Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment?

Powerlifting.

Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't.

It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often.

Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exception of (hopefully) temporary setbacks like injury. Hitting personal records and milestones feels particularly good because you know you've earned it. It's hard! But it's also not so hard that I'm liable to get discouraged.

Lots of people prefer bodybuilding style training, but there's something magic about the barbell for me. Olympic lifts are also a lot of fun, but they're more technical and you need more gear and space.

Also it's much easier to quantify your strength progress (I have a literal spreadsheet), and it feels less vain than focusing on looks (not that it isn't a significant bonus).

Dunno. Feels good. I'm gonna keep at it. Two thumbs up.

For anyone looking to get started I highly recommend the StrongLifts program and the associated app, both free [1].

I neglected strength training for a long time because every time I tried to get started I would feel overwhelmed. Then I tried StrongLifts and loved the fact that it's just 5 exercises, but provides pretty much a full body strength workout.

The guy who developed the program has put a ton of effort into making sure it's detailed and accessible so that pretty much any question you could have is answered.

[1]: https://stronglifts.com/5x5/

The StrongLifts program, while still pretty good, is not for absolute beginners. The app and the website has videos and detailed instructions, but that doesn't replace a human coach being able to point out in real time mistakes in your form that you do not even realize. And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.

Just find a human coach. An app is not a substitute.

Sorry I don't mean to offend, but this comment rubs me entirely the wrong way. This attitude strikes me as gatekeeping and turning people away from barbell training.

mistakes in your form that you do not even realize.

form is entirely overrated in lifting. There's little evidence that a particular way of moving in the gym is more or less injurious, even if it looks funny. Efficiency is another matter, but don't nocebo anyone into not touching barbells in fear of "bad form".

And while coaching is surely useful, it is entirely unnecessary for a beginner who just wants to get started. You can make plenty progress for years without a coach, but it might be faster with one.

And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.

this is also clearly untrue and way too generic. Even inefficient lifting is healthy. Youtube is all you need to get started. There's plenty dumb info there, but plenty good also

oh boy, are you a horrible person.

Even inefficient lifting is healthy. Youtube is all you need to get started.

this is the best way to not only need a coach but months of rehabilitation.

form is entirely overrated in lifting.

WHAT THE FUCK. I assume you started early in life and or you have have good joints and tendons. but bad form will absolutely lead to at least tiny injuries that you will notice the latest after a few months.

I am certain you know all that and that you are one of those piece of shit youtubers who want people to fail with free programs and ignoring proper form or even teaching slightly wrong form so that they have to get coaches and see doctors at some point.

fuck you

You seem to be very passionate in a conviction not based on data.

bad form will absolutely lead to at least tiny injuries that you will notice the latest after a few months.

(Citation needed)

youtubers who want people to fail with free programs and ignoring proper form or even teaching slightly wrong form so that they have to get coaches and see doctors at some point.

(Citation needed)

What is your personal experience with lifting? Have you learned these lessons the hard way, or are these just common myths in the bodyweight fitness community that you've regurgitated without any critical thought in order to justify why you aren't enjoying the benefits of progressive resistance training?

Yep, the modern view is that injuries happen due to doing too much too soon rather than any technique problems. Either way injuries are super rare if you follow a program with a good build up of stress over time.

Counterpoint: there's plenty of coaches out there that teach/reinforce bad form.

And if you are a beginner, any attempt to do these exercises will invariably contain so many mistakes that they are not worth doing any more.

I totally disagree. StrongLifts (and the Starting Strength book it derives from) starts you with the empty bar. Unless you have a serious medical condition, putting 20kg on your back / chest is unlikely to result in serious bodily harm or damage to musculature. As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement. At least, that's how it worked for me (I only made it to ~100kg squats though).

Of course it's great if you can find a good coach. But I think an app like StrongLifts is a viable+reasonable substitute for a coach.

It's not that a beginner cannot put 20kg on their back or chest. It's that a beginner does not know how to safely put that 20kg on their back or chest. Especially the chest.

Also some exercises like the deadlift can't be done with an empty bar. Stronglifts would ask you to start with 95lbs which is too much.

To me your comment is toxic and reeks of a sense of superiority and elitism from your own experience. You labelled everyone who can't put 20kg to be someone having a serious medical condition. That's both untrue and disrespectful.

As you slowly and steadily increase the weight on the bar, you discover places where your form needs improvement.

Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.

The StrongLifts program starting with an empty bar is not right. They should've started with a PVC pipe with the same dimensions as a bar to practice form.

My advice: find a coach and ask him/her to supervise you if you can afford it. If you can't, still find a coach for your first month doing these exercises and then switch to the app.

Please no. The beginner does not discover places where the form needs improvement. The beginner simply fails to lift after increasing the weight. The beginner injures themselves when they thought they could lift but they did not.

This assertion is contradicted by the hundreds of thousands of people (myself included) who have progressed beyond the beginner stage after starting out with the 20kg bar and without ever requiring the intervention of a human coach.

That said, I would have benefited from one. I had to completely deload and relearn my squat form because I was consistently leaning forward and de-emphasizing my posterior chain (now it's my best lift).

Speaking from experience, it's really pretty difficult to cause yourself an acute injury (i.e., worse than a nasty bruise) with 20kg if your form even resembles the squat, bench, or deadlift.

Granted, 20kg can be a big starting weight for overhead press, and if you're a petite woman you may initially need an alternative to the Olympic barbell even for the others.

Also, deadlifts are kind of tricky: a bare bar on the floor is a deficit deadlift. But a couple of blocks can solve this issue.

Or you could go with Starting Strength, which is similar and has some good information on the form of the lifts as well as novice programming.

https://startingstrength.com/get-started

This honestly isn’t a great choice for beginners for a number of reasons.

For someone seeking a better introduction to strength training, please take a look at the BoostCamp app

https://www.boostcamp.app

It depends what you want. Bodybuilding or strength training/powerlifting.

never start with lifting weights except if you have somewhat athletic hobbies or if you did more than a bit of physical labor.

your joints and tendons can't do their jobs properly yet and you have no feeling for your skeleton and the correct positions of shoulders, hips and spine. your nerves will get pinched and your muscles will push to grow into their genetically intended position while you will bring nerves and tendons in bad positions due to habit.

joint strength, posture, bodyweight core training, 200 bodyweight squats in two sets, 200 pushups in 4 - 6 sets, 2 - 3 min hang from bar or rope (holding it as tight as possible all the time) and be sure you can roll forward and backward and wrestle with a big dog or young and strong child for fun on the ground without hurting yourself. now you can start lifting low weights.

I'm a big fan of Greyskull Linear Progression! I've always liked 3 sets of 5 more than 5x5.

Powerlifting can be very dangerous. You can really, permanently, mess up your body, specifically your back and neck. What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?

This is a complicated question.

First of all, your statement is absolutely accurate. The weights involved can cause injury and can possibly be dangerous or even fatal when not handled correctly. On the other hand, exactly what is meant by "injury" can vary widely, so we have to be precise in our language.

Acute, serious injuries typically come about due to poor form, carelessness, failure to use safety mechanisms, or irresponsible selection of load. They are the most easily preventable type of injury, and unsurprisingly they are most common among novice lifters.

I address these risks by being deliberate about my form, consistent about my use of safety devices, and reasonable about loads and progression in my training. I also use a belt with proper abdominal bracing technique.

Chronic injuries, on the other hand, are much less preventable and much more common among experienced lifters. I've worked through several, including a soft tissue injury in my hips and a nagging tendonitis in my left elbow. Managing these types of injuries comes down almost entirely to sensible training.

Powerlifting in general is associated with a lower injury rate than other sports[1]. That's not to imply that injuries aren't a reality of powerlifting -- they are -- but more that I do not believe they constitute a good reason to forego the benefits of lifting.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07651...

I have been into powerlifting since the 90s. I think it is a convenient myth that form prevents injury. "Form" is just something that everyone thinks they do well and everyone else does poorly.

It is ultimately a trade off. I don't know any long term powerlifter who doesn't have a ton of injury.

Ultimately, it isn't a good idea to load your spine with 400lbs+ over long periods of time. There is no mystery what is going to happen here regardless of "form".

Just a couple of weeks ago I saw a video of a guy who got internally decapitated by the barbell during a high bar squat because he leaned forward and came up onto his toes rather than sitting back.

That's a freak accident, and it's certainly turned out that stuff like deadlift hyperextension is not nearly as dangerous as originally thought, but "form" also means "keeping the bar path under control and in a safe range".

Just because most people have figured that out before they graduate to handling potentially dangerous weights doesn't mean it's not still a critical piece of the safety equation.

Chronic injuries, on the other hand, are much less preventable and much more common among experienced lifters. I've worked through several, including a soft tissue injury in my hips and a nagging tendonitis in my left elbow.

Can you describe your hip injury a bit more?

Do you have any data to compare risk of injuries of powerlifting vs other sports?

Powerlifting is probably the safest "sport" there is, which is why many of us nerds do it kind of like people do long-distance running. You pretty much control every variable. Obviously if you aren't ego lifting and "know what you are doing" to some degree.

Personally, good coaching. I joined the Starting Strength gym near me and enjoyed having an incredibly high quality coach monitor nearly every lift. Rippetoe has some obnoxious views but the local gyms usually have coaches which are a great fit for the local culture. Our gym was very inclusive.

Powerlifting can be very dangerous.

citation desperately needed. Injury rates for resistance training is very very low. The far higher risk is in not training.

If you start juicing and compete to the absolute max, then maybe? Even then I am skeptical that the data supports this.

I don't know where this weird belief comes from, while the universal recommendation is to do both resistance training and conditioning to reduce a whole bunch of risk factors for health and longevity.

What steps do you take to mitigate that risk?

Well, we train to make our tissues resilient, of course.

It's dangerous if you get really strong and keeping pushing the envelope, but at "gen pop" levels if your form is good, you use safeties, get a spotter where needed etc you should be fine.

I just began the 5/3/1 strength training method. I’d like to use gymnastic rings for most of my accessory work to try and get a nice balance of strength and flexibility.

I tried 5/3/1 in college and I after week 4, I felt like you need to be juicing to keep up with it.

What were you eating? Were you trying to stay lean at the same time?

I didn't diet, which probably didn't help. I had an unlimited meal plan in college, but didn't take full advantage of it.

Yeah, eating and sleeping loads helps.

No.

What? If you start light like Wendler recommends, the program is completely manageable. In fact, most people I know think there is too little training volume at first. I used it for several months in a row a few years ago and it led to great strength gains in every lift.

5/3/1 is good, but it's not a novice programme. It's more intermediate. I started on 5/3/1 and did OK but would have got stronger faster at the start of my lifting if I had followed the Novice Linear Progression in Starting Strength.

https://startingstrength.com/get-started/programs

One the "newbie (strength) gains" are tapped out though 5/3/1 is an excellent programme.

I've also seen older people use 5/3/1 when they are unable to recover as quickly from linear progression routines.

Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested

This really resonates with me. Not powerlifting myself, but I have a strength training routine at the gym with the goal of improving my right knee pain. I have to take things very slow (increase by 1 rep each session, up the weight every ~2 weeks by the smallest possible increment) but looking at my graph this year is very satisfying. This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now

This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now

Yes that's exactly it! It's something of a refuge from whatever other chaos I'm dealing with. I get to feel good about trying and even better about succeeding.

The body is incredibly resilient, and given enough stimulus and patient consistency, it's pretty amazing how strong average people are capable of becoming.

I'm reminded of this quote from Socrates:

"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeking the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."

I am not young anymore, but I'm not old, either, and I've come to the conclusion it's certainly better to start late than to never discover my limits at all.

ChatGPT makes very good training plans if you know what you want. Like a 4 day split with XYZ available machines.

Not for beginners, but very good if you want to think a little bit less which exercises you take for the next 4-6 weeks.

Running.

I got the bug about 12 weeks ago. I had never ran longer than 1.5 miles continuously 12 weeks ago. Now I’m planning my next Sundays long run. 12.5ish miles.

Im a heavy guy. My heaviest was 270, but I’m down to 220 now. I hated running my entire life. But I finally figured out how to run pain free and now it’s the thing I look forward to everyday.

It’s also tremendously rewarding to see such rapid improvement. When I first started I ran a 38 minute 5k, and 10 weeks later I ran a 25:44. I’ve almost improved my 1mi time from 8:30 to 6:30. Signed up for a marathon a couple weeks ago and gave myself 6 months to train.

Sub 4:30, here we come

Any tips for running pain free? I used to run pretty often (3-5 times per week) for 5+ miles. Longest was 11. However, my feet started hurting while running -- never while walking even long distances.

strength training helps a lot in preventing injuries. I've been through years of achilles tendonitis and finally got rid of it mostly by doing leg/calf strength exercises.

Fwiw, here's some example exercises for Achilles: https://routineshub.com/public/1faae50e-8d36-4eec-84ee-ae3ef...

thank you for this. I've been dealing with plantar fasciitis for a year+, finally got it to go away ~5 months ago and got back into running, and just in the last 2 weeks have noticed gradually increasing pain in my achilles and I'm absolutely devastated at the thought of battling another chronic injury.

I've been running for 12+ years and after going through plantar fasciitis and some other issues (went to a very good orthopedic sports clinic that helped me a lot), getting a Theragun and using it every day was amazing afterwards, especially for calves (that can help with achilles tendonitis) and for your foot for plantar fasciitis).

For me, slowing down, proper foot striking (go for a couple barefoot runs at the park until you know what feels right and then translate that to form with running shoe on), and I did feet and ankle strength training for the first month.

Oh and #1 is listen to your body. I’m running for the joy of running. If something hurts I’m not gonna run, lol. Important to rest.

If something hurts I’m not gonna run

And this is why I don’t run.

I can't give specific advice as there are just so many factors at play, but I'll offer that it has to do with what you're used to and what you're conditioned to. I started running after a long history of skateboarding in very thin shoes. I end up with pain in my knees and even my arches with thicker shoes - I say this as it is somewhat counterintuitive to make the point that it's not always true that more cushion = less pain.

Aside from that, be very gradual in ramping up mileage and try to feel for wasted motion/effort/impact. There are tons of "form cues" people get caught up in, but just trying to be efficient in your use of energy to travel forward is what has been generally helpful for me in developing a stride that doesn't get me hurt. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I'm pretty passionate about running and I think that there are a few things that you can try: making sure you are stretching after your run, especially calves, legs, and feet. Getting a foam roller can be helpful as well. If it's a specific type of pain, it could be due to footwear or gait so you could also try switching up your shoes perhaps.

Have a look at recover athletics [1], recently bought by Strava, which allows you to specify where the pain is and they give you strength exercises to help strength surrounding areas which will put a stop to the pain.

You get pain through muscle overuse and the best way to fix it is to strengthen up. Running is pretty tough on your muscles and tendons, especially if you are not used to it, you ramp up volume too quickly, or your form isn't great.

Being stronger will help you go faster and keep going faster for longer as well.

Other quick tips:

1. If you get recurring pain then try increasing your cadence and shortening your stride length. To try target 170 steps per minute or more.

2. Run slowly. Easier said than done. Aim for a heart rate no more than 75% of your VO2max HR. You'll recover quicker in all respects and this will help to build up your aerobic capacity. You shouldnt be out of breath for most of your running.

3. If you have an anterior hip tilt then you'll get pain after a while. If you have weak glutes and core then this will happen, esp when you are tired. It will cause back pain and leg pain. Try to keep hips level - you will feel much more stable.

4. Weak glute medius will cause leg pain because you legs bow inwards during the stance phase. You see this when people knock their knees together when running. You shouldn't do this. Follow on effects are over pronation of the foot during strike as the ankle/foot needs to compensate for leg instability.

5. Weak calves might cause foot pain, especially if you keep your foot dorsiflexed during the swing phase. Try to keep feet/ankle reflaxed during swing phase. do some calf and ankle strengthening. The recover app has some good ones e.g. single legged calf raises.

Good luck!

[1] https://recoverathletics.com

I had this happen to me when I got into running. I went on a trip for 2 months and let my injuries recover. When I got back into running, I had no pain and haven’t had for more than a year. I’d say give it another try, I think a lot of the injuries are overuse and your body will adapt over time.

Personally, I intersperse my running with Interval Training on an exercise bike: 2 minutes out of the saddle with the resistance turned up a bit, pushing as high as you can go, 1 minute of easy riding in the saddle with low resistance. Repeat 7 times.

I think it provides a few advantages to your running:

- it’s excellent cardio, so it’ll improve your VO2 max, which is hugely helpful for both running and living longer

- it’s low impact, so it gives your joints time to recover. Recovery is critical for an impact sport like running!

- the resistance builds leg strength, so it makes you more resilient on longer runs

Oh, and get a decent pair of running shoes, ideally from a store that knows what they’re talking about. Note that the best shoe for you won’t necessarily be the most expensive one - things like whether your over pronate or not are critical, so don’t go out and buy the latest carbon sole foodad just because that’s what the pro’s have.

Worn out shoes can cause pain after a few months. Any further diagnosis should probably be delivered by a PT.

For me, my hips start hurting after a run. My shoes are relatively new and I’m running on paved pathways or surfaces that are not too uneven. After learning just a little bit, I don’t try to take long strides, I don’t try the “heel strike” approach, etc. But running is quite difficult for me, both during and after. I’d really appreciate tips on avoiding the hip pain (I do some yoga too for the hips, hip flexors, quads, etc.).

Do please divulge, I'm at my heaviest, but have started jogging backwards to try to limit the damage as I get used to it again. What're your tips?

Barefoot running (or extremely minimalist shoes) helped me. Build it up slowly! Your muscles will likely be degraded from a lifetime of low mobility footwear.

Consider: how could humanity have survived millennia walking and running around before Nike and orthotics?

I read Born to Run which I think may go a bit over the top in advising running barefoot, but there a big overlap between what this does for you and some of the other best advice in this thread. Taking your shoes off forces you to slow down and pay attention to what your feet and legs are doing.

Personal anecdote but I started with the couch to 5k app, wasn't working for me. I ended up switching to the Nike Run Club app and initially used their Guided Runs to help get started (They have a massive amount). The host of the run talking really took me out of the run and made it easier.

Also, going super slow at the start to warm up, picking up speed gradually. I look as the distance as the goal and not the time. After about 10 months I recently hit a 27:30 PR at 35 (quit smoking 2 years ago). There's hope out there.

It might be better for your joints to walk on the incline (treadmill) until you are lighter. Might be worth building a program with a personal trainer and mixing in some weight training. Apologies in advance if you've already done all of the above

I'm in the same boat as you. I have been running since the summer and I recently finished a couch to 5km plan. My pace is similar at 35-38 minutes. Do you have any tips on going from 38 to 25 minutes? Thanks

Do more short high effort intervals. Find a track to run at if you can and alternate easy/hard laps. The visual cues of a track will really help you feel confident pushing hard because it’s easy to see how much distance remains.

Also, check out your local running clubs on Strava. I know social running isn’t for everyone, but it’s a really good way to push your speed up. Every club I’ve run with has been psyched to get a new person.

As a second opinion, everyone is different. This is quite literally the last advice I would give anyone starting out. Short high effort intervals and spiking HR for someone with poor cardiovascular strength (myself 12 weeks ago) feels like absolute horrid shit and I would never want to go to the track again.

Prioritize enjoying the run. Which you can’t do when your body thinks you might be having a heart attack.

My biggest thing was slowing the fuck down and consistency. I was an athlete in HS and had a huge ego around how fast I should be going. For reference I didn’t run faster than 12min/mi for the first 2 weeks. Also I run 5-6x a week now (1 long run the rest super easy recovery runs <5.5 mi)

Other things: 1. Foot/ankle strengthening. Lookup YouTube videos on how to strengthen feet and knees. 5-10 mins a day as you’re starting. If you’re going slow it’s low impact too. 2. Focus on form/don’t zone out. I used to run and try to “zone out” as quickly as possible to “ignore” the pain. Instead focus in and run a mental checklist of your form. Again, YouTube videos on good form (which often aren’t targeted/explained how to run that well when running so slowly, so be specific with your searches). 3. I moved to NRC which I liked a lot better than C25K. I like the mental coaching and found it very valuable especially in the beginning. Now I run without music because I like listening to my breathing, as if I lose focus on my breath that also hurts.

There’s a lot of other things that I now keep track of for funsies. But those will come naturally if you start to enjoy running for the sake of running. I’m not running for health, to lose weight, or to look better. I’m running because I really enjoy running. YMMV

Did you do anything to improve on 5ks other than running 5ks? My 5k time is around 35min forever, I run every now and then and recently signed for a public 5k run but I don't see myself improving my pace. (It took years until I could run 30 minutes non-stop and at least I didn't lose this over the years, but I'm slow...)

Yes. I didn’t run 5ks and I didn’t try to run fast. I heard the buzz phrasey “to go faster you have to go slower” for like 2 years and totally disregarded it.

I used to run before this latest bug, like a year ago, but I hated it. My only goal was to do a sub 30 minute 5k and I trained for like 8 months with 0 progress and was so dejected I quit. I would show up, run at a 10 min pace for as long as I can, repeat. It felt like shit and I didn’t get better. My growth happened when I just ran 4.5 mph until it was the _bad kind_ of uncomfortable (this is too much stress on my shins vs my legs muscles are building lactic acid). After two weeks, I upped the pace a tiny tiny bit. I spend most of my runs fighting with myself to slow down.

The science behind it is something something aerobic base and running economy. I’m absolutely not an expert, but anecdotally I’ve never had my life improve so much in such a short amount of time by just _running slower_

I found high intensity interval training helpful in building up strength and speed.

Run a quarter mile at 80% of full speed, then 50%, then 80%, then 50%, etc and play with the percentages and interval lengths to push yourself.

I run every now and then

Consistency is the biggest factor for improving running. Run at a pace and distance you can handle every day, then do that consistently. Every day, ideally. It doesn't matter if that's 10 minutes for 1km, just as long as you're being consistent.

I’m feeling some envy right now. I’ve tried running…or rather, walks and runs interspersed, at least once a week or more often. But my heart rate shoots up even at a moderate pace of 5mi/h (7.5km/h) to around 140bpm or higher (I’m 50 years old). I just can’t run (actually jog) continuously for more than one minute before breaking into a walk. Otherwise, I workout everyday, mostly cardio and some strength for at least 45 minutes a day, every single day. My weight is in the normal BMI range. I don’t know if this is how it is to be.

I'm 39 and my HRV will shoot to 160-170 at those speeds... I think its ok?

Have you tried Couch to 5k? (C25K)

FWIW I did it a few years back after coming back from an ankle fracture that had stopped me doing any exercise for 6 months. Looking at my Week 1 Day 1 activity on Strava my HR was ~105bpm when initially walking, but then up to 160bpm when running for a minute, and only dropped to ~130bpm when walking for the next minute. This see-saw repeated; up to ~160bpm when running, down to ~130bpm when walking. At the end it dropped from 160bpm to 115bpm over the course of the final 5 minute "cool down" walk. There's quite a "lag" between exercise intensity and HR.

My point is that if you're not regularly running then your CV system is inefficient, and so even walking may put your HR up quite high. If you stick at it it should improve.

I'm 47 and my HR when I go for a run is ~170bpm. If I go for a gentle run I try and keep it below 150bpm, but when I was just getting back into it I'd struggle to keep my HR under 165bpm even on a "gentle" run. As you get fitter (or lighter) you can do the same kind of runs with a lower HR than before. When I really want to push it I can average 180bpm-190bpm for a 5k (although it feels grim at the time).

If you get through a few weeks of C25K and you're still having trouble running for more than a minute or so at a time then I'd go see a doctor. If you're concerned/nervous about the idea of trying C25K with a possibility that there may be something amiss then go and see a doctor about it now.

(This is not medical advice. I am not a doctor.)

Running has pretty much changed my life completely - very good stuff. For all of the snake oil out there promising ridiculous benefits, consistently running anything more than about an hour a week is as close to the real McCoy as I have ever experienced.

The changes I’ve seen in 3 months are frankly staggering. I quit smoking, cut like 95% of my alcohol consumptions, started eating healthier, etc. and it was really easy for me to do all at the same time.

I had tried tackling each of these problems independently before and typically failed. Withdrawals, cravings, etc. are too much. But man I really fucking love running now and smoking, binge drinking and junk food just look so gross to me now that I know they’re gonna ruin my runs.

The brain is weird. I’m insanely grateful.

As someone who fluctuates between 180 and 230 lbs, you will see your times completely sky rocket as you drop to 180. It's easily a minute off every mile when doing 5 miles. Hopefully that's a little motivation.

I wouldn't consider myself an avid runner, but I run semi-regularly. It does wonders for clearing my mind.

(To the curious) Don't get bogged down trying to train for a marathon. Just run what you can, then walk, then run again.

A resource recently shared in HN for running tech lovers https://github.com/yihong0618/running_page

I also started running again relatively recently - about one month ago - definitely not to the same extent parent is doing it, but it managed to reduce the upper back pain I was getting from dev work

Also the mental health benefits cannot be understated, very glad I built it into my routine

I think it's worth consulting with PT/pros who could give feedback on the ramp up period and the load you're putting yourself under. What I've read in my research is that you can feel fine for a while but if you're not building up methodically you can cause yourself some long term issues but with a delay.

