I got it about ten years ago and it drove me absolutely insane for a few months until I just accepted that I would have it. Then a weird thing happened: my brain stopped paying attention to it. Now I mostly only hear it when I think to myself, “do I still have tinnitus?” and try to listen for it. It’s still there, I just don’t care anymore. I had no idea that even what you hear can be such a subjective experience until I went through this, but it makes sense. You do this all the time when you tune out ambient sounds and conversations to focus on something.
“If you get a lucky break, you have to really use it. You have to fight like a bastard. You can’t just sit there and wait to get lucky. It doesn’t happen.”
- Joe Simpson, who, written off for dead, survived one of the most harrowing mountaineering accidents ever documented.
The tech industry is littered with once-giant megacorps that had an opportunity to pivot as technology progressed, failed to do so for this exact reason, and were usurped by startups with a better vision. In Shell’s case, the writing is already on the wall. With the emergence of EVs and renewable energy, what is the fossil fuel industry going to look like in 20-25 years? How will this decision seem justifiable retrospectively?
Unfortunately most of the ADUs around here are converted garages--maybe 300 square feet with a micro kitchen. They're essentially hotel rooms, not a place where someone would live. This is a much different thing than a multi-unit lot.
One unfortunate side effect of this is that this behavior ultimately gets priced into the market. When a house with an ADU will reliably fetch 20% more than one without, then eventually all houses on the market will have ADUs, with the consequence that people buying will need to depend on short term rental income in order to make their mortgage. I’ve seen this happening where I live (West LA) over the last ten years, and it feels like a net decrease in quality of life for everyone at this point.
One of the remarkable things (in the context of this age) about reading history is that you see just how many people used to write letters in heated moments and then choose not to send them once they'd cooled down. The histories of presidents are littered with such moments, and I often juxtapose that fact with social media. How often has the ability to send something instantly allowed each of us to expose our worst self to people?
Love this. One idea that I haven't seen implemented in other drawing tools: the default behavior after drawing a shape is to revert to the select tool. This is rational but it can also pull you out of flow if you're trying to diagram quickly. It'd be useful to extend the keyboard shortcuts to the select tool, so that when I highlight a region with select, I can press, e.g. 5, and have a circle automatically filled inside the selected region, so that I can bail myself out and not have to draw the same selection twice.
Here’s a reasonable way to maintain your weight:
1. Limit added sugar to an absolute minimum. Fruit is fine. Go crazy.
2. Avoid processed foods like chips and other things that have lots of preservatives.
3. Limit breads and starches to no more than 35-40% of your diet.
4. No restrictions on fat and protein. Go crazy, you glutton.
5. Stop eating at least five hours before bed. You don’t want to be digesting while sleeping and this is a reasonable amount of time to avoid that.
6. Sleep enough.
7. Try to keep a 12-14 hour stretch where you don’t eat. Do 5 and 6 and this will take care of itself.
8. Walk 3-5 miles per day.
9. Limit drinking to 1-2 days per week.
10. Critical: Avoid snacking too much, and stop eating when you’re full. You know when that last helping is more than you really need. Just don’t eat it.
That’s it. The boring diet. It won’t win any awards, but you’ll be healthy enough and that’s what matters.
George Saunders gave an interview with the Guardian earlier this year[0] in which he said, “ There’s something wonderful about the spontaneity of social media, but I think at this point it’s becoming 100% toxic for people to be firing off the top of their brains. One of the things [the book I’m writing] says is that the deeper parts of our brain are actually more empathic. If you revise something 20 times, for a mysterious reason, it becomes more social, empathic and compassionate. With Chekhov, you feel he’s always saying: “Well, what else?”, “Is there anything else I should know?”, or “Maybe I’m wrong.” And all of that seems to be designed to foster love, or at least some kind of relation to the other that’s got possibility. So I’m not a fan of social media. I’m not on it. And I won’t be, because I think it’s killing us, actually. I really do.” I had never considered it from this angle before, but I think he’s right. The internet’s superpower—frictionless engagement—is also it’s greatest shortcoming because of who we are as people.
I actually needed a few weeks of body work and mild exercises to teach me how to correctly engage my scapula before I graduated into more rigorous exercise, and I still require work to keep my infraspinatus from feeling like a steel cable. Things that helped the most:
- Prone T's/I's
- Cat Cows with thoracic spine emphasis
- Child's pose
- Open Books
- Supine Chin Tucks
- Dead bugs/Bird dogs
- Upper trapezius stretch
- Levator scapulae stretch
- Quadruped open book
- Foam rolling back (every few days)
These all caused pain at various points, but as I learned to keep my shoulder rooted in the socket and learned how to correctly engage my scapula (pull down and back rather than up and back) I was able to do them without pain. I also learned to listen to my body and skip things for as long as needed when I wasn't feeling right. Pushing through nerve pain just leads to more pain. Your body will adjust eventually, but it will do it at its own pace.
EDIT:
1. Exercise frequency: daily/as tolerated
2. I also scrape the muscles in my inner forearms with a fascia release tool (butterknife, but you can find real ones online) a few times a week and this helps tremendously.
