HN user
Daily jogging, healthy diet, and meditation make the biggest difference to me.
The biggest change I'd like to make would be to defeat my social media and entertainment addiction - not even entirely, just contain it to a 2-hour window every evening. I keep failing at that, but there were weeks/months when I was successful, and it made an enormous difference, way more than I expected.
Depends on what kind of family and friends you have.
I switched to mac after about 10 years on linux, and I'm not going back.
I'm also very annoyed by most of the things you have listed, but there are two things that are a deciding factor in favor of mac for me:
1. In addition to webdev I sometimes need to do design, graphics, 3D art, and on linux most of the software just doesn't work. There's absolutely zero chance I'd be willing to cope with GIMP and Inkscape instead of using Photoshop and Affinity designer. There's a lot of other software (for screen recording and video editing, for instance), that works on mac and doesn't on linux.
2. On mac, things just work. On linux there's more customization, and open source software, but you pay for it dearly by having to spend hours (sometimes days) tinkering with configs and installing dependencies every time you're trying to get anything to work. I didn't mind that before, but at this point, I'm too old for this sh*t. I just want my laptop to work and help me do my work and make stuff, I don't want to cross my fingers and pray every time I need to install something I need to get anything done.
That's a big part of the problem - a group of people have unilaterally decided that they're the grown up ones, and they know better, and dismiss everyone else as toddlers.
Using that wonderful justification, they proceeded to censor everyone who disagrees with them, including the points of view that later turned out to be correct.
When you decide that you're a smart adult, declare every dissenting viewpoint to be "disinformation", and, therefore, you get to decide for other people what they do or do not get to read or think, and then you get it wrong, people will be justifiably upset. Even if you get it right, people will be upset.
So here's a wild suggestion - why not treat other human beings as adults capable of making up their own minds about things?
The alternative to a billionaire deciding how to spend the money they have earned is a politician deciding to spend the money they didn't earn.
I trust a person who has generated billions of dollars worth of value over a buerocrat who won a popularity contest.
Besides, I don't think it should matter whether or not these people spend their money optimally. They've made this money, it's theirs. Don't take other people's stuff.
We’ve already seen what more extreme individuals are prepared to do with that power.
Until we leave in a featureless dystopia where all people are perfect clones brought up in an identical environment, there will be power disparity between people. It can be based on inheritance (like in monarchies), or ability to commit violence, or charisma, or political skill, or ability to create value.
Between all these options, I'd much rather live in society where people get to keep the value they have created. It seems to me the most correlated with merit (not perfectly, but better than the alternatives), besides, it is morally right.
You estimate wrong.
Top 1 percent of earners (with incomes over $540,009) pay over 40 percent of all income taxes.
Why does everyone think that they know better how to spend other people's money than the people who have earned it?
Somehow the people who didn't have the intelligence and discipline to spend decades successfully doing things that make them rich are so sure that they would be able to do better with their (totally hypothetical) wealth than the people who did.
Everyone loves to claim some kind of moral superiority over the billionaires, but I don't see these critics spending a significant portion of their wealth on charity.
How many of those 160,000 people would be able to successfully run Apple?
Would all 160,000 of them put together be able to do a better job than Tim did?
People are not paid based on what they need, they're paid based on value they provide (and other things, like how difficult they are to replace).
Another good one: https://nulis.io/ (or https://gingkoapp.com/). It's like a mindmap turned sideways, in a more convenient format.
And of course: https://dynalist.io
Both are infinitely nested tree editors, that enable you to organize information very conveniently. Great for writing, brainstorming, taking notes.
On iOS I use Editorial (a great text editor) to write down all my notes, and I use #tags to make it easy to search all my notes by topic (like #webdev, #health, #books, and so on).
Also Track and Share is a great habit tracker, and Things 3 is a great todo list manager. The more thoughts I can offload from my brain into the app - the better.
On my laptop I use Emacs org-mode, it's fantastic.
Which probiotic strains did you try? Did you do anything else that worked?
What did you do to fix your microbiome? Can you share? It would be really helpful!
Can you share the methods?
Can you share a bit more about your autoimmune disease?
What disease was it? What kind of medications have helped you?
