Education isn't based on the premise that they'll never disobey. It's to help them recognize when things become dangerous or are getting to be a problem. Of course kids will do things they're told not to do - this is just helping them tap the brakes and understand how to recover. The attitude that the only solution is perfect enforcement is (in my opinion at least) partially to blame for the lack of self-awareness that makes the more vulnerable to later addiction problems in the first place.
This comment really hit me - I have a few things I've worked on but never released, and I didn't even realize it was basically because I don't want to deal with all of that extra stuff. Maybe I'll release them with this philosophy.
Yeah, the idea of getting to a viable income source for plugin writers is what I'm hoping for. I didn't know about the issue with Apple App store, that complicates things quite a bit.
Congratulations on your success with relay.md! It looks like a great tool.
I just wanted to drop in and thank you for posting this. I'd never heard of it, and seeing a plain page of actual web results was almost a visceral relief from irritation I wasn't even aware of.
This is how it was for me too, but I actually think the world has moved out from under us. The environment today is way more complex, and it's a lot harder to be proud of little things when you see people crowing about how they "wrote this little app over the weekend" and it's already polished and full of features. I remember being proud of my little unit converter that ran on the command line, and even more proud when I got an actual window to show up on a screen (GUI programming took a long time to get into). These days, those things just aren't special enough to keep them engaged. I don't know if it's just too commonplace now, or too complicated to get started, but it doesn't feel the same as it once did.
My kids have finally gotten hooked by godot, after a few years of building up a foundation with simple programming assignments. It's fun to see them digging in for hours to make something, but man, it was a long road to get here.
I think that any new tool just changes what's possible. At the start, we're all just rehashing the things we used to make, but faster (and possibly lower quality). This is the part that's scary for current practitioners, because the tools now do something basically for free that used to require a lot of human skill and it devalues our current skill set.
However, at some point there are people who really master the new tool and open up an entirely new range of possibilities because of what it can do. The value of craftsmanship just changes as the tools develop, it doesn't end. I don't know what new things will become possible with AI, but I'm confident that there are people with vision out there who will raise the bar on what can be created now that it's a thing.
Apparently it's done to dry out tough perennial weeds so that harvest can run more smoothly, and also for crop desiccation (getting the harvest to dry uniformly by killing all of the plants simultaneously).
I've been making a game system in which the core mechanic is using a limited language to describe magical effects, so it's a long way away from the intended purpose for both Toki Pona and Mini. However, I've found that Mini is far easier to work with and more expressive for my purposes because it's easier to put structure into the statements using the particles to indicate what part of speech is intended for each word. The selection of words also seems to be surprisingly well-chosen, because most of my use cases have been pretty straightforward to express.
I haven't really tried to limit the system to just Mini Kore (which is also 120 words, like Toki Pona, and would be a more direct comparison), mostly because Mini's current size actually seems to have the right feel. It might be an interesting experiment though.
Same as l3x4ur1n, I use Obsidian. Plain markdown, a simple directory system, and multi-device sync were the deciding factors for me. There are many other good tools out there though.
I've struggled with very similar issues for about 25 years. I finally started to break through it just recently, and I give credit to two basic things: Listening to the Huberman Lab podcast (which echoes a lot of good advice in this comment section, and focuses on physiology), and using the system from "Building a Second Brain" to get myself organized. I've always had a problem with having too many ideas and not enough time and energy to pursue them all. Having to choose between them leads fear of missing out on the others, and I never actually managed to finish (or even start, usually) any of them as a result.
The thing that the second brain stuff has done for me is to provide a place to keep those ideas in suspended animation so that I can revisit and touch them up over a longer time period. I can see them all laid out, with clear "do this next" breadcrumbs for myself. Nothing is getting lost, and I'm not missing out on anything. Since setting this up, I've made a ton of progress on a wide variety of things because it's easy to get started again, and I don't get sidetracked by other ideas. I just capture them, make a note to develop them further at a later time, and then get back to work.
I came here to basically say this same thing. I also use Obsidian with the "Building a Second Brain" system and I can't imagine trying to function without it at this point. Notes can be functional and useful if done well.
Reading your comment made me realize another thing: Using rust often feels like the language is a successful attempt to take the best parts of a lot of other languages and put them together into a single, rational collection of features. Most of what's in there isn't new, but it all fits together well in one place so I don't feel like I have to make a devil's bargain for important features when I start out.
In my case, I use it because it is dead simple to get a standalone, lean, fast, native executable (on top of the other functional programming features). Cargo is a huge part of what I love about rust.
I've been homeschooling my children for about four years, and figuring out how to achieve experiential learning has been a primary goal for the entire time. It has been very tricky for me to get it right, because there is a constant need to balance between over- and under-challenging them, and the process of struggling that's so crucial to learning is also self-defeating because it generates so much frustration. Emotional resilience is a skill that I think is foundational to being able to learn in this way, but it's been glossed over in the materials I've read on constructivist learning. The closest I've seen is the material about growth mindsets, but it's generally vastly oversimplified in my opinion.
The approach I'm currently working with is to ask them to do difficult tasks (such as math problems that don't have a straightforward, mechanical process to produce an answer), then I watch them work. When they get stuck, I try to get them to explore what they know and think about what would help them break a bit of new ground, but so far it's been very hard to guide without showing. Generally, they struggle for a bit and then I show them a couple of ways in which they could make progress. This seems to have very good results, but I can't imagine how it could be institutionalized effectively when you start to get beyond the most elementary topics. Even with only two students it's challenging to manage.
Another related strategy: Pay an extra month on any recurring bills at the start (for services that allow you to maintain a credit balance). Then, just pay your bills as normal, except that you have an automatic one month of grace period for everything because you have a credit balance. This has saved me numerous times because of absentmindedness.
I will often use things like this, not because I don't know how it's done, but because I have a hope that whoever made it will maintain it and keep it working properly under future changing conditions. Today, it's easy to see if the platform is windows. Later, that may change, and if this code is maintained it will save me headaches. If lots of other people are also using it, there's a very good chance that it will be updated quickly and that weird corner cases I'm not aware of will be already taken care of.
I've only been actively teaching (at home, no less) for a couple of years, but I can definitely identify with this. I make index cards with each kind of question we encounter in the curriculum, then I draw some random cards from the deck in order to pick questions going all the way back to the start. We do a quiz every week for every subject that's made up of those questions.
It always comes down to time though, it seems like you can use all these ideas and teach for mastery, but it costs about 30% in terms of forward motion through the material. I'm lucky in that that I can just decide to pay that price, but it would be a real stretch to put all this into practice in a place where you have a coverage deadline that's already hard to hit.
Resilience Thinking, by Walker and Salt, is a concise and clear presentation of what makes complex things resilient, and how it can go wrong. I see the ideas from there everywhere from ecosystems to business. This one really made it much easier to think about the big picture and the long tail of consequences in otherwise messy systems.
Complexity, by Mitchell, is an introductory look at complex systems that changed the way I see the systems in the world and sent me off on a long tangent to learn more.
Life's Ratchet, by Hoffann, is just plain mind-blowing, or at least it was for me. It's about the inner mechanics of living cells, and does a really good job of conveying how insanely complex life is.