Now I am personally offended :) I kid, but I am a big fan of well formatted PDF documents. What problems would you say that trouble you in mobile? I understand the 'absolute' viewport is tiresome, but I tend to prefer the consistency at times.
There are multiple points in the article, each of them probably deserving its own article. I want to focus on the two.
One is the peer effect. Who you surround yourself with absolutely matters. This applies to the content consumption, and this applies to your surroundings too. This can be as simple as going to the library, having surrounded by other people working and researching is great, even if it's just schoolwork. Beyond that, I have found I enjoy spending time with people who are deeply interested in some kind of a craft. Listening to someone talking about a piece of software they are working on, or a music album they are recording, is absolutely interesting. It sets sort of a benchmark for yourself too.
The other one is the point about how 'little' time it actually takes and how easy it is. This is a point that is both true and false, in many ways. If you have general software development expertise, finishing[doing the exercises as well] a single book on a language/technology/framework will absolutely get you to the intermediate level on that piece of technology. Finishing a book isn't hard, you can do it in a weekend.
At the same time, as easy as it is, it is also hard. There are lots of obligations in life. You probably have somewhere to go that weekend. You are also a bit tired, you have been working during the week. And well you have to socialize a bit to be healthy, so shutting yourself off every weekend isn't something you want to do either. I find occasional, short retreats healthy for this reason. That seems to be a nice balance.
In the end, it is simple, but not easy, that's the word I was looking for. It can be achievable if you plan ahead and are purposeful in your actions.
My godson wants to be a storyteller of some kind, either video, or music, and he was fretting about not being good enough. My advice to him was, "look, if you just sit and THINK about what you're going to do before you do it, you're going to be better than 80% of the people out there".
That's about what I've run into in my life. Most people do things on autopilot and don't think about what they're doing, or don't consider it worth thinking about. If you want to do something and be good at it, wanting to be good at it is enough to move you past most people, as long as you have a growth mindset.
It is obvious to me that there are two types of thinking: there's planning, which only goes so far, and there's ongoing introspection into the work you're doing, which is what most people really need.
I'm trying to write fiction at the moment. It's far, far harder than technical writing, programming, writing a reply on HN, or anything else that's remotely similar. I'm not used to it, at all. My brain suggests things that just aren't good ideas, and then I spend time eliminating those bad ideas, and then my brain suggests more things, and I find one good one, and so we continue. I have to work in ten minute stretches and then go for a walk to clear my head.
I think this is how most skills are learnt. You try something ("write the first chapter of a novella"), you analyse what went well and what went poorly ("I felt my writing was boring, and I noticed that nothing really happened because all I wrote was description and exposition"), you deliberately practice ("I read through the first chapter of some books I enjoy and tried rewriting my first chapter with similar interactions and events"), and then you go back to the base task and get a little further ("the first chapter was compelling but I didn't leave any story hooks and don't know where to go for a second").
An example for clarity low, difficulty low might be making an app in an unfamiliar framework, or something like "organize that pile of boxes in the corner of my room".
Difficulty of the next achievement/step vs. the ability to know what that next step is
> - Clarity low, difficulty low: ??
I'd say navigation here. Like, finding that new restaurant or traveling overland without maps. Easy to just drive/walk there, hard to find the place though.
Kinda relates to David Epstein's kind vs. unkind learning environments too.
I was once playing around with a 3-point ranking system. Think thumbs-down, thumbs-up, and double-thumbs-up. The thumbs up and down would basically function as expected, while the latter would be weighted heavier for the recommendation algorithm. Basically a `recommend me more of this, this is high quality content` action.
There is a general problem with a 5 or 10 star voting system, consider a [malicious] user who only gives a 1 or 10 star vote, thus ending up with more voice than one that votes in the range of 4-6 which would be what the majority of the content deserve. Therein lies another problem too, while the scale would imply 5.5 to be average [out of 1-10 with no 0 option], most people tend to consider 7-7.5 to be average instead, there's a very natural bias on the scale.
This idea isn't actually uncommon however, as platforms tend to work with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and a `favorite` action of sorts. Some platforms tend to respect favorites in recommendations and some don't. I have found that YouTube doesn't care all that much about my... let alone favorites, it doesn't even care about my votes. TikTok however did this well, I had downloaded it one day and at the end of the day my feed consisted of neat programming tricks and lessons on color theory. Which kind of revealed something my own prejudice too, as I had expected TikTok to show me the worst content and it was the platform that respected my choice the most. That said these things change a lot so it wouldn't surprise me if the same test shows the opposite results a year from now on.
What you're describing is fully observed in education. The scale of your evaluation has to have an odd total of numbers and a limited number of choices. 1-2-3, for example. That means that each digit sends a strong signal. 1-2-3-4 means the 3 is the non-controversial choice. Average, so to speak, and you don't want average in your evaluation. You need to adequately grade stuff here, and giving most things an average grade is a weak signal that prevents you from differentiating.
