Ever since I read about Rodney Brooks and his idea of the Subsumption architecture I've been convinced that something like this is going on in our minds - likely with some other mechanisms too. It just clicks for me - I'm mostly likely completely wrong, but it's a pretty cool idea, and I've used it to create some really interesting simulations.
I think it’s important to remember that you don’t have to wait until you retire to live your life. Finding a balance between your work and personal life is the most important thing to get sorted as early as you can. This looks different for everyone.
Sure you can climb a mountain, or cram in life experiences at 60+ if you’re in good health, but I think it’s better to do it as you go and enjoy your entire life.
I live in Sydney and we have a bunch of these on the street. There’s also one in my next door neighbours small back yard growing over my house.
I think I might be in the minority but I really don’t like them. The tiny leaves fall all the time and make a mess, and the purple flowers smell really bad and also make a mess.
Not only do they make a mess but they block my gutters and the roots have destroyed a lot of sewer pipes. I’d much rather see some native Australian trees planted such as paper barks or flame trees. I really don’t get the love affair with them.
An impactful thing you can do for your health is delete all of your social apps and disengage from the circus completely. I did that a couple of months ago and it’s improved my concentration and given me back a lot more time to do other things.
The small amounts of time add up, and the quality of all of your time improves. You don’t have to use these services, and we got along just fine (if not better) before they existed.
Interestingly they've gone for a UIKit approach on iOS. I would have thought for future proofing they would have gone straight to SwiftUI. In my experience so far the transition has already started.
Back in the late 90s/early 2000s I worked at a game studio. One of the things we got in to were DVD games - we built a tool that was used to create quizzes on DVD players. Feels pretty similar to this - lots of fun.
I’ve had a similar path to you. Whenever I’m having a frustrating experience with them I just remind myself that it’s better than it used to be. It used to take weeks to resolve things - now it merely takes days. The problem is that most of the time the frustration should have never existed.
This made me think about how we use the term 'over engineered' in our industry. In most industries it seems to be a good thing (i.e. space shuttle). In our industry it's synonymous with bad, unnecessarily complex code. We seem to have a knack of taking positive attributes such as clever, and flipping them!
Was a joy to do it while I was in lockdown. It’s a bit buggy but generally works if you have an Apple Music library with some albums added. If you have any issues just kill it and start again!
Thanks for the video I’ve not seen that one before. There should be a PR up on GitHub somewhere with my fixes (search kemalenver) and you should find it. We had some issues getting it merged. The work Robert and Tom did with it while at bloom was very cool.
Cinder is fantastic. I spent the start of last year fixing an old iPad app that was built with it called Planetary. It’s free on the App Store if anyone is interested.
At this point I actually prefer the cocoa methods of creating UI. This kind of tech also affects the architecture of the app that is utilising it - SwiftUI and the like seem to be quite prescriptive in terms of application structure, whereas with cocoa I feel that I have a lot more possibilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture