The best thing I did for my mental health was my gradual decline from interacting and using social networks. I was scrolling through my IG feed mad and jealous because people there seem to have a lot more going in live than I have, until by pure chance one girl who seemed the happiest person on her IG travels randomly outed herself to go to therapy for her depression and suicidal states. This happened almost 5 years ago, and I never looked back.
Do you not feel jealous of the people here who write a Rust compiler over the weekend, make a 7 figure salary at their first job, give lectures on quantum physics at their local community center, sell their bit toggling SaaS so they can retire early, work out every morning, and who are able to save the world from hunger by promoting nuclear energy?
In other words, it might be wise to start avoiding Hacker News as well, because it is also a social network.
The very first example resonates strongly. Here I am struggling with the simplest bugs, all of Sunday wasted on something oh so obvious. Proud of the effectively 7 lines of code produced.
Then looking over HN in the evening, yet again “everybody else” seems to have implemented their third Haskell compiler for fun. Boring at this point really, to them.
Yet I am scratching my head over how there can be such huge gaps in performance and productivity. It’s the same principle. As a physicist you wouldn’t compare yourself to our darling, Feynman. Physicists are too smart to be doing that (or at least quickly stop doing it). I am apparently very dumb.
Sorry for the late answer, and the answer is - I actually do!
The difference IMO is that the person who wrote a Rust compiler over the weekend actually worked hard to arrive at such a point in their life, and instead of jealousy I feel a drive or a motivation, thinking 'Well, if I code/learn hard enough, maaaaaaaaybe I could do that at one point in my life'
I do recommend a good, hard journey in your life though. Take your shoes, or a bicycle, and go somewhere. One week, two weeks. Enough to be tired and want to go back home really hard. Enough to have to deal with a problem without a credit card (good example: bike broke down 10 miles from the closest city, not a soul around to help you).
But most importantly, enough to enjoy the moment despite the hardship.
Once you discover that it is possible, that it is logical, then a new life awaits.
Not the OP. I was thinking about this the other day in relation to social networks like Mastadon and Bluesky vs HN and Reddit.
I have found Mastadon and things like it to not be sticky at all. I wanted to be involved in the community because it seems like its growing, but when I open the app nothing grabs my interest.
I think it is because social networks like Mastadon, Bluesky, Twitter... are "people" or "stream of conscious" oriented, while sites like HN and Reddit are "topic" oriented.
I am really interested in engaging with a topic, and want to read have have long conversations on that topic. However on "people" oriented networks there is no broad coherence to what people are talking about, and I lose interest
Unrelated to the WFH dilemma, how is Australia generally for IT and tech workers?
I've gotten two invitations to emigrate in the past and although I naively refused, as time goes on I am strongly inclined to at least take the offers into account.
I'm really, really interested in the way Elon's psyche works. He was touted as an IT gargantuan for so long, but to me (and this is only my opinion) he just seems... fairly... simple-minded. Some of his more brazen actions, such as this one just reinforce my opinion.
I never experienced the level of immersiveness of the author, but I did daydream quite a lot all the way into my early 20s. I would completely ignore my professors during my classes, I would talk with myself when I walked home, I would dissociate myself from reality imagining all kinds of different scenarios.
How I solved this? Well, not by myself. One of the topics of my daydreams was this girl that I was infatuated with. Long story short, we somehow get together, I realize that our relationship wasn't exactly going on the way I imagined it, we break up, I go through quite a depressive, suicidal period, I lose most of my friends. Completely unrelated, two years after I had to do a surgery which kinda grounded me more into reality. Since then, I rarely daydream, it is like my imaginary world was shattered by this moment. It is like I finally 'grew'.
Oh yeah. Extremely narcissistic, controlling, 'better than you' type of person. Used to let me recover for a couple of weeks then stomped me again. That whole experience completely destroyed my daydreaming experience because in my imagination everything was rosy with unicorns, when it was toxic as hell in real life.
Especially with empaths, they can sort of take over your mind for a while. I had the same experience in the past, although it was definitely distinguishable from the daydreaming I knew, which was more often just activated because of boredom at school or as a "passive pastime" in the train.
The word "infatuation" says enough, especially if we're talking (young) adults, and not the kind of puppy love we expect from teenagers. If you're an adult and you feel infatuated, you might mistake that for love, then check if you're dealing with a narcissist or other cluster B disordered person, and also see if you yourself are an empath or highly empathetic.
I feel like the sensational title and the content of the article are completely unrelated. Also the author is somewhat toxic.
On the other hand, I was always interested in AI, but this listing really scratched my curiosity. What would be the proper roadmap for someone who wants to learn AI?
I don't know if the charts presented in the link are misleading or not, but I did notice a visible reduction in quality of answers (during a period of 5-6 years) as I can't find relatable questions to issues I'm facing.
The problem is AI generated articles (not short-form marketing content) only rehearse human information (at least for now, since they don't yet have human intuition and understanding), thus creating an infinite pool of same information that is only slightly syntactically different. I wonder what are the consequences of this in the future, especially as someone having a tech blog.
I remember reading Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity is Near' (a book with bold predictions about human development and future) and thinking this guy is nuts, we are decades if not centuries away from these predictions. Well, now I don't feel so comfortable.
Hopefully they also start porting older games - I had to install wine and lots of other packages only to play VTMB and Morrowind on my machine, and I lost an hour at least managing and setting everything up.
