Benjaben

Yeah that's fair, and it was clear to me from the jump that it's an unrealistic desire.

Holy shit. My life is a lie?!

Thank you for fighting the good fight.

I wish we had a dialect or subset of English that was intended to be more like computer code, and would be used for precisely specifying things. I have no idea how we'd do such a thing, and it'd never be adopted (and probably it's been tried!). But trying to write English in a way that can't be misinterpreted can be a real chore.

My pedantic hill to die on is the word "jealous". For example:

"I'm going on vacation!" "Ugh, I'm so jealous!"

No, that's envy. Jealousy is a weird way of behaving about things you already have, it's not wishing you had what someone else does! Weirdly, explaining this does not cause people to use the correct word. At this point the battle is probably lost and the meaning has officially shifted.

I write myself little lists of tasks, even when I'm entirely clear on what needs to be done. It may not feel like a hack, but it sure works like one for me - it's a simple habit that makes a dramatic impact on the flow of my day.

Advantages I notice:

• mental shift in the perceived effort - instead of a full day of indeterminate stuff, instead it feels like a list of small things
• provides clear places for breaks (which also provides an easy way to say "I'd like to do X to relax a bit, but I need to get Y small thing done first")
• helps me avoid getting distracted and working on something low priority
• makes it clear what's getting done (one less cognitive task, also harder to miss items) and kinda fosters a sense of satisfaction as I go

I dunno, really feels silly that it makes such a big difference, but here we are. I don't do it every day by any means (overdoing it "roboticizes" life to an unpleasant degree), but I use it most work days at least, and sometimes to keep up with chores and personal life stuff when I get real busy.

Analog Zettelkasten! You're rad.

Cool thanks! I haven't tried it for troubleshooting, I'll give that a go when I next need it.

Are you using one integrated into your IDE? Or just standalone in a web browser? That's probably what I ought to try next (the IDE end of things). I saw an acquaintance using PyCharm's integrated assistant to auto gen commit messages, that looked cool. Not exactly game changing of course.

Do you feel like elaborating any? I'd love to find more uses. So far I've mostly found it useful in areas where I'm very unfamiliar. Like I do very little web front end, so when I need to, the option paralysis is gnarly. I've found things like Perplexity helpful to allow me to select an approach and get moving quickly. I can spend hours agonizing over those kinds of decisions otherwise, and it's really poorly spent time.

I've also found it useful when trying to answer questions about best practices or comparing approaches. It sorta does the reading and summarizes the points (with links to source material), pretty perfect use case.

So both of those are essentially "interactive text summarization" use cases - my third is as a syntax helper, again in things I don't work with often. If I'm having a brain fart and just can't quite remember the ternary operator syntax in that one language I never use....etc. That one's a bit less impactful but can still be faster than manually inspecting docs, especially if the docs are bad or hard to use.

With that said I use these things less than once a week on average. Possible that's just down to my own pre-existing habits more than anything else though.

Actually after a re-read, you were constructive and made reasonable points throughout. My bad, I dunno why I interpreted that last one so harshly, wasn't really my business anyway.

What a dismissive, reductive response. As if your point of view is the only one with any merit.

Just want to back you up here and say the deeper ethos sometimes DOES matter. People need to stop acting like a piece of generally good advice applies to every situation ever. The "stop gatekeeping" pendulum has swung a bit too far (although the principle is great and, incidentally, punk as fuck!).

When did we decide everything has to be for everyone, and everyone has a right to participate in everything, just by virtue of existing? What would these folks say to someone who walks around in - e.g., Sikh cultural accoutrement - but has zero interest (and even a snobbish disdain) for the underlying religion? "Good for them, we shouldn't gatekeep"? Fuck outta here.

On the one hand, all culture and art is syncretic, full stop. I'm not saying punk rock is off limits in any way, that'd be absurd. But at this point it's got what, like 40 years of maintaining a broadly consistent ethos or spirit? That's remarkable, it's valuable, and it's only been possible because of gatekeeping - passionate community members putting forth effort to maintain the community identity. In a time when every damn thing of cultural significance is being hollowed out and commoditized for profit, we should all celebrate punk rock staying punk.