lightandlight

I agree, and this is why I dislike A/B testing for product development. It replaces the "someone" with vague broad appeal or rogue optimisation forces.

I think the "what" is way less important than the "how". I think "how to live a fulfilling life" has general principles that apply to everyone, but the results of applying those principles are different for everyone.

I think the core of it is: following my intuitive sense of "rightness" across time scales (seconds to decades). When I'm doing it, I feel peace, joy, contentment, and my life seems meaningful. When I'm not doing it, I feel dissatisfied, restless, and nihilistic.

I'm frustrated by how vaguely and abstractly I'm conveying this. But this intuitive rightness thing precedes language. It's like a bodily sense or an emotion, but deeper. Have you ever put a t-shirt on backwards and only noticed because something didn't feel right? Then you take it off and put it on the right way around, and it just feels right. It's a bit like that but for life in general.

I can give some examples of "what" I've done if you like but I'll leave them out of this comment.

> "living a fulfilling life" means other trade offs, and potential losses.

Part of how I know I'm doing the thing is that the trade-offs and losses don't concern me. If Y matters to me, and X really is necessary to have a life with Y, then I do X. X is simply the price of having Y, which I'll gladly pay.

In contrast, when I feel resentful of a price I'm paying, it's evidence that I'm not following my sense of rightness.

> I've lost a lot of my spark in the past 6 years as well.

I felt similarly and had a "crisis" point at the start of 2025. I realised that living a fulfilling life had to become my top priority, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable it may seem. Otherwise, I might not survive another 30 years.

Now I can see a bit of the mechanism behind the dimming of the spark. I had gradually conceded the direction of my life to external forces, and let anxiety and self-doubt drive my decisions. It's a great way to end up with a life that you don't want. I shudder to think of what it's like to do that for 20 years instead of 5.

Yeah, I like this more. I want curl/wget to get the canonical representation by default.

I'd also like the same thing for televisons.

Great article! You've pinned down a bunch of intuitions that have been floating around my head lately. I especially liked the Ahmdahl's law reference.

> I've learned a lot about using a tool like this but the biggest result is that development has lost its joy. There were no challenges, there were no puzzles, no hurdles to overcome. The biggest lesson is that software development is now about the destination not the journey, the journey is for the agent.

Which is why I minimise my use of these tools. I'm not going to delegate the fun/meaningful parts to a machine.

Thanks!

Do you have a link to that video?

> The web is a few dozen companies, each holding a filing cabinet, each with a receptionist posted out front. He'll read you one file at a time, but only files you can name, as fast as he cares to read, and as long as his boss allows.

Fortunately this isn't true. Social media consists of a few big walled gardens, but the web itself is still open. Go forth and create a website!

Yeah, I used to Google things until Google went to shit. Now I use Kagi, but it doesn't sound like a verb. I'll gladly add "search [it] up" to my lexicon :)

I learned about 0mq a few years back, found myself wondering why it had such an air of quality. Then I found Hitnjens' writing, only to learn that he had been gone for a while. I was surprised by my sense of loss.

> Good luck standing out universe filled with AI slop apps.

This was written sarcastically, but I'm optimistic. The more crap that's out there, the more refereshing and noticeable it is when something is good.

I'm learning operating system fundamentals by writing baremetal code for my Raspberry Pi.

My medium term goal is to draw a cursor and move it using a mouse.

I recently got the USB host driver to the point where it could recognise port connects/disconnects. Enumerating USB devices involves some waiting, so I decided to work on concurrency support so that the USB driver wouldn't block the rest of the system. This week I got preemptively scheduled threads working (super fun stuff).

Now I'm trying to make the driver code more self-contained by keeping the driver's message queue on its stack. I'm not sure if it's a good idea. I'll play around with it for another day or two and then get back to USB enumeration.