I find woodworking extremely alluring. I'd love to do woodworking, but that requires space for an environment which I don't have. I like to think that in a parallel universe I build guitars and restore old wooden furniture.
I don't want this to sound derogatory but my experience is that simpler minds are generally happier in life, and I'd guess that this often (not always) comes with an inability to multitask, so I believe you are right. I had a friend in school (great dude, very grounded and happy person) who couldn't eat ice cream and walk at the same time (I swear I'm not making this up).
I do, but I'm not convinced there is correlation. In front of the computer I can easily multitask and I can just as easily sit for 10 hours straight and code with focus. Outside the digital realm I find it harder to multitask - if I talk to someone on the phone and try to do something at the same time I immediately lose focus on the conversation, I drift away and no longer know what the other person is talking about. I've been wondering if the difference is that there is external input which I can't anticipate - if I do multiple things on the the computer by myself all state exists in my head and it's just a matter of random read access. On the other hand, I also find it hard to cook and go back to the computer for "just one second", every other time I immediately forget that there is food on the stove. I'd say that my attention span has suffered since Covid and I find it generally harder to keep focus, for example when watching TV, but if the focus is there I can still hold it for a very long time, e.g. when programming.
I explained in another comment why it isn't throwing money out of the window. In my experience, it often costs a lot more money in the long run to not do it. The underlying problem is that most companies don't really think mid- or long-term and are happy with chasing fast money and eventually throwing it all away anyway because the product isn't competitive anymore and/or maintenance becomes too expensive. These are problems which definitely can be mitigated, but it requires a good team.
My mom also knits while watching TV, and she is super fast. I think one secret ingredient is that she doesn't care about making mistakes. Tinier mistakes she just ignores (even if they are visible in the end [I don't like that, so that's something I try to avoid, which adds pressure and slows me down]) and she doesn't mind backtracking and re-doing several rows if she really fucks up.
Absolutely! The difference is that with other things the learning curve can be part of the fun while you are in the process of figuring things out. With crotcheting, it only really takes a couple of minutes to get going, but doing it fast and consistently takes time, but you aren't really learning anything new other than becoming faster, so the emotional return isn't as big compared to, let's say, learning a new language or playing an instrument. It's just very mechanical by nature; which is a good thing, but for me personally, it takes away a bit of the joy.
I absolutely did it for fun and to learn something new, it just didn't feel like as much fun as I had anticipated to me personally. I want it to be fun and relaxing, there is some fun in it but it's not relaxing.
I did have a purpose and it didn't help much in this regard, it only helped with keeping up the friendly pressure to actually finish them. But generally, your advice is good nonetheless.
I hear what you're saying but my experience is that dwelling in #2 without seeing the bigger picture does very often just as much result in cost/schedule overruns, because shoving certain features or trying to improve certain aspects just collides with the status quo and sometimes cannot be easily accomplished if things are built "wrong" to begin with (wrong often just meaning that they were based on then-relevant prerequisites/assumption which are no longer relevant). Also, the cost of maintenance is often just not taken into account, which means that in the end you have to spend way too much time to shoehorn a half-baked solution into the status quo which has the appearance of delivering what was requested (but doesn't always, because you had to compromise, leaving everybody unhappy) while taking way too much time and at the same time just piling more bloated poo on top of what's already there, making maintenance in the long run even harder. I can't count how many times I've been in a situation where implementing something shouldn't have taken more than 30 minutes but because the codebase was in a not-so-good(tm) state took several days instead. This piles up exponentially, resulting in frustrated developers, a worse product and cost/schedule overruns. In a perfect world, code should improve over time, not deteriorate.
My thoughts exactly. I think this has mostly to do with marketing because pretty much nobody uses Wordpad and most people hate it, while everybody uses Notepad or a replacement (Notepad++ or similar) which usually already has a lot more features, including markdown support. So from their perspective I can understand this decision, even though I don't think that this is where Notepad should be heading. On Windows, I use NP++ and other tools if I need more features, but I specifically use Notepad for when I don't want fancy stuff and slow startup times, often for the sole reason of getting rid of formatting of copy'n'pasted text. Notepad is stupid, but that can be a good thing. If I want something else I use something else.
I like crotcheting (tried it again for the first time since childhood during Covid). My main problem is that, unless you have already mastered it and can do it in your sleep, I have to fully concentrate on it to not fuck things up, which means I can't do something else at the same time, e.g. listen to an audiobook. And because I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead. Objectively, I know it is wrong to think so because the whole point of it is to get away from other stuff and let your brain rest for a while, but it just doesn't work for me and creates extra stress, sadly.
I have only skimmed the text but regarding GUIs specifically the list in the end is spot on.
With that being said, I firmly believe that all software (given that one is not already deeply familiar with the domain) is/can/should be written three times to end up with a good product:
1. Minimal prototype. You throw something together fast to see it can be done, taking shortcuts and leaving out features which you know you will want later(tm).
2. First naive real implementation. You build upon the prototype, oftentimes thinking that there is actually not that much missing to turn it into something useful. You make bad design decisions and cut corners because you haven't had a chance to fully grasp all the underlying intricacies of the domain and the more time you spend on it the more frustrating it becomes because you start seeing all the wrong turns you took.
3. Once you arrive at a point where you know exactly what you want, you throw it all away and rewrite the whole thing in an elegant way, also focusing on performance.
(1) and (3) are usually fun wereas (2) fast becomes a dread. The main problem is that in a work context you almost never are allowed to transition from (2) to (3) because for an outsider (2) seems good enough and nobody wants to pay for (3).
I do believe her when she says that this has great sentimental value for her as well (although I'm equally certain that's not the whole truth), since the business value, as you said, isn't as huge anymore as it used to be before her re-recordings. But she bought back the rights to everything, including artwork, music videos etc., so she got back a lot more than what she possibly could "work around" by just re-recording the music. The re-recordings are really, really good (in a reverse-engineering sense concerning the production), and to a casual listener or untrained ear they might sound identical (apart from the stuff that's intentionally different), but they aren't and to me they sound just off. Swifties probably prefer the new versions for the reason you explained, but I like the originals more since every nuance is engrained in my brain and to me the tiny differences are throwing me off when listening to the new versions.