But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?

"First was the vision, then the technique of working it out. I wanted to find my own way of singing by knowing myself. I knew that if I started listening to other singers, it would take me years to develop. So I shut myself off from other singers for along time."

from page 25 of https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/R%26B-Re...

“Everybody's sayin' that the Scatman stutters

But doesn't ever stutter when he sings

But what you don't know, I'm gonna tell you right now

That the stutter and the scat is the same thing”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatman_John

I’m kidding of course - great game!

Also in the way that the Ouya didn’t succeed at - their kickstarter tagline was “Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV”. I actually had completely forgotten about the Ouya, but the wording of your comment made me go look it up.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of...

But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I tried improving diet/exercise/sleep like the other commenters suggest, but of course the depression makes that nearly impossible. The only thing that actually helped me was burning all the way out, quitting my job, and going back to blue collar work. I don’t work from home anymore and I make less than half of what I made as a dev, so it was a big lifestyle change, but I wish I had done it years earlier.

Anyway, I hope you figure out what works for you. I wasted a lot of my life being depressed and I hate to see others going through it.

I briefly tried to use Reason since it “fixed” a lot of my biggest issues with the syntax, but it wasn’t worth it overall so I went back to plain ocaml pretty quickly.

I didn’t look very closely at F# at the time, but I remember thinking it looked like “ocaml with more normal syntax”.

I only say it’s not “already convenient to use” because I heard tons of complaints about the dev environment - mostly that there’s no debugger, no official package manager, etc. But they are working on ‘dune’, and just like the language itself, I got the impression that the dune developers were being conscious to “add great features reliably and safely”. So overall I thought it was a great language/ecosystem, ymmv though.

I just saw this comment yesterday about one of the tests from Bun’s rust rewrite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314311 It reads in the raw source code and uses a regex to assert that “unsafe” is used.

> These days, I don’t even bother with unit testing. They are a maintenance burden

I’ve come to the same conclusion, but that’s only because I’m working on solo projects. I think they are probably worth it with multiple devs on the same project.

> So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way. Shall we play a game?

> Start by picking your favorite spot on the equator. You're going to walk around the world along the equator, but take a very leisurely pace of one step every billion years. The equatorial circumference of the Earth is 40,075,017 meters. Make sure to pack a deck of playing cards, so you can get in a few trillion hands of solitaire between steps. After you complete your round the world trip, remove one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. The Pacific Ocean contains 707.6 million cubic kilometers of water. Continue until the ocean is empty. When it is, take one sheet of paper and place it flat on the ground. Now, fill the ocean back up and start the entire process all over again, adding a sheet of paper to the stack each time you’ve emptied the ocean. Do this until the stack of paper reaches from the Earth to the Sun. Take a glance at the timer, you will see that the three left-most digits haven’t even changed. You still have 8.063e67 more seconds to go. 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun, is defined as 149,597,870.691 kilometers. So, take the stack of papers down and do it all over again. One thousand times more. Unfortunately, that still won’t do it. There are still more than 5.385e67 seconds remaining. You’re just about a third of the way done.

Believe the repliers: I created an account in May 2024 and I have not added a phone number. Here's a screenshot from my settings: https://imgur.com/a/Q7kJpDv

But also, your eyes aren't lying to you: some servers require accounts to have confirmed phone number in order to join. So there is probably a lot of people who have had the experience of creating a Discord account, trying to join a server / accept an invite, and immediately seeing a "you must provide a phone number" prompt.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

They did this in 2020. The article points out that "Whether this tactic actually works in court remains to be seen" and I haven't been following along with the story, so I don't know the current status.

Wow, you weren't kidding - it's basically a note-for-note cover of the whole album. Thanks for sharing the link!

Deep Work by Cal Newport focuses on these ideas pretty heavily, and he cites plenty of studies to back up his arguments. Like the author of the blogpost says, "There’s no guarantee that what works for them will work for you", but I found my productivity increased noticeably after I applied some of the advice from the book.