When you grade by competency (not by knowledge), you also assign a written description for each grade. That helps a lot. I think those platforms are keenly aware of those facts I just described, and are trying to boil them down to simple actions for users, that impart large signal, and that respect the cultural norms of evaluation. That's why Letterboxd has a 5-star with half-stars rating system, but also has a like button.
This is also a great way to test out a page during web-development in a pinch[when you are on Linux]. Chrome and Firefox are obviously available, and GNOME-Web is useful-enough to fill the gap[of Safari]. I'd always run a real cross-browser test before a proper release. Thankfully the cross-platform issues are dwindling by the day.
The author concludes with becoming a novice again, and again, that's in a way similar to the idea of `Beginner's Mind`(shoshin) in Zen Buddhism[0]. Alan Watts would talk about this quite a bit.
I think that's a nice way to look at it, or even just, taking a step back and observing. Adding the next zero, or two, and in that, consider whether if it's worth it too.
You can get a decently fit body and be healthy by going to the gym or taking up some kind of sport and doing it weekly, and well you can become exceptionally fit by living by very strict rules. Whether that's worth it to you depends entirely on the person. Same applies for money, knowledge of the crafts, or even personal relationships. I am willing to spend a lot of time in computer science and I am very much interested in being the best person I can be, and honestly I am decently interested in a lot more things, but there's a certain amount of energy in me, certain obligations in life, and a certain balance to be made. I am happier when I believe I have struck the right balance for me.
$30 definitely isn't much for a niche book, I would've preferred a short preview or a longer brief.
As an aside, an idea I find underrepresented is gift economies[0]. There's some representation of it in the form of `goodwill` and `relationships`, but this was [likely] a huge part of the economy. Consider the consumption of the average person, and it's going to be more fish and eggs and less MacBooks, and you wouldn't be buying eggs the same way you buy them on the market today[by barter or trade]. You would be definitely using currency for the highly specialized armor, though.
All of this doesn't matter too much in the grand scope, it's perfectly fine to trade 2 shoes for 5 eggs in Skyrim, but some additional depth would be interested if incorporated correctly.
I would prefer views, to be honest. For example if some arbitrary content is stored for 2 months without anyone ever watching it, that feels reasonable for me to remove it, no one is watching it. Some video that is actually serving a purpose being culled just because of the arbitrary hour limit feels to me, a less reasonable stance.
In practice though I doubt this makes a huge difference either way, the vast majority of the people that can have noticeable amount of views on such already have their YouTube channels or other venues they are also making money from.
this seems really trivial to detect. dump current viewcounts of all VOD into a table somewhere, and then check however often you feel like to see if any of the ones with less than one view per unit of time you decide, are now getting many views.
I think this gets the 'imposed limits' part right.
What I've found is that I am unable to be organized or keep things organized if I have too much stuff. It doesn't matter if I organize by 'category' then 'thing' or 'thing' then 'category' or if I keep myself to 2 levels of nesting or 3.
I have been decluttering every now and then, say, I will dedicate a weekend once every 6 months. I have started by getting rid of what is _obviously_ not necessary.
By necessity I'm not talking in a materialistic sense, I find joy in the tiny statues I own and a physical photo album, even if they are not _vital_ for my life.
I started by getting rid of things that are useful but just wasn't up to par anymore. Like old clothes. I would wear old clothes inside the home and justify their existence, but I have come to value myself enough to wear my nicer clothes, which are honestly still just relatively cheap shirts, inside the home too.
After that, it was getting rid of things that are working, in good condition, but I had no use for anymore. For example I had built a computer, this meant ending up with a stock cooler, stock fans, stock thermal paste, my old PSU that was still very much working, all that. I wouldn't throw these away as they had no issues, but wasn't of use to me anymore. For these donating was easiest for me, as I would feel bad about getting rid of tons of in-working-situation hardware.
I must note, all this requires certain privileges in life. Just getting rid of things you don't use but might, by some low chance, need, requires you to be wealthy enough to replace that without worrying about the price tag.
I have also come to find out gender also matters. My clothes fit in a single-side wardrobe, and no one pays enough attention to my clothes to realize I'm cycling through 10 t-shirts and 5 shirts. Or if they did, that's plenty anyway. For women there's a certain social expectation and imposed necessity and a deeper sense of fashion. For a man a dress-shirt functions well in the workplace just as it functions in a job interview and it functions just as well in a wedding. For a women what they can wear to a wedding and what they can wear to work are very different, so there is a natural difference of expectation and necessity. But I digress.
It is honestly one of my favorite documents. With the thought put behind it, it is of no surprise the game was such a well crafted masterpiece.
Most software work tends to move away from this kind of ... I don't want to say documentation, we have better documentation tools than ever, more-so a level of writing in general that is more 'human', be it written documents at length or well commented code.
I recall a Warcraft III one I once saw, that went into technical details on the tooling/scripting packaged with the game. That was another great document too, but I don't have it :)
I got to ogle a game design doc for a Sonic the Hedgehog game that was never produced. And yeah its very similar, except it had way more visual layout. Absolutely everything sonic could do was amazingly visualised and described.
