They don't think they can make electric super cars in 14 years? They have plenty of notice. On a side note, John Carmack was on Joe Rogan's podcast and talked about supercharging his Ferraris. In the same podcast, Carmack said he actually prefers his Tesla over the Ferrari. The supercar companies may be in trouble, and extending the life of combustion engines is unlikely to help.
I recently had to spend 14 days locked in a hotel room alone as mandatory quarantine to enter Australia.
Shockingly (for me), after just 14 days I already felt more comfortable inside the room than out, and I got a real glimpse into what being "institutionalized" means. Life was so simple and not scary, it was enjoyable, in a sick kind of way. I couldn't imagine what coming out after an entire year would be like, let alone 29.
If you go this route all devices will be running Linux. The one OS route is kindof nice, hence the pinephone over open android alternatives (like Graphene OS).
I sorted from least to most technical. I also tried to pick the least technical challenging in each category. The Dell stuff should just work. The Phone will require some tinkering for the moment.
I would look at inverting the causality there. If your data is accurate, I think it's better to say, "Most companies create developer jobs that get boring for people after 24-36 months."
I was chatting with a Trader Joe's cashier Sunday. It turns out they change jobs every hour. That was a surprise to me; when I long ago worked in a grocery store, I was assigned to one position for 8 hours for every shift. Why does Trader Joe's do it? To keep things interesting: "She tells Money that the change in jobs during shifts helps to keep things interesting for employees. 'It's perfect because it breaks down your shift. You don't get tired doing one repetitive thing,' she told them." https://www.mashed.com/175743/workers-reveal-what-its-really...
If Trader Joe's can do it hour by hour, I think tech companies can do it at least every year or so.
I'm hiring right now and one of the major draws for the good people I'm talking to is the chance to do something interesting. If that's why their coming, it's unsurprising that I'll have to keep giving them that over time. For us, and for most places I've worked, I think that's doable.
It's weird how we don't want to admit we are overworked. Competition is such a horror show.
I really disagree with the whole "procrastination" thing. It's normal to feel depressed, it's part of nature of being tired, our brains are fragile and require a lot of energy and sleep.
I bet that I would generally would be much happier working at a moderate pace in a farm rather than using my brain to do some other complex thing.
I went to do some military training for 2 weeks, it was quite difficult and demanding, but in a way, it has the good stuff of a holiday: you're outside, you use your arms and legs, you have no time to use your brain which often demands more energy.
Do you really understand how stressful it is for a brain to perform programming? Our bodies are not made to sustain such mental effort. Brains are small but they consume a lot of energy to function.
There is a good book employing the TRIZ mindset for self-improvement called "How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use"[0]. Although some of the outcomes the book lead you to can seem banal, if you approach them from the perspective of how to optimize misery, it can give you a new perspective. It certainly did for me in some areas.
CGP Grey also made a video based on the book, called "7 Ways to Maximize Misery"[1] that may be easier to digest.
The 10 minute rule: if you want to do something, really force yourself to do it, but only for 10 minutes. If you want to build a daily habit, commit yourself every day no matter how you feel, but only for at least 10 minutes.
More generally, if you have a bunch of tasks, commit yourself to at least one. Don't necessarily push yourself to do everything but force yourself, no matter how hard, to do at least one. If it's a big task, break it up into smaller tasks.
This one rule is seriously like a magic bullet. 90% of the time you'll end up doing everything. Somehow you're brain just goes from thinking "I hate this, it's so hard" to "wow, this is easy, let's keep going". The other 10% of the time, you can keep your pride, because 1) you at least tried, and 2) it's sometimes a sign of an actual issue (e.g. you feel bad running because you're actually sick). I've heard this advice many times, and somehow I've never yet heard a single person say it didn't work for them.
It's well worth implementing and testing out the Kelly Criterion. It's super simple to code up in a Jupyter Notebook so that you get to enter an amount to bet each time. When I tried it, I found my own psychology changing as the bets continued, even when I knew the coin's bias. It's a really great demonstration of the difference between a) intellectually knowing the optimal strategy, and b) what actually happens.
A bet on a biased coin paradigm was actually tried in the real world with finance professionals, with a cap on the maximum payout. The results are described here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.01427.pdf
It's pretty interesting. (Note though that the "average returns" reported hide a lot of variation.)