Congrats on the weight loss and figuring out that you can be a runner. It's quite liberating. I was never a good runner even in peak competitive basketball conditioning in my late teens and thought I would never be a runner until a few years ago. Keep pushing!

Low-plastic living.

I read a book by the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo. The book got me thinking about how different our lives would be if oil were expensive. "Pretend oil is really expensive" is a good proxy for doing things that are "eco-friendly." Since reading the book, I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard. Everything from my socks to my vegetable packaging to my dog's toys to my floor is made of plastic.

I've slowly been adjusting my habits - such as checking whether clothing is natural or oil-based, buying food mostly at the farmers market, and eating in instead of takeaway. These little change have decreased my carbon footprint immensely.

I enjoy playing this game of "pretend oil is expensive" even though it's not because it's revealing problems we will need to tackle as a society. At some point we will run out of oil. When that happens, everything will be impacted. Travel, food delivery, and most of all healthcare.

I have been doing this for about 2 years now. Got a few glass mason jars that I fill up with items like rice and nuts from the bulk bin at the grocery store. Peanut butter and jelly both come in glass jars. I get just about everything else from a local farm share where the items are not packaged in anything. It’s nice not dealing with plastic with my food. I used to throw so much of it away. Now most of my food waste is compostable.

My understanding is glass causes higher levels of carbon emotions b/c it is heavier to transport [0].

If you are re-using the jars, then that would have a lower impact, but if you're buying jarred butter and jelly, you're making the problem worse.

[0] - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic...

I'd think the benefit of using glass, especially in the context of food and drink, would be lessening the amount of nano plastic your body digests.

Besides it's not hard to tip the carbon emission in favor of glass if the externalities of plastic (and fuel) were appropriately priced and not massively subsidized.

About nano plastic: Are they any serious (respected), peer-reviewed scientific studies on the negative health effects of nano plastics? It is frequently mentioned by the "natural crowd" on HN, but I never see any scientific evidence shared.

Even if there weren’t any studies on the harmful effects of plastic consumption (which I’m fairly certain there are at least theoretical mechanistic studies if you make the effort to look for them), it makes common sense to try to avoid that, no?

I don’t think there are any studies on the effects of regularly drinking gasoline or eating toilet paper either, but plastic, gasoline, and toilet paper consumption aren't exactly time-tested foods that propelled civilization forward.

What a silly reply. Yes, there are many studies about the consumption of hazardous chemicals, including gasoline. There are even many about just the fumes -- no need to regularly drink it.

My point: The "hair on fire" comments about nano plastic still hasn't been borne out by peer-reviewed scientific research. I recall on HN someone mentioned that a recent discover was that tyre dust is a large potion of micro plastics in our world.

I am with you on finding the studies that verify these hypotheses, but for newly discovered problems, I think there will not be any long-term impact studies, but we must make a decision today about if this is safe or not.

It doesn't make sense to me that the plastic would be beneficial. It is either neutral or detrimental and I not that no plastic is neutral.

If youre so certain about your ability to find long term studies on the consumption of micro-pieces of toilet paper or gasoline, then surely you can find one on plastic ;).

Not many have their hair on fire. People just want to make a conscious effort to avoid what common sense says to avoid.

I'm not aware of any truly long term studies but any substance that takes thousands of years to break down I don't want in my body at any level.

Finding plastic in our blood doesn't seem healthy.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/24/micropla...

Glass correlates with higher levels of carbon emissions, but doesn't cause it.

At Silo, wine causes a lot of headaches. Their solution is to use wind-powered transport ships. Then, they turn the waste glass into tiles. So, the carbon footprint is low.

If you can tolerate slow shipping, then the carbon footprint can be reduced. So, well-preserved food in glass (as opposed to, say, flowers in plastic) can have a lower environmental impact. Plus, glass can be reasonably reused or recycled.

    they turn the waste glass into tiles

This is delusional. Think about how much heat energy it takes to melt glass to make tiles. There is no way this has a low carbon footprint. I applaud the PR team at Silo for convincing their customer base of this fantasy. The lifetime carbon footprint (from manufacturing to "recycling" / disposal) is much lower for plastic compared to glass. And, I write this post as someone who tries to reduce my plastic footprint as much as possible.

Probably about ⅓ as much heat as virgin glass

There is no active wind powered transport, obviously. The one ship they are testing is not shipiping anything yet.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/travel/wind-powered-cargo-shi...

Incorrect.

"Three Dutchmen decided to take a step back to make a leap forward and established Fairtransport, the world’s first modern emission-free shipping company. Silo gets coffee via Fairtransport – it still has to be transported from the landing port, but it is a huge saving on energy. It’s a fine example of imaginative thinking. The small fleet of traditional sailing ships used by Fairtransport includes the world’s only engineless sailing cargo ship. The focus is on transporting special products which are organic or crafted traditionally – such as olive oil, wine and rum. In addition, the fleet is raising awareness of the huge amounts of pollution created by the modern shipping industry and is affecting positive change in the way goods are shipped around the world."

McMaster, Douglas. Silo (p. 71). Leaping Hare Press. Kindle Edition.

https://fairtransport.eu/en/

Glass is basically infinitely usable, aside from breaking it, and does not pollute the things that go in it or if it's tossed in a landfill. It's also the most easily recycled material with high yields (basically 100%).

I was recently made aware that some amount of glass is not recycled and instead turned into powder to cover landfills. Apparently, where I live, most used glass ends up this way; but I expect it varies between institutions.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/recycling-glass-eigh...

Yea, there is a lot of discrepancy between what is actually recycled or not, particularly from trash and recyclables coming from homes and municipalities. I keep wondering if there's an opportunity there to help improve the yields of recycling.

I do similar things. Just replacing plastic sandwich bags with reusable silicon ones has been a big win. Even at the farmer's market, I eliminated the last little plastic by bringing cotton vegetable bags.

To be clear, I'm not puritanical about this. I still do takeout sometimes. And, I'm about to hop on some flights that will burn a ton of oil. (Ironically, one of those carbon-belching flights is to a dinner at Silo, which I'm looking forward to.)

Two of my biggest realizations have been:

1. There are many low-hanging changes we can make to reduce plastic, such as going to a farmers market, replacing a one-time use sandwich bag with a reusable one, or skipping delivery food (which often has more plastic packaging than actual food).

2. Low-plastic is often synonymous with quality. My cotton jeans, leather bag, and metal water bottle are all more expensive - but they are higher quality, have lasted for years, and can often be repaired. For example, my leather was an expensive $400, but I've had it for 8 years and counting - and just had it restored to look shiny and new. (Put another way: Plastic lacks wabi-sabi beauty).

My god, this section is full of self-congratulatory, delusional posts. Hop on a flight to go to dinner at Silo? That single flight it probably worth more than a decade of reducing plastic sandwich bags.

    My cotton jeans, leather bag, and metal water bottle are all more expensive - but they are higher quality, have lasted for years, and can often be repaired.

You can probably buy jeans at Walmart for 10 USD. They will last for a decade.

Walmart jeans are about $20, men's wranglers have stretch with spandex plastic, but will definitely approach 10 years.

Is this satire? Do you realise how much plastic is used and wasted when farming and how insignificant your actions are?

Does replacing plastics with paper packaging means that trees will be eliminates much more on scale?

Trees are renewable. The mass of a tree comes from the carbon it extracts from the air. [1]

It's not a zero-sum, though. Why does my cilantro need to come in a plastic bag? At the farmer's market, it doesn't come packaged at all.

[1] And, fire is basically reversing the process - releasing the sunlight that created the plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE

Why does my cilantro need to come in a plastic bag?

Everything here is hugely regional, but two answers spring to mind:

1) coriander is frequently sold in unpackaged bunches, typically larger than the packaged ones;

2) it's packaged in plastic because then it can be filled with some inert gas that prolongs spoiling, it's not completely obtuse.

(In the UK for example Waitrose sells it growing reared in Sussex, or packaged grown idk Spain or Monaco or somewhere; Sainsbury's sells it similarly packaged or cut and bunched of undisclosed origin.)

The big takeaway from the Silo book matched the motto of restaurant Noma - "Time and place" - to eat locally and seasonally. So much of the carbon footprint of food comes from not eating locally or seasonally. For example, getting an avocado toast in November here in NYC requires putting an avocado on a 747 and flying it around the world. And, yes - in places like the UK or Denmark or New York, that can mean that fresh foods in Winter are scarce - but that's where fermentation can be a fascinating area of exploration (and, a related passion of mine right now).

I don't share this to create a sense of guilt or scarcity. We have oil now and can get coriander and avocados in the Winter. That means it can be from a position of fun (and privilege) that we can explore alternative ways to eat. But, our ancestors still ate without 747s. Constraints drive creativity - and exploring these areas of low-carbon eating now can drive innovation that helps us cope with with a more low-oil world.

Eating local has a very small impact on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with food, because transportation makes up a small part (~10% on average) of the total. Most foods, avocados included, are sent via ship not airplane. The actual foods you choose to eat (e.g. more vegetables, less beef) has a significantly greater impact than where they are coming from.[0]

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

    Everything from my socks

Are you socks synthetic fiber? I am surprised they are not cotton.

One way to think about plastic: Is there a reasonable alternative? For most plastic (food) wraps, the answer is (sadly): no. They are the best option to reduce food spoilage and only take a couple of grams of oil to make them. Plastic bottles for drinks? Most of them can be avoided by reducing your consumption, or reusing old bottles.

Patagonia has a great article on plastics - wool socks on a polyester core create a drastically better and longer lasting sock than 99% cotton or wool.

https://www.patagonia.com/why-plastics/

Article linked doesn't have anything to do with socks?

I never understood why we don't pump and incinerate all non-recyclable waste straight into a volcano and let the lava deal with it!

It could work with unmaned aerial blimps or other load bearing uav's.

You would sort the waste and grind it down if necessary.

They could hover high enough to not be affected by the rupture of the lava lakes. Unless there is an open caldera like in Nicaragua.

Then you would just have to deal with the local communities spiritual beliefs, which would benefit from a financial incentive.

If oil were expensive, plastic would probably still be used in all the places it is used today because it is lighter and a large percentage of oil goes into the transportation of goods.

I actually don't have a problem with plastic, at least in theory. Oil exists in the ground. I don't see an issue with pumping it up, using it for a bit, and putting it back into the ground via a landfill. I take more of an issue with recycling where plastic is shipped overseas and makes its way into the waterways.

Oil exists in the ground. I don't see an issue with pumping it up, using it for a bit, and putting it back into the ground via a landfill.

- The form it is put "back into the ground" isn't the same form it was "pumped up".

- The landfill isn't the same location where we put it compared to where we sourced it (much deeper).

I'm not an ecologist, but both these differences have complex consequences for earth and us.

I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard.

I’ve tried too, and I agree that it is very hard. I rarely buy packaged and ready-to-eat food products, which eliminates a lot of plastic. But still there’s so much plastic when buying grocery and produce. Buying grains or other items from loose bins means insects, lower quality and what not. I’m happier with the lower plastic though.

Games. I've been forcing myself into productivity for too long because that is the thing to do. I recently built a gaming pc, picked some jrpgs, and I'm having a blast. There are entire franchises and worlds for the exploring. There are amazing rich stories and history and beautiful soundtracks that I'm living through right now. My wishlist grows by the day as I discover new tales.

What are your favorite RPGs at the moment? New or old? I feel like RPGs have been holding strong since the Super Nintendo and there so many hours of incredible gameplay to be had.

An old one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire:_The_Masquerade_%E2%80...

There were many technical issues with the release version, but GOG sells the game with unofficial patches integrated, which worked great for me.

Yes that game is STUNNING and absolutely pulled me in

Try it as the insane vampire, it’s great.

I don't remember thar it was possible to select House / class. Was it? It is 23 years go so ...

Malkavian (the crazy ones) and Nosferatu (masquerade violation if anyone sees you) are both very-different spins on the game compared with the rest of the clans.

If you haven't played the various Bethesda games (Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout), now is a great time. There is a modding tool called Wabbajack that auto-installs curated lists of hundreds of mods, all patched to work together, and you can get an incredible setup with very little work.

Are these mainly new features for the games or graphics updates?

It depends on the wabbajack list you use. Many bring the UI more or less in line with modern standards. Most of them include major graphical improvements. Then they bring new content on top of that - items, spells (if applicable), creatures, NPCs, etc. rarely, they also expand the game maps with new areas.

Don’t forget tons of bug fixes and performance improvements! The amount of work the modding community does for Bethesda games is amazing.

I know it's got a lot of hype at the moment, but Baldur's Gate 3 really is something special. I never played the first 2 games, but I have played D&D regularly for some 16 years now and it's one of the best narrative adventures I've ever had.

I'm planning on going back and playing the Divinity: Original Sin games that Larian made before it. I hear they're fantastic as well.

I’m getting Baldur’s Gate 3 as a gift for Christmas this year and I’m looking forward to trying it.

I'm planning on going back and playing the Divinity: Original Sin games that Larian made before it. I hear they're fantastic as well.

They are. I'd play them in order -- the combat mechanics of DOS1 are kind of tough to swallow after the improvements in DOS2.

The DOS1 plot is also a bit thin, and you have to appreciate their brand of humor. But they are both great.

Baldurs Gate 3

Right now the Trails series (trails in the sky, trails of cold steel)... I think it's an old and new series isn't it?

Also a surprise like was Blue Reflection, if you watch its trailer it doesn't even look too dynamic but it was great fun.

I never liked Rocket Propelled Grenades, so no favorites, and in these dark times of multiple violent conflicts, they are holding up the path to peace. Never knew Nitendo was also a weapons manufacturer, I know them mostly for computer game devices.

As I've gotten older its rare for me to enjoy games, I can't seem to play for more than 15 minutes before wanting to turn it off/feel like I'm bored.

As I get older, game controls just get too complex for me to enjoy casually. Way too many combinations of stuff to remember. NES is most fun - 2 buttons and a d-pad.

What age range is 'older' here?

Controls have gotten easier in my experience, at least on anything made for a mainstream audience. Recently it came up on a podcast with a game reviewer among the hosts that games nowadays seem to all have a setting where enemies can be beaten by looking at them angrily and how it's basically story mode at that setting, and how much that's doing for inclusivity and how many non-gamers they've seen play/enjoy such-and-such game.

More anecdotal, my partner started playing hogwarts a few days ago and wanted to set it to easy. The default was normal, and there's also "story mode" and "hard" available at opposite ends of the spectrum. She's terrible with wasd+mouse (her own words, but I concur) and wanted to go for easy but I encouraged her to go with the default setting, figuring that'll be balanced to be enjoyable for Harry Potter fans (who are book nerds, not necessarily gamers). So far, she's managed to beat everything in one try!

I'm surprised you experience the opposite

47. NES had 2 buttons plus a d-pad. An xbox controller has 8 buttons, 2 joysticks, and a d-pad - it's all just too much for me to have fun with. I'd learn to play the accordion if I was up for all that.

Oh my dear dear bored wanderer. You have not tried Baldirs Gate 3.

Yup. Realized this when I tried to catch up after a nine-year gap. It has started feeling like a chore now, I find myself playing for the sake of finishing it instead of being in the moment.

This was absolutely true for me up to this year. What changed?

I retired, and my chronic burnout started to recede (slowly). I realized that, for me, the issue was learning and remembering new systems were introducing a cognitive load that I just couldn't handle on top of the load I was carrying.

I know that's not directly helpful, but it may be worth looking at whether you are showing signs of burnout.

I tried this by playing Factorio, and realized I was doing similar "work" as my job, but without the added stress of deadlines, compromise and people. Ironically, it felt extremely productive, but not very recharging.

I feel this. I don't reach the same level of drain after playing compared to work. However, it's such a fun way to use my brain in a similar way, I can be hard to put it down.

I also find it rewarding after getting robotics and memorizing recipes. Which allows me to focus more on designing (I suck so bad at it but it's fun).

After a good few hundred hours I moved on to krastorio2 + space exploration. It's so much more complex.

Oh and multiplayer is a great addition allowing me to asynchronously play with some friends /colleagues.

Factorio is fun but the way I play it was unhealthy—several hours of Factorio after 7 hours of sitting in front of a computer. I had to give it up to find a healthier lifestyle—e.g. running, hiking, or taking a walk in nature.

I do want to come back to Factorio since it's an awesome game, but currently I cannot find the good timing for it.

Bought a SteamDeck. I haven't play video games so much for the last 20 years as in the last 2 months.

I dunno, I was a fairly early preorder, and have been quite underwhelmed with it. It does what it’s supposed to do, but there are just way too many games in my library that don’t really work well with it, and/or are just overall much better with keyboard/mouse.

Maybe I’m not the target audience. I also play console games, so most of my library are games that don’t overlap with console (so games that are probably designed for keyboard/mouse).

I played it for a bit, and there are definitely some good games on it (I finally beat Portal on it), but I just haven’t found any games that make me want to break it back out.

Yes! 2023 was one of the best years by amount of well-received games in a long time and I can't agree enough. Some people will disagree but I think it's a very cheap hobby too, you can get dozens if not hundreds of hours for the same price as semi-expensive dinner at a restaurant. Many of games I played are pure art and I admire all the hard work that goes into making them. I cringe when people dismiss gaming as a childish hobby and then proudly say how they binged a netflix show, or did some similar activity for "real grown ups (TM)"

Absolutely this. The overwhelming need to be “productive” has been wearing on me a while.

Gaming is a great stress reliever and I make sure to make some time for it everyday. I mainly like single player games for my PS5 such as Horizon, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher and more recently Spider-Man 2. Sometimes you just need to be selfish and have you time!

This post caught my attention because recently I met a woman I really admire. She dropped out of her computer engineering class, took a vow of celibacy and poverty and became a missionary with a Catholic sect.

The reason I admire her isn't that. What caught my attention about her is that she has a sense of purpose. She has a purpose in life and has devoted her life to it.

I used to have one. My goal was to make the legal system cheaper and more accessible. And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot.

I hope I'll find a purpose soon. That's what I'm passionate about right now, finding a new purpose or a new way to accomplish my past purpose.

It would be nice to have a legal wiki.

Maybe not to represent yourself ("anyone who represents himself has a fool for a client") but maybe useful stuff.

For example, in california, you have certain online privacy rights you can exercise, and it would be nice to have a form letter to enumerate and exercise those rights.

or how to fight a parking ticket, etc.

what i find stupid is that you can represent yourself, but you cant have your non lawywr friend represent you. Despite one being better than the other.

Not stupid at all! There are many things I help others do that I explicitly want others to do if it were me. eg: I am really good at helping other people build websites but every personal website I have tried to build, I've floundered at until I've brought in outside help. I assume lawyers have figured out it works the same way as the common saying goes "Any lawyer that represents himself has a fool for a client".

I think we're in approval, no?

But in lawyering, people need defending cause they can't defend themselves. It's not preference, it's a need.

"There is nothing more annoying than when you think someone is wrong, but they think they are right". And here's the interesting part, it doesn't matter if you're actually right. This is why people need someone defending them. Cause the resulting optics from defending yourselves, coming off as ignorant, unrepentant, or downright evil, is so destructive.

Ofc it's even worse cause it often is the case that you are wrong, but still needs defending for lighter sentence (which you deserve, in truth). YOu can't do this on your own.

Tangential, but this is also why employees don't come to their manager to tell about all their small accomplishments and deeds that they think are underappreciated. You just simply can't testify for yourselves. Especially if you have some dirt on you, and who doesn't? We dont promote ourselves cause we know instinctively it will be received poorly. AND IT WILL. But if other employees go to the manager and say things they appreciate of you, then it's suddenly okay. If people catch on to this, we'll have a more healthier workplace.

This is an example of regulatory capture. In this case, by the legal profession.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot.

You have no contact in your bio but I've run into this with founders a lot and you need to recognize that what you're going through is a period of grief and mourning. I recommend you look up some books on how grief is processed in breakups or deaths and see if you find points of similarity.

Kubler-Ross' "On Death and Dying" is a classic place to start, it's where the "five stages of grief" model was first introduced. Her version of it is a lot more complex than the pop culture, linear understanding that most people have. She mostly talks about the interplay between the five stages and how we ping pong back and forth in interesting ways.

Also, FWIW, I've found ChatGPT a remarkably efficient tool to "read" books in an area you're totally unfamiliar with and want a quick download. You start by asking it to give you a broad overview of a book/set of books and then dive into the areas you find the most interesting until you arrive at an actionable framework.

The year is 2024, and I've just read somerhing like the following comment online:

"Sounds like you're going through a period of grief and mourning. I've found computers to be a remarkably efficient prosthetic replacement for processing meaningful experiences with other real, live people."

It just breaks my heart, and fills me with despair, to see opportunities for human connection so giddily elided. Radio and television were bad enough. Social media has been bad enough. Now we're selling out the last bastions of compassion—grief and mourning—to be mediated by cynical corporate silicon golems? This is the psychosocial equivalent of a catheter and feeding tube. This is an induced social coma.

The wo/man is grieving, for heaven's sake! My advice would be to go have coffee with someone who has read the book! A real live flesh and blood someone. Several such someones! Possibly an entire group or congregation of mourners. We, the grieving, would really appreciate you dropping by.

The books will tell you to do all that!

They're not ready for me to tell them that, they need to be guided on the path to the path to the path.

As an experiment, I just went to ChatGPT and tried to solve the problem as if I were OP and here's the result: https://chat.openai.com/share/3f0fe9cd-76ff-44ac-956f-cfb332...

I certainly found it helpful, even as a basic refresher of the field and I learnt a new thing which is apparently there is no single book that explicitly focuses on helping founders move on which feels like a business opportunity?

But also, you can see how I got to a useful place from first principles with the help of an AI. I stopped where I felt I was sufficiently interested that if I were in OPs shoes, I would have just bought the whole book and read it through and I did it in about 15 minutes although I admit I was cheating since I had an end goal in mind already.

I've left it for anyone else to go further in whatever direction and close the gap between where I ended and specific advice like you have provided.

I worked with a founder who had the same vision. Democratising legal industry using tech.

It was my first job after college and was fun building a contract negotiation platform, document assembling API, etc.

Learnt a lot but had to leave because something was missing & it wasn't working out.

The person who I worked with has the same name signature as yours: vivek durai

Would be incredible if it was the same person

It obviously is

Not that I find this person's path admirable, although I don't know enough about his personal life to feel comfortable saying much more than that. But you might be interested in reading about this one time wold class climber who left his life to join a monastery and become a priest. And then left that and returned to climbing recently. His story doesn't resonate with me, but there might be something to it that grasps you. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/crack-of-des...

It's very difficult to have a real purpose. This is more of an escapist abstraction, which is what people realize eventually.

Why is it fallen apart?

Don't be too dismayed. They get a credit card with an unlimited spending account.

Also, see my post history about acts. It may help you see the trees instead of the forest.

I hope you find it as well, thank you for sharing...it can be quite soul crushing when you loose something that gives you a strong sense of identity.

If you are into the legal system issues right now I am passionate about fathers rights and its been a huge outlet for me. SO many kids and fathers are desperate for help and 50/50 shared parenting is a admirable and achievable goal.

[1] https://www.sharedparenting.org/

She dropped out of her computer engineering class, took a vow of celibacy and poverty and became a missionary with a Catholic sect.

It seems the only way to make HN even better is to bring in people that HNers admirer and to interview them on here.

Speaking of nuns, I know two cases of admirable women (one English and one French), who left their studies (and one also left her then-fiancee) to live and serve in a religious order. At least in one case no-one could have predicted that, least the (MIT-educated) brain researcher fiancee.

i believe that the purpose of humanity itself is to advance our civilization.

that suggests that everyone should contribute to that, which further implies that every contribution matters, no matter how small. you tried something, and it failed. that's fine. ideally others have an opportunity to learn from that, but even if not, at least you learned something, and you can use that learning for your future.

the goal is not to create the greatest possible impact, but to learn and make the most of the resources available to you. it could be something small like if you are a lawyer having one out of ten clients pro-bono or for a very low rate for people who could not afford a lawyer otherwise.

find an area/place/people that need help, and then help them.

Thanks for your honest answer. Finding purpose is a pretty good passion

It definitely makes a lot of easier when having a purpose. On the other hand tying the own identity that close to one thing is the equivalent of putting all eggs in one basket.

Can you tell me more about how you went about trying to make the legal system cheaper?

Hey I fell into this, only I tried to improve the health care industry and it fell apart over a decade ago. My tip, be a good person, don't let other people change you. Bring kindness to the world. You aren't god, you're vivekd, which is actually much harder to be. You aren't all powerful, yet your mind can comprehend so much beyond your reach. Read some Sun Tzu, only fight the battles (including those in your head) that are winnable (I.E. the outcome is worthy of the energy). Be a good person. Stand up for others. Give up political dogma, emotional mastrubation, and just be human. My grandfather spent his whole live advocating for better mental health care in a midwest state. Just hitting a brick wall. But he was content, he did what he could do, and what he felt he must.

