I'm commenting on Hacker News, and I believe that getting access to a community of engineers, programmers, whatever, successful people, has been a net positive for me. So many good ideas get shared here.
Hobbies that you want to discover more in, but no one in your immediate friend group knows. You want to go deep in programming, basketball, golf, whatever. There's multiple Youtube videos, subreddits, etc. for it.
Video calling? Chatting with a person from literally thousands of miles away? My grandpa used to literally write a letter on paper to his brother who was in the States. Now I can just call my parents with video calls.
I'm almost always on perplexity now, it has supplanted Google search.
Curious what you're using chat GPT on and not perplexity? I feel that its free tier offers more than ChatGPT. It is particularly helpful for the "tell me how ..." kind of queries and to confirm understanding with concepts I'm learning
> And then run an Ansible script which installs a series of Brew items (ansible has a brew module) along with other stuff not on brew.
Yes, this is what I have right now. I have it set up to install some non-Brew stuff as well (Chrome, Firefox, Whatsapp, etc.). I intend on using this even for my non-tech family's machines, ideally should just be 1 script to install `homebrew`, `pip` (or `uv` like the other fellow said) + Ansible, and then 1 script to install everything else via the brew module.
Hey, thanks - I don't think it's a good idea to time machine my personal laptop to my new work laptop. And definitely I would try to follow the guides if the company has them.
> I wonder why complicate your life?
I wouldn't say it's complicating life? I'm quite having fun tinkering around with it. I intend to use the playbook (or maybe Brewfile as one of my friends recommend that as well) for setting up future machines for my family and I.
Great comment and blog post man. I think you crystallised what I've been wondering, why do some business or self-improvement books feel they could have been a tweet like you said.
Just to add. I suggest journaling and keeping track of things. Like even 10 to 15 minutes per say of how the day went, what you felt. This is a cure but also a prevention thing. Meaning what were the days and trends of what you were doing before the big bad monster came. For me its usually when I havent exercised, ate junk food or didnt eat my veggies, sometimes when I havent gone out of the house (remote work). I dont think this will work for clinical depression but I'm not a doctor. Just a tip. Gather data and figure out how to reverse engineer the suck. Good luck!
Yes, I agree, and it really is a feature (flaw?) of human psychology. As much as I want to say that I want to make sure that I research something before doing or buying it, more often than not I just choose something based on emotion. Even for something like programming, I wonder if I use libraries based on their utility or on the star power of the guy who built it. It takes a lot of mental power to weigh pros and cons versus just choosing and hoping for the best.
I think you have to just keep on practicing actually speaking, like even in front of a mirror, I didn't do this enough (I practiced, but in front of my machine). Also just look at a few people in the audience, think of it like you're chatting with 1 person 100 times/5 people 20 times as opposed to chatting 100 people.
Thank you! Those are all helpful tips. Yup, I have sort of a script written. Instead of "you know", I'll just try pausing. I might actually reference this thread in the presentation just to show my human side. :)
Nice. I've read a bunch of books and I'm also looking to make something like this. Just a question: I'm not an American, how does copyright work for things like this? Can I write something like a "10 things I learned from <BOOK>" with a few (like < 20) lines copied (or should I paraphrase it?) from the book?
Hello, thank you for replying! That's so great to hear. Yes, I have other interests (hiking, cycling, travelling, recently writing/journaling). They don't pay the bills though, hehe.
Christ, that's right. "Without publishing, it is impossible to write blog posts." I should just keep on publishing because (this is just my thought process right now, not so sure about this):
- People can figure out points, because I've gotten things from blog posts with so-so sentence composition but brilliant points. As long as the points make sense, an article that's badly written from the technical perspective still has some value.
- Everything can be edited or deleted anyway.
I completely agree with this. Whatever's most familiar for you, but hopefully, it should be familiar for other people too. Try to write it in a way that you can switch out parts if you really needed to. For example, I'm still a Rails programmer but I've been structuring my apps differently from traditional Rails (oftentimes just doing the API backend).
However, that's only because I still have the luxury of time. If I had a gun to my head and a finite number of hours to code an app, then I'd go with vanilla Rails. If I was given a few weeks to study a new framework, I'd go with Elixir/Phoenix, but only because I spent a few days trying it around and while I'm not particularly fluent with it yet, I like its design and speed a lot more than Rails.
I think this is why we perfect our craft. We have to be able to code fast or code pretty, depending on the circumstances.
I hook it up to a bike computer (Garmin Edge 520) and an app called TrainerRoad (https://www.trainerroad.com/platforms). It's a bit of an investment, but I find that having numbers/instrumentation makes things exciting especially when tracking your progress.
My bike and my bike trainer are in my top ten best purchases ever in terms of the value they've given (increased energy, increased fitness).
Hobbies that you want to discover more in, but no one in your immediate friend group knows. You want to go deep in programming, basketball, golf, whatever. There's multiple Youtube videos, subreddits, etc. for it.
Video calling? Chatting with a person from literally thousands of miles away? My grandpa used to literally write a letter on paper to his brother who was in the States. Now I can just call my parents with video calls.