I read The Economist which every year publishes their list of notable books. That is how I found Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World by Tom Burgis of The Financial Times. That book describes how the richest people get there (mostly through ill gotten means) and what they do to hide money (lots and lots of real estate)
Small quote from The Economist that does a wonderful job summarizing why this book is very good:
“Kleptopia” is wonderfully if grimly entertaining, replete with tales of Zimbabwean thugs, late Soviet gangsters and kgb officers-turned-entrepreneurs, as well as a Romeo-and-Juliet romance between the children of rival oligarchs. Mr Burgis’s depiction of the interlocking worlds of post-Soviet business and politics captures the way corruption binds together economic and political power. He meticulously demonstrates how, once overseas money enters Britain (attracted by the protections of its legal system), the associated power struggles and skulduggery follow.
Except it is not just Britain, but also us here in USA - countries that he touches include USA, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Colombia, Congo, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, China and both Koreas.
It was a fast and furious read that made me REALLY angry at times. It does not have a happy ending:
America and Britain, he thinks, are ever-more like Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan: “Like a parasite altering a cell it invades, so kleptocratic power transforms its host.”
Highly recommend as a serious, if depressing read.
Finding a customer category that regularly spends money on the kind of software you're intending to build can make it signficantly easier to actually sell them software.
Go to Capterra or G2 and read what actual paying customers say about your competitors and other SaaS products. It's eye-opening.
It's a pity English speakers are often taught the wrong (English based) pronunciation.
For self study I also suggest reading Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, it's a book completely written in Latin that gets progressively more complex and guides you through the language in an utilitarian way.
The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail. So from a pov of looking to reduce my chances of failure, reading about a failure means there are now Inf - 1 ways I might fail, not too useful. Pragmatically reading about success and seeing if I can repurpose their techniques to my situation is far more useful.
Where reading about failure is useful is to help remove the general stigma around failure that prevents people from even trying, but there's only so much of that form of self-help a person needs before they move on.
The longer interest rates stay at zero, the longer this assumption gets baked into the structure of the economy and the more chaos that'll be unleashed when and if they finally go up. There were no interest rate hikes between 2006 and 2015, and interest rates have been at zero for 8 out of the last 13 years.
It's easy to blame COVID for the latest rate cut, but interest rates were already dropping in late 2019. The Fed slashed rates 3 times from July-December, and then went straight to zero in March. I've heard (from finance industry professionals) that the reason was that corporate debt loads rapidly become unsustainable when interest rates go up. They need to roll their debt when it comes due, but debt levels are now such that they rapidly become insolvent when borrowing costs rise.
I'm seeing more people reach the obvious conclusion that interest rates are simply not going to rise. The Fed has an incentive to keep them low - they'll get mass bankruptcy and mass unemployment otherwise, contrary to their full-employment mandate. The government has an incentive to keep them low, since it keeps borrowing costs on the rapidly-ballooning federal debt low. Retirees have an incentive to keep them low, feeding 401K bubbles that they need to live on. Young adults have an incentive to keep them low: it keeps student loan and car payments manageable, and inflation reduces the real value of their debt. Homeowners have an incentive to keep them low: the value of their home will drop if mortgage rates go up. The only people with an incentive to see them go up are vulture funds & shorts, who nobody likes anyway, and prospective homeowners, who are largely the same people with loads of student loan debt that they'd like to see inflated away.
If everybody has an incentive for rates to stay low, they will stay low. This ends in hyperinflation.
Or it ends in a market crash. When interest rates are zero, savers have no choice to build on wealth except the market. This is why the market continues to hit higher and higher records, and at some point people will lose trust in the market and flee.
Hyperinflation can always come after the bubble bursts.
Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem; you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the concept of "antagonistic learning": https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin...
If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's done poorly these days. I suggest you start with the essays and writing of John Taylor Gatto; his writings were ludicrously inspirational to me. Here is the first article I ever read that made me realize that I was a deficient learner and had never truly engaged in learning: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Consider that Roblox and Youtube are essentially slot machines for dopamine. If you want to engage with your children as creative, disciplined learning machines, they must be weaned off of addictive superstimulus-coded platforms, which is damn near impossible given the tech demands of modern school. I don't have any advice for you on that front, except that the more time you can spend with them the better. Perhaps you can start by playing Roblox and watching YouTube videos with them (taking care to only offer them positive and genuinely interested feedback on what they choose to do), and after they've built you into their habits, begin steering them towards more productive activities.
