Paul,you don't know me. But this could not have been more perfectly timed. Thank you, so much.
Life is Short
51–60 of 452 posts
Re: Life is Short
#52I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once. When you realize how short time really is you…
Incidentally, one of the stickiest lessons I received from my Econ 101 prof was that if you ever have a choice to go out with a couple with kids or a couple without kids, you should opt for couples with kids, for they value their leisure time as though it was ground up rhino horn.
On the other hand, how long does it really take to build a new PC? Maybe an hour for research and ordering parts... another two hours at most to put it together. Seems like a small investment for something you're going to use a lot.
Re: Life is Short
#53This article resonated a lot with me. It verbalizes what I've been trying to do over the past year or so with my own life. For me a lot of the BS elimination on the first pass was just getting rid of distractions and interruptions, so I cut out the phone/email/chat, etc all during my working hours except for certain times, like 10 minutes after lunch and just before the end of the day. The noise was all driving me in…
I'm trying to achieve currently what it seems you have already achieved. The problem is I cut everything out, but then there will be a moment at work where you're waiting for something (in my job for example, waiting for RHEL to install), and you decide to glance at Facebook. Then you do it a couple of times. Then you get home and decide as it's raining you won't go cycling. It all builds back up and I'm back to square one.
It feels like trying to kick smoking. I have a list of stuff I want to do (fix up my motorbikes, finish my 'day van', get back in to DH mountain biking) and a list of stuff I do (video games, drink, NetFlix, Reddit), and I always seep back to the latter one.
Might give it another go soon, life is short after all.
Re: Life is Short
#54Out of curiosity, what does the vb in vb.html stand for?
Re: Life is Short
#55Life is too short to not be involved in and/or contributing to anti-aging research in any way. If Wright brothers (and other flight enthusiasts around that time) had not taken the initiative, academics, pundits, and "experts" had it settled that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. It had to eventually happen because technology is inevitable, but we might have conquered flight in 1953 instead of 1903. In the case o…
Surely you mean cancer research? It is much more likely to kill us all than old age.
Re: Life is Short
#56I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once. When you realize how short time really is you…
What is your reasoning behind labeling building one's own PCs as bullshit, as opposed to buying Macs?
The idea is because your time is more valuable. I'm not sure I agree with a Mac having a lower total cost of ownership in either cost or time, but that's the idea. Don't do work Apple pays Chinese laborers to do.
Re: Life is Short
#57Paul,you don't know me. But this could not have been more perfectly timed. Thank you, so much.
Re: Life is Short
#58In a very real sense, though, isn't it all bullshit? I mean, it depends on whether you choose to accept or reject the current Matrix as normative human life, but there is an argument to be made.
For instance, it is kind of funny to say this or that company is more or less bullshitty, when the whole structure is such that requires the masses to work for some company, else essentially be deprived of the resources required for their subsistence. So, most people will have to earn their subsistence by participating in a scheme that allocates more to someone else's subsistence.
Maybe it's the best we can do, but on that scale, the bullshittiest company of all is only marginally more bullshitty than the least.
Re: Life is Short
#59Life is too short to not be involved in and/or contributing to anti-aging research in any way. If Wright brothers (and other flight enthusiasts around that time) had not taken the initiative, academics, pundits, and "experts" had it settled that heavier-than-air flight is impossible. It had to eventually happen because technology is inevitable, but we might have conquered flight in 1953 instead of 1903. In the case o…
Surely you mean cancer research? It is much more likely to kill us all than old age.
Why do young people not have cancer? (save for rare genetic forms).
Re: Life is Short
#60On a zoomed-out log scale of significance from 0 to infinity, bullshit activities would rank almost equally important as non-bullshit activities. So just let life happen. Nothing you do is extremely consequential or important regardless.
If you're stuck in traffic, you could've been reading a book. If you were reading a book, you could've been cleaning your room. If you were cleaning your room, you could've been working on a side project. If you were doing that, you could've been working on a better side project to get rich. But that would be less important than curing cancer, which is less important than curing old age. However, even curing old age pales in significance to the fact that entropy will dissipate all energy in the universe. How are you going to prevent that? And what if there's multi-verses that need to be fixed too somehow. You didn't fix the past either. Maybe you should've worked on a time machine instead of solving entropy problems. And what about all those people in poverty getting malaria because you were working on some b.s. problem?
It never ends. You could go crazy dwelling on this stuff too much.