You should talk with AI Judge guy, wehad an interesting chat about similar things (sort of). Check my history

Time and new life experiences will mend some of your wounds. I had to give up my life's work and its mission. People often talk about regret of not trying, and there's a less-discussed painful experience of not accomplishing a mission.

If you'd like to connect, please reach out.

Small city council politics :( there's a lot of resistance against a new temporary housing project for Ukrainian refugees with many legit concerns, and some NIMBY, but also xenophobia and racism.

It's tough but we've been able to start a YIMBY group and encouraging people and organisations to make public comments or send letters of support. A good few didn't dare because they feared reactions, and rightfully so, because some who did (including me) ended up on the receiving end of some bullshit. All bark and no bite - for now - but not great for democracy.

How does racism play into your situation? Small towns and Ukrainians have one thing in common: they are both white. I would think their race wouldn't be the deciding factor.

It's same everywhere. Fear of the unknown, coping with own failure via blaming someone weaker, different language and of course at least in EU a lot of hatred due to desinformations.

Of course more descriptive word would be just xenophobia combined with copium addiction.

Using empty words like disinformation, xenophobia and othet short cuts wont help here. Build bridges, listen opposite opinions and do not judge.

Ideally don't use rethoric that you fight against. It's not consturctive.

It's also the fact that if you bought a house and they build a refugee center near it, your house immediately loses value. For many that might mean negative equity and losing a chunk of their main life investment while still having to pay the mortgage.

Italians weren't "white" when they first came to the US, either.

Italians weren't "white" when they first came to the US, either.

Italians have been "white" since the dawn of the construction of "race" in which "white" was even one of the options.

(They've been othered as "ethnic" in a way which closely mirrors othering on race-qua-race, and we use "racism" to describe both racial and ethnic bigotry, but while similar and sharing some features, the two things were not the same in the US.)

Teddy Roosevelt, not yet president, famously said the lynching was indeed "a rather good thing".[15] John M. Parker helped organize the lynch mob, and in 1911 was elected as governor of Louisiana. He described Italians as "just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism

Haiti codified "whiteness" into law way before then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Haiti

It's not about the Ukrainians directly. On the more 'civil' side of this discourse it's mostly claims that this will become a general asylum or registration center (which it won't) and/or that there'll be a lot of crime, often accompanied by sources featuring African people.

This flows directly into the less civil side of the discussion, which ranges from conspiracy theories of EU or WEF-planned repopulation to all out etno-nationalism. Our city has a rich history of voting literal nazis into the council. There's talk of storming the city council and all that.

Slavs have been discriminated against quite terribly over history.

‘White’ is just a category invented by Anglos and other Germanics (including Scandis, Franks, excluding Slavs and Jews) to lump together the ‘good sort’ of light skinned people away from dark skinned people and the ‘bad sort’ of light skinned people.

If you want to get deeper into ethnic speculation, I suspect it’s because Slavs have historically absorbed non-negligible amounts of ‘other’ groups such as Turkic, Iranic and Mongol; and this sets them apart from the more insulated Germanic groups who perhaps feel it makes them superior. Look at Nazi views on Aryanism and how Slavs were considered impure (funnily enough, except Bohemians, Croats and Ukrainians for political reasons… there was a war on)

Sometimes, a better word for racism is tribalism, since it does not always stem from skin color. Tribes delineate among infinite lines, but common ones are wealth, religion (or customs), lineage, education, etc, and some of those might even overlap.

Thinking that racism has to do (only) with skin colour is a typical American misconception.

Hitler considered the Slavs the be a "race" (an inferior one that ought to be enslaved).

Is there a country closer to their homeland where they can be housed? It is unfortunate they have to be so far from home. Or better yet, can we just push for peace talks so they can stay home?

Or better yet, can we just push for peace talks so they can stay home?

"Stay home" as in "stay in a country occupied by an enemy country who wants to get rid of you"?

Sure. That sounds like a brilliant solution.

If we are talking about Palestine and Gaza yes, stay home would be much better than be killed and repelled.

Ukraine itself houses a great many internal refugees. The EU countries have agreed to each take a fair share of refugees, but Germany, Poland and Czechia carry the good majority right now.

I'm not sure how it's counted (whether it includes forcibly migrated), but according to Statista, Russia currently holds the majority of non-internal Ukrainian refugees.

Peace talks with Putin lol, like any of that would work

Or better yet, can we just push for peace talks so they can stay home?

Some of these people don't have any homes anymore, literally. Some places have been pretty so extensively damaged that you're not able to live there anymore.

We need both, help for refugees that have nowhere else to go, and more dialog to end the conflict.

This applies to all conflicts.

YIMBY politics is where it's at for me too. My city has a housing crisis. My best friend here got forced out by the prices.

It's different from software... so slow to get things done. But also really rewarding to see housing get built and policies allowing different, more affordable kinds of housing to be built. We just re-legalized SRO's here!

That's great! There's a housing crisis here too and unfortunately the opposition to the project uses this as their main argument. Those supporting refugee housing are framed as enemies of the 'real' locals, even though the current plans are the result of trying to fit the refugee housing in such a way that it doesn't impact planned permanent housing projects.

The answer is to build enough for everyone. Building enough can happen in a lot of different ways:

https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...

BTW, the two groups that seem to be doing the most concrete work on housing are:

* https://new.yimbyaction.org/

* https://welcomingneighbors.us/

I've learned a lot and it's great to connect with people all over the US doing similar work.

What's an SRO for the nonamericans here?

Single room occupancy (studio flats)

If you’re in Germany, please stop.

There is a new show on HBO called Scavengers Reign, and it's become my favorite scifi story ever. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21056886/

It's kinda like watching Planet Earth about another ecosystem, with a strong focus on judgment-free ecology (ie there isn't good and evil, just different flora and fauna and otherwise interacting both with their normal food webs and with human outsiders).

It really tickles the environmental science geek in me. There's such a wonderful assortment of predators, prey, symbiotes, diseases, treatments, and thoughtful little touches everywhere. Beautiful art too.

------

That aside, I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm...

Simple pleasures, man.

I'm really enjoying Scavengers Reign, but I can't help but feel like the local biology is a bit too absurdist. Or the amount of consistently lucky moves some of the characters would had to make to discover some weird quirk of that alien life. They had been there for maybe weeks or months, but somehow discovered that if you climb inside of the belly of this particular creature and twist some of his internal organs that it will release a light producing egg when you hit them against a hard surface? Or that if you attach this tentacle sac to your face that you won't inhale some fungus gas.

Very creative, but a bit hard to believe. Perhaps the timescale of how long they were stranded there could have been increased a little bit.

I also struggled with this when watching it. It's frustrating because I am really enjoying the show, it makes me feel like a kid again, but I have such a strong desire for consistent and cohesive world-building.

The trick/explanation/excuse I've been using is that we know our characters are explorers and experts, so maybe the life on this planet isn't as "alien" or "unknown" to the characters as it seems to us.

I've had survival training, I know how to identify certain useful plants or recognize tracks from animals in ecosystems I don't live in, so I tell myself that it must be like that from their perspective. Which lines up, seeing as the character's don't seem to react that strangely or shocked to most of what they see. Even one of them says that their goal is to not only survive, but _thrive_ here until rescue.

Highly recommend it, the trailer gives a good sense of the vibes without giving away too much.

That particular character is a biologist before the crash, perhaps prior knowledge since the planet has been inhabited before.

This is precisely what I was saying to my friend the other day. Their knowledge of the planet is hyper-specific in some ways, but they also seem to acknowledge that they don't understand the planet. One person says, "This place is like a puzzle." but it seems like a puzzle they've solved, if they know that taking the tiny skull from a worm and rolling it in a leaf will make a whistle that summons a bird that won't hurt them.

Yet, on the other hand, they seem mystified by things like which plants are edible, or the yellow fungus on the computer circuits, or the intelligent mind-power beasts. Stuff that should be top-level knowledge, I'd think? So do they understand the planet or not? Clearly a lot is known about the esoteric workings of the planet, but weirdly the BASICS of the place are a total mystery to them.

And yeah, the biology of the planet is both supremely alien yet also amazingly perfectly suited to incredibly specific use cases: this creature doubles as a gas mask, this other one is a personal flying machine with handlebars, reach inside this one and it'll inflate into a personal balloon guaranteed to hold your weight.

If I turn off that part of my brain, I enjoy letting myself get caught up in the "LOST"-ish mysterybox-ness of it (LOST, in space!).

I've been wondering the same thing! My explanation is that the planet was already known/cataloged and that the crew has access to that knowledge somehow.

Is this based on any of Jean Giraud/Moebius's work?

I don't know who that is (had to look him up), but some critics think the series was inspired by his look & feel:

https://www.theverge.com/23912922/scavengers-reign-review-ma...

https://www.polygon.com/23798021/scavengers-reigns-announcem...

I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3.

I was too worried about wasting loot then I finished the game with 20k gold and nothing to spend it on and thought "And nothing of value would have been lost if I had yeeted more people off cliffs."

I had a fully converted party my first play through. I was already overpowered, but everyone having telekinesis and flight on some maps was just ridiculously broken.

This sounded really cool so I went and checked it out, turned it off within 10 min. Was just kind of silly, felt more like someone having fun with drawing than someone really trying to do any sort of serious ecological design.

Just dropping back in to say I started this show after reading your comment and am enjoying it quite a bit. Very imaginative and beautiful animation. Thanks!

Haha, yea I binged that one too. I'd give it a similar description, I loved it. I also watched Pantheon. There are a few questions in Pantheon that are interesting to imagine. Also, the computer science fan service (like the philosopher's problem in concurrency/multithreading) feels fun - irrelevant to be honest, but fun.

The aesthetic is heavily inspired by No Man's Sky.

It is surprising very creative. Somehow it reminds me of manga mushishi through there is hardly any obvious overlap

It is incredible and definitely inspired by the work of Mobius which makes me incredibly excited.

Having his art style come to life as animation is beyond delightful.

If you are enjoying this I also recommend Blue Eye Samurai. Both are amazing.

Beautiful art too.

I just looked over a couple of trailers. I think this makes my watchlist.

About the artwork... reminded me of Another World [0, 1] but with the better rez of today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game)?use...

[1] Walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjMf_bEfqIc

One of my favorite things about Deathloop was kicking unsuspecting NPCs off of cliffs and roofs. I've played a lot of that game and that hasn't gotten old yet.

Mental health. I recently passed out in public and had to finally admit to myself that I’m severely burnt out. I had ignored the signs and mentally written off the concept of burnout as a bit of a wishy-washy mostly “emotional” concept and not as the very real psychological AND physiological condition that doesn’t just go away if you get a good nights sleep and a day off. It was emotional to actually read up on it and realize my disillusionment with work, deteriorating relationships and steady decline in my ability to carry out daily tasks weren’t signs of a personal lack of interest or effort, but an inevitability resulting from the position I had put myself in.

Could you please elaborate on why you think you passed out or what led up to that incident? Whenever I'm particularly stressed, I tend to become very light-headed or dizzy to the point where it feels like I'm about to pass out, but I never do. I've had this on and off for years. I'm only 26 years old.

Usually it is the way of breathing that changes, because of anxiety (fight or flight state). The pace and volume becomes imbalanced with respect to the oxygen / co2 needed, even when no hyperventilating seems to be happening. This imbalance causes lightheadedness and ultimately dizzyness or passing out. One trick that can help, when you feel like that, breathe in deeply and the breathe out very very slowly through a fine opening between the lips. Then pause several seconds and repeat. This can be done without anyone noticing, because it is subtle and slow.

I have the same thing, one weird connection I realized was: coffee. Apart from the stress of being a solopreneur, I noticed whenever I had coffee, I ended up being anxious/panicky later in the day.

It might be placebo, but since I stopped drinking coffee, I rarely have those intense feelings of anxiety.

Mental health for me as well.

That's the point of https://rationaldino.substack.com/ and this pseudonymous account. Separately I have other children who were impacted by COVID and lockdowns and are part of https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-g.... That's also been hard.

All of this is made more complicated by the fact that I regard psychology as having a lot of pseudoscience in it. Feynman was right to call them that in https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. It took them 40 years to realize that he was right about the importance of replication. But they still haven't accepted the rest of what he said.

For anyone dealing with mental health things, see https://www.therapistaid.com/

You can work through most of the worksheets online for free, and it helped me understand mental health better than I ever had. I think they charge $9 per month to download PDFs of the worksheets, which is cheaper than therapy with a professional confuser.

I am not affiliated with them, and I do not make money off them. I am a former customer.

Thank you for the recommend. Given where I now am, I don't believe that I need this. But it is a resource I will likely forward to others.

The world is slowly realizing that the advice to "suck it up", "tough it out", "walk it off", "man up", etc. aren't helpful. Real problems need real solutions, not platitudes.

I'm sorry you've gone through this. I quit a previous job with no other job lined up because of burnout. Fortunately, I could afford the 4 month gap in employment. My heart aches for those who can't.

That's true, it's important to recognize the problems and start working on them.

It sucks that you had to quit. I was advising the same to my girlfriend because she couldn't bear with work anymore, until a friend told her that she should not quit and instead the company should pay the burnout because they put her in that situation. Luckily she didn't follow my advise and it's been in burnout leave for the last 6 months, with help from a therapist.

that doesn’t just go away if you get a good nights sleep and a day off

Try to sleep (or at least stay in bed) 10+ hours a day, consistently for a few weeks.

If I don't get enough sleep (10ish hours in bed) I crash rather quickly. Long covid sucks.

Longhorn PHP in Austin, Texas wrapped up just a couple of days ago. One of the keynote talks was titled "Stronger Than Fear: Mental Health in the Developer Community" by Ed Finkler. It outlined why these things not only need to be talked about, but also taken seriously:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYPAGuh6Le8

Thanks for this, I really needed it.

I feel so seen. And the first time I created an account here to respond to a message after lurking for many years. I am off work due to burnout after having recently understood that was what I was experiencing.

People are talking about therapy and while I’m in therapy I find that it could benefit from someone who actually understands working in Tech/SaaS. Wonder if others here have felt this while talking to therapists and what they’ve done about it.

my disillusionment with work, deteriorating relationships and steady decline in my ability to carry out daily tasks weren’t signs of a personal lack of interest or effort, but an inevitability resulting from the position I had put myself in.

Wow this is exactly what i'm suffering from right now... I recently thought about applying to a more serious tech team at my company given i've slowly slipped into a basic DBA/PM roll.

But i'm worried it's only going to make it worse. What does the science or your peers say is the key to getting help?

You are not alone! I have been dealing with burnout since the pandemic began. For me it was the inability to focus on the simplest tasks that made me realize I could no longer ignore the problem. Therapy has helped a lot.

Created HealingGardens.co after such an episode myself. If you want to chat just DM me

Sending a big hug over the protocol stack of the Internet. We neglect the signs because our society tells us so, but now that you have started noticing them, I am sure you will find the balance you need for a happy life.

Obsessed with quite a few things right now:

• diving into plant law; writing a series on plants and property

• research clamping mechanisms and jigs for woodworking with handtools

• sadly smitten with all the genai advancements

• plotting multiple "chaos for social good" projects

• trying to figure out therapists can be so attuned to feelings while staying neutral

• promoting tiny blogs and the "small web": https://blogs.hn

I don't know what "chaos for social good" is supposed to be, but I am intrigued. Would you care to expand on that?

I'm producing tools for the following:

• converting gendered restrooms to all-gender restrooms (with or without permission)

• easy legislative templates and meetups for removing billboards from your municipality

• low-powered and repairable permacomputing hardware designs

• tools for improving home ventilation

• software for retrofitting walkable infrastructure into existing towns and cities

converting gendered restrooms to all-gender restrooms (with or without permission)

I believe, for a long list of reasons, that families with stably married mother/father are the best way to preserve humanity and that they are most stable without wandering eyes. Avoiding having wandering eyes, or wandering loyalties, in turn, is helped when we make it easier for people to manage and direct sexual attraction to keep it within marriage, rather than otherwise. This includes avoiding porn or behaviors that are like porn to others. I want to keep my thoughts clean and faithful to my wife. I hope others can make that easier and less work, rather than often putting things in my sight that make it be more work.

I feel that broad overgeneralizations like this are often just self-revelation.

This reads like you find people besides your wife attractive, but rather than recognizing this as normal and healthy, you vilify and repress it. But you see (part of) the responsibility for avoiding your thoughts with others, and expect of them to act according to your needs and wants.

The thought of people of the other gender using a toilet near you is sexual to you and you don't like that, but this is a you problem.

Also, I don't know whether your "stably married mother/father" is just heteronormative or deliberately excluding same-sex couples, but if it's the latter, your "belief" is demonstrably wrong. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309949/

I feel that broad overgeneralizations like this are often just self-revelation.

That's how I feel about "I know it when I see it". It's the kinks of the proverbial seer.

I tried to explain a bit more in a related comment, FWIW.

Thanks for the considerate reply.

I have learned for myself that God exists, that he cares, this life is not the beginning or the end, that our choices matter, and that the commandments he gives us (like the 10 commandments, as an example) are to help us get through this life and prepare to receive the blessings he has promised based on our choices.

I have written more of why I know this, at my web site (in profile).

All the best to you.

Going to the bathroom is like porn to you? Not to kinkshame, but that seems like your problem, not anyone else's.

I bet I can think of a less erotic environment than a public restroom, such as...

...I'm going to have to get back to you.

Mike Johnson is on HN?

What's he posting with, a quill?

Fine. I do not share your views and I will not cater to them.

I tried to explain a bit more in a related comment, FWIW.

Neat.

Thank you for blogs.hn! I'm a big fan of exploring what people on here are up to.

As a fellow "small web" fan, thanks for linking blogs.hn! Great resource; I like it. Will submit mine shortly.

Learning about my own mind and how to tame it.

I've started realizing that I don't have much control over the external world, people or events, and only my perception of it can keep me sane or fix my mental issues.

This has effectively forced me to see my relationship with my devices with more scrutiny. I've repeatedly found that digital consumption, whether it is infotainment, knowledge, or mindless Reels or Shorts, has always led me to a more depressed and sad state.

A recent trip in the mountains without any cell reception even further confirmed this hypothesis for me personally.

I try to leave my devices and social media for longer durations, but the eventual FOMO and withdrawals that kick in always bring me back to square one of agony.

Events around a romantic interest recently also made me to rethink on how to effectively control emotions and feelings. The other person can do nothing wrong, but my mind can still feel tormented by their simple actions and events that unfold.

Unless I can achieve some sort of mental and emotional equanimity, I feel all my pursuits of learning and career would still not alleviate me from this joyless state of life.

I'm pretty sure Buddhism is what you want

Or stoicism.

Or CBT.

Learning about the mind and controlling it better has been a recent passion of mine as well.

Like you, I’ve noticed a direct connection between media consumption and quality of life. Namely, if I get a dopamine release with minimal to no effort, my day is pretty much shot as I have little motivation to do anything I want to do.

This has led me to delete all social media, completely. I wiped all my accounts and walked away. I also leave the TV off during the day, which is still weird for me because I’m that person who works with the TV on in the background. I thought it was harmless, but it turns out, it’s not.

Basically anything that gives me dopamine without trying is gone, which in this world is mostly screens.

The more I experiment, the more I realize how important control of one’s mind and thoughts are. I’m now at a point where I believe that the only barrier between one and their goals is their mind. Giving up, doubting, lack of motivation, perseverance, persistence, confidence - it all comes from the mind.

Control your mind, control your life. It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds though :)

Bingo re dopamine!

You might find this video interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kse87ocS0Uo

It talks about different levels of thinking without going into any religion or culture.

PS: The YouTube channel seems to be related to dating, but this particular video doesn't have any of that.

There are books that can help with this action -> thought -> emotion spiral.

I found great help by reading the (IMHO poorly titled) Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living

https://a.co/d/1QeKVAn

Heres a term you might appreciate: JOMO, the joy of missing out.

You should try Raja-Yoga. I suggest you start small - with Vivekananda, for example and then, if that brings you joy, read the whole plethora of interdependent teachings.

Perhaps you might be interested in the works of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. When I encountered his ideas, I was impressed by his psychological insights. I had never encountered same level of insight before. It really resonated with me.

His approach is not religious in the usual sense -- there is no need to believe anything or pray to some entities. It is not in conflict with religions either. Gurdjieff is presenting the psychological and spiritual ideas that are behind many mystical traditions of religions in a way that is more digestible by the modern man, and possible to apply in modern life.

His own books are probably too dense to start from. A good starting point for me was the book series Psychological commentaries by Nicoll. Another popular one is In the search of the Miraculous by Ouspensky. You can only get the Commentaries as used, and they are really expensive, but you only need one of them to start with and PDF versions can be found online. One one book of the series will do, as they all are all composed of one pagers on recurring topics.

Drop me a note if you are interested.

Check out the book Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke to see why this might be happening. I think she also has a YouTube video with Andrew Huberman going over the same material.

Check out buddhism and meditation, pretty much all about that

That's a topic close to my heart as well. I found two books helpful:

- No Self, No Problem (Chris Niebauer) - Solve For Happy (Mow Gawdat)

Events around a romantic interest recently also made me to rethink on how to effectively control emotions and feelings. The other person can do nothing wrong, but my mind can still feel tormented by their simple actions and events that unfold.

I struggle with this as well and in addition to the two books above I suggest you look into the works of Albert Ellis.

Moving golf simulation into the cloud [0].

Golf is one of the only sports that can be realistically simulated indoors.

Golf is also one of the only sports where even severe lag has no effect on the accuracy of the play - just the viewing experience. Unlike FPS games in the cloud which become unplayable with even modest lag.

The golf simulation technology landscape today is pre-cloud. People running their own gaming computers with complex lash ups of open source software to connect their launch monitors. All pretty prohibitive to the stereotypical older tech-averse golf player.

[0] https://golfsimcloud.com

Golf and downhill skiing were huge when I was a kid. I grew up golfing and downhill skiing.

Decades have gone by now. Who golfs? Who has downhill skis?

Bought season passes for me and 3 of my kids this year, we’ll ski as much as possible. Have multiple pairs of skis myself. Resorts are always busy and 50/50 ski/snowboard.

I think this very much is a personal perspective thing. Skiing is only increasing in popularity. Many ski resorts recording record high visitation this year. https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/29/national-ski-areas-record...

Who golfs? Who has downhill skis?

I imagine you could answer that question by going to a golf course or ski slope to see who's there.

Colorado resident, here. I'd say 95% of people I know do one or the other. Probably 50% of people I know do both.

Figuratively everyone skis in Seattle. Like, you need to reserve parking or get shuttled at Crystal these days it’s so busy.

Golf has surged in popularity after covid, 20 year high rates of growth in every demographic.

your site flashes and loads content for like 10 seconds for me. the content just keeps moving up and down...

Is it possible you have first party cookies disabled? On your first visit we need to run some JS (apparently the only way to get the user timezone). We store that in your session and then redirect you so we can show availability in your timezone. If first party cookies are disabled then there will be no session and the page will loop. (Open to suggestions on better TZ handling - other than rewriting as an SPA :)

The first time loading the page, the white bar holding the menu flashes 2cm lower then higher for a few seconds (as elements load). It doesn't flash afterwards. Consider moving something to the footer, so the user doesn't see the loading/flashing.

Many thanks for the input.

When you loop at least set a query string counter and stop after 3 times. You can then display a note to the user that they need to enable first party cookies.

Print media -- seriously. There are vanishingly few types of paper-based products left besides mass-market paperbacks and a handful of soulless conglomerate-owned magazines that may disappear tomorrow.

Just like there are small farming collectives out there, I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers.

Something, anything to counter the overwhelm of ad and email popup-ridden "content blogs" and walled garden platforms sucking everything into their in-house LLMs.

I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers.

what do you like to read? i might have some suggestions

I'm open to different topics. Short stories, music, business, art.

little engines has stories and it's free: https://www.littleengines.pub/

i also like forever magazine, the writing is better than little engines: https://forevermag.net/

Just like there are small farming collectives out there, I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers.

You seem to be describing what I've known (since forever) by "Zine"[¹]

[¹]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zine

Yeah that's what I was thinking of. Are there semi-professional zine publications out there? I checked out Etsy but the stuff there was not really to my taste.

Do you have any decent local bookstores nearby? You might be surprised at the variety of magazines they have once you skim past the usual options. I've seen all sorts of niche publications, including zines. Most are not for me, but that isn't a problem since there is usually something that catches my eye.

You might find something that grabs you from the list of exhibitors here: https://www.seattleartbookfair.org/Exhibitors Or look for similar events and check out who attends.

I like reading about food, so places like Omnivore books have specialty books or magazines that are not just recipe books. Though I do like cookbooks. https://omnivorebooks.myshopify.com/

I've had the opposite experience. I'm amazed at the types of print magazines on niche topics that still exist. Are you aware of https://www.stackmagazines.com/ ?

I've been looking for something like this for a while, thanks a lot for sharing! It just sucked when I was checking out a few mags and after calculating the cost for shipping to Sweden it was higher than the total cost of 4-6 magazines...