Chesterson's Fence is the act of DECIDING without knowing. There's nothing wrong with SUGGESTING without knowing. In fact, that's a very desirable thing. Different disciplines bumping into each other and making such suggestions is how great ideas and great solutions are hatched.
Honestly, nothing holds up to Mullvad [1]. They don't even take an email address while creating accounts, and you can pay easily with Bitcoin or even with cash mailed to them.
I'm not affiliated, just a very happy customer.
Mullvad is also who Mozilla trusts for the Mozilla VPN [2]. You can sign up with that if you'd like Mozilla to get a cut.
And (another fun fact) if you want to email EPUBs to your kindle, just make the file extension .png (!?) and it will be automatically converted, without the need for Calibre.
Bill Gates is the wealthiest person in the world (or arguably Arnault).
You might say, no, Musk and Bezos are worth 50% (or ~60 billion) more. On paper yes, but that's not a great metric. When I think of wealth, I think of what you can reasonably acquire.
If you multiply Musk's shares in Tesla times the current share price, sure you get 180 billion. But if he tried to sell a large number those shares, they'd plummet in value as he was selling them. Without Musk, I'd be surprised if Tesla is worth 20% of its current valuation. To a lesser extent, this is true of Bezos too, although Amazon without him is still a very valuable company.
On the other hand, Bill Gates owns 1.6% of Microsoft, which I believe is his biggest holding, followed by Berkshire Hathaway stock. I'd bet he can sell both of those holdings completely without a huge hit to either stock price (but definitely some hit). Same with his farmland and other alternative assets. On top of that, having already sold his Microsoft shares, he's not subject to as much capital gains tax as Bezos or Musk, each of whom pretty much owe 20% of their total net worth the second they want to sell.
So on paper, Musk and Bezos are wealthier, but if all of them decided to Scrooge McDuck it and put all their money into a gold filled vault tomorrow, Bill Gates' vault would be the fullest.
EDIT: typo above... Originally said that Musk owns 180 bn in Amazon stock :)
>I have an extra day for family and side projects - 1 day might not sound like much, but having that extra day off feels like my work/life balance is so much better!
That's because you increase your free days by 50% by cutting your work days by 20%. It's not a symmetric exchange. I did the same over the summer (just by using my excess vacation days) and it was a revelation. Highly recommend, especially now that it's so hard to travel.
To anyone who is still craving sweetness in their coffee, I would humbly suggest brewing your own cold brew coffee (buy a coffee sock and a giant glass mason jar - you could probably upgrade this to a pillow case and a wooden barrel if you drink enough coffee). A pure cold brew process (use frigid water, and then move the brew cask directly into a refrigerator) eliminates the bitterness of a traditional brew, leaving a cleaner, almost sweet taste. For a pure cold brew process I would suggest an 18-24 hour brew. Be careful though, even though it goes down easy it still packs a punch!
Edit: And if you really want to get it proper, rough grind the beans. Don't grind them into a fine grain, make sure you see plenty of half chopped beans in there.
during a very long hike across the Alps I stumbled into a group of very upset farmers who desperately were looking for 3 cows that got separated from their herd during a severe storm and lightening. Since I had f-all to do other than walk for several hundred more miles, I offered to lend them an extra pair of eyes to speed up the search. It turned out that 2 of them were dead, one killed by lightening under a tree, the other fell off the ridge. We never found the 3rd cow during all the time that I was there (4 days in total). They told me that it's normal for herd animals that when they break lose from the herd for too long that they become very hard to integrate back. Once you separate them for a few days and they learn to survive by themselves, even you catch them they're becoming very likely candidates to bolt on you in the future.
weeks later the farmer texted me to say thanks once more and to update me: The 3rd cow has turned up (weeks later). And since the animal was back it already tried to do a runner on him a couple of times.
Maybe this sounds silly but I think humans are very much alike. Once people are happy by themselves and able to live without the need for friends (either due to circumstance or free will) it becomes difficult to integrate them back. I value friends and those I know from 30 years ago. But making new friends? It's not for want, but it's impossible to get close to anyone the older you get.
- consider men especially. very few of my male friends are actually able to create new friendships as they age. women are more skilled and open to maintain relationships. if you think this is hyperbole think about your own or other people's dad's in their 50ies or older and imagine them going out by themselves to actively bring new people into the group/family for the purpose of becoming friends. (friendships don't work that way, they rely on common struggle that is needed to build trust. the older we get the less our chances of going through a common struggle (like puberty). See also army training programs where people are thrown into hard situations just for the sake of bonding etc.
My econ prof always said that moderate success is the worst outcome for entrepreneurs - failure means you can do something else and learn, and massive success means you are rich, but moderate success can trap you for years.
I am going through somewhat lengthy explanations and using interactive graphs in 2D and 3D. My goal is to introduce things gradually and provide different perspectives to increase the chance of at least one clicking.
It’s in no way complete. In fact, it currently only has one chapter. But I am actively working on it. Hope you like it.
The problem exists in the educational methods, in my opinion. It seems most, not just in mathematics, feel that learning is the same as if the student can simply be played a tape that cannot be paused or rewound but can sometimes be sped up. Nearly nothing works like this, and it’s just that the penalties in mathematics are greater.
I think of the ideal learning path as a sort of circular, recursive path that bends back and goes back over itself from time to time. Imagine a human painting a canvas. One does not simply do a raster scan, painting pixel by pixel in a linear fashion. By the time the painting is done, the piece has been gone over multiple times with multiple layers of finer and finer detail. A painting is a mishmash of broad and finer strokes, with some layers simply forming foundational layers for the later portions.
A pyramid is the wrong metaphor. In my opinion, learning mathematics should be like creating a painting.
One of the best examples of this I know of is the book Advanced Calculus: A Differential Forms Approach by Harold Edwards. The first three chapters introduce the material heuristically. The next three chapters circle back on the material, thoroughly proving everything introduced in the first three chapters. The remaining chapters greet the student with applications and extensions of the material. In the preface, Edwards states that he wanted the book to be able to be opened to any page and be read and make sense. It’s a wonderful goal, and he achieves it.
Timeboxing is an alternative method to goal-setting. The classic case is diets: instead of saying "I will lose 10kg in a month", timeboxing says "I will eat healthier and take some exercise every day for 2 weeks and see what happens". The difference is to do something different for a set period of time, and then see what the result was, rather than set a goal and a deadline.
For those of us immersed in Lean Startup thinking, where goal-setting doesn't really work any more as a motivation method (who cares if I fail in my goal, that I set myself 2 weeks ago, the important thing is what have I learned in that failure?). Time-boxing is a great alternative because it doesn't judge, it all about learning what happens if we change behaviour.
Timeboxing as setting goals and "exclusion zones" misses the point of it. If you say that you're going to "timebox" writing those two missing features today, but don't manage to complete them, then what happens? Do you extend to tomorrow? Then you're not really timeboxing, you're just saying "I'm not answering any calls until I've finished these features". Which is a totally different thing.
Properly timeboxing this would be "I'm going to spend today working on those features". I don't make any commitment to finish them. I don't know if I can finish them in a day. There's no judgement if I don't - I successfully spent a day working on them, and that was the requirement. After that one day I will know more and may be able to make a judgement or commitment about completion. Or not. I'll know after I spent the day working on them, not before.
Yeah, the Discord SuperMemo community has grown actually a fair bit over the last year: https://discord.gg/vUQhqCT
I myself only started using SuperMemo over the last 2 years but I think in the last 1, I've seen lots of friends get massively better and I'm looking forward to what we create over the next 5 years.
In terms of new implementations, one thing I'm excited about is dendro: https://dendro.com.au/.
It's made by a long-term supermemo user and some other friends and I think is the best shot at a modern incremental reading alternative to SuperMemo. It's missing lots of features and is aimed at bring IR to the masses rather than power users but I personally like it and find it good enough to use on my phone when I'm on the go.
Fire extinguishers require regular inspections/refills that, I fear, many home users won’t do.
Because of that, I think the blanket, combined with a fire alarm (also requires inspections/maintenance, but will annoy you so much that you will replace the battery regularly) is the best option for kitchens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM_tqQNJWzc
Around 11:56 he talks about why his Tesla wins in many ways over his Ferraris.