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Coffee Is Hard

stilldrinking.org

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Re: Coffee Is Hard

#221

Post by throw0101a »

matwood wrote: post #59
throw0101a wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sisyphus may disagree. :) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

If I was Sisyphus and got the boulder to the top, I would push it back down myself. I'm going to die eventually, so is it futile to exercise everyday, to learn, to try and be a better person? I don't think so, but all of those things are journeys that never end and require many mundane tasks.

> I'm going to die eventually, so is it futile to exercise everyday, to learn, to try and be a better person?

Many repetitive activities end up having a practical purpose: as someone who does strength training I know about sets and reps and lifting heavy things. But that gives me strength for everyday things.

But the point of giving Sisyphus that task is precisely because it is pointless. Sisyphus isn't doing anything with his existence except that task.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#222

Post by zem »

deckar01 wrote: post #49

Waiting for a Haskell programmer to explain why this is an artifact of procedural languages and that making coffee should be abstracted as the death of coffee caused by hot water.

they'll only explain if you force them to

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#223

Post by neumann »

Loughla wrote: post #23
monktastic1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfuln…

Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff. I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some next thing is about enjoying the tedium. Some of my favo…

"The only advice I have is, is that give you have to do some things anyway, you might as well find the joy in them and do them with a smile"

Changing a nappy bleary eyed at 4 am with an inconsolable screaming infant I recalled this advice from my friend with three kids. I had a sort of epiphany realizing that I could control me reaction and find joy in pretty much anything if I accept that it just has to be done.

Finally, it comes down to a decision when I am not enjoying something: i) Do I have to do this? (can I change the circumstances, or not do it) ii) if yes, be creative and enjoy it.

Surprisingly, works a lot of the time. The times this reasoning fails is when the task imposed on me is by other people that to my judgement have done it out of laziness, incompetence or exploitation.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#224

Post by Doxin »

rconti wrote: post #115
Loughla wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff. I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some next thing is about enjoying the tedium. Some of my favo…

The parent post, and your reaction to it, reminds me of the two days after my wedding. We were rushing to get everything ready for the wedding. Picking up supplies. Moving into a house near the venue for a couple of days. Doing the wedding itself, packing up, getting home the next day. Obviously it goes without saying that the weeks leading up to the wedding were busy, just a little bit more so than every week before…

To riff a bit on this: I've noticed in my life that I subconsciously subdivide every activity into two categories: things to accomplish, and obstacles to the former. I have not in my life ever enjoyed the second category. The crux being that by consciously re-sorting the activity from obstacle to target I get much more enjoyment out of it.

If I can convince myself that clearing the table for a new project is in itself a project it'll be cleared and washed and clean with a smile on my face. If I can't I'll be much more likely to just shove everything to the side to "solve" the obstacle and keep going.

I'm not very good at recategorising stuff on purpose yet, but it's definitely something I'm actively practicing.

Anyways I figured that's more or less the same thing as the journey-vs-destination thing worded a bit differently.

I'll end my ramble here before it gets too long.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#225

Post by Doxin »

knzhou wrote: post #122
chrisco255 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most stressful thing about modern commutes is that you can easily die if you take your eyes off the road for one second. Romans on horseback certainly didn't have that problem.

Back then you probably couldn’t afford even a horse, plus if your feet got a little scratch while walking you might have just died of infection a week later. Come on, any claim that antiquity had better living standards is absurd on its face.

Clearly the living standards were better, but I imagine there definitely were less things considered to be chores. Gathering food hardly gets boring if you're hungry.

That said I highly doubt if that's a preferable state of affairs.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#226

Post by Doxin »

jv22222 wrote: post #110
godot wrote: post #6

As a geek and a fan of 80s-90s PC games (not just Sierra but also LucasArts adventure games and so on), this was a super entertaining read on its own; but I also enjoyed some of these insights about life in general from it: > Living is mostly a series of repetitive and unrelated tasks. It makes sense that the most tedious things to code are the tedious things that just have to be done. There are no life lessons or gy…

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I gameify all those chores and try to do them more perfectly each time I do them. I find this especially effective filling up the dishwasher more perfectly optimizing the layout each time. I guess I approach these chores like Zen gardens. Anyway that’s how I tricked my brain into turning the chores into quality time. ;)

I think the trick here is that by trying to be ever better at a chore you stop filing it mentally as "obstacle in the way of a target I'm trying to reach" and instead as a target in its own right.

The distinction is fairly small but at least for me personally it makes a gigantic difference in how much I like doing a task. If I'm woodworking I generally loathe sanding, it's repetitive, tiring, and dusty. But if I see the sanding as its own mini project I can spend hours getting it perfect.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#227

Post by Doxin »

caseymarquis wrote: post #81

Having enjoyed the article, it also reminded me why I never once finished making a game. Instead of seeing the example code and thinking 'Ah, yes, that code gets something done in a straight-forward way.', I instead think, 'I'm pretty sure I could build a scripting engine and turn most of that code into ajax calls to json files. Of course, I'd then have to build an in-game editor which allowed you to modify the conte…

I too, highly prefer building game engines above building games. Not that I ever finish a game engine either but at least it keeps me busy I suppose. And who knows, I could hit on the big new paradigm in game programming at any point ;-)

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#228

Post by Doxin »

jmiskovic wrote: post #215
jasonkester wrote: post #181

The Coffee part of this article resonates with me. I have a stovetop espresso machine, and I'm constantly amazed at the new and ingenuous ways I come up with to mess it up. Making coffee before you've had your morning coffee is the great connundrum of our generation. Here's a short list of failure modes I've run up against: - Machine on stove, no water - Machine on stove, no coffee grounds - Machine on stove, complet…

The coffee part also resonated stongly with me, for a completely different reason :) I spent last year thinking on how to implement a text-only simulation that could cope with just about any situation. Most of my models were mentally evaluated on this "simple" task of making coffee. The design I came up with (still to be implemented) is not code driven, but data driven. Instead of executing bunch of nested if-elses,…

Sounds like it could make for a fun variation on the text adventure, where having stuff go wrong is at least as amusing as actually solving puzzles.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#229

Post by Doxin »

comicjk wrote: post #93
czinck wrote: post #3

Probably worth noting that he also wrote the very well done "Programming Sucks" article, https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks and the original HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7667825 . If you hadn't read that post, definitely worth it.

I like the core description of programming, but the framing - that programming is tougher than manual labor - is childish. Life is not a competition for whose job is hardest, and if it were, no one on Hacker News would win it.

> Life is not a competition for whose job is hardest

I think the author agrees, and wrote the article mostly as a response to people who think it is.

Re: Coffee Is Hard

#230

Post by rconti »

Doxin wrote: post #224
rconti wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent post, and your reaction to it, reminds me of the two days after my wedding. We were rushing to get everything ready for the wedding. Picking up supplies. Moving into a house near the venue for a couple of days. Doing the wedding itself, packing up, getting home the next day. Obviously it goes without saying that the weeks leading up to the wedding were busy, just a little bit more so than every week before…

To riff a bit on this: I've noticed in my life that I subconsciously subdivide every activity into two categories: things to accomplish, and obstacles to the former. I have not in my life ever enjoyed the second category. The crux being that by consciously re-sorting the activity from obstacle to target I get much more enjoyment out of it. If I can convince myself that clearing the table for a new project is in itsel…

Thanks for this. I've heard folks refer to "replacing 'shoulds' with 'coulds'". Don't say "I SHOULD do the dishes"; it's not an obligation, it's a choice. You can let the dishes stack up. That will have its own consequences, but don't treat things like obligations, treat them like choices you're making.
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