I am also into micro-zines (and larger). There's a great community around Sword and Sorcery style short stories, with a handful of high quality quarterly and monthly publications, with strong authors in the genre.

Are you ruling our hardcover books that still get written and published? I'm on email mailing lists of two small/Independent publishers, and they still make books.

And where I live, there's a book binders workshop on my street.

There's 100s of literary magazines (litmags) that publish in print and/or online. They tend to focus on fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. But you'll also get commentary, news, art, comics, works in translation, litmags that focus on certain genres etc. etc. Below is wikipedia's list. "One Story" is a good example of micro in the mail, literally one fiction story sent in small print format once a month. Also below is one writer's take on which are "the best" litmags, including what they could find about each's circulation numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_magazines http://www.erikakrousewriter.com/erika-krouses-ocd-ranking-o...

I just downloaded Ableton Live and it’s been a blast playing with it. Similarly, I finally understand how modular synths work and it’s basically just functional programming with sound. I haven’t bought any modulars yet but I’m really looking forward to getting into it in the new year. Music production is very cool and I can’t wait to learn more.

Enjoy!!!!

I worked in music tech for a few startups starting in 2000, have written a few instruments (VSTs) and dabbled in making noise (some call it music). specialize in cutting edge dsp, but i just like applying it to PHAT SOUNDS. :D i'm a much better sw engineer DSP enthusiast than an artist, but can still hold my own.

Get ready for so much fun. Making music gets infinitely more fun once you start to build all your own tools =) Do you code? If you can code even a bit..

It's not my day job anymore, but send me an email if you'd like to know more, I guess I'm finally old enough to pass on some shit...

Hey, you mind if I email you!? I'm really interested in starting to create my own plugins and I'm not sure the best place to start.

Don't mind at all. go ahead. I can sometimes be an ass about replying.

I do enjoy coding quite a bit as well. Where do you recommend getting started merging these two interests?

I got into making house/techno music about a year ago and it's become a life-changing hobby just like getting into tech was. Getting to that point where you start making "listenable" music is unmatched. The best advice that I can give (that you didn't ask for) is to use a reference track as you make a song. It keeps you inspired, allows you to learn from the track, and prevents the kind of listening fatigue that makes it easy to convince yourself your mix is well balanced. It's not- yet :) Have fun!

When you say use a reference track do you mean trying to e.g. mimic some style, sound or beat?

Yes- it's common to drag a track into Ableton and use that as a reference for a few different reasons. You can try to mimic particular sounds, the structure of the song, or the overall mix. For example, if I like the hat of a particular house song I can try to match the sound and loudness of the hat I'm hearing from the reference, as well as how it's mixed and when it appears. There are a ton of videos on the best to go about using one. Also, if you want to take the route of just trying to copy a song exactly that's a great way to learn. It'll be far off but it's a good exercise to go through.

I did audio production for about 10 years before pivoting into tech, ha! Live sound for work, but I'm also a musician so I've spent my fair share of time with Logic Pro. It's funny because I also want to dig more into synths, I've always been a guitarist and have thus far only used soft synths mostly due to not having the money to play with nicer equipment. Now that I make good money, I haven't found time to circle back to it. Very high on my wish list is a nice analog synth and maybe a physical sequencer. I find that what happens to me is the futzing around with the DAW gets between my idea and getting it recorded - I've done some solid work at getting channel strip settings and templates built out to minimize this, but at the end of the day I need some more equipment. It really is a ton of fun, though. It's as broad and deep as you want to make it, not unlike software more generally.

Good stuff!

I started getting in to this at the start of the year. Already had an old, dusty MicroKORG and MIDI interface to use it as a controller, but recently splashed out on a bigger controller as the Korg's tiny keys were hurting me - plus, I wanted something bigger to get better at piano!

A couple of free soft synths I'd recommend are Surge XT, and Vital.

https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/

https://vital.audio/

This is me, it was my pandemic hobby and then it just stuck. I’m still terrible on pretty much every front but I’m constantly improving.

Take your time with modular. It’s easy to get carried away and overspend. Each module is deeper than it looks and you really benefit from getting to know each one.

Edit: and, of course, VCV Rack is the best.

It’s haven’t bought any Modular’s yet but I’m really looking forward to getting into other on the new year.

http://cardinal.kx.studio

https://vcvrack.com/

The former is libre and gratis, runs as a standalone or plugin and in the browser!! and is based on the latter.

The latter has a libre and gratis standalone version, the plugin version is non-gratis.

Learning to use Vim! I've tried three times before in the past 10 years. This is the first time it actually clicked. It's the first time I've tried Neovim. It's awesome and I feel like I'm playing a game with myself while working. I thought it would take much longer to get to the speed I'm at now. I've been using Vim exclusively for a month.

Any resources you can share or did you jump into the docs?

Tbh the best bit of advice I ever got for learning vim is to keep a sticky note on your monitor with 5-10 motions you want to learn, and replace it once you've started using them consistently.

Start with h, j, k, l, w, b, a, i, o, esc And go from there

(Not the person you asked) but it helps to realize that vim in "insert" mode is just like any other text editor you know, you can use your arrow keys and the delete button to edit your document. You will get annoyed pretty quickly navigating with arrow keys and no mouse cursor, so you might search up "how do I jump the end of this damned line!" (hint: it's the $ sign). As you edit documents you will get more and more annoyed and search up more shortcuts which you will be happy to incorporate into your life. This is what worked for me, anyways.

Years ago I learned the basics from this IRC chat log of someone introducing someone else to Vim basics: https://www.vi-improved.org/irc-style-tutorial/

There's a popular stackoverflow answer as a Vim (Vi) introduction, which I haven't read through but will link anyway: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...

http://vimcasts.org/episodes/ screencasts are high quality short videos, go back to the early ones for introductions to buffers and windows and things (more recent ones tend to be too many niche scripts and plugins for me).

Sure! The first thing I did was follow this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7i4amO_zaE

This is ThePrimeagen's 0 to LSP, Neovim RC from Scratch. In this video he performs a clean installation of Neovim and goes step by step adding the things he considers essential. This was very important for me to acquaint myself with how things work, how to install plugins, how to define custom key maps. I remember the first times I tried using Vim, I couldn't figure out how to get Nerdtree to work. This video made me realize I just lacked the knowledge of how Vim config works.

This video was such a good start because It provided me with the tools to continue my exploration of Vim autonomously. In a week I was already able to install new plugins and tweak them using Lua config files the way I specifically wanted. It's such a cool experience!

Keep in mind that both the author of this video and I use Neovim, which is a fork of Vim. As a text editor they both function essentially the same. The difference lies on the config files and in broader UI capabilities by Neovim. While Vim uses Vimscript, Neovim prefers Lua, although Neovim is fully backwards compatible, so you can choose to use Vimscript for your configuration if you want as well. This also means that Vim plugins just work with Neovim!

The docs are also a huge source of knowledge for me. In the beginning I resorted to :help key-codes a lot when defining key mappings.

To learn the Vim motions, which is the most challenging part of using Vim, I suggest you find a cheatsheet online and refer to it all the time. One very cool plugin that will help you get comfortable with Vim motions is ThePrimeagen's VimBeGod: https://github.com/ThePrimeagen/vim-be-good. It's a set of game-like exercises to practice the motions. This is also pretty cool and helped a lot: https://vimsnake.com/. It's a classic snake game where instead of using arrow keys, you use HJKL. And speaking of arrow keys, one thing I did very early on was disabling them (or, in reality, remapping them to noop) in normal mode so I was forced to move around the text using Vim Motions.

At first you will get frustrated because your brain will need some time to rewire in a way to absorb all the new abstractions Vim presents. It's a whole new logic of editing text. The most important thing is to stick to it and you will be surprised with how fast you end up picking things up. Of course, don't expect to be crazy fast in a few weeks. But right now, after a little over a month, I no longer feel that discomfort using Vim anymore. I suppose I'd still be faster on VS Code, but I really want to master Vim, so I'm sticking with it and I feel a constant improvement.

When I dove into vin about a year ago I shortly after added Vimium-ff to Firefox to get him-like keybindings there. Feels great.

Yeah, me too! I also created my own firefox add-on, Hacker News Navigator: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-n...

It allows you to jump parent comments in a Hacker News comment page using either left/right arrow keys or, in Vim mode, h and l. j and k will move the page up and down.

Same here! What keys/combinations are you usually using right now?

I try to not stray too far from the default key binding as I think it would be good to be able to use Vim on servers that don't have all my config. But, hey, what's the point of using Vim if you're not having fun ricing it? These are some indispensable key maps to me:

In visual mode, move a line up or down: vim.keymap.set("v", "J", ":m '>+1<CR>gv=gv") vim.keymap.set("v", "K", ":m '<-2<CR>gv=gv")

In normal mode, replace all occurences of the word under the cursor: vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>s", [[:%s/\<<C-r><C-w>\>/<C-r><C-w>/gI<Left><Left><Left>]])

In normal or visual mode, Yank to the OS's pasteboard: vim.keymap.set({"n", "v"}, "<leader>y", [["+y]])

And there are plenty more that are related to specific plugins.

Also, I've remapped caps lock to esc in the OS. This makes it way easier to leave insert mode without leaving the home row.

Congratulations, you're in for ride. If you're not on Windows add these 2 lines to your ~/.inputrc to get vim keybindings pretty much everywhere in the terminal (readline based programs):

```

set editing-mode vi

Control-l clear-screen

```

Also install vimium[0][1] to get vim movements and some useful keybindings in your browsers.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vimium/dbepggeogba...

Congratulations :) The same thing happened to me about 12 years ago. I'd tried Vim a few times and it didn't grab me, but then suddenly it clicked and I haven't looked back.

Not sure if you've seen this, but worth working through, sooner or later (no rush): https://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com/

A discipline I wished I'd learned earlier was don't let your vimrc grow too big. Instead, keep carving parts of it off into plugins. Track everything in Git.

Not drinking. I only drank at weekends. But pretty much every weekend for 25 + years, this is totally normal from where I'm from.

I read the book alcohol explained https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcohol-Explained-William-Porter-eb...

Listened to the Huberman podcast about alcohol.

And realised I don't want to drink anymore.

It's really strange, I used to struggle having a single weekend with no booze. Now I actively just don't want to. I look around me and see people boozing and I think it's insane.

I'm 8 weeks in. I doubt I'll drink again. I really regret not realising much earlier in life how shit drinking actually is

Congratulations! I have about a year and a half sober. You should be proud of yourself.

Thanks :) I'm interested, do you find it a struggle as so many people do? Or did you have a similar experience to me were you aren't really that bothered about it anymore?

I'm really hoping my desire to drink doesn't come back as easily as it went away.

Not OP, but I'll share my insight. The main way I keep myself on track is to remind myself as to why I am doing it. For me it is: sports and not being hungover (in particular on weekends). When I drink too much I tend to get anxious and emotional and that would last for a couple of days. Both of these reasons kept me from drinking again. It has been 3 months thus far and I haven't had an urge yet. People are also much more accommodating these days if you don't drink. I downloaded an app to help me track my "progress" and remind me as to why I am doing it. App is called "I Am Sober". It's free and has no ads. Can highly recommend.

The anxious depression that lasts for days is my main reason too. Btw I think you'd really enjoy the alcohol explained book I mentioned. The thing I took away from it was drinking is pointless because the relaxing feeling after first drink disappears and leaves an anxious feeling unless you drink more. This because your body releases a stimulant to counteract the depressive effect of alcohol. This stimulant lingers for while and is part of the reason many of us wake up early after drinking feeling anxious and not able to sleep. I'm going to check out that app. Thanks

Keep it up! Two months is when you start to feel the amazing effects of abstinence. It only gets better over the next year.

Thanks :) I actually feel like I've found the secret to being ok with my life. Like a sort of calmness.

I didn't realise that weekend drinking was leaving me mildly hungover for days. Its like a filter was applied to my thinking where I could mostly only see nagatives in life. Though it's more subtle than this.

Cutting a vice out of your life is always a good thing, so well done.

But I am curious: why not just moderate your drinking? The dose makes the poison. Yes, it is true that alcohol is bad for you, but so are many things. If you limit yourself, you can enjoy it on occasion without doing too much harm.

I personally don't see utility in having a hardline approach to alcohol. You only live once. If you want to crack open a bottle at Christmas, why not?

"The dose makes the poison".

According to the WHO, there is no level of alcohol consumption that is good for the health.

OP sounds like he doesn't get anything out of drinking anymore, so I guess he doesn't even want to crack open a bottle for special occasions. He's realised he only lives once, so he kicked the booze.

As somebody who's never drunk, the only thing I think I've ever missed out on is the social lubrication element, but that just made me find people who are more like-minded.

That Huberman Lab episode had a similar effect on me. I've barely touched alcohol since.

Link for anyone who is interested: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/what-alcohol-does-to-you...

For reasons unrelated to health, politics, or religion I never got into drinking in the first place and never had an issue with it.

It was mostly neutral experience after leaving my teens since you grow a somewhat thick skin and select a bunch of friends who are not assholes about it.

Now in my thirties something came up that makes it unwise to consume alcohol and to the surprise of my doctor I could just check that point.

With the latest crypto rally, yield farm rates have skyrocketed. Getting 10 to 30% APY on stablecoins (i.e. no risk of loss in value as they are USD-matching coins). Making money hand over fist for clicking buttons.

How in the loving gods earth are you getting 10% to 30% interest rate without risk?

None of the stable coins have gone through a full thorough audit done by a reputable company, thus it's safe to assume they are not fully 1:1 backed and thus it's a ticking time bomb.

30% interest rate sounds like a pyramid scheme. If something sounds like a scam, then it probably is a scam, since it's crypto, then it's most certainly a scam

Not sure if you are someone who just wants to shit on stuff without ever learning, this is HN so 90% chance that's the case. But on the offchance you are actually curious:

Tokens should be viewed like stock. The team behind the token has a pool to fund their network / app. Different products in the decentralised finance space (DeFi) incentive usage by handing out their tokens (stock) to people who provide value to their product. In DeFi this is usually by becoming a liquidity provider (LP), providing your own assets to their protocol in return for a fee and incentives.

This makes logical sense for the team, because the most common metric for valuing an app is "total value locked" (TVL). The more TVL an app or network has, the more usage and value it has, which typically translates into increased value for their token.

There are way too many protocols to list. Checkout Velodrome as an example of a very high APY protocol https://app.velodrome.finance/liquidity?sort=apr&asc=false

You should take to heart that most people here are not just "shitting on stuff without ever learning", but have seen this story play out many times now.

Everything you described about LPs, TVL, and token value; you are just describing the mechanics of the ponzi scheme, not describing the way in which it isn't a ponzi scheme.

If you are getting "interest" over 20%, what you are doing is extracting that money (which isn't real until you turn it into fiat, btw) from the people in the future who lose money when the scheme inevitably crashes; they are transferring their future losses backward in time to you in the present.

That's fine as far as it goes, if you're aware of what's going on, ethically comfortable with it, and make sure to get out of the scheme early enough to not yourself be one of the people left without a chair when the music stops.

But from your comment, I think it seems like you aren't one of the people cynically taking advantage of the scheme, in which case, you are actually one of the marks.

It is simply not possible for a scheme that is above board to pay over 4x the prevailing global interest rate, without significant risk.

Wow you must know more than me, oh wise one /s

I’ve been in crypto for 13 years now, I’m sure any day now Bitcoin will hit 0 and you’ll be proven right, and all the yield farms and defi will collapse, sure sure.

You seem to act like you're the only one here who has been following this for a long time... But that's far from the case on this particular forum.

I didn't say anything about Bitcoin. But yes, all those yield farming schemes that are paying double digit "risk-free interest" will eventually crash out and leave some set of people in the red. It has happened over and over again, it's just that new tokens get set up and re-start the cycle.

It's impossible for smart contracts that are properly coded to enable anyone to pull the funds out. Nothing is 100% guaranteed but protocols like Uniswap have been around for years, their contracts have had many professional audits, and the reward for breaking them is billions of dollars, so the odds of a bug in an Uniswap pool is very low. Other protocols pay incentives to LP the Uniswap pools. Where you expect the failure to come is perplexing, but yes you know more than me.

What I'm describing is, literally, just what has happened with Luna and a lot of other yield-farming centric tokens that pay these outlandish "interest rates". Those "interest" payments are being extracted from future losses.

By the way, the point defi enthusiasts make about how that's just the same way interest in the "legacy" financial system works already is also true. The only difference is that the existing financial system takes its current interest payments out of future growth in real resources and productivity. And this is why double digit interest rates are extremely rare; because that rate of real growth is difficult or impossible to sustain for long.

But thus far, defi remains a closed purely financial loop, without creating any real non-financial growth, so it's all zero sum, just pitting current speculators against future ones.

I've been a crypto_saver for over a decade; yet still I downvoted your ridiculousness [parent comment].

Please don't be so wreckless in your passion(s). And:

HODL

I've been yield farming for years, this is not a new thing.

Meh Madoff outperformed that

The following open research problem. Given an undirected graph G with two vertices s and t, the task is to determine whether there is an undirected path connecting s and t which is simple (no repeated vertices) and has length divisible by 3.

It is not known whether this problem is NP-hard, or whether it can be solved in polynomial time; apparently the question is open since the early 90s.

(The problem is also open for paths of length p mod q for any fixed p and q (fixed means they are constants, and are not given as input), whenever q>2. The problem is known to be in PTIME for 0 mod 2 and 1 mod 2, and to be NP-hard when the graph is directed. Pointers to related work here: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath)

done: https://chat.openai.com/share/c8bc7305-6c75-4194-8753-b319d6...

I can't tell if you're making a joke, a troll, or genuinely believe what ChatGPT tells you with out bothering to test it.

This is why I hate the AI hype, because people do legitimately do this and think "wow it's so smart." When I explained the halting problem using Python to a student he asked "did you use ChatGPT?" No. Of course not...

Lol it was a joke, but I imagine it won’t take too long before AI can start solving problems that we’ve been struggling with as humanity.

What makes it NP-hard? Naively, I would assume the number of simple paths between any two nodes in a graph to a polynomial function of the number of nodes plus the number of edges, so checking every path wouldn't be hard.

In the complete graph on n vertices, there are (n-2)! simple paths of length n-1 between any pair of distinct vertices, which is more than any polynomial in the number of vertices or edges.

What makes it NP-hard?

That's the question, isn't it?

An old favorite open graph theory problem:

In your right hand, take any collection of trees with 2, 3, ..., n vertices. These have a total of 1+2+...+n-1 edges, ie, n choose 2.

In your left hand, take the complete graph with n vertices. This, of course, has the same number of edges.

Conjecture: it is always possible to pack/embed the trees into the complete graph in such a way that all edges are matched exactly once.

The problem has been open for like fifty years, lacking a counter-example or a proof. One can assume Erdos thought hard about it at some point...

What's the motivation for this problem if there is any? It's a really specific problem.

I mean, so what if there is?

I’ve been reading up on diy speakers, with the eventual goal to make an excellent sounding pair myself.

Ever heard a pair of speakers that didn’t sound like hearing a recording of an instrument, but rather hearing the instrument itself? Me neither, but it’s apparently possible.

The DIY speaker/audio hobby is highly specific but also fortunately has a lot of informative available online. I’d recommend diyaudio.com and partsexpressforums for anyone interested, I have more resources if curious.

What sort are you thinking about building? I keep toying with building either the flat panel speakers made out of foam-core board from Tech Ingredients on YouTube, or the big giant speakers he made.

https://youtu.be/zdkyGDqU7xA?si=UOPff5nJLD4d_iTn

https://youtu.be/EEh01PX-q9I?si=1deXn9OU1rvy2pJ2

edited: Thought DIY Perks did the big speakers, found them on Tech Ingredients.

I'm hoping to build "small but might" type bookshelf speakers - I don't live in a large house and I might move so I don't want to have large/heavy speakers. Using DSP quite some impressive things are possible.

Thanks for the links, I think I've seen (parts of) both videos but now that I have learnt a lot more I think I'll pick up more info.

Btw there have been a few valid criticisms of these speakers, although it's more of a "they aren't really the best in the world" rather than "they're shit" type of critique. I think ASR forums or diyaudio.com might have a few thread(s) on it.

Have you seen this video from DIY Perks? https://youtu.be/XEspOD1NHr0?si=MpFTZaMYsfNdSrAU

when you make them, be sure to post here about what you find out. It feels to me like that community does a lot of Q&A, but not a lot of build logs (Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?)

Also, if near Boulder, CO, I've got some CNCs if that helps you build stuff.

Thanks, that's very kind of you but unfortunately I live in the Netherlands haha. I'll almost certainly post my speakers when I make them, though probably on diyaudio or reddit.

Re build logs, I have seen quite a few on diyaudio.com as well as reddit's r/diyaudio and r/diysound (which I frequent much more often). Are you more curious/interested in the enclosure hardware (woodworking) side or the driver selection and crossover building side? Because if you're curious about learning to make crossovers there are a few threads specific to that on diyaudio.com.

Ever heard a pair of speakers that didn’t sound like hearing a recording of an instrument, but rather hearing the instrument itself?

Yeah, full-range drivers + tube amp. I built the tube amp and speakers so it was not really expensive at all. (Maybe $500 or so all told — so not audiophile expensive by any means.)

That sounds very interesting, which drivers did you use?

Also your website's pretty nice and the moongame seems very interesting but its performance in firefox is around 2fps, which is bizarrely slow (Safari on my iPad was smooth).

Crossword puzzles! They make very interesting combinatorial problems (both for solving and creating grids). I recently had a ton of fun writing a constraint programming model that generates grids, including the automatic placement of black squares (this was the main modeling challenge). This model is useful for creating grids using short word lists (which is the case for e.g. thematic grids).

What model did you end up using? And what system did you do it in?

My immediate guess on how to model it would be to create reified constraints for the wordlists of different lengths (the constraints in chapter 22 of https://www.gecode.org/doc-latest/MPG.pdf). For each square, use standard logical constraints to check if it is the start of a word (previous square a black one, this square not a black one), and how long the word is (using backwards counting of runs). These can be used to trigger the reified constraints above.

If the word-lists are short-ish enough, then an alternative for the above model would be to model the whole words using MDD or regular expression constraints, with an added control variable and setting all values as don't-care for the false case.

The problem mentioned in the Gecode documentation example is different than the one I solve. In their case, they start with a WxH grid with known black square positions, and their model essentially answers the following question: "Given a crossword grid template and word list, does there exist a feasible assignment of words for the template?"

I my case, the black square positions are unknown, so the question instead is: "Given an empty crossword grid and a word list, does there exist a template allowing a feasible assignment of words for the grid?" Your intuition of how I modeled this is mostly correct, I used custom TABLE constraints for the words, that can be triggered on or off depending on the values of boolean variables.

I used CP-SAT to model this, and if you're interested in the technical side of things, I've discussed it in great detail here: https://pedtsr.ca/2023/generating-crossword-grids-using-cons...

It turns out that there are many weird complexities to take into account when the black square positions are unknown.

Thanks for the link. I think that your version of getting to a reified extensional constraint (your table method) looks like a reasonable way to do it, and probably works quite well for OR-Tools CP-SAT in particular.

Another way to do it directly is to embed the control variable in the table, with a full set of all possible tuples for when the control variable is false. This, however, gives a large blow-up of the table size, especially for wide tables/long words and might be too expensive. Using compressed/smart/cartesian product tables or MDD constraints if the system supports it would solve this (OR-Tools does not, AFAIK).

As for the Gecode model, my idea was that the way to model the words using separate element constraint for each letter could reasonably be extended into a model for reified words by changing the element constraints to tables over the triple <control variable, index, letter> in the above way. The benefit is that one would not trigger the combinatorial blow-up one gets for the above with a full table over the whole word since it is only a single letter.

In a related case, I used reified extensional constraints specified using regular expressions in https://github.com/zayenz/cp-mod-ref-2019-patchwork to optionally place polyominoes on a grid.

I'm not too familiar with MDD constraints, but there may indeed be better ways to model this. In particular, I'd be very curious to see if any improvement can be achieved using regular constraints (one for each row/column).

PS: I remember meeting you during the poster display at the CP2019 conference at UCONN. We discussed the difficulty of finding solutions for the Nmbr9 game because there were too many propagators. It's a small world!

The key point for all of MDD, smart table, compressed tables, the case constraint, and regular expression and finite automata constraints is the ability to compress don't-care information, which essentially gives one reification for a low cost.

The implementation of a regular constraint can in essence be an MDD propagator (the implementation unfolds the automata into a layered graph, which is mostly isomorphic with an MDD), however it will depend on the implementation how efficient it is. In particular, if the original finite automata is already of an MDD shape with layers, some implementations (including the one in Gecode) will create too many nodes by creating all nodes for all layers.

Fun, didn't make that connection. Yes, it is a small world.

Very nice! Have you seen the talk "How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal"[0]? Or the largest collection of crossword data on the planet[1]?

Source: it me.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aHfK8EUIzg [1] https://xd.saul.pw

This is fascinating, I had no idea about the gridgate scandal!

