I think with guitar it is easy to enter flow state because it is easy to avoid playing the "wrong" notes. Probably similar to these other hobbies. Perhaps they just happen to have a tactile component, although it is nice to do something a little different from time to time. It seems computer games probably provide a similar form of satisfaction.
Can you put them all on one page and zoom in/out? Might be interesting to see some patterns in the sequence. Maybe allow filters for different factors or number ranges or different groupings.
Distributed systems are hard. I like the idea of "semantic locality." I think it can be achieved to some degree via abstraction. The code that runs across many machines does a lot of stuff but only a small fraction of that is actually involved in coordination. If you can abstract away those details you should end up with a much simpler protocol that can be modeled in a succinct way. Then you can verify your protocol much more easily. Formal methods have used tools such as spin (promela) or guarded commands (murphi) for modeling these kinds of systems. I'm sure you could do something similar with the lean theorem prover. The tricky part is mapping back and forth between your abstract system and the real one. Perhaps LLMs could help here.
I work on hardware and concurrency is a constant problem even at that low level. We use model checking tools which can help.
Step one should be having an edtech ecosystem that doesn't allow students to use the web. There are just too many distractions online. I think noone has really invested the kind of capital required to do a good job with this. Most of the software my kids have to use for school is pretty bad.
It is interesting to see the type of analysis he does and the visualizations are impressive, but the conclusions don't really seem too surprising. To me, it seems the most efficient learning algorithm will not be simpler but rather much more complex, likely some kind of hybrid involving a multitude of approaches. An analogy here would be looking at modern microprocessors -- although they have evolved from some relatively simple machines, they involve many layers of optimizations for executing various types of programs.
For me, reading fiction is all about beauty. I liken it to listening to good music. It isn't really to learn anything "substantive." It is to experience a feeling or be transported to another place. In fact, I like to listen to (typically instrumental) music while I read as a sort of "soundtrack." I would liken reading a good book to watching an epic movie. I guess you might occasionally gain some insight into the human condition, but it isn't primarily an informational medium.
For me, Joyce is the pinnacle of the English language. I can't say I understand too much of what is happening but noone writes more beautifully. I just love the sound of his words and the images he conjures.
Also, the main conference in the area is FMCAD, you can find a lot of related work there. More recently the conference has moved more towards software, but if you look at some of the older proceedings you can find a lot of hardware related stuff.
There is decent amount of overlap between formal for hardware and software, so if you study one you will likely have enough background to get started in the other.