41–50 of 152 posts
Or writing prompts that get fired off by a script once the usage resets when sleeping so that you at least get some free tokies?
I'm sympathetic to wanting to squeeze out what you can to control costs, but this is something that might only seem sustainable because you're too exhausted to fully appreciate the potential deleterious long-term health effects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could have a HN front page without AI (or "$foo rewrite in Rust"). I'm not an anti-AI luddite, but it's just way too much at this point. Surely there are other interesting hackery topics we could talk about.
Flag them all and hope more do the same.
You seem to be a young fella, so let me tell you this: Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards. Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on. I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But…
People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history. It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice. It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people. A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or cons…
Burnout is never a good thing. Go slower. Go well. Thank yourself later.
At this point I can't even tell reality from satire anymore.
/s
seriously tho.. yeah I'm a skeptical bastard in every aspect of my life these days. its exhausting.
You seem to be a young fella, so let me tell you this: Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards. Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on. I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But…
Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :)
For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the next crunch.
You seem to be a young fella, so let me tell you this: Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards. Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on. I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But…
People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history. It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice. It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people. A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or cons…
I disagree, I believe what we mean when we say "productivity" these days was invented maybe during industrialization, maybe 1800s, and a couple etymology dictionaries I checked seem to agree, that the word being used in an economic sense to mean "production per unit" only started occurring in the 1890s. Also, I believe that the modern sense, meaning, "whether a human's time is spent being productive for the economy," is a mid to late 20th century invention of neoliberalism.
I don't really like hyper-generalizations like "all people have been doing this thing for all of human history," because it's just a silly thing to say on the face of it - the English were doing very different things and had very difference concerns in the year 800, 1100, 1700, 1900, and 2025! But also, the English in 1300 were doing very different things than the indigenous Americans in 1300! That said, one generalization I'm comfortable with is that throughout all of human history, until maybe the 1940s, people have been seeking comfort, leisure, and peace, and only recently have we developed a global society, and at that one that is obsessed with finding economic justifications for everything, including how humans spend their time!
You mention, "it isn't always a choice," and I agree, that is the failure of capitalism - there are people out there destroying their lives, minds, and bodies to scrape out a living. Our global economic system has failed these people - in fact it's sacrificed them on the alter of consumerism.
Many a child had stunted development from mothers and fathers subscribing to the cult of capitalism and overworking themselves and never being at home, with the self-serving justification of "I'm making a better life for my child," when in fact they're not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history. It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice. It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people. A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or cons…
> It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years. Burnout is never a good thing. Go slower. Go well. Thank yourself later.
I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years. Burnout is never a good thing. Go slower. Go well. Thank yourself later.
I disagree. The year or two that ended with me burning out was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
> I couldn’t work for two years after it and it was still worth it.
That sums up kind of the problem I have with that type of survivor's bias.
Question to you:
Was it worth because of the burnout or because of other variables in that specific part of your life?
If the other variables were not the same, would you still recommend it, just for the sake of "recommending the experience of a burnout"?
You seem to be a young fella, so let me tell you this: Every time you do coder.Health-- for bank.Money++, you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards. Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on. I know how it is, I've been there myself. You'll be reluctant to listen now. But…
> you have the problem that you are never able to do coder.Health++ for bank.Money-- afterwards. Can you expound on this for me? This rule is not at all obvious to me. I'm curious what perspective this hails from :) For example, most of my career, I will take 6+ months off between particularly intense work crunches for contracts/startups/jobs. I find the time off restorative to the point where I get restless for the…
That is a sign of addiction, not a sign of balance.
The issues I have with this "crunching it" mentality now (post-burnouts) is that even with some time off afterwards you'll pay the price with physical health.
Just the heart issues alone that you'll get because of the absurd and constant stress levels are now for me an indicator that it's not worth it.
A company doesn't give a damn about you. They are not your family. The first sign of risk they'll ditch you. Devs need to see work as what it is: it's a contract with mutual expectations.
And my recommendation is to self-reflect more on the health part, because we (including me) tend to rationalize that it's worth working more for the sake of building something or for the interesting research parts, or for learning experience or whatever we make up to justify it.
You can do that still with basic income. We just can't because society is fucked up, and research and development isn't paid enough to make a living and a healthy life. I also think that huge parts of the open source community that I identify myself with on a moral level are pretty hypocritical, considering that only the top notch famous "leaders" make enough to have a good balanced life. The 99%+ majority doesn't make enough to even rent a flat, and that's the absurd part of our society. I still can't fathom how the richest companies have money laying around on their bank accounts, and were built on the shoulders of unpaid open source contributors that got nothing in return.
That is something I really don't understand because it's honestly really messed up if you think about it.