Learning about Christianity, after being an atheist my whole life thus far.

Curious why Christianity and not some other religion?

Mainly because knowledge about Christianity is the most physically accessible to me, as I am a next-door neighbour to a Theology professor of New Testament.

I am wondering if you became believer, and what changed you if so?

I'd be surprised if you hadn't already read it, but just in case, this audio version of Mere Christianity is my absolute favorite: https://www.audible.com/pd/Mere-Christianity-Audiobook/B00JP...

I also really enjoyed One Year Bible with Bill Creasy. It doesn't get too academic, which may be a downside if that's what you're looking for, but I found him to be very engaging: https://www.audible.com/pd/One-Year-Bible-Audiobook/B00G5OEH...

And, although our theologies diverge quite a bit, I found that the Bible Binge podcast is pretty entertaining. It "translates" Bible stories into modern pop culture references: https://faithadjacent.com/show/theclassics/

Mere Christianity is trash. Couldn't even get through the first chapter because he calls out atheism almost immediately and basically says it's not even worth discussing because it's stupid and not an actual philosophy, which just strikes me as pure intellectual laziness, especially in a book about religion. Avoid, especially if you're an atheist trying to approach religion.

If you have any questions, lemme know. I've been collecting questions and seeing if I can tie them all back to a particular idea. It's nice when things fit together like that

You may enjoy dr Micheal Segrue on YouTube. He is a wonderful philosophy lecturer who has many fantastic lectures on the philosophy of Christianity.

[1] https://youtu.be/teQhNXBMxvE?si=3NdaTFuj3QQAkN4l

Board game design, but specifically solo and 2-player co-op games that have a small footprint, small board states, and are easy to play.

I've been looking for offline hobbies and recently got into solo board gaming, on top of playing games with my wife a couple of times a month. I work in gamesdev and I want to retain a creative outlet in the direction of gaming, because I just really enjoy it, but I also want to stop spending my entire life in front of a screen. So far it's been a lot of fun, I'm going to be printing play test cards later this week to start dialing in my first game.

If it goes well I plan to release it as a cheap print and play (PnP), and if it turns out to be boring I'll release it as a free PnP.

never heard of solo board games before, is it possible?

Of course, who doesn't like playing with themself?

Seriously, though, there's a wealth of games for solo players! Some are made specifically for soloability, some have solo modes, some are older titles that have had solo modes written for them in retrospect.

It's a very interesting little niche and I think there's a ton of room for growth in it. I'm excited to be part of it as a player and to hopefully push the envelope a little bit on what can be done!

Most modern board games have a solo mode and many games are solo only. I gave two links to the sibling comment if you want to look at some games.

There are quite a few of them - either basically puzzle solving ones, scoring against a benchmark, or “defeat random events from a deck”.

any suggestions for solo board games? not a genre that I'm familiar with

Here is a good start: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/306154/2022-peoples-choic...

The subreddit is pretty active too: https://old.reddit.com/r/soloboardgaming

Quit my job earlier this year to start an indie game studio and a little bit of contributions to misc open-source projects.

A fair balance of relax time but also enjoying the time off. There is so much I want to do and get excited for, but I still suffer a lot of procrastination related problems or else I feel like I could have done a tremendous amount more.

I feel like there is lifetimes of things I get excited about and want to do, but spend so little time doing them. :( It sucks

Feel this hard. I feel like I did well during unemployment while the Covid lockdown played out. I was an audio engineer before that, and during lockdown I ran 30 miles a week, made a lot of music, learned some Python, managed to pivot into tech (analytics). Still, it never feels like I'm really doing anywhere near as much as I could - that was all pretty much 3-5 hours a day with the rest being more or less pure leisure and rest.

Part of me is tempted to buy into the idea that the human animal just isn't naturally inclined to do more than a handful of hours of difficult or "productive" work in an average day. I honestly have no idea whether I'm normal or not, but I agree the pressure I put on myself probably isn't ultimately helpful most of the time. It's hard not to feel like others are getting way more done, and even harder to tell how much of what is presented is authentic.

Can relate. I get excited about so many things I want to do, but ultimately lack the energy and abilities (executive dysfunction) to do even a tiny fraction of them. And there is this constant self-pressure of “I should do so much more”, which is not helping. Anyway, hope you have a great time and success with your indie game studio!

I'm quitting my job in December to work on my game full time, neat to find someone else who also quit for something similar.

Would love to connect, maybe we can help motivate each other :). My email is in my profile if you're interested in connecting, same goes for anyone else in a similar situation.

I'm also trying to find some free time to contribute to some open source projects. It's not hassling but I just want to give back to the community—who gave me the career and many awesome tools already.

Getting into contributing is not easy, I have to admit. It's like you're having a second job and no one has the dedicated resources to help you understand the internal architecture. All you can do is submitting the bugs, questions, pull requests and hope for the best.

I was in a similar boat. It helped me to find a collaborator who could inspire me and advance the projects without everything being on my shoulders. It's easy to be paralyzed when you know every single detail of all the work that you alone have to do.

So many foundational bioinformatics tools are broken and I just want to rewrite them all.

which ones are you thinking go?

I'm interested in this space too-- it'd be great to get in touch and discuss (my contact info in my profile).

same, i've been trying to do proactive / productive work in this field

I think I'd do anything with a friendly team

Interested as well! But the future is not so dark, things like e.g. https://github.com/lh3/minimap2 are a breath of fresh air.

Heng Li is an outstanding contributor to bioinformatics.

Interested in this as well - do you already work on this somewhere out in the open?

Mead.

On my 5th batch and it's an awesome hobby. Very easy and inexpensive to get started, the process is slow-paced, but not glacial, not hard to follow, but with a depth to it if it's your thing ... and then you get to drink the result!

Tried Schramm's? He wrote the book on mead (no really, The Compleat Meadmaker).

Grab some Dansk Mjød of you find it; they're doing some of the most interesting stuff right now.

I'd love to try Schramm's but they ships only within the US. Dansk Mjød - will have a look, thanks for the pointer.

What styles are you making? I made a dandelion flower dry mead and it tastes decent after 6 months but feels flabby. I’m experimenting with adding some acid to balance it out.

Traditionals, just testing different honey varieties. I've just barely started, first batch hasn't even done aging yet.

Dandelion, eh? Consider sharing on /r/mead, you will fit right in :)

, Carver. Oh wait, no...

Parenting. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about how to prepare my kid to grow up around the internet, smartphones, and AI. Our technology often takes an indifferent or even cynical view of children, and I can’t understand why there aren’t better tools available (e.g. smartphone designs) that put their developmental needs ahead of the need to exploit them for immediate profit.

How old are your kids? My eldest is 5, and this is starting to be more and more top of mind. I felt like earlier on that it wasn't worth thinking much about it because it was too hard to predict what the issues would be as they became relevant to her. I think this turned out to be right, because if I'd thought about this a bunch a few years ago, I wouldn't have included generative AI in my thinking at all.

Less than a year old, but I have been thinking about the issue proactively and there are things you can do for them even at this age. For instance, I set my son up with a Proton email account on the family domain name before we left the hospital (see my reply to sibling comment for reasons why).

I'm starting down this path soon as well. Any books/resources that you recommend?

Congrats on that!

My kid is too young for tech so far so I haven't fully dived into the issue yet, but one thing I've already done for him to start him off on the right foot is set up with a Proton email account on the family domain name.

It's great because family members have been sending notes for him to read when he grows up and we have been cc'ing him on baby pictures, medical records, and vital stats. And when you think about it, our email accounts are the foundations of our online identities, so it's kind of messed up that we normalize surveillance of our children's online activity from Day 1 by setting them up with inboxes from Google, etc. and you owe it to your kids to give them privacy and, eventually, agency.

I'll turn over the keys when he's old enough (of course I'll probably make a backup of things first)!

I am on this road too, with two children between 5 and 10. My conclusion is pretty much that if I don't want them to do those kinds of activities (social media, youtube, games, endless TV) then I have to put my money where my mouth is and proactively fill their time, either by giving up mine, facilitating time with friends, or by paying someone else (after school activities, lessons etc).

I have heard the argument often (form older folk, mainly) that it's ok for kids to be bored. Kids _should_ be bored sometimes etc etc. And while I agree with the spirit of such, to an extent, it was easier when I was a kid because there wasn't so much competition from the outside world for my attention. If I had nothing to do, I'd have to find something to do, and the only options were 'good' things that weren;t commercially orientated attention-thieves made in the mould of services intended for adults. Now, if my kid is bored, they know that they can watch pretty much any TV program ever made, and chip and change at will, they can play games on my phone, they can play games / youtube on their laptop etc etc and half the kids at school are watching Squid Game and playing Fortnite, so it's pretty hard to justify saying "no you can't do those things" unless you are willing to present some fairly compelling alternatives. Kids love attention from their parents, and hanging out with other kids. And on the plus side, giving your kids attention is normally pretty fun if you can make the time to do it properly, imho. Often hard to do though.

Tabla. These are drums from the South Asian region, which are probably the "most" harmonious drums you can construct. I am learning to play, but also slowly working out the physics of them. There is some work in the area, including foundational work by Ramen, the Nobel prize winning physicist.

But there is quite a lot still to be done. I would like to turn some of the art of making Tabla into the science of making Tabla.

Who's your favorite Tabla player? I became oddly obsessed with this instrument for about two or three years of my life. It helped that I had an extremely competent teacher. My favorite player was Anindo Chatterjee. Of course, there are also a lot of extremely talented younger players.

I was training for a few years under Ustaad Khursheed Hussain, one of the finest Tabla players Pakistan produced. But he unfortunately died recently.

While you are training under a master, it's hard to have a favorite player, because you are also learning the style of your Ustaad. And doing that requires making that your favorite style, because that is the best way to imbue the master's style in your being.

Yeah, I'm aware that this is often the arrangement between teacher and student in India or Pakistan. My teacher was Nepali and studied both with his childhood teacher in Kathmandu and also with Suresh Talwalkar in New Delhi. We were actually about exactly the same age when I studied with him (both in our late twenties). So it was a much less formal arrangement because he was not exactly my elder. Also, it was an American setting as he was living around Denver, Colorado in the US.

Regardless, I still felt I owed him a great deal of respect because he took his music very seriously. He was legitimately a virtuoso at Tabla. Truly an amazing player. And I was committed to practicing diligently. Since life in the US didn't permit me to study all day with him, I spent a lot of time finding recordings of performances on Youtube to learn from. As I mentioned, my favorite performer other than my teacher was Anindo Chatterjee. My teacher also knew of Chatterjee and enjoyed his playing as much as I did. Since he was from a younger generation, I don't think he was bothered by my trying to learn from watching other players while I wasn't practicing with him.

Anyhow, nice to see mention of Tabla on Hacker News :).

Yes, it is definitely an older generation thing where people cared very much about style. It was necessary, because of the socioeconomic conditions of their time. To be financially secure, you needed to have patrons, and to lock in your patrons, you had to make yourself distinct by creating a particular style. Moreover, the lack of recordings before the 1950s, meant that people couldn't easily copy you.

Today, there are many more ways of making money as a player, and everything is recorded and ready to be copies, so people care less about style.

But I do care about it a little bit. My Ustaad had a very clear style of playing, where he made every note clear and distinct. So now, I don't like listening to some of the super fast rough styles that some players have. It is a legitimate style, but I have been trained to not like it.

Anyway, very nice to meet a fellow player on HN.

So now, I don't like listening to some of the super fast rough styles that some players have.

Completely agree with you on this point. I find that there are very few players that I actually enjoy listening to. Many players rush their playing and don't follow a clear rhythm or sound clear notes. Tabla is such a difficult instrument to play properly. Seems like it really takes a life time to become a good player. Sort of heart breaking since American life makes it hard to bring that kind of devotion to art (not if you want to be financially secure anyway).

Solving men's issues, particularly friendship for middle aged men, developing hobbies outside the purview of providership, infrastructure and tools for fighting addiction of all kinds and mental fitness. I think a lot about what a modern day men's magazine would look like, and what sort of platforms or tools could exist in service of men's emotional well being.

how are you doing that?

This will be important for me when I get there, but I’m still in the first quarter of my 200-year lifespan.

This would be something I'd like to know more about, as a middle aged man myself.

Love this idea of a modern day men’s magazine.

Brining the meat rabbits I just slaughtered. Should have some great roast rabbit on Thursday. Easiest meat animal to raise, delicious.

How do you prepare it?

Either rabbit roast (bacon + tomato) or exactly like chicken. The taste is close enough that most people can't tell, but rabbit accepts savory flavors better. Rosemary is phenomenal with rabbit.

What are the major costs associated with raising rabbits besides land?

Land is not a major cost factor, as the rabbit equivalent of a broiler will not be moving too much, and will either live in small cage with mom, or medium cage as a grow-out with its siblings. Only real expense is feed, and you do want quality feed. I get a locally made non-GMO feed for $23.50/50lbs.

Dating.

No, seriously.

As a life long loner/introvert with high anxiety, I kinda discovered recently (after a long marriage/divorce/several years of not dating) that dating is actually kind of amazing.

I never even knew this side of myself. I actually enjoy talking to random people about random stuff. Even if it doesn’t lead to a relationship, making any kind of connection with someone is deeply satisfying.

I kind of wonder why I didn’t do this for the last 40 years.

Anyways, if you’re like me, I really recommend pushing through your awkwardness and anxiety and just try to make connections with people. It’s one of the best things I’ve experienced.

I feel like I spent the prior 40 years denying myself of a basic human experience. I’m glad that’s over.

I get it! I am an introvert and have often been called shy. I am also now happily married. But I strangely miss first dates. I miss meeting new people who lead very different lives, and having both of us try to present the best version of our stories. I'm sure it was awkward and filled with dumb small talk. But I miss it.

There's nothing wrong for you and your wife to invite a stranger couple over for dinner.

I am married now but I went through 7 years where I compromised career for dating. And I'm glad I did that. My wife and our social life together, adds more value to my life than any manager/company/co-worker/compensation/insert_another_rat_race_item.

I spent a period of time doing that as well. Very glad that I did it. It wasn't even really 'dating'... it was just meeting random strangers with the pretense that it was a date... even though I got to the point where I knew within 30 seconds if I would ever meet that person again. I still enjoyed the conversations I had and helped my fine tune myself, and like you,... lower my anxiety levels.

Love, life, people and planet.

When I was young I spent a lot of time blinded by rappers with their spinning wheels and crowds of hangers-on which drastically lead me astray — being from a single parented poverty stricken family in the London it wasn’t exactly hard.

Since then I have been through so many different stages to get to the point of contentment with whatever life throws my way.

Within this contentment I have found that the things I truly care about are (as cliché as it sounds) not the things which can be bought but the things which connect me to other beings.

The realisation and acceptance of the inevitable end of life has made me realise that we will all cease to exist within a generation, our memory will cease within two, our entire footprint within three.

From this I found my passion was not buying things to distract me nor was my desire to be remembered long after I pass. It is to enjoy the now, make others feel the love I never felt until I reached my mid 30s, lift people out of bad places where possible and do my utmost to appreciate this breathtakingly beautiful planet we call home.

Cheesy, I know

Not cheesy at all. I wish I could enjoy the same thing, but when it comes to showing kindness to others I often end up feeling used.

I’m sorry to hear that, it’s a really hard mindset to grasp and we all falter here and there.

I can’t speak for anyone else (I don’t know your particular situation and do not want to assume anything) but I found that doing something for the sake of doing it was one of they key things that helped me overcome a feeling of being used/unappreciated.

In my personal experience and with a lot of introspection I found that the reason I had that feeling was that I personally had painted a picture of what gratitude should look and feel like when, in reality, we all express gratitude in different ways.

By painting that picture I had essentially built up an expectation as to what the outcome of my actions would be, and when that expectation failed to materialise the negative feelings ensued.

Something which I found massively helped with limiting my expectation was to have a mantra which I could repeat in my mind as a sort of short circuit to break the chain of negative thoughts.

The mantra can be anything, I went with ‘thank you’ as it is hard to feel anything other than gratitude when you are thanking someone/something

Hi, thanks for posting.

A mantra I use that some might find useful is:

"To the work you are entitled, but not to the fruits thereof."

Good luck on your journey!

Like the other commenter said, this isn't cheesy!

It's one of these funny things, where during adolescence, stuff like this sounds really cheesy (or "cringe"), but then gaining wisdom through life is largely a process of slowly figuring out: oh, this isn't cheesy at all; serious people have been thinking and talking and writing about this topic for millenia, because this stuff really is core to the human experience.

Citizen science! It's great when people realize they can answer their own questions with observation and data, and for activism because data is a powerful story. One friend of mine started https://publiclab.org to feed this, and another is doing data journalism to highlight holes in the government's environmental data. https://www.muckrock.com/project/ A rules-configurable sensor tool I made a long time ago was used by a non-profit to provide a service that logged NYC landlords' violations of thermostat settings.

These combined with the experience of exploring the natural world in my kids' school's makerspace, has made me come back to making sensor tools for the people - would love to hear from others how they use sensor data for change: https://supermechanical.com/pickup

Your kids school has a makerspace - that sounds awesome can you provide any more details?

Oh, I realized I answered how we set it up, but maybe not what we do. It's just during regular library time, a parent volunteer presents/reviews a concept (the teachers tell us what they've been working on) and has an activity. Depending on the grade level, it might be playing with batteries, switches and bulbs, bringing in nature to look at under the microscope, building a motorized vehicle with LittleBits, or trying out pulleys.

Kids can also take stuff from the shelves to work on themselves, but we need to make activity cards to give the ones who are less sure of themselves a self-guided path.

This is awesome - thanks f you would not mind I would love to try and replicate it at my kids school(s!) - can I contact you?

Helped my kid’s teacher win some Teacher of the Year award where a company gives away grants for PR, and as punishment, she charged me with using the money she won to set up a makerspace in the library. Funny thing is when I went to see what they already had, there was more than enough to start with…LittleBits, Makey Makey, a ton of supplies for paper circuits, etc.

Used the money to buy some more things like a microscope and sewing machines, but realized that it had failed before and will fail again because there isn’t enough humanpower to guide the kids in activities. So I’ve enlisted a couple of other parent volunteers and we’re trying to figure out a sustainable program. One step is to make the space (a corner of the library) look cool to attract current and future parents. Think I’m going for a satire of a corporate lab, with snaplock linoleum tile and a steel worktable.

Working in ad-how volunteer groups is a new skill I’ve been learning since we started at this public school. Very valuable, but not a personal passion!

I'm recently passionate about motivation. I'm on the lookout for ways to keep me motivated. I always thought burnout is not my problem, until it hit me and now I'm looking for cure.

If you're open to it, I'd recommend trying the Wim Hof technique. The combination of controlled hyperventilation followed by cold water exposure is something like a reset button.

Here's a link [0] - just don't do the breathing exercises anywhere that passing out could cause problems; like when driving, in water, etc.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tybOi4hjZFQ

Thanks for sharing! Controlling my breathing helps me a lot to reduce anxiety, but I found it's not getting me back into motivation mood I used to have.. To stay motivated always seemed to be such basic thing- part of my reality, until it stopped and I have to consciously build it.

That sounds like a deeper issue. I am not a motivational expert, though I've had more experience than I'd like developing coping strategies for low motivation.

Consider that perhaps being motivated automatically isn't always the best thing. Auto-motivation can make it harder to choose a good and worthwhile direction, which motivates you on its own merits to something above self-interest.

Maybe you could afford to let your self-motivation lie fallow for a while, if that's what you need to do. Put your brain in a jar, and do something helpful and physical.

Maybe none of this applies to your situation? I do find it an interesting topic as well though.

There have been a number of discussions on HN about this, with some interesting comments. Maybe:

https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=579886644&hl=eo&gbv=1&...

In this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23550758

... i posted links to other HN discussions on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553508

Math as prep for 3d game programming. I've been out of school a long time, and when I was there I didn't even get to the pre-calculus level.

This year I've churned through all the introductory level texts from Art Of Problem Solving. Yes, they're written for high schoolers and you need to have some humility to admit you might be missing or have forgotten some fundamentals, but the lesson strucutre really appeals to me. It's the only series I've found that respects the learner and really builds up knowledge one piece at a time.

Before I start the intermediate texts and the calculus book, I've taken a detour to "Linear Algebra: Theory, Intuition, Code" and it's sticking a lot better now than previous attempts on the subject. So that gives me some confidence.

The Art of Problem Solving books are not for regular high schoolers. I'd say they're more geared towards gifted high schoolers (which may eventually go on to compete on contests such as the USAMO or the IMO). So definitely no shame in learning from them.

Yup. They were the bible for our competitive math teams in HS.

This is awesome to hear. I took trigonometry and business calculus 1 & 2 in college, but that's a far cry from what I'd need to do anything interesting with ML which I'm interested in trying.

I've bought a few textbooks for statistics, math, and data engineering - I'm in the middle of getting my life together in terms of habits and time management so hopefully I'll be right there with you doing what is essentially remedial math for someone in their 30s, lol. I know it will be exciting once I make space for it and get into a rhythm. Cheers!

I am currently reading the introductory books of AOPS as I did not do well in high school math. I did not find the way my teacher taught math interesting because it didn't connect with real-world applications. The hardest thing I face as a 21-year-old going through the middle and high school math books is accepting that I lack the foundational knowledge and setting my ego aside. My plan is to learn calculus and linear algebra as a follow-up.

Learning Korean to better communicate with my GFs family and take advantage of _finally_ having real motivation to learn another language.

I'm really enjoying having a different type of challenge than I'm used to. Mostly approaching it with Duolingo and Anki vocab cards with moderate success so far. We both have our own careers, kids, various responsibilities...so I don't get much time to practice with her. And practicing memorization at the end of a long day is tough, so I'd love to hear any tips you all may have to improve my memorization techniques and mnemonics.

Practice in the morning

Get Korean teacher irl or on italki. At least once or twice a week.Try to speak and listen to much Korean as you can.

Watch Korean kids tv shows on Netflix with Korean & english subtitles (I use language reactor chrome plug in)

Real life Korean conversations for beginners by Talk to me in Korean is good.

When you get to an intermediate level (TOPIK level 3ish) the iyagi podcast is GREAT.

Ive been going through the sejong institute practical Korean textbooks. You can get them for free online. They focus on understanding and expressing youself in spoken Korean. The audio examples emulate Korean speech much more than other Korean textbooks I've used.

The sejong institute also to free Korean online courses with weekly zoom lectures.

How to study Korean, sells anki flashcard decks with audio attached. The lessons are free. They're quite dense but are BRILLANT as a reference to grammar you have forgotten or want to know in more nuance.

Vocab-wise when you do flashcards have two for each direction KOR<->ENG. Learn the words for 3 days before putting them into an Anki deck (e.g. 30 words a day, but every day 10 words 'graduate' to the anki deck)

I find Anki good for keeping words memorised but not learning them. When you are looking at the korean word play the audio, it helps SO much!

Remember Korean is one of the hardest languages for a English native speaker to learn. There are times when you will feel you're making no progress. Then one day you will realise you actually understand what you MIL is saying. Have a sacred time every day where you do some Korean. Ideally at least an hour, anything less you will not improve quickly enough to re-motivate you, or thats at least how it was for me.

Good luck 파이팅!

Focus on acquiring the language through meaningful input, rather than rote memorization. Favor listening comprehension over reading comprehension.

The Refold guides, YouTube channel, and Discord server are good resources for language learners with busy schedules.

https://refold.la/

Kind of in a similar boat!

Been learning Korean to speak more with my girlfriend’s family, especially since we’re going to Korea soon.

My biggest waves of improvement have come from reading aloud the Talk to Me in Korean books.

I’ve found that getting the structure of the sentences has helped me and then I learn vocabulary by using what I interact with on a day-to-day basis.

There’s also a Korean slang book by Talk to Me in Korean which is really great too! Helps break out of the “learned it from a textbook” sound.

I'm reading a book about electricity markets. Modeling electricity prices using a mean-reverting model with "jumps", exotic derivatives, etc. Pretty exciting stuff. Though you need a million dollars in liquid net worth to trade with any ISO so it's a bit out of my league. Really interesting author too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Mack

Am working on some large scale authorship attribution stuff on the side and have an Arty A7 that I want to make do something besides flash purple LEDs but I have some health bullshit that's killing my motivation. But I'm working on it.

- "authorship attribution stuff"

Can you tell more about it? I've done something about it in my master's and PhD, but I'm away from this area for some time and don't know the actual state of the art...

It's like my previous project https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 but on a much larger amount of data. Rewrote everything in C++, tried to minimize allocations etc but still have some things to optimize. Current algorithm is just the cosine delta method on word/character {1,2,3}-grams as described in https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/32/suppl_2/ii4/3865676 combined with a few other features from the Writeprint paper.

I have no academic or professional linguistic background so it's definitely not state of the art, but it works reasonably well and from what I can tell in the literature the fancier methods work slightly better but have significantly worse performance. The beauty of the cosine delta is that I can put the vectorized representations of each author into something like hnswlib (InnerProductSpace) or Milvus and get really fast comparisons.