A lot of people really underestimate the impact that mobility and strengthening can have addressing issues with RSI. If you're struggling with RSI, consider going to physical therapy as your condition may be caused by a wide variety of issues that aren't obvious based on the pain you're having.
My own experience was that I dealt with ulnar nerve RSI for about a year. During that time I wore braces at night and tried just about every keyboard and keyboard layout imaginable, and at best I managed to keep it at bay. When I finally made up my mind to go to physical therapy I learned that:
1. I had postural issues which led to trapping the ulnar nerve in my shoulder (not my wrist, that was just where the pain referred to)
2. I had deep myofascial issues that were preventing my muscles and nerve from moving freely in my arm
3. I had poor mobility which was contributing to decreased function overall
Where I thought I had a localized problem in my wrist, it turned out I had a systemic problem which required strengthening through my entire arm, shoulder, back, neck, and core. I resolved these issues through physical therapy and my ulnar RSI hasn't returned since, though I now maintain an exercise routine that focuses on mobility. I still use an ergonomic keyboard, but I'm now convinced that the issue can't really be solved with gear.
Zettlekasten: the Kubernetes of note-taking systems.
I think it’s important to bear in mind the context this system grew out of (academic research) and ask yourself whether you really need such a heavyweight note-taking system. It’s also important to realize this system is not a substitute for accepted patterns of knowledge generation, such as summarizing extemporaneous notes and making time to review your notes frequently enough that the knowledge captured actually sticks.
Zettlekasten is a system layered on top of that and basically serves as a database for things you already know. If you’re not already doing the former behaviors then it’s likely you’re just going to be wasting your time hacking on a system that won’t provide you enough value to justify the maintenance cost. In fact, it’s likely that the overhead will be so high that you’ll lose time to practice the foundational behaviors that really pay off in the long run.
It’s tempting to believe that climate change just means that some places will get hotter or colder, or that species will move north or south, upslope or downslope, but the reality is that we don’t really know. Much of the work coming out of ecological niche theory shows that ecosystems have many emergent properties and can’t simply be studied at the level of an individual species because those species wouldn’t survive without their symbiotic relationships [1]. What is true at the species level, however, is that each species has a unique and oftentimes non-overlapping adaptation to whatever environment it’s in relative to its peers. That means that as the climate shifts, some species will go north or south, or upslope or downslope, and others will behave differently. The consequence is that many ecosystems will literally be pulled apart, and species which lose their symbiotic relationships will have to either adapt over a short time span or go extinct. Assuming the climate stabilizes, it will take time, probably much longer than humans are comfortable with, for things to reconfigure.
While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of these forests, it’s important to note that the specific forest management practices that have been implemented over the last century have drastically changed the character of the fire regime in western forests.
Most of our pine species have evolved to burn every few decades. During these burns, a fire sweeps through the forest floor, killing most of the trees which have cropped up since the previous fire but haven’t had time to mature. The older, taller trees survive because their characteristic thick, flaky bark protects their trunks from the heat of the burn (interestingly, the smoke from the burn causes the cones in the taller trees to open up and fall into the freshly carbonized soil, creating the next batch of seedlings). The younger trees don’t have this yet, and anyway they usually aren’t tall enough to keep their branches out of the fire, which leads to the major issue here.
Fire prevention over the last hundred years has resulted in forests with a wide mix of trees at various canopy heights, which fire ecologists have taken to calling ladder fuels, because the trees are taller than the saplings which would usually be cleared out and shorter than old growth trees, providing a “ladder” for fire to jump into the canopies of older forests. These forests are not in any way whatsoever equipped to deal with canopy burns. All of their fire defenses are near the ground, in the bark, and there’s a high likelihood that once the fire reaches the canopy it will at least kill the tree, if not spread through the canopy and destroy the forest.
It goes without saying that the physics involved here, when the fire is burning from the ground up to hundreds of feet in the air and consuming all of the available fuel, are magnitudes different than a typical brush fire on the forest floor. While these fires weren’t impossible in prior to the emergence of forest management practices, those practices have unambiguously resulted in more and more severe fires by increasing the volume and density of fuels in these forests.
To that end, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the fire really has consumed all of Big Basin.
> "Oh, Parkinson, Parkinson!" I cried, patting him affectionately on the head with a mallet, "how far you really are from the pure love of the sport—you who can play. It is only we who play badly who love the Game itself. You love glory; you love applause; you love the earthquake voice of victory; you do not love croquet. You do not love croquet until you love being beaten at croquet. It is we the bunglers who adore the occupation in the abstract. It is we to whom it is art for art's sake.
Excerpted from “The Perfect Game”, by G.K. Chesterton
One thing that often goes unmentioned when I see discussions about these sorts of alternate layouts is that, particularly for programmers, the keyboard isn’t just a simple device for entering text, it’s the mechanism through which we interact with our computing environment, and most tooling is either specifically or unintentionally designed to enhance the productivity of people typing in QWERTY. Whether it’s simple copy and paste, vim keybindings, shell commands, etc., using these sorts of tools from other layouts often feels much more tedious than it does in QWERTY. So I’d caution against adopting a new layout naively, unless you’re also willing to accept that you may have to also begin adapting your environment to your new layout in addition to learning the new board.