And Thibault iirc is the kind of person that's not terribly interested in earning lots of money. Of he wanted to, I'm sure he could make bajillions elsewhere in tech, because he's that good. But he apparently prefers to only work for a "measly" upper middle class salary and doing something he's really passionate about. And I thank him for it, because lichess is awesome.

When I think back to using computers as a kid, both at school(starting in 1999) and at home I don't think it's all that black and white wrt just playing at home vs learning useful skills at school.

At some point in the early 00s my underfunded elementary school acquired a bunch of old windows 95 computers. We would have classes where we mostly did basic touch typing, MS Office etc. At home, my middle class parents had also managed to find me some old outdated clunker. And yes, most of my time at home was spent playing games, chatting with friends on msn, pirating mp3s etc.

But I'd say I learned orders of magnitude more from my frivolous activities than from whatever we did at school. At home I was learning things like: online research(into warcraft cheat codes or quest guides for Runescape etc); software troubleshooting(having to reinstall windows because I downloaded malware on limewire or otherwise borked my install somehow); fast typing(from chatting with friends about whatever 12 year olds like to discuss. Probably 90% of my typing practice back then came at home, not at school, and there was no touch typing. I could type 100+ wpm on just 4 fingers by the time I was in middle school. Never actually learned to properly touch type until I had force myself into it 5 years ago due to RSI); English as a second language(from various forums, irc, etc, hard to avoid back then); And I believe one of my first forays into programming was trying to get a cracked game with a broken .bat installer off TPB to work. I had a friend who got into it via Morrowind modding.

Actually, come to think of it, most of computer class was also in reality spent sneakily playing flash games and/or messing around with the computer settings just to screw with the next student/teacher to use it.

Even generalising beyond computers, I think a remarkable portion of the skills and interests that end up defining us as people, can be traced back to stuff we did trying to avoid boredom as children.

To summarise though, I do think computers have a place in school. But especially at an elementary school level, I think play should be a significant portion of their use, because play is how kids explore the world and themselves.

To be clear I realise you were mostly talking about learning curve specifically; this is not an attempt at refuting what you said, just adding to the discussion.

Biometric login was also confirmed to work around the same time. I can however confirm that it doesn't work on the latest app version. It complains that the webview isn't Google Chrome.

This is probably just an oversight. I will email them again; good chance they'll push a fix to recognise Vanadium webview.

Doesn't help that when i notify them about these things, their support people just gaslight me. "I've notified our development team about this". Then nothing happens. I told them about the speed issue with protondrive when it was new, that was years ago now. Still not fixed, no updates, nada.

I will be moving to something like fastmail, plus some other vpn service, since those are the only two products of theirs I'm actually using. It seems like I'll get a far better product in both cases for almost half the overall cost.

I'm still open to it being psychedelic(primarily acting on the 5-HT-2 receptor family) though. It could just be that there's enough folklore surrounding these mushrooms in the local culture to explain the very specific effects. After all, cultural beliefs are a part of "set and setting".

GTD helps address that disconnect. The thought pops up, I dump it in the inbox. It is now "dealt with", asynchronously, and the thought can stop bouncing around my head. If it pops up again, I remember that I wrote it down, and let it go. Sometimes I'm not sure, so I just write it down again, no biggie if it gets duplicated.

And it also serves as a filter. So many of my ideas are just silly flights of fancy that, when I'm confronted with them even the next day, I already hate them, and just discard them.

It took me months to get used to it, and get consistent with even remembering to write stuff down. But you get better at it, and eventually you'll have less random thoughts bouncing around your head all the time. It's actually helped me be less stressed and calmed me down a bunch.

It's important to note that the system is ever evolving. It wraps in on itself. As I use the system, ideas and frustrations about the system pops up. I write them down as well, and if actionable, do something about them. So for instance, my list of "asap" tasks was getting cluttered with: groceries I need to buy, various changes to my emacs/wm/OS configuration, things that needed to get done, but were not really urgent, like "clean the shower". Obviously cleaning the shower is a good idea, but it's not like the world will end if I don't do it right this minute. This resulted in me always having more of these single tasks that I could typically finish in a day, which was distracting, because there were all these items on my agenda pulling my mind in different directