mega_dean

I really liked "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera because of the style of writing and not because of the story. The author goes on a lot of thought-provoking philosophical tangents. Here's an example from the very beginning of the book:

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

If it was really an “HN themed puzzle”, all the letters would be A or I and the minimum word length would be 2.

I’m kidding of course - great game!

Lazygit for a standalone program, or magit for an emacs package (some people use a different editor and just treat emacs+magit as a dedicated git frontend).

There is a setting (at Settings > Playback > Autoplay) that you can disable those songs after your playlist ends.

I used to go hiking in New Mexico and I actually liked when I came across little signs that someone was there: a small stack of rocks, sticks arranged in a crop-circley pattern, a makeshift bridge over a small stream, etc.

But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was in a similar place ~6 years ago, so not AI-based but still depressed. I tried therapy for 2-3 years and personally didn’t find it helpful. My problem is overthinking and dwelling on things, so I think it was counterproductive to spend dedicated time every week talking about why I was depressed. However, I’d still recommend trying it since it’s obviously helpful for a lot of people. Just don’t get too discouraged if it doesn’t work for you.

I tried improving diet/exercise/sleep like the other commenters suggest, but of course the depression makes that nearly impossible. The only thing that actually helped me was burning all the way out, quitting my job, and going back to blue collar work. I don’t work from home anymore and I make less than half of what I made as a dev, so it was a big lifestyle change, but I wish I had done it years earlier.

Anyway, I hope you figure out what works for you. I wasted a lot of my life being depressed and I hate to see others going through it.

That was my reaction at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly. Some of the other bizarre syntax bothered me for much longer, like using semicolons for list separators, eg [1;2;3] instead of [1,2,3].

I briefly tried to use Reason since it “fixed” a lot of my biggest issues with the syntax, but it wasn’t worth it overall so I went back to plain ocaml pretty quickly.

I didn’t look very closely at F# at the time, but I remember thinking it looked like “ocaml with more normal syntax”.

I don’t know if it satisfies “already convenient to use”, but IMO ocaml fits “adds great features reliably and safely”. They merged their multicore compiler ~4 years ago, which was a pretty huge change that added parallelism through domains. Notably, they had a working version ~10 years ago, but refused to merge it until they sorted out some performance issues that would have affected existing single-threaded code.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

I’ve never really had good luck with the artist radio, but I’ve found a lot of music I like by starting at a band I like and going through the Related Artists. It’s a little strange because I’m sure the artist radio includes a lot of songs from the Related Artists. It’s probably a psychological thing, wanting to feel like I’m in control instead of the app choosing for me.

I had a very similar experience releasing a video game. Barely anybody downloaded it because I didn’t put any effort into marketing/promoting, but “I couldn’t be happier with my journey in making it”. I have replayed it a few times and it makes me unreasonably happy (although I’m taking a break now because I want to forget where everything is on the map).