I'm suffering from some kind of autoimmune-like disease with similar symptoms and trying to figure out what's wrong with me.
Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad.
Sounds like the guy just overdid it. Like anything else, movies/books/games can be enjoyed in a healthy way, or can turn into an addiction. When I consume too much, it makes me feel pointless and hate myself. When I consume from time to time, in a limited and healthy amount (like a weekly episode of Rick and Morty or Dimension 20) - it makes me happy and adds to my life.
When the consumption tunrs into an addiction, you keep seeking the joy you felt when you watched your first few great movies/episodes, and then you run out and start scraping the bottom of the barrel, naturally the quality of the available entertainment declines, so you end up feeling like the author does.
Just take a break, watch fewer movies, new amazing ones come out all the time, now more than ever, just not as often as once per day. Find a healthy balance between consuming and creating, and you'll enjoy both again.
Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story.
There are countless writers who have said that there are only X types of stories. Sometimes there are 3, 6, 12, or 50. They all claim that their categorization is the one that captures every story ever told, and they all manage to fit any story into one of their categories (it really helps that they're vague and people are willing to stretch and shoehorn things).
All stories are the same in the way all songs or poetry are the same. They have a structure (well, a bunch of different structures) that audiences tend to enjoy, and that artists follow because it helps them to have a more structured process (or sometimes they break/ignore the rules, or just don't know them, and create awesome works of art anyway). But that doesn't make every story "the same" just like using the rules of perspective, construction, and anatomy doesn't make every painting the same.
Recently I've been thinking the exact opposite things.
Many novice artists get too hung up on doing "exercises", because they're easy, straightforward, and comfortable (compared to doing the real thing). They waste a lot of time without improving all that much, because repeating exercises out of context can quickly become mindless, people tend to lose sight of the real purpose (making good drawings/paintings), and instead keep drawing boxes to "practice" perspective or get better at drawing straight lines.
I think what you need is a combination of what he's calling "scrimmage" and "drill".
To develop skills the fastest - try to do the thing that is as close to the specific real thing you want to do as possible. If you want to design characters - spend most of your time designing characters. You won't find a way to grow faster than by doing exactly what you want to get good at.
Then you can analyze your artwork, find the skills you're the weakest at, and deliberately practice them. But still, do it in the context of doing the real thing.
Oh yes, The Late Philip J. Fry is about the forward time machine, what a masterpiece! Probably my favorite episode in the whole series.
There was also an amazing song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE1drY3A418
I think this Godot Dedicated Multiplayer series might be interesting to you: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ-54sd-DMAKU8Neo5KsV...
Godot also makes it very easy to export games to be run in the browser.
Could you share the specific antibiotics and probiotics they've used?
What an amazing website, thank you for sharing! I love it when people put love and effort into making complicated things accessible. Some of these comics explain the concepts better than the rambling 40 minute lectures at my uni.
I'm happily paying for youtube premium because it allows me to watch youtube on my iPad without ads, and to download the videos to watch offline. Totally worth it.
I don't know how many youtube users are paying for it, but youtube premium is still a thing, and I hope it continues to be. Seems like they're making it work somehow.
Speaking of blueprints for data science: https://www.luna-lang.org/
It's not a perfect solution, but you could try online roleplaying games, like DnD (over discord).
Great way to meet a lot of friendly people and make friends.
Affinity Designer is the biggest thing holding me on Mac. I wish Wine supported it, I'd switch to PopOs in a second.
Mirage - simple, rules-light, novice-friendly, lighthearted, low-combat, improv/storytelling focused roleplaying game. Designed to facilitate what's basically a long-form improv game, freeform roleplay. Think DnD but without the tedious number crunching and hundreds of pages of intricate rules, for people who like storytelling but don't care all that much about the wargaming-side of DnD.
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Adventure Writer's Room - a community of GMs who meet in the discord voice chat, and challenge ourselves to improvise a one-shot adventure in 2 hours. Our goal is to brainstorm fun ideas and improvise stories together in a chill, lighthearted, no-pressure environment. It works, it really helps with creating adventures, and it is super fun.
(also we have published a bunch of short and fun adventures)
As a counterpoint, here's an amazing video making a convincing argument that "Uncanny Valley" isn't a thing: