be kind to yourself.
Finally, one comment that deeply resonated with me during a time of grief is this reddit comment[0]. It helped give me some perspective in a time that seemed void of hope.
It does depend on the situation, and how easily you are able to change tools down the road. However analysis paralysis can be a never ending cycle, so at a certain point you need to accept that you just need to pick one.
If its a low cost, easy to switch tool then I'll force myself to stop over analyzing and just dive into the tool. Theres no better way to learn a tools shortcomings than actually using it.
A high cost tool is a lot more difficult. Personally, I assign myself a deadline to pick the tool (eg this week I'll research, next Monday I'll purchase) and then I must follow through on that day. Otherwise I will just keep overanalyzing every single comparison until neither tool looks attractive.
There are situations where you are going to pick the wrong tool. It happens. An example is I started music production in Logic Pro X, hated it, and ended up switching to Ableton. I spent a lot of time researching the two, but it was only once I started using them that I realized which tool suited me better.
I don't mean to come across as rude, but maybe the LA influencer culture has you jaded? I can guarantee that not everyone wants to travel the world just for some instagram photos.
I do agree with some of your main points. You can't learn a culture in a week, and "helping" poor people for an instagram post is definitely problematic.
However being exposed to the different types of cultures around the world can be extremely valuable and eye opening. The world is a beautiful place with lots of interesting places to explore.
LA is not influencer culture. It’s first and second gen Latino immigrants. It’s Armenians. It’s white Protestants from OC. It’s a major industrial port. It’s a real estate scam. And yes, the entertainment business is here. Thinking that LA is it’s influencer culture is SO SHALLOW.
Yes, that’s fair. My only exposure to LA culture is the entertainment industry and the large amount of influencers that are based in LA. So I’ll be the first to admit my understanding is shallow. I was just curious why you are so jaded to travelling.
My point still stands that travelling the world is not a completely shallow endeavour. However you seem obsessed with labelling people as shallow, which ironically comes across as pretty shallow in itself.
PG briefly touches on it here, but one of the biggest factors on being able to consistently work hard is reward.
PG mostly talks about intrinsic reward in this article. We should work on stuff that is interesting to us, and brings us fulfillment. However, I believe that Paul is missing a huge component here, and that is extrinsic reward.
Extrinsic reward complements intrinsic reward. Extrinsic reward allows us to push through the hard, difficult work that we might not be interested in, because we know the work will be rewarded. It is the light at the end of the tunnel for difficult work. PG, and Bill Gates were able to work so hard because they had internal belief that there was an extrinsic reward for all the work they were doing.
In a perfect world, we would all be completely self motivated to work on every task, but this just isn't realistic. Especially in today's working work. People like PG, and Bill Gates are able to fully credit intrinsic reward, but fail to mention that the extrinsic reward ($$) validated the hard, gritty work they put in.
This is something I struggle with, as someone who worked really hard in school but has become less productive as a professional. In school there are well-defined deadlines and discrete tasks with extrinsic rewards in the form of grades. Even though the rewards were "fake" in a sense, people cared about them so I was motivated to earn those rewards, partially due to competitive drive.
In my professional life, that motivation has all but disappeared for me. I already have the comfortable salary I hoped for, and individual achievements aren't directly rewarded with more money in the short. So what else is left as an extrinsic reward that can provide that drive on a daily basis?
I haven't found the answer to that yet myself. Sometimes I feel like I've been given too much too soon and that's removed my hunger to work. That plus existing in a collaborative environment instead of a competitive one.
This comment fails to see the real reason that Apple, Google, and Microsoft lock down their hardware and software, ease of use.
A vast, vast majority of the population could care less about learning about interrupts, tinkering with BIOS settings, etc. They want a device that is easy to use, and as simple as possible. So companies therefore abstract away 90% of the "creativity-inducing" components because a computer is a lot less intimidating when the user clearly knows what they can and can't do with it.
Apple and Google are not sitting in a meeting room pitching the best ways to stifle creativity. They are selling a product to a population that wants their highly complex device to be as simple as possible.
> They want a device that is easy to use, and as simple as possible.
I'd add "reliable" or maybe more accurately "repeatable".
When my mother runs into technical problems, she will literally get frustrated to the point of tears. She doesn't give a single fuck whether she can change the OS or install unapproved software to tinker, she just wants the stuff that was working yesterday to still be working today.
When she wakes up and an OS update has broken some app she uses, she's never gone "Let me dig into why this happened, maybe I can fix it." and she never will. That's simply just something that has gone wrong in her life and ruined her day and now she needs to find a new way to do the thing that she wants to do.
But you're wasting your breath. A very vocal segment of HN are effectively fundamentalists about this. The fact that there exists a market segment best served by devices which do not conform to their fundamental ideals because they have different priorities is simply unacceptable regardless of any other consideration.
Finally, after many failed attempts and a few too many coffees we managed to complete the assignment. I left a comment in the code “// We did it!!!!”, and we called it a night.
The next day we tried to demo to our TA and suddenly our code wouldn’t upload. Tried multiple PCs, multiple arduino’s, and had multiple TAs look into our code. No idea.
Finally one brilliant TA heard our story and deleted the comment I left. Suddenly the upload worked! Turns out anytime the bootloader saw “!!!” anywhere in the code it would drop into debugging mode and cause the upload to fail. Even if it was in a comment! That bug gave me major trust issues working with that 2560 that semester haha