Links for the Week of 2022-09-26
Here are some links I enjoyed from the past week.
Table of Contents
- How the Sausage is Made
- Dumb Phones Equal Smart People
- Rickman Journal
- Vanderbilt for Success
- Hookers and Cocaine
How the Sausage is Made
[ARTICLE] 700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built
The process of building code is messy - drafts, re-drafts, mind maps, diagrams, scribbles, restless nights, hair loss, weight gain, crushing anxiety…you get the picture. To paraphrase the famous quote: Coding is like sausage. It is best not to see it being made.
But when you look at production code or at the final product on your screen, all you see is glossy, shiny, perfectly manicured lines that are meticulously formatted and run seamlessly. It’s as if every Github repo is a $57 link of sausage fit for the dearly departed Queen of England
And this can be discouraging to the new and experienced coder. It’s like with social media: “we’re comparing our behind the scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel.” If you could see how real code is made, you might gain insight into how to better structure or build your project. At a minimum, you would
Other disciplines use various tools for illustrating how products and skills are developed
- Writing Draftback is a Google Docs plugin that captures a real-time movie of your writing. You can review the movie (at high-speed playback) to show how you formed each part of the product.
- Sports Tools like Hudl help athletes across multiple sports “capture, analyze and learn from video and data.” You can have
- Sprinting Using video to review and illustrate proper running technique. See 15 Keys for Taking Video Analysis to the Next Level - Link - DB.
- Basketball Numerous apps, smartwatches and sensor based systems can track multiple shits, skills and statistics in realtime and historically.
Most of the tools noted above lack a true social component to share the development process with a wide audience. They allow the individual athlete, writer or presenter to capture and review their practices and performances, but they don’t share this development with a newbie. Granted their is a small risk of exposing trade secrets or giving up some competitive advantage in doing so. I am guessing that Nick Saban doesn’t want to give the competition a leg up by giving them a behind the scenes view of how he runs practice. But this type of learning would be invaluable for a beginner.
A tool for new coders would ideally have these characteristics
- Social have the ability to share your progress and work with others
- Reviewable similar to Draftback, you could record and review how you built your code
- Reference built in reference for multiple languages
- Cross Reference cross reference code, similar to what Google Code Search does.
TLDR: Coding is messy. Getting better at it involves seeing that mess.
TODO: Create package that shows how R code is connected in a repository similar to Google Code Search .
Dumb Phones Equal Smart People
Image from the Harvard article mentioned below showing the three dopamine pathways in the brain and how each become active when anticipating or experiencing a rewarding event.
[ARTICLE] Pavlov’s in your pocket - Seth’s Blog
A short summary of why our phone addiction is what it is: cause you love that dopamine.
Why is that an issue? Because it decreases focus, wastes time and causes anxiety.
- 73% of people experience panic when they think their phone is lost or temporarily misplaced.
- You likely touch or pickup your phone 2,600 times per day
- You likely spend at least 5 hours a day on it. (“According to a survey conducted in February 2021, nearly half of the respondents stated that on average they spent five to six hours on their phone on a daily basis”).
- “Studies are beginning to show links between smartphone usage and increased levels of anxiety and depression, poor sleep quality, and increased risk of car injury or death.” See Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time
- “The average American spends around 109 days a year online, with 32 of these days being spent on social media.’
All this adds up to one conclusion: you are addicted to your phone.
Solutions to our collective smart phone problem exist, in varying degrees of severity.
- Read a whole book (if you can pay attention that long) or take a course about Breaking Up With Your Phone.
- Find a sweet dumphone on reddit or use a hipper version like the light phone or the punkt phone.
- Make your smart phone dumb again by following these instructions.
I have thought a lot about dumbing down the ol phone and came up with this list of “must-haves”
- Call + Text
- Camera + Photos
- Web Browser
- Google Maps
- Spotify
- Notes
- Hotspot Tethering
Dumbphone purists might scoff at the idea of having a web browser, but it’s really a way to back in to using email, calendar and other 1-off “oh crap I need to find this right now” tasks without having the cluttering, annoying app on the phone. Not having a camera is a no-go because of the kids, but it could always be replaced later by a digital camera. I could likely get by without Maps or Spotify but they get used so routinely, and I never really find myself down a rabbit hole at 2 am going “oh shit I can’t believe I have been looking at Google Maps for 4 hours” kind of thing.
The second tier would be a “nice-to-have” but not required list
- Podcasts
- Alternative texting (Telegram, Signal)
- E-reader (Kindle)
- Ride Share Apps (Uber, Lyft)
- Dedicated Mail App
- Video Chat (FaceTime , Zoom or Google Duo/whatever they call it this week)
Everything else can go fuckity fuck right off: social media, YouTube, Games, Terrible Hotel Apps etc. etc.
After reading a lot about smartphones, the Light phone seems like a good choice. Group messaging is supported and any media gets automatically forwarded to your email. Spotify is out buy they have a basic music player where you can old-school upload some mp3s to the cloud and then they get synced back and stored on your phone. There is a 1 gb limit which is enough for roughly 230 songs (at 128kbps) or roughly 16 hours of music or 20 albums. They also just introduced a directions tool, but how well it works is up for debate.
A lot of the dumbphone options will work to varying degrees. Of course, it is really up to the addicted to get clean, and no matter how much social media and smartphones play on our collective cognitive weaknesses, you have to take responsibility for you own actions and get uncomfortable with the stillness.
Rickman Journal
[ARTICLE] Alan Rickman’s secret showbiz diaries
Neat piece on the late Alan Rickman’s journals that he kept daily for the majority of his adult life. I mean how many people can say they invited Daniel Day Lewis over for tennis?
You can read more about Harry Potter and Die Hard in the upcoming book that will be released soon.
Vanderbilt for Success
[ARTICLE] Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Habits Contributed to His Success
I am not a huge fan of the “study a millionaire, copy their habits and become a millionaire” plan, but this guy was next level.
Some of the tips are basic: live below your means, avoid debt and build relationships. Like most successful people, some of the Commodore’s wealth was made because he was born at the right place and the right time. But he leveraged this advantage by embracing new technology and modeling other successful business’s models. I am reading The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt and will report back any nuggets of knowledge.
Hookers and Cocaine
[ARTICLE] Post Grad Problems - EXCLUSIVE: Detailed Timeline Of The Guy Who Went To Mexico To Kill Himself But is Saved by Hookers and Cocaine
Just read this one. Wow.
Have a great week!