If you get to the point where you have some insight on trading electricity... i know some people who have some capital..

The market operators always need people who can help make sure the market is operating correctly and that market power is not being abused

I'm obsessed with interfaces at the moment.

How do humans interface with computers and data, from control to visual feedback.

How humans interface with music, perform it, read it, store it. How do birds interface with tones and rhythm?

How software interfaces with other software and hardware.

How humans interface with the world via symbols. I've been reading about Semiotics a bit, and find the field fascinating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics?wprov=sfla1

Birdsong as code: https://youtu.be/OCYU0LtqRH0?si=4DwOKC3oZ6vE-w-y

For my masters I proposed that you could treat urban spaces as one giant interface (and that interface would appear different to different users). After stepping away from it for a while, I've gotten back into it. My main interest is information design for wayfinding, transit, and urban navigation. It's such a human problem and it's so fascinating.

Though he never called it such, a lot of it intersects with Donald Norman's work that he describes in "The Design of Everyday Things". Even the objects we intereact with are interfaces.

Drop me a line if you're looking to chat about it all.

I'm not OP, but I've been interested in something like this, but from the perspective of memory systems within oral cultures. I'd love to talk more!

I wonder if you know (and maybe have thoughts about) the arrangement of ancient Cusco, set up to be possible to navigate without any written directions (as the Inca effectively functioned without a writing system).

From Lynn Kelly's Memory Code:

The Inca turned their major city, Cusco, into a massive memory space, the details of which were documented by the colonising Spanish. Radiating from the Coricancha temple in the centre were over 40 pilgrimage pathways known as ceques. The ceques divided the land into wedge-shaped political, agricultural and irrigation zones, each assigned to a specific kinship group. It is still unclear the degree to which the ceques were physical paths and how much they were purely imagined. To form a city-sized memory space, it does not matter as long as the pathways could be followed in the minds of the users.

I've been thinking about how memory intersects with navigation, and how both of these influence how we interpret the world.

Greetings from a fellow interface junkie!

I am noticing more and more how underwhelmed I am by the current status quo of human/computer interaction - everything seems so homogenous now, and after being heavily inspired by Alan Kay and Brett Victor, I'm sure there is a lot more to be done in this space.

Howdy fellow intellectual/addict!

Currently I'm reading Michael Pollen's "Botany of Desire" about how how plants interface/manipulate humans (spec: Apple, Orhid, Marijuana, Potatoe). There is a salacious passage on sexual reproduction strategies, involving bees ("flying penises") and this plant that "play resists" the bees entering — and then author Pollen ends his description of this interface by suggesting: many people might see this as the bee penetrating the coy defences of the flower, but in fact it is the flower manipulating bees.

I'm gonna give you the first recommendation free, but the next one'll cost'ya =D

Studying the relation between just how volatile SPY 0-day-to-expiration options are in regards to the underlying. A 1% directional move in SPY can yield a 1600%+ in most cases if you can time it right in regards to direction + strike.

I would never actually trade or anything like that. It's just fun to scrape data. Historical option chain data isn't really publicly free/available so I wrote a scraper + analytics on top of it.

FT has written extensively about the rise of zero day options on the S&P 500 index.

Example: https://www.ft.com/content/312e9b3c-a5e0-4eff-8b9a-8637696d2...

date,start_time,end_time,underlying_start_price,underlying_end_price,instrument_start_price,instrument_end_price,instrument_price_change_percentage,instrument_type,instrument_strike_price 2023-10-09,14:52:01,18:56:19,427.14,432.79,0.09,1.92,21.5294,Call,431.00 2023-09-27,18:11:48,19:12:18,422.74,427.31,0.09,2.42,27.4706,Call,425.00 2023-10-12,16:21:35,18:11:44,437.19,431.44,0.06,1.92,33.9091,Put,433.00 2023-10-06,14:09:50,18:48:25,420.93,431.04,0.06,4.12,73.8182,Call,427.00

I don't think HackerNews supports enough Markdown to show tables but... tell me what you think about that.

Any conclusions?

I could be wrong because of the obvious downside of "if you get it wrong it'll expire 100% worthless by end of day" but if you can use "technical analysis" to know when to enter a long/short position, I'd say don't use margin (short) and don't buy the underlying (long), instead buy a slightly out of the money (this is where predicting which direction the market will go and for how much/how long gets... impossible) call or put depending on direction can yield a better return.

Obviously it's all gambling but I see why so many people are attracted (addicted?) to it (Robinhood traders)

If you lose 100% of a $100 out-of-the-money bet 7 times but then hit an 800% ROI... you break even, right?

I recently bought myself a copy of Ashley's Book of Knots, and been teaching myself... well... knotting.

In my ignorance, I used to see knowledge of knots as this complex, hard to learn thing, but one thing I've been learning is that the more common, practical, knots tend to be fairly easy to tie. There's just different knots for different purposes.

The decorative ones can get very complex, though.

https://philosophersguild.com/products/how-2-knots

What is your approach to learning them? Do you do them in order from ABOK or pick ones that look interesting and/or useful?

What are your favorite knots?

I've tried to learn a number of knots. I find that tying knots is a good way to keep my hands busy while doing something else, like listening in a meeting.

I favor the diamond knot, constrictor knot, hangman's knot, alpine butterfly loop, and Japanese square knot.

knots are such an elegant solution.

I've been way into decorative knots lately. Putting turksheads and coxcombing on everything, and I've come up with a nice way to use some lanyard knot trickery to tie a ukulele strap to the headstock in a way that looks like a tiny flower.

Being a dad - Preparing for the Google Cloud Associate exam (5 YEO front-end developer trying to get out of my bubble) - Fixing my posture using a daily routine - Really fine-tuning our budget, researching the stores that have better prices for items we frequently buy, having a better grip on upcoming expenses, figuring out what things we need that we can buy used, and most importantly, getting the most out of the amount we can spend monthly!

I have some exam notes (10 parts) on my blog at https://www.sebhook.com/tag/pca/ if that's helpful. It's mostly focused on the architect exam, but there's a lot of crossover.

Could you share your routine for fixing your posture?

Becoming a dad or are you already one and just upping the excitement? If you’re new, my two pieces of advice are that there’s only right now to deal with when things start to feel rough, and lick your fingers to open the nappy sack before you start dealing with the nappy. Both gems and hard-won

Im currently passionate in improving the life of my young nephew. His father left him devoid of a father figure while his mother is a mess who takes her frustrations out on him. Ive only just turned 19 but I’m trying my best to work on myself so I could be a good male role model for him. Myself and my mom (his grandma) are the only ones who care about him, his education, and his growth. I really just want to make sure this lil fella grows up to be a good man and not mimic the paths of his parents.

Admirable. Good luck.

I’m a few years older and in total admiration of you. Just from writing this comment I’m sure you’re already a great role model (at least you are to me!) I hope you get where you want to go too :)

Keep up the good work! My wife and I have fostered kids and ended up adopting a young boy (we got him when he was 4 months old, adopted him when he turned 2, and he is 4 now). He is very different than our two biological kids and it's been a challenge for us. But it's worth it in the long run. You are doing a good thing. If you need support, there should be a lot of resources in your community, if not online. Don't hesitate to ask for help. But finally, try not to alienate him from his mother. Don't bad-mouth her in front of him. If possible, it would be good for him to a relationship with her.

God's blessings!

I created a booktube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@NevsBookChannel

I'd been writing reviews on Goodreads for years so it was kind of a logical next step. Also have found it interesting to learn how to edit videos and improve my confidence in speaking.

PS there is a review of Gerald Weinberg's "Are Your Lights On?" in there, so it's tangentially related to coding. Currently reading Code Complete.

Oh awesome, subscribed and will be watching some videos from the backlog :)

Thanks!

Subscribed! I have a stack of books I've been meaning to read. I just need to make time for it.

Bicycles. They are so radically inexpensive to acquire & service. Why did I ever stop riding at 18?

i love my bike too!

I love bikes and was going to comment about them so I'll just tack on to your comment.

Built a single speed out of a cheap, used frame with some spare or cheap parts and it has been going strong with little maintenance for 14 years.

Also have a long-tail cargo ebike that I got this summer and already have over 500 miles on it. It can be faster than driving a lot of times on top of being more fun for me and my kids.

And to top it off a full suspension mountain bike (2018 YT Jeffsy) which I get out on about twice a week and is really great for my physical/mental state, and has a huge skill ceiling so there will always be something to strive to get better at. Just got back from a weekend off riding an area with huge granite boulders and slabs with a few friends. Really fun to attempt features that made us a little uncomfortable and build skills/confidence.

Rode the Katy Trail a few weeks back. I loved it but after 6 days on the saddle my ass hurt so much that I'm trying out recumbent trikes right now. (Got a used one off Craigslist.)

Three things at the moment:

1. Improving my health / fitness.

2. Learning Korean.

3. Financial freedom through my business (currently growth has flattened...).

What motivates you to learn Korean? I have been doing this recently too. I find it very slow to learn for me in my 30's

I'm in my mid-30s. It's certainly "slower" than when I learned languages in my early 20s. As for motivation, my wife is Korean and our young children speak better Korean than me already =(

How about you?

It's a similar situation for me. I want to make things easier for my in-laws who strongly prefer speaking Korean at home. No kids for me yet but I plan to learn it with them someday. It's a fun experience because of how excited 장모님 is after hearing me say a single word.

I'm gonna start myself with something I got into again recently. I got back into game development as a hobby a couple of weeks ago (sadly just after Ludum Dare ended) and have since been learning Godot to make the switch away from Unity permanently. So far its ease of use has been a real game changer for me, although I miss having my IDE on a different screen. The goal is to know Godot well enough to take part in the next Ludum Dare next year.

A relative of mine teaches (free and paid) online courses for Godot:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=eo&gbv=1&q=heartbeast+%2Bsi...

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrHQNOyU1q6BFEfkNq2CYMA

Oh nice, didn't realize HeartBeast switched to Godot. When I first got into game dev with GameMaker Studio about 8 years ago I used to watch his videos a lot to learn, I guess now I'm gonna repeat that cycle for a different engine. Thanks for reminding me :)

I watched the old RPG series using GameMaker and it’s one of the reasons I picked CS at university. Man it was so fun and rewarding.

Ultra HDR - I predict it will cause a revolution in photography. This isn't the old HDR that was all about capturing a wider range of brightness; it refers to display of a wider range of brightness. It's built into Android 14 and you can now capture Ultra HDR images with the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro. Ultra HDR is really just jpg, uses the standard jpg extension and works the same as a regular jpg, unless your display software knows about the "HDR mask" that's embedded in the metadata, AND your display supports extra brightness. Chrome supports the format, and you can view images that look SO REALISTIC on most recent phones and desktops/laptops that support HDR display, both macs and PCs. The look just like reality. BUT - now I need a way to convert my big camera's HDR images into the Ultra HDR format, and I haven't found a way. Really just need to create and embed a brightness mask. Looks like Adobe is adding support to lightroom...

Can you post some example photos that you found to be a good representation of this format used tastefully ?

There's also an Apple variant, where the hdr mask is embedded in an HEIF file...

Here's a link to a Google Photos album with some scenic photos I took using Ultra HDR, mostly in Yosemite last week. For this to work you will need to view it in Chrome on a device such as a fairly recent phone - I believe android or iPhone should work. Even better is a laptop that supports HDR display. Be sure to enable the HDR. Note that the album thumbnail view doesn't show the extra-bright highlights, you need to open a photo. If your device doesn't support HDR display, you'll still see the photos, just not with super bright highlights. https://photos.app.goo.gl/tizNFDFgbC5mzGCU9

I'm currently passionate about trying to understand the importance of young's modulus in machine design, and whether it can be "worked around" with different materials that are easier to work with.

you mean like concrete where the sand is silicon carbide

'epoxy granite' is a thing

right now, I'm trying to figure out if fabricated steel with the right design can accomplish a functional analog of what cast iron can. the objective is to leverage flat pack laser cut pieces instead of castings.

it can certainly be equally rigid if that's what you're after; they have very close to the same young's modulus. thermal stability and vibration absorption is more challenging

i think castings often come out closer to net shape than weldments and thus need less final machining, but i could have that backwards. they both shrink as they cool, but weldments don't need draft

I am passionate about AI in education.

Economies die because of underutilized or wasted resources.

Our educations system is horrible at wasting everyone's time right now. Source: I've been teaching since the 1990's and learning in school since the late 1970's or 1980.

AI can fix most of that.

Example: It has been many years since I looked a C code and I never really understood much about the Linux Kernel, even back when I tried to contribute to it in the 1990's. Yesterday I started chatting with ChatGPT on how I could understand the code in the Linux Kernel. I made some progress towards a previously inscrutable goal.

I am teaching my students how to use AI to learn anything they need to know.

Problem with learning from AI is that you don't know if it's telling you b/s or not.

To be fair, also true of teachers. Even at the college level sometimes. Probably happens a lot more frequently with AI tools, though.

Interesting topic, I was thinking a bit about this too recently. I just released a simple flashcards app[0] and I was thinking how I could use AI to either help with memory retention or extend user's content or create quizes or explain topics etc. Can you recommend any specific sources to get interesting ideas/projects/news/opinions on AI in education?

[0] https://byheart.io/ - it's a pet project so both app and website are rather basic. Btw guess what tool helped me create text content for website[1]

[1] It was ChatGPT

Target shooting, specifically pistols and rifles. I recently acquired a 1973 Anschutz made in West Germany that I'm smitten with.

Is that 22LR?

Yes, single shot 54 action target model. Beautiful wood. I usually shoot heavier rounds, but you can shoot that thing all day. Best trigger I've ever felt.

I'm using ELEY Club rounds. I tried ELEY Match rounds but didn't notice much of a difference at 2.5x the price. It came with a diopter which I used for a little bit but swapped out for a Leupold 3-9 scope. I'll probably need to get a higher magnification though. I have a hard time seeing the hits at 50 yards with a shoot-n-see target (old eyes I guess).

Not sure why you got downvoted so much, everything you said you were doing is perfectly legal. I guess some people got their sensibilities triggered (pun intended) about 22 talk. If that's the case, they should probably grow up a bit.

Sailing -trying to raise $30m+ to build a boat to break over 20 records.

Surfing -Finding remote point breaks and surfing northern latitudes with nobody around.

Getting any waves in BC or alaska?

There's no surfing in BC ;)

cold water surfing

https://www.surfline.com/travel/canada/british-columbia/regi...

Embedded systems and electrical engineering. I knew close to nothing in either field and it is refreshing to learn a new field starting at the basics. Creating a practical, physical product is also very rewarding.

How did you get started?

Are you me? I'm starting all over and doing high school physics! Can't wait to solder stuff and get electric!

I’ve been teaching myself abstract algebra, which has been really great! I’ve also now gotten to the point in the book where I’d like to discuss with other people.

Awesome! Which book are you following?

A Book of Abstract Algebra, Charles Pinter- it’s pretty good, each chapter is has a short description of the math and then many problems to work through. Would recommend

I push capability based security relentlessly, because I see its absence as the root cause of a bunch of waste, and the cause of the loss of the war on general purpose computing. The world could be so much better if we could trust our computers.

I'm scratching an itch, hoping to get a chip made to implement the biggest waste of transistors ever, per George Gilder's call. (A cartesian grid of LUTs, clocked as to avoid race conditions, a Turing complete system) It might be a way to make a cheap PetaFlop computer.

That sounds interesting. If you want to share more about the project: Is there some writeup about it?

Here's my old blog on the subject

https://bitgrid.blogspot.com/

Here's my github repository where I have an emulator written in Pascal

https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

Here's a writeup on the idea, from a computing language perspective, on the esoteric languages wiki

https://esolangs.org/wiki/Bitgrid

Passionate? Nothing, anymore. The last bunch of years has been a long, never-ending series of setbacks and knock-backs that have drained my emotional, professional, and financial resources in a relentless manner. Along the way I appear to have completely lost my passion and drive for everything. Some people are completely dependent on me, and if it wasn’t for them, I’d check out already - this ride is not fun anymore.

Sounds like you've been having a rough time?

The last few years have been brutal in many ways.

Building out the web ecosystem for Go over at: https://github.com/livebud

Go is a surprisingly pleasant language for building websites, especially for indie hackers, yet the tooling is not quite there. I'm trying to get the developer productivity for building websites in Go to be on par with building web applications in Node.

With ESBuild and Goja maturing, we're pretty close. Go is still just missing a few important connections needed to the frontend ecosystems (e.g. React, Tailwind, etc.)

Let me know if you're also interested in this space!

What about go tooling's missing in your mind? I've never found a language as prepared for it (node feels horrifying and dreadful in compariosn).

Mostly the frontend story. Server-rendered React pages that work with layouts and error pages. You can cobble something together, but it's not as seamless as Next.js or Remix.

I'm passionate about being thankful, and making sure that those I appreciate know the degree to which they matter to me.

if you wanna appreciate someone, say it to their boss or to their relatives. Much more useful than saying it to them

For my fellow autic monkeys:

"How to write a letter to Cared-Abouts:"

1) Gratitude (solo)

2) What I'm working on / towards

3) Anything exciting / worrisome

4) Thoughts on wordly problems / solutions

5) Transactional / accounting stuff

6) Questions

7) Gratitude (together / partnerships)

Sometimes it's just "doing the dishes" or ceasing to be difficult, "because I can."

Grateful for your passion.

Poverty abolition.

I just finished Poverty, By America. It's really moving and seemingly well-researched and honest.

I don't know if I'll stick with it. I don't have a good track record of sticking with social activism stuff. Deep-down in my bones I know however that poverty is wrong and really doesn't need to exist at the levels we have collectively accepted as "natural".

How does one 'do' social activism stuff anyway? Do you find out found a local group that hands out informational flyers to move people to act or donate, or how should I imagine this?

I suggest imagining it as "what can I do that will actually affect change?" rather than "what does activism normally look like?"

In my case:

* Switch to a bank that supports poor people rather than exploits them (overdraft fees are a racket). Beneficial Bank and Amalgamated Bank look viable.

* Boycott exploitative companies and be vocal to friends and family about it. Support equitable companies.

* Support affordable housing development in my neighborhood.

* Join a group dedicated to the cause. Maybe People's Action.

* Keep educating myself to be able to persuade others effectively.

* Form real relationships and community with poor people.

* Participate in local government (just participate, not necessarily serve).

Stuff like that. You get the idea.

The Brompton folding bicycle[1]. I have been obsessing over it to the point where I contacted the manufacturer because one of the product pictures had the wrong number of cables on it. The folding mechanism is an amazing piece of design, it not only collapses small but it also keeps the grubby tyres off the ground, keeps the chain and cogs inside the fold, can be left with the seat up to wheel around, or the handlebars up to wheel around - and bags mounted on the handlebars stay upright and usable. The the changes over the decades (it was lengthened and the fold joints thickened around 2004), the options (the telescopic seatpost goes higher than the extended seatpost and collapses smaller than it), the colours (the raw laquer editions have problems with rusting), the tweaks people do (leather strap to make the luggage release switch easier to get to, aftermarket 3D printed widgets to make the unfolding lock stay in place[2]), a table of all the available gear ratios... etc.

How they have kept the same frame shape and size and design, but vary the colour scheme in special editions making it more of a consumer product than a cyclist product - like Swatch watches used to be, and with the stylised logos. I could argue why it's a great product and why it's a bad product.

I have no idea why; I have no commute. I don't use much public transport. I already have a bike. I wouldn't fit well on one. I have no need of one. I've never ridden one, never seen one except in passing, but I'm obsessing over them recently for a couple of months. (Likely some avoidance / dream that $product will improve my life involved).

The Kwiggle[3] is a more interesting design, a standup bike that's even more portable.

[1] e.g. Everyday Cycling's video "What makes it SO SPECIAL" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6bmuJ98Zc8

[2] https://ezclamp.co.uk/

[3] https://www.kwigglebike.com/en_US/

I assume you already know about Bike Friday, but if not you might enjoy, their folding tandem bike! I have been contemplating an AllPacka, or a minivelo, but cargo bikes have my attention in the other direction.

https://bikefriday.com/

You're contagious!

I also have no need for one, and now can't stop reading about them.

Making an album.

It’s been a journey. For about a year I was trying to do it all by myself.

Then one former band mate moved back, another reached out and we reunited to make new music.

This is gonna sound corny, but after that first time we got back together to jam, later that night I was in tears because it playing with them again was such a large emotional release for me.

Now we’re in a great place, we all want the same thing. We’re all in on making new music, no one is trying to make this a career or go on tour. It has to be fun, that’s number one.

Nice! I’m starting a project that can automate pressing vinyl records, kinda like a kickstarter, you create a 45 day campaign with the aim of selling 75 pre sales and we then go into production (you need to 100 total). No upfront cost from the artists. Still working on the details. My friends have opened a vinyl pressing factory so I figured building out an automated indie vinyl pressing crowd sourcing app would be cool. Check out Kushty buck records if your interested. It’s my weekend passion project.

Sounds great, good luck! I'm hoping to get back to making music again after a few years away due to health/life reasons. I definitely know that euphoric feeling of jamming with an old bandmate after a long break.

Now we’re in a great place, we all want the same thing. We’re all in on making new music, no one is trying to make this a career or go on tour. It has to be fun, that’s number one.

This is key. I've made more music goofing off than I did when I sat down to write a song seriously.

I would love to dedicate significant portion of 2024 contributing back to the old web (creating open source web 1.0 apps) and linux desktop apps (most probably on KDE).

creating open source web 1.0 apps

Pretty sure we call those pages :p

GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE

Learning about Information Theory.

It’s pushing me out of my comfort zone. For example, leading me to improve my math skills in order to understand some of the concepts and notations that are used in research papers. Also gives me some context into learning C, a language which I consider low-level as a web developer, and it’s been fun to have to think about things like memory management, along with other things I don’t generally need to consider. It gives me an appreciation for when I’m writing high level code like Elixir or JS, etc.

Compression, which I’d say is an application of information theory is just really interesting to learn about for some reason.

What sources for learning do you use?

Here's a few

- Book called Compact Data Structures by Gonzalo Navarro https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/compact-data-structures...

- Ben Langmead's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@BenLangmead

- MIT Open Courseware https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-02-introduction-to-eecs-ii-dig...

- Stanford lectures https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv_7iO_xlL0Kz2nU05COp...

Building an off-grid home on a piece of land me and my wife bought. We are documenting our progress on YT.

link please?

http://youtube.com/@danrl/videos

Thanks for your interest!

Likely, provably correct software ++ Rapid iterations

I don't know that I've ever heard that combination together before. Can you share any thoughts on how to do both at the same time?

I have 3 slides for that ... https://www.osequi.com/ If questions ... ready to answer :D

Guitar, and as a subset of that, music theory and composition. It started as a something to get me through the first pandemic winter in Minnesota in 2020, never having held a guitar before, and it turned out to be something I've been completely obsessed with for more than three years now. I have played guitar literally almost every day since I started. I play for about a half hour every day before I head out to catch the bus, and very often play for another hour or two in the evening.

My main focus for the past two years has been solo fingerstyle guitar, especially classical. The two full pieces I've learned so far are "The Water Is Wide" arranged by Yenne Lee[1] and "Home" by Andrew York[2]. I've almost finished memorizing "Tango Azul" by Nemanja Bogunovic[3], and I'm working on learning "Autumn Leaves" also arranged by Yenne Lee[4], and "Blackwood Lullaby" by Justin Johnson[5]. And I've learned a bunch of short studies and pieces, a recent favorite being "Vals Frances" by Francis Kleynjans[6].

In addition to playing, I also attend classical concerts put on by the Minnesota Guitar Society[7] and do a little bit of volunteering for them, primarily editing full concert videos for their YouTube channel (which, sadly, are mostly taken down after a brief viewing due to contractual stuff).

[1] "The Water Is Wide" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufc2HY9F2U

[2] "Home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajTcwJBbw4

[3] "Tango Azul" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZgTsKrluE

[4] "Autumn Leaves" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxGT5z6d-GA

[5] "Blackwood Lullaby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC58eXL-MJY

[6] "Vals Frances" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSNmwn54vEI

[7] https://mnguitar.org/

I finally got back into music this year because my kid started piano. I played guitar a ton throughout high school and my early 20's, did classical for a few years in there too. I could play almost anything, but I was terrible at writing so I sort of just stopped. I really wish I had had the infinite supply of composing videos that are so easy to come by now. I learned so much this year already in my "spare time", I feel like I could have been decent at it back when most of my time was spare.

Hey, a fellow classical guitarist!! Love that York piece and Lee’s Autumn Leaves

Piano. I am doing Czerny op 599.

School of Velocity next!

The wealth of Czerny exercises is so much more engaging than the Hanon that have been inflicted unthinkingly on students for generations. Check out the Dohnanyi exercises for something wild and different; the later ones, not the first ones that focus on (potentially harmful) finger isolation.

Thank you! I did the Hanon exercises years ago and they were okay, but the Czerny 599 exercises are amazing! I love them! They practically sound like songs! I will check out school of velocity and Dohnanyi.

I couldn't imagine applying the word passion to anything business or computer related, it's not now—nor has it ever been—the right word, but I'm definitely passionate about being in nature, among the mountains and birds, skateboarding, and doing challenging hikes with fun people.

I agree so much! I've always shivered when they asked me what tech I'm passionate about on job interviews.

When I hear/read people who say that they're passionate about a javascript lib or a programming language, it sounds really disingenuous to me (or like marketing bs, depending on context). Although they probably mean well, in most cases.

If you only do programming for a job, it is probably very difficult to see how someone could be passionate about computing.

I suppose I can't really illuminate this point, but I suppose for me it's about figuring things out and making something? Maybe a bit like maths, but if you play your cards right you have something to come out of it with.

democratizing traffic data and monitoring for high-risk corridors and neighborhoods

you got website or github?

I'll reply here when I hit publish on the repo.

I've been collecting data from my phone and some different "sensors" (food delivery orders, bank payments, Activity Watch statistics, I'm adding a video camera soon. For phone about every sensor I have in my phone like ambient light, wifi APs, GPS, rotation, steps, when it was last unlocked, what app is in use, what app / artist is playing media etc.) and I'm using ML to predict activities I'm currently doing. I guess the end goal is to automate my diary writing to GPT as a joke..

Started as a small project on wanting to learn C# better and being interested about how much sensors collect information about us and how we could analyze that, but it really got out of hand. I've been working on it for a ~month (with some breaks), sometimes all day, built a lot of tooling (like webassembly & android app to tag current activities for ML training data) and analysis things for it and am nearing a burnout point :P but been fun and I've definitely learned a lot about C# and ML.

That's quite interesting. What form is the collection being fed in to the ml, is it sentences that gpt would understand or more tabular

It's just hundreds of variables of data and some calculated features - basically from current point in time and some configurable points in history + some aggregated history data, fed to ML.NET FastTree / FastForest. I think LSTM / some Python frameworks could have been better, but learning C# better was one of the main reasons so ML.NET algorithms it is. I get quite reasonable predictions, though I need to do some more to get better at predicting the end of an activity because of some limitations how I'm giving the data to avoid overfitting. GPT is just going to be last step of the process, being fed todays actions and we'll see if I can get it to blurt out anything interesting based on it.

I just checked my manual tags in the training database and I've been on this for 197 hours and 37 minutes since since 12th of October. No wonder I feel like I need a break..

Currently have some free time between jobs to explore what actually makes me passionate, so threads like this are really useful to get inspired!

Been starting various projects to quickly figure out what I like and don’t like. Realized that I miss working on highly technical projects after working on consumer apps for a couple of years. So as a result been revamping my resume and planning my next steps in my software engineering career. There are some really cool companies out there in the space of databases and distributed systems.

As part of scouting for jobs built some little tools with help of LLMs to tailor my resume to job positions.

Also, rediscovered that I enjoy solving little algorithm problems after practicing with LeetCode. ChatGPT makes as if I have my own tutor to explain and hint when necessary, reminded me of university and study groups.

I'm a math student with a similar desire to learn more about these topics. I've asked around at my university about forming a study group around the following courses (which I myself would really like to study), but there seems to be little interest: Stanford CS143; MIT 6.824; MIT 6.001 .

Would you like to collaborate on something along these lines?

I’ve taken CS162 (operating systems) a while back at UC Berkeley and that along with networking, CS168, were my favorite classes. And they probably were the most useful going into the industry as well, so I highly recommend that you dig in even if you don’t find folks to study with. Makes me wonder if someone already created a service to match study groups for open content classes from top universities like this

Context: Father of two girls, Husband, Dev for 20 years.

- Breathing: fuel yourself with fresh energy out of thin air. The Wim Hof Method (WHM) really just changed my entire life. I found finally a method to stabilise my bio-rythm aka constant up-and-downs.

- Cold Showers: In combination with WHM it's one of my biggest physical improvements. I was always the guy who complains a cold climate. Now it just doesn't matter anymore, I don't get sick as easy and my body feels great!

- mindfulness: value the moment, keep it clean from other topics that doesn'tfit in right now. Matches perfectly with breathing/yoga exercises.

- build up my second career as life- and social counselor to help others getting their life sorted: https://gedankenfrei.at

Just hit me if you want to talk, I love people and social interaction!

I don't get sick as easy

How would you know?

Beeing in my late 30ies I know my body pretty well and also track my health status. Having two kids in school/kindergarden I'm also exposed to all kinds of viruses and diseases. The years before I was constantly more or less sick but now I didn't even got a cold even my surroundings got it.

Violin for me! Been going at it for a bit more than 3 years and have just started learning one of the Bach Sonatas.

It feels great to have a direct output from effort put in. The combination of physical and concentrated mental effort leaves me feeling refreshed after a good practice.

As a child violinist, the act of approaching the violin, rosining up, and putting it under my chin fills me with dread. Too many forced practice sessions.

My siblings were raised the same way, but somehow my older sibling devised her own passion from it, independent of parental pressure and she played it much longer than I or my younger sibling did.

It's a great skill to have, and sometimes I find myself whistling old orchestra tunes that have no searchable lyrics (bzw. John Playwright's Newcastle lived in my head for 15 years before I found its name via a music contour search).

One day I will pick it up again. Without the fear or the dread, and just play for happiness.

That’s definitely tough.

Learning an instrument as an adult has had its advantages that I’m learning for myself and no one else. I’ve accepted that I won’t be the next great violinist, but want to be good enough for me.

I sincerely hope you do pick it up again! Or maybe trying a new instrument for yourself.

Biology and bioinformatics. I've been reading about medicine and biology for a while now and want to get more serious. It's just such a huge fascinating field with a lot we don't know.

For now I completed one course on Coursera and am planning on finishing the specialization with 6-7 courses. Also trying to learn some statistics going through ISLR on the side.

I considered grad school as well but I don't have much of a shot. So I've been applying to software roles at biotech companies to break in that way. I'll make my own grad school with free online resources:)

I have similar interest! Let's talk?

I'm passionate about the game I'm making. Completing 2 years this december. Doing progress one step at a time.

Remember this: if you finish a game at all, you are well ahead of the crowd. Best of luck.

- Playing with my kids

- Health & Fitness (lose your health and you have nothing)

- Electric scooters (so fun!)

- Hiking

- Reading more books

- Playing more Chess

- Keyboard layouts

- Baking

- Penny whistle

> Health & Fitness (lose your health and you have nothing)

And I'm guessing first step here will be getting rid of scooter? :)

Only half joking here - health and two wheelers, especially ones with engine, does not combine greatly.

I know personally three people that had serious life changing accidents driving motorbikes, I was a witness to two serious crashes (guess who get out of them without a scratch - the one on bike or the one in car).

Even I had serious bike accident that damaged my health quite greatly. It may be just me getting older - but I seriously am afraid of using any kind of two wheeler in any traffic.

Groundwater. The issues, the proposed policy solutions, the technologies to support study and engineering, and potentially overlooked avenues to get a lot of freshwater otherwise destined for the ocean into the ground instead.

Topically:

Global land subsidence mapping reveals widespread loss of aquifer storage capacity (October 2023)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41933-z

Scientists map loss of groundwater storage around the world

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-scientists-loss-groundwater-st...

Blogging in multiple languages.

I’ve launched many blogs over the years, but they were mostly a hobby and consistency was lacking. My goal is to change that now, by writing every day about some things that interest me while improving my skills in multiple languages.

It’s been roughly two months since I began and this is something that truly inspires me at the moment. Everyone can benefit from writing down and sharing one’s knowledge from time to time.

Can you share it? I want to know if you're mixing languages "on the same page" or you have any kind of separation.

Home automation. I always had an Alexa and a couple of WiFi switches, but I just discovered the rabbit hole of Home Assistant, Zigbee devices, flashing devices to get rid of cloud capabilities and install your own firmware, and the whole ordeal. Haven't had this fun with tech in a while.

A few years ago, I got really into orchestrating LED accent lighting in my small studio apartment without going the Phillips route. With a few Alexa commands and some switches, I had multiple configurations that turned on when I woke up and again when I came home (using various cheap sensors). It was a blast!

I started skateboarding two years ago in my backyard and this year I started skating at my local skatepark. I'm all padded up for safety and even use hip pads. It's a very fun and cheap hobby. Seeing a lot of progression so it's very fun.

Hey! I’ve been skating for a few years myself! Have fun keeping at it!

Building lo-fi synthesizers with Teensy or Arduino. They are becoming more like interactive sculptures than instruments now. The sound is important, but the visual aesthetic is just as interesting to me.

Love to see pics.

playing high performance multiplayer games. building high performance multiplayer games. exercising. hanging out in the backyard.

Any specific favorites? Or technical achievements that are worth calling out?

I feel like battlebit is laudable for getting 254 players in sync at a 60 tick rate

I know it's a bit weird...but I'm really getting into creating my own religious style structure around modern AI programs.

Originally I was interested as a concept for a story, but as an atheist who was a very devout Christian for a long time I really wondered if there is some modern twist on the structure of organised religion and replacing a traditional meta-physical source of knowledge for a real world one (or group of them).

It has essentially turned into a framework of ritualism based around core concepts of various religious structure...with the ability to 'hot swap' your 'god' or 'AI' or 'book' or whatever source of wisdom you seek to lead your decisions.

It is much more complicated than I thought, but it is super interesting to me and while I have nothing that yet really helps me any better than normal reason based skepticism...I do like the ability to engage in tribal style ritualism in a modern context.

I've been trying to name it but so far all I have come up with is Algoruspicy (Haurspicy using algorithms) or Nexialism (Connection based philosophy)

You might be interested in “chaos magic”. Writings on the topic can be out there and often heavily metaphorical, but the core idea is that one designs not only their own rituals, but also the belief systems the rituals are based upon, often per-ritual. It doesn’t take suspension or reason or “belief in magic” - ritual magic - like religion - can be viewed as the combination of a symbolic model of the world and self-conditioning through that model. It’s a subject I find fascinating and want to write about at some point.

Anyway, I’m curious about your approach and always interested in discussion about these topic, drop me a line if you’d like to discuss ! Email is my username @ my username .net

Pong! In WebAssembly. Gotta start somewhere.

I would love it if you shared the sources when you were done. I would like to start somewhere too. ;-)

DIY!

I built a bad fence, a less bad gate, and a little shed. A lot was learned, they have issues but damn I’m proud of my creations.

I DIY as much as I can within reason. I couldn't begin to count the amount of money I've saved over the years. Plus, when it's something you've worked on, it's even easier to work on in the future because you understand it inside and out.

I don't work things I don't have the knowledge to do safely (some electrical work for example), or things I feel I don't have the knowledge to do correctly and there's risk of really bad resulting issues (I don't touch load-bearing walls for example).

Working on AI characters for companionship https://netwrck.com keeping going with the digital embodiment then one day we will have physical embodiment AI they will be in the world with us helping out.

Building a token economy for it too

Ahhh a Her

Preserving family moments with a 35mm film camera and the attachment an analog photograph engenders vs. digital.

After seeing a friend with young kids post candid photos of his family for the last few years, I decided to give it a try. Purchased a Retina IIIc rangefinder camera (from the 1950s, preceded SLRs) and it's one of the most amazing purely mechanical, consumer-focused engineered products I've held in my hands. Got a scanner, successfully booted the Nikon Scan abandonware on a virtualized Windows XP environment, and saw my first roll of photos appear last weekend. Wife and extended family absolutely loved it. I've reviewed those 36 photos (standard roll length) more in the past week than the 1,000 family photos of the past 2 years on my cell phone. Excited for more.

Film cameras truly are a joy. I’m using a Minolta X-700[0] myself. I also review the photos taken with it far more than my digital photos. There’s something about slowing down and focusing on taking a few good shots instead of a quick action with minimal effort that feels so rewarding. And they can look beautiful with the right film. Enjoy your new camera in good health!

[0] https://www.kenrockwell.com/minolta/700.htm

There are several topics that I recently got more into:

- The utility of randomness: returning from a machine learning conference in Italy where I had a pretty random (if you do not believe in fate) conversation with a stranger, where suddenly more people stood around and joined in. It basically started with me commenting on one poster "Isn't it amazing how useful randomness is, given there is no pattern/structure in a random sequence, and it costs me nothing to make up?" What I meant is how can something as arbitrary still be useful. Suddenly we started collecting examples: randomized algorthms like the random walker model behind PageRank, Random Forests in machine learning, random numbers for perfect encryption (one time pad), Pentti Kanerva's "Hyperdimensional Computing: An Introduction to Computing in Distributed Representation with High-Dimensional Random Vectors" (thanks to an anonymous Finnish bystander, for I could not recall Kanerva's name at the time) etc. Today, I found a book that studies how random people's travel decisions are: Ennio Cascetta (2009) Random Utility Theory, Heidelberg: Springer.

- hypergraphs: graphs have been very useful representations for so many things in work and life, but they are only for expressing dyadic relations between nodes, whereas their generalizations, hypergraphs can express n-ary relations between nodes.

- how to bring people back to a culture of books & libraries: I collect books and I read a lot. As I teach/lecture also, I often ask my students about their reading habits, and find it shocking that many have never been to a library, and most do not read books. I would like to contribute to changing that (seems harder than finding out whether P = NP?).

Have you made any progress on that books & libraries "project"?

My current special interest is guns.

Noise cancelling headphones, breathing exercises, generally no social interactions. So wonderful.

About to goto the range with my 22lr for some group therapy. 2inch groups at 50yards.

I was very into blackpowder some years back. I just haven't had the time to get back into it.

BattleBots. 250 pound robots with 70 pound steel blades spinning at 250mph fighting each other? Yes please.

Besides for the absolute mayhem, the planning, driving, and engineering that goes into these competitions are insane.

Some fights to give you an idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORDg67i70IU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx2aJMISaP4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaTIreDG45M

I love battlebots.

Really hoping for tombstone to come back next season re-engineered to be the top dog again.

Sound localizing. I was intensely passionate about it when I saw the possibility to do it well on a Raspberry Pi. There were quite a few more problems than so expected which is why it took five months (of weekends) to complete it well.

But I’m super happy with the result and have a bunch of geeks with recording nodes setup a long distance apart. Localizing large explosions show that it’s possible to localize to a carpets even when some of the nodes are almost 5 away.

For those interested, here is the project:

https://github.com/hcfman/sbts-aru

Localize to car parks that was supposed to say.

One node almost 5km away. Another more than 2km. One more than 3km. But they all converge nicely to a small area.

Amateur Radio!

I got a bachelor's degree in geophysical engineering about 10 years ago and never really used it besides programming, GIS, and data visualization.

Ham radio lets me do a lot of the things I loved about geophysics. Wave propagation, being outside, electronics, talking to satellites, remote sensing. Driving around being cool with a radio lol.

I'm just getting started but I'm really glad I got licensed. Especially in case of emergencies. I hope to practice and get to a point where I can help with public events or during emergency situations.

I got my license about five or six years ago while living in Colorado. The coverage of the repeater network was better than the coverage of the cellular network there. I was just on the east side of Glenwood Springs on I70 headed back home when there was a four car wreck right in front of me due to black ice, and of course no cell reception. I was able to reach someone on the Colorado Connections Repeater network and they reached the Glenwood Sheriffs instantly. They were able to dispatch sheriffs and ambulance very quickly. Otherwise it would have taken probably 30-40 more minutes for someone to reach cell reception just to call 911 to let them know there was an accident. That or the traffic to back up to the city.

It's an incredibly handy tool and worth looking in to the local ham group and repeater network in your area. I just sold the vehicle that I had my mobile radio previously installed in. I need to install it in the new vehicle so I can go back to chatting with the local HAMs on the way to work.

Sadly as I moved from Colorado about four years ago the community isn't as large where I'm at now as it was there.

Edit: I've been reading HN for a long time but for some reason today I felt I'd finally create an account to respond to this.

creating content

What kinds?

Started following Rugby during the world cup - got a bit obsessed, went to a couple of matches, joined a club, started following the national championship (Top 14)...

It's been great so far! It has a lot of complexity and physicality, which I enjoy.

Rugby is awesome. RWC is the only time I ever watch rugby and get obsessed with it. Played a bit during school too, went on rugby "camps", etc.

Getting out of my current flat / apartment as I'm getting serious noise pollution from above and to the left of me, and it's really affecting my mental health. Not had a proper night's sleep since the new upstairs neighbour moved in, around June/July, and this extra sensory overload has removed my ability to ignore the sub-bass coming from the left of me.

Last week there was a guy in social housing who killed himself after similar, and since then my social housing manager has been in touch to look at doing something - sad that it takes a death before someone investigates.

No chance you can strike up a good relationship with these people and then kindly ask them if they could turn it down a little?

Best of luck.

Elixir. The community is nice and welcoming.

Everyone is passionate about the project, you can feel the care that’s being poured into the ecosystem.

Worked for several years in that language--overall a very good experience.

I just built myself a sim racing rig with triple screen setup. Will be signing up for iRacing soon.

I'm tired of being productive and "on".

Wecome to the dark side.

We have cookies.

Secondhand shopping and stores

Trying to build something for businesses like thrift stores, vintage stores, secondhand stores, used furniture, consignment, etc. I started working at a vintage shop a few months ago after leaving my SWE job, and it's a pretty analog industry. No updated inventory, digital presence, business intelligence, etc. (not for lack of usefulness or lack of trying, just because digitizing hundreds or thousands of unique one-off items is really labor intensive and not ergonomic on existing tools). Hoping to build something purpose built for the use case that can also make shopping secondhand more accessible to end consumers.

Feel like the social stigma against "used goods" is dissipating, and shopping secondhand/vintage is seen as a viable or even preferable option b/c of cost, uniqueness, cyclical nature of trends, or sustainability efforts.

If anyone has any thoughts or tips, I'd love to hear them!

No particular tips, but would love to follow along if you’re blogging about it anywhere!

A pair of Visual Pinball cabinets.

Even with an initial sloppy mockup I found the wife loved playing pinball. So I went all in and built a new gaming PC, bought a 120 Hz TV just for a stand-alone pinball cab build.

(Oh, and found that using the previous gaming PC and a few other things lying around I could also build a mini-pinball-cab — so I have that one coming together as well.)

Hey, I'm building a next gen virtual pinball simulator!

Most of my passion is around cycling, if I didn't have to work for a living, I think I'd spend most of my time doing long bike rides.

This.

I'm riding an early-70s Schwinn road bike in an hour or so, and a modern modern mountain bike Saturday. Bring it on!

Working through "Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms": https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/comput...

Finally found the trifecta of an engaging lecturer with recorded lectures, an excellent textbook, and a solid set of exercises.

I just learned about Mackay's lectures on YouTube and am working through the same. Outstanding teacher.

I was so sad to see he died shortly after the course was recorded. He has a gripping/heartbreaking chronicle at https://itila.blogspot.com

turning my workspace into an ADHD-proof cockpit.

learning to design and build mechanical joints and stuff.

will need to learn welding asap.

Futsal.

Just started playing pick up futsal at the local YMCA. I’m pretty unfit right now but really enjoying it. I’d played football (soccer) as a youth and wanted to get back into it. Found the futsal pick ups and jumped in. A lot of fun and really good work out. I’d never heard of futsal until now. Similar to indoor 5 a side. Would recommend it to anyone wanting to play some competitive sports.

Product and marketing. How do you find out if you're building something really relevant, and how do you find your market?

Reading research from the past.

There are several papers/books in math, economics, logic, philosophy, etc. from the past 200 years that I've been interested in reading but have never had a structured plan to go about it. I've occasionally just read random stuff.

This year I started a project where I write some thoughts on a handful of papers/books from 100, 150, and 200 years ago. Here's the result from 1923 [1], and I'm nearly finished with 1873.

Organizing the reading like this has kept the scope manageable and the project fun. Hopefully, it's something I'll continue into the future.

[1] https://bcmullins.github.io/research-from-1923/

CUE(lang), generally, current efforts are because devops & yaml engineering has gotten out of hand

I maintain https://cuetorials.com and am heading up the CUE sig-infra group for the time being

Building my Tyranid army in Warhammer 40k

A good buddy of mine had been itching to get back into the hobby that he played as a teen but I wasn't interested in it. Until I got the Ultimate Starter Box from my game store as it was basically calling out to me.

It's been an incredibly fun (and yes, expensive) hobby.

The people are great, especially in my local area they're suuuper friendly and welcoming to new people. They want cool people to play with and enjoy the hobby with so there's little gatekeeping that I've actually run into.

Learning new skills (assembly, priming, painting) and learning the rules has been really fun as well.

My passion for coding has been at an all time low, so it's good to have something to channel my passion into.

Dependent types and type theory. I’ve only been understand small pieces at the fringes so far but each thing I am able to get is like a little mind blowing.

Also moon phases (?)

Probably join a monastery. I give up on tech

Rediscovering the pleasure of reading after I (feel like I) lost my ability to focus on a text for longer than a few seconds.

Getting back into society. I've been taking a sabbatical and building a passion project for a few years. It's been great and not so great. The project is reaching a point where I can build a web page and move it to the sales/marketing phase, and spend time with people other than my wife and close friends.

It's really time to get out of the introversion bubble again.

Photography.

On the weekends I now wake up at 5:30 and drive to remote places to take photos during sunrise. I spend a lot of spare time researching lenses and watching videos with tips on things like composition.

I was never a morning person before.

Working on a programming language competency scale for myself. The idea is to give one's self confidence at using a specific language. Everyone learns programming differently obviously, but as someone who's self-taught, it might be useful for others.

Not “passionate” per se but I’ve been taking the stairs to my penthouse for around a year now, and sometimes as a challenge (against firefighters who obviously do that for living) I take the stairs and go down by the elevator to take the stairs again four of five times in a row! Good cardio.

Listening an choral music and conducting choir that sing sacred music during a liturgy as well. Mainly orthodox, byzantine, latin. Old, classical and modern.

Thinking about consciousness and how weird the human-constructed world is and other big deep stuff like that. If that sounds interesting to you I'd love to exchange thoughts with people. Especially if you're in the south bay area, I'm trying to meet more weirdos around here.

And biotech/biohacking! (not the supplements flavor that calls itself those things but actually isn't at all)

As a tech engineer who ended up in marketing, I've spent the last decade building an agency business and working with tech companies.

When ChatGPT/LLMs became accessible, I started playing around with OpenAI's API with the goal of "encoding" some of my expertise into the AI so it does the work for me (specifically how to write founder stories for my customers).

The result is https://storypitch.ai and it's already generating revenue.

But I have to say it's both worrying and fascinating to see AI do my work for me.

I am crazy about bare metal kubernetes clusters and gitops.

I'm trying to document the process of setting one up in such a way that I can do a teach in for my friends at my local hackerspace.

In the process I've determined I would like to write my own k8s enabled application (likely a daemonset for checking for a specific hardware device and configuration on each bare metal node, and storing that data in a way for k8s to use and reference later).

I've been working on this any free time I get, since September, each weekend sees a flurry of activity then I spend the week daydreaming about it.

I’m fascinated by the possibilities of trading as a video game instead of a way to make money. I’m building a stock exchange to prove this idea. https://github.com/sneilan/stock-exchange

I write code that makes live music and/or controls hardware instruments. Latest recording https://lowveld.bandcamp.com/album/antarctica-sixteen-ninety... Styles are quite varied (imho) within the experimental and ambient genres. Managed to get some of these pieces in a few short films, they tend to be horror/thriller type. Slow listening.

Tennis - as a life long racquetball player, I transitioned to tennis. Joined a club, taking lessons, it's amazing.

Waterfowl hunting and training my Labrador to hunt with me and retrieve my harvested game. The bond my pup and I have created in the past ~9mo training multiple times a day is incredible. I used to absolutely despise winters and now I can't wait for it to get cold, windy, and wet.

I have been captivated by all aspects of waterfowl, dog training, being in nature, finding public lands accessible to me and preparing the game for consumption - and it keeps me intrigued in some capacity throughout the year.

Memorization techniques, basically what's in _Moonwalking with Einstein_ by Josh Foer. Here's a podcast on the topic https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_how_to_re...

Helping my cleaner get more customers. I'm helping him put together a letterbox flyer which I'm interested to do some a/b testing on response rates. I'll also systematically track which houses I've covered and when.

In Melbourne I see a lot of cleaning websites that use stock photos of people that don't racially reflect the cleaners working for the agency. I want to flip that upside down and have encouraged my cleaner to put a photo of himself on the flyer (he's Sri Lankan). I think this will show any potential customers that he stands out from other cleaners and is proud of his work and who he is.

Right now, really focused to improve my diet and physical health with mental well being, But also passionate on philosophy reading

2D and 3D animation. I've started with 3D and Blender and Unreal Engine, and following along with Youtube tutorials on the same. Still very much a hobbyist, haven't produced much that is worth showing, but am passionate about this space.

Truth

I've really been playing with the idea of getting into trying to mod Valheim.

Writing as a method of processing my feelings on the tension between using my time for cheap entertainment to enjoy life and my desire to balance out dopamine hits resulting in the erosion of things I enjoy. I am channeling these things into a Paladin class, because for some reason that speaks to me. I have promised myself that at no point will this see the light of day. That makes me write more fearlessly.

Energy efficiency and optimization through out of the box technology, hardware and software solutions.

This is the focus of my latest venture. Market is global. Our first installation went online earlier this year. All self-funded so far. Working on raising a round to scale.

Fully deployed, in the US alone, we can free-up enough energy to support over 30 million electric vehicles without having to build a single new power plant of any kind.

Yes, applied to YC multiple times as we were developing the technology. Rejected every time. My guess is that the combination of an older solo founder and a complex hardware/software model just didn't pass the filters. I get it. Hardware is hard. We are past the YC level of startup funding at this stage (need ~$5MM), so that's no longer an option.

Still in stealth.

Learning Lua and (re)learning C. After 20+ years of Java and Python the minimalism is deeply satisfying

Inline skating for the last N years, and it is still the best few hours of my life every weekend.

Gaza

Text rendering / UI on minimal hardware and finding more time for ML-family languages.

A few months ago, an iced-rs maintainer[1] recommended I try Elm. So far, this has lead to:

1. A an MVP[2] of a curses[3]-like library for CHIP-8 derivatives (https://github.com/pushfoo/octo-termlib)

2. A growing interest in language design

3. An ongoing re-evaluation of my software development worldview

[1] 13r0ck / Brock on GitHub (https://github.com/13r0ck). Hire him if you get the chance. He has a rare blend of know-how, mentorship, and community management skills.

[2] Unsolved issues with octo-termlib:

1. Finding a license friendly toward beginners editing pre-made template assembly files (Maybe zlib + acknowledgement?)

2. Elegant & efficient syntax for ending screen X / Y parsing before all digits are used

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)

I'm passionate about my guitar playing again and I've been teaching guitar to a couple of people, which is very rewarding. Also I do Jiu Jitsu and I'm halfway to my purple belt, and I've had some opportunities to help coach kids, which is fantastic.

My newborn son. Stakeholders come and go.

Currently, I'm excited about making music again. Before, I wasn't completely happy with my compositions. My creative process seemed to be driven by the sounds from software and hardware instruments. Now, I started dividing my work into two distinct sessions. One is exclusively for sound crafting and tool preparation, which clears away any technical distractions for the other type of session, where I can dive into composing music with more concentration.

Foreign languages. I'm a native English speaker and I've been studying Spanish for almost 18 months and I just started dabbling in French.

I recently got into DMing a DnD campaign. It‘s so much fun to play my ideas and concepts together with friends.

Reduce the massive amount of dysfunction in heavy civil construction project delivery. If you only knew how bad things really are.

Family, especially our kids. Still have career goals which im working hard towards but its all in service to building a family.

Teaching.

Virtual Pinball.

In particular the open source Visual Pinball engine and the amazing content made for it and community around it. https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. Also vintage pre-Windows computers and retro video gaming. Home computers in the 80s and early 90s were so unique, diverse and interesting. Each had strong opinions about what the future of personal computing could be, expressed in their own hardware, software library and community of enthusiasts.

Horsemanship, as a philosophical pursuit and an AI-proof retirement business. Learning Bach arrangements for guitar to play around a campfire. My oddly perfect job.

I love these threads:

- Learning to use Emacs better

- Common Lisp

- Clojure

- Getting better at chess

- Rubiks cubes and solving them faster

- Indie gaming and fighting games at the moment

Being Calm and Content with whatever I have.

I think, I feel, I am out of this rat race of fighting for that next promotion, learning that new language, earning more money, wanting that ${THING}. No, I am not a monk, nor do I want to become one, but I am passionate about how to be content and grateful for whatever I have; I am relatively at peace for a good while since I started to train & reinforce my brain to behave this way. Thanks to Almighty.

Encouraging everyone to try going vegan - it can greatly reduce the amount of animal abuse and environmental damage in our world - plus these days it's easier than ever with loads of high-quality information on nutrition and recipes.

I recently made this webapp: https://foodchoices.app

Cool to see that you kept the idea alive, thanks! :D

I'd have totally forgotten to post again, even though I also considered doing it at some point.

"Learning games", games that teach you something as you play. The best kind of learning games nudge you towards an answer so that you can win without ever having heard of the answer, and without Googling it. One example: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1635132575

Philosophy helped me a lot during the pandemic and helps me everyday

nature sounds! they help me focus and relax :)

earth.fm is now at 700+ recordings

Snowboarding -- it's been a joint passion with my Wife.

We always intended to do it, but life and Covid got in the way, now the restrictions are gone we are spending as much time as we can on the slopes, we are fortunate enough to live "near" a large indoor ski slope with actual snow on it and there's a real online and offline community vibe around the venue.

AI induced reactive Observability. What if we could (ok we can just haven't) create a system that based on past solutions looks for a specific condition and then, when that condition is met, takes specific actions immediately and then reports to the human rather than reporting to the human and waiting for them to take a known set of actions. Beyond just "container died restart" but getting into "Container 2 is exhibiting performance that indicates it is suffering a very slow memory leak. Capture logs and readings to prove this, restart the container and report findings to a human"

Making music inside, learning to grow my own weed outside :) Also, I'm fixated on Muriel Spark books right now.

I've been on and off trying to implement automated template matching OCR for DVD subtitles. Picking it up once again.

There are a few solutions which use tesseract type OCR and a few which are human assisted template based, but I figure with some linguistic clues it should be possible to automatically solve.

Number theory and spacetime! I have a proof for an old number theory problem

Finding ways to do something useful despite health challenges. Learning to have the right attitudes and have peace & happiness, & stay pointed in the right direction, despite whatever. It's a good learning process, and my beliefs are making all the difference, motivating me to be patient, have hope, keep trying, use it to grow in quiet ways.

Acrylic painting!

I’m recovering from a knee injury so I’ve had a rough time keeping my mind occupied without being online all of my waking hours. It’s been a ton of fun painting based off of famous impressionist works, pictures I’ve taken over the years, and from my imagination, and it’s definitely given me a fun new way of looking at the world!

Archery. I got my first bow in 2019 to try bow hunting, but now I am mostly interested in it for target archery. In state competitions, I was on the podium in 3 of the 6 events last year. It’s not a huge field but it feels pretty good.

The other big thing this year is walking, it’s simple exercise that has helped me lose 30 pounds since July 1st.

A Primer on Pontryagin's Principle in Optimal Control: Second Edition by I.M. Ross.

https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Pontryagins-Principle-Optimal-...

Explains optimal control theory and the pontryagin minimum principle from a geometrical perspective rather than the confusing derivation from calculus of variations that is more typical. Also explains it at an "Engineering" or applied math level rather than at a mathematical foundations level so the results are more usable.

[ I'd describe this book as the "Div, Grad Curl and All That" of Optimal Control Theory if that makes sense to you ]

Getting Ohio House Bill 14 passed and fathers rights in general.

Right now in the state of Ohio a father has 0 default rights to his own children, even AFTER paternity. Ohio is a "mothers rights" state meaning that be default the mother has 100% custody so it is always an uphill batter to get time with your kids if the mother doesnt want you to.

[1] https://www.sharedparenting.org/

Tinkering with brass astronomical gizmos.

Made this orrery a week ago: https://youtu.be/FGdjk5fY87s?si=t9nwZI8YXxy4Bi7D

And presently working on a world clock inspired by the xkcd 1335 commic.

I've been competing in ultra-distance bike races since 2020. In April this year, I decided to take a break from work and see how well I could do if I dedicated one year to training. I chose the Race around the Netherlands in 2024, the race that started it all for me, as my goal race. Training takes up to 30 hours a week, so at time it's like a full time job, but I haven't felt so fulfilled in a long, long time. I definitely recommend it to anybody that has the opportunity.

The political thought of Louis Brandeis and George Kennan. These two men are very different, but between them they seem to have comprehended and sometimes even developed solutions to nearly all the large issues facing our country and world today.

That and cellular communication. The g-protein coupled receptor[0] is basically an all-purpose biological switch. Combined with other messaging pathways it is used to build complex logic into cell message/response networks.

[0] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gpcr-14047471/

Photography. It's a good excuse to go outdoors and get some fresh air, and it's fun to get a good shot every once in a while.

My AI startup: https://aiconstrux.com

Whitewater kayaking! I got into it late (26), been doing it for 2 years now. It’s a multi faceted passtime, of course at the core it’s a physically demanding sport, which helps keep in shape. But it’s also a social accelerator, meeting people with the same niche passion is amazing. I personally love the travel aspect, you get to seek out and find new wonderful places on earth that can’t be accessed otherwise (some rivers don’t have footpaths following the banks).

Compiling and editing together my travel footage for my YouTube vlog. I've had the fortune to have traveled to 96 countries in my life so far, and have been posting a vlog for every country that I've visited (I'm making an attempt to go to every country)

I got hung up around country 55, feeling that I hadn't found my "editing voice" and have had difficulty finding the motivation over the last year to edit and post my most recent 41 countries worth of content. I want to say that part of it is because I'm overwhelmed with how much there is to go through? I also get in my head and have to consistently reassure myself that I'm ultimately editing this for my future self/family to watch, and that I shouldn't necessarily be optimizing for viewership (though passive income through travel vlogs would be nice.)

There's a definitive, "what's up brand gang, immranderson here!" blueprint that could be followed, but I have no interest in ever doing something like that.

Drawing with pencil on rough paper every morning.

Finding and listening to good music while working on my own first EP.

Writing about video games and whatever comes to mind on my website, as well as playing old classics, indies, and AAA giganto-games.

Writing to friends regularly.

X4 Foundations

If you've never heard of it X4 is a space sandbox game with an emphasis on trade. I can't remember the last time I was this captivated by a game. It combines a lot of things I love - simulation, automation, optimization, statistics, space combat, slow but quantifiable progression.

Modelling natural gas consumption. I don’t think it’ll be actually useful and certainly not as nuanced as professional models for trading, but adding the necessary data to my data warehouse and then working on it has been a fun experience.

Observability! Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry, you name it.

I'm digging deeper into the architecture of those open source tools—how they work under-the-hood—and not only at the superficial surface (deploying the stack and tune some parameters).

a topic often seen on Hacker News - the Julia language

I find Python to be useful but excruciatingly verbose, particularly when you get to using NumPy and Pandas. I like the syntax of Fortran/MATLAB/GNU Octave so here's to hoping that Julia can take over some of this workload. I also use R extensively (and love it) for data analysis; glad to see Julia's capability in this space also.

Elden Ring. Need to finish this mofo to be able to focus on anything else. It truly is a masterpiece.

Getting out of debt somehow

After that it would be robotics, navigation, space, underwater exploration, random stuff, I'd be a tinkerer, have a ranch somewhere

Public speaking. I started an internal diversity group based on (what I thought would be) a less popular diversity strand and wanted to get better at public speaking and presenting to do the topic justice.

So, I joined Toastmasters. Went along for a few taster sessions and signed up. Quite apart from improving my speaking skills it's actually a lot of fun. I'd recommend it.

Mushroom cultivation. Aside from the medicinal motivations, it is an extremely testing endeavor that requires patience and skill, so there is much to learn and get better at. Sterile technique is one skill to refine. It is also fascinating to observe and better understand the life of mycelium.

Has been over two months since I started to germinate spores on agar plates and am about ready to move to a fruiting chamber.

The same thing I’ve been passionate about since I was five: computers and software.

I started taking salsa lessons a few months ago, and it’s been incredibly fun. Before that, I really got into Magic: The Gathering for a while.

Surfing. Never been so addicted to a form of exercise before.

I'm building a computer around a DEC J-11 CPU, from first principles, that is, only parts datasheets, not "just" recreating a PDP-11 compatible machine. I'm hyper-focused on it, so much I'm starting to think in octal and gate logic. It's great fun, even if nothing comes out of it in the end (except much wasted time and money).

Actually, my machine WILL NOT run unmodified unix, nor do I plan on porting it, I want to write my own, single-user system for it.

SQLite Archive Files: https://sqlite.org/sqlar.html

I'm writing a Go package to read them: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dolmen-go/sqlar/sqlarfs

Modeling!! Military tanks and airplanes, Gundam and now Warhammer. Learning a lot painting techniques.

Also building "drones". I create a glider and slap some propellors on it, then race it once a month in a local club.

Tabletop Role-playing Games (ttrpg), specifically being the Game Master (gm). I'm actually pretty new to ttrpgs was always more of a card and board gamer. I have a friend who recently Kickstarted a diceless system he designed. I helped with some proofreading and it seemed really interesting. He invited me to do an Actual Play and I was hooked. Decided to dive into the deep end and immediately started gm'ing.

I am utterly fascinated by Japanese joinery

I started climbing and bouldering a few weeks ago. I'm doing a top rope climbing course and will maybe follow it up with lead climbing. Having been running for several years now it's really fun doing something completely different. Every weekend now I drive to a different climbing gym to mingle with the weekend crowd and tryharding on easy routes.

Drawing at least 30min every day using Line of Action[1]. It’s relaxing and fun to see improvements over time.

I’m also writing my own tools in Elixir for playing around with LLMs. Currently exploring ways to efficiently chunk documents/code/webpages so that I can create embeddings for them.

[1] https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing

Practicing bass guitar. I never played music as a child which makes learning as an adult ten times harder, but that won’t stop me, I see it more as a fun challenge hah. I started with piano during the pandemic, which I enjoyed, then that morphed into generally learning the full gamut of production with DAWs and whatnot. Bought a bass guitar in the summer and have been having a blast learning, I have practiced nearly every day that I am at home, and actually notice how much better I am getting. Also identifying areas to improve upon, and focus on getting my hands to do what my brain wants is a really good exercise, and a really good break from the ol’ enterprise software grind :)

Streaming flight data from the FAA. I'm building a system to ingest data from the FAA SWIM system to build a real-time flight board for airports in the United States. I'm learning how to manage high traffic data via a JMS program.

Learning to kiteboard!

Finally launched our crowdfunding campaign for everyone who wishes great desk work jobs didn't come at the expense of the harm of sitting for extended periods. (here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/movably-pro-the-freedom-o...)

This is a great thread! So many interesting topics. Awesome to see.

For me, at the moment, it is internet governance. Kinda like getting involved in local city council politics, but at internet scale. There are so many ways to get involved it is confusing... and it often seems so abstract for an everyday dev, especially if you are just a frontender like me. I have been interested in governance for a while, but had my first participation opportunity at the UN Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto last month, and have been slowly blogging some of my learnings:

https://micro.chadkohalyk.com/2023/10/30/attending-the-inter...

It has motivated me to interact more with the IETF and W3Cs. Like local politics, this stuff actually is important... even if the entire community does not participate.

Computing.

I have been passionate about programming for a long while, figured it out at 14, slowly kept going upwards doing online courses, ended up doing CS in Uni at 19, did an industrial placement where I felt like I grew tremendously. At 22 it felt like my fuel has ran out, I had a terrible final year in Uni, Covid hit, I was terribly burnt out and I have not felt as passionate at my job since.

I'm just now slowly getting back into actually loving computing and delving deep into the things that I didn't have a chance to so far, like IoT projects, functional programming, compilers etc. I'm also really lucky to be working for a company and in a team where it's understood and accepted that we don't run at full capacity all the time, and given freedom to put as much as I want on my plate for a while.

Space Race Two. China versus the USA.

Which country will achieve the first crewed lunar landing of this millennium?

Which country will set up the first permanent moonbase?

Which country will achieve the first crewed martian landing?

Which county will set up the first permanent base on Mars?

etc.

I was surprised by how much progress in space China has made. They have a permanently inhabited space station. They are planning to achieve a crewed lunar landing by 2030. They are planning to complete a permanent moonbase by 2035.

I have been sick with colds and fatigue for 1.5 months. I have another two weeks and then I can get back to normal programming. I hope.

At this moment, I am feeling passionate about seeing my wife.

Wine. It’s fascinating, tastes good and a fun conversation with people.

Putting food in my teams mouth.

Woodworking and designing furniture. Just this weekend I finally set up my home workshop after almost a decade of dreaming about it (and collecting things I thought I might need). Just spent two hours drawing basic layouts for some wardrobes, and looking at beautiful midcentury, Scandinavian, and Japanese items online. Any good resources (for technical or aesthetics) are very much welcome - I’m looking to invest in my knowledge now I can put it to use.

Cannabis genetic biodiversity.

Home video creation (recording, editing,…)

This summer I finally bought a GoPro to capture our motorcycle tour with my girlfriend – have been thinking about getting one for years but never did. Well, since then we have been on three city trips and I enjoyed recording those. Since then I edited and finished one of them, and it is such a joy.

Medicinal value of fig leaf extract, a la fig tea.

Learning to play a musical instrument

I've started with the Vangoa EWI-100, which is an affordable, silent, and good enough MIDI EWI (electronic wind instrument) device. I have also been learning some of the technical details of MIDI. I sometimes use it alone, and sometimes with a Cocos Reaper with free VSTs. I have only been doing this for 4 days, but I am already enjoying it a lot.

If I continue to play it, most probably I will upgrade to a better EWI.

Making money

Being finally able to work in US, after 15 months of spending savings to survive. Ouch.

Tabletop RPG games, with friends and food. Good music, food and friendship is the key.

It's currently the election year in my country, so I now have access to a huge amount of open data: voters, politicians, etc.

I'm still wondering if I can process this data into something useful.

Re-capping and restoring an RCA SRT-301 reel-to-reel tape machine.

Building a modular synth from scratch.

Building infrastructure to make SQLite databases more useful.

- https://airsequel.com - SQLite hosting platform

- https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteDAV - WebDAV server for SQLite databases

- https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteGPT - Call ChatGPT directly in SQL queries

Building an open source sync backend for Logseq: https://github.com/bcspragu/logseq-sync

I'm a big fan of Logseq for keeping track of useful information and tasks and stuff, but the file-based (or Git-based) syncing has sharp edges, and the actual Logseq Sync feature has a proprietary backend, so I've been enjoying figuring out how the protocol works and building an OSS implementation.

Extremely passionate about classical guitar.

I played electric in high school and developed some chops in jazz band. Loved it, but like many others, dropped it completely in college. Years later, I moved to SF for a FAANG and had an impossible time developing a new friend group; I wanted to reignite my old love in a new style, so I filled the time with weekly lessons with a well-known teacher in the area.

Fast forward 8 years later, that hobby’s turned into an obsession, and I’m now playing at a fairly high level. Am studying privately with a conservatory professor (not SF), who’s trying to get me to join for a Master’s degree. I’m performing regularly at public events & retirement homes, streaming most of my practice sessions on Twitch/YouTube, posting progress clips to other socials, and even built my own metronome/practice journal app to track time & organize notes (mujoapp.com). I love it all dearly as a lifelong and infinitely-deep hobby.

All socials:

http://linktr.ee/jcpractices

Capricho Arabe by Francisco Tarrega:

https://youtu.be/l3203CvetCs?si=Zf4BmjsvWo3BGi15

Sales pitch for Mujo:

https://youtu.be/3zh-RehOuDg

Home Assistant: between cheap ESP-based controllers and ESPHome, I'm aiming to get my whole house under local, cloud-free control.

Table tennis! The sport has so much depth, that you can keep learning/improving for a life-time. Whenever you think you now everything about it, there is something new to learn (spin, tactics, focus, psychology, bluffing, etc.). It's like a combination of fast-paced chess, poker and reaction testing.

That, also combined with other hobbies such as VR (Eleven VR), 3d printing (printing/designing table-tennis adapters for the VR controllers).

I’m working on a silly website called Late Night Bomb Defusal. It’s just a microwave that you have to open/stop as close to 0:00 as possible. But it doesn’t show you milliseconds, just seconds.

Edit: by random chance if anyone wants to help with a title card graphic/logo, that’s the one gap I have in capability for this toy.

Folk music. Digging up weird old ballads and learning about how they've changed over centuries. I'm putting together a version of Captain Kidd (Roud 1900) for my repertoire right now.

I've been meaning to up my Mexican cooking game. For years I've been making the standard easy Tex-Mex stuff (tacos, burritos, etc). But my wife recently bought me "Mi Cocina"[1], which is a level up in both challenge and authenticity.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mi-Cocina-Recipes-Rapture-Cookbook/dp...

Recording music.

I have recently started recording Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 2 using some DAW and orchestral instruments from my digital piano. It is not easy to make sound good, and a major undertaking since even the first part is 10 minutes long. But it is a fascinating process to me. I hope it turns out ok.

Right now I’m very interested in Creativity Software and Machine Learning.

Motorcycling. Didn’t expect to love it so much getting into it later in life.

Love the speed, the acceleration, braking, leaning, the sound and the smell of it and getting over that second-guessed fear of death every time I get the bike out.

Also love the dynamics, physics, maths of it and the skill and absolute attention it takes to control.

Actually my job is just a means to support my motorcycle addiction now.

Soldering stuff. Think esp32 and iot

My current passion is to maintain and fix cars. No modification because very little is allowed in my country and I keep the budget super tight.

I started about a year ago. Prior to starting I had never owned a car or done any sort of mechanic task. My first oil change was on a friend's car before I actually owned a car (getting to his place with a jack, jackstands and other tools in a rental mechanic bike was an experience in itself).

Getting into that hobby was a key factor in my battle with depression. While I've not recovered my pre-covid energy, I'm in a much better place.

Since then, I've done minor operations on 5 cars, and lots of things, including non-trivial operations (suspension overhaul, gearbox replacement) on the car I bought to be my "test dummy" (though it's by no means a beater, I bought it running and driving, it's just 20 years old with a fair mileage).

I would definitely recommend that hobby, especially if you already own a car and have a space to do it (living in an appartment, I had neither and still figured it out)

I also started a Youtube channel of filming myself doing those operations, but I'm not that passionate about it. I'm still on the fence of whether to stop or continue it. While I'm proud of it, it's a time sink and the few bad comments (it's the internet after all) leave a bitter taste.

Writing some libraries in a new language I've gotten excited about, and training to bench press 300+ pounds by the end of the year.

Volleyball. I played sports my whole life but picked up volleyball for the first time when I took a class my senior year of college with the main goal being to meet women. Fast forward seven years and now I play 5 times a week, travel 4-5 times per year to play in tournaments, and am married to a wonderful woman who loves playing as much as I do.

Although I've played sports my whole life, this is the first sport where I have really dedicated myself to training my skills and studying how to get better (as opposed to just playing pick up games all the time as I did with basketball). The volleyball community is exceptional. My wife and I moved to Arizona a few years ago, and we now have an extensive network of friends, all of whom we met through the sport.

About a year ago, my friend who played at a very high level in Iran decided to try out for the semi-pro team here in Phoenix. I was going to watch the tryout, but he encouraged me to try out as a libero (defensive specialist). I was originally a hitter, but it is exceptionally difficult to play in the front row at at the professional level when you are 5'7".

To my surprise, I made the team. The starting and backup liberos are significantly better than I am, but in the past year I have improved tremendously from being able to practice regularly at a high level.

Although it is growing fast in the US, there isn't nearly the same interest in volleyball as there is in mainstream sports like basketball or football. This means that very, very few people in the US make a living playing volleyball, but it also means that someone like me who never played in college has access to volleyball at a very competitive level.

I've also been able to help grow the sport by using my skills as a software developer. I threw together a little website for the team using a bootstrap template and it looks significantly better than our old website. Check us out at http://www.ascensionvolley.com and take a look at our YouTube channel!

I've been exploring new opportunities made possible by advances in deep learning. That which was nearly impossible to do before is now within reach.

I’ve never been a car guy, but somehow came across a kit car that I think is so gorgeous I have to build it. But I have few mechanical skills. I took a (tig) welding class at the local community college and have signed up for an intro to auto mechanics class for the coming semester, with plans to take more after that. I built a nice work bench in the garage and am getting it cleaned up. Suddenly tools are interesting and exciting to me. Would never have predicted this :) I figure it will take two years to gain skills, and five years to actually build. We’ll see if the passion/lust for that car endures long enough to get there.

The band Cloud Rat.

Some of the sickest, gnarliest grind metal music ever. Super creative, relentless drums, awesome production. Just so nasty. Trying to learn the album Pollinator on guitar at the moment. Guitar player has tabs posted on his instagram

Getting back into the "maker"/"tinker" groove.

Modifying and calibrating my 3d printer(s), chasing speed while maintaining print quality.

Using CAD more seriously, trying to challenge myself with more complex projects and models. Current project is to make a CoreXY Plotter from an old 3d printer I just disassembled.

Wanting to get/make a CNC Mill/Router to finally have the ability to work on some bigger "cooler" projects. ex. I have a custom PC case model that I've been working on, and can't wait to build for the upcoming rig upgrade.

Very passionate about helping orphans in war-torn region get education and building water pumps

Nix Flakes.

I like to keep things nice and declarative.

Recently discovered an arcade in my city with a ton of Asian rhythm game cabinets, mainly Dancerush Stardom where you have to dance to the song. Kinda like DDR but a lot more flexible. I've always been a very stiff person so I hoped that learning to dance can help with that and what better way to learn to dance than with a video game with very exact goals.

Plus, there's an awesome community around the game and the arcade so it's been nice to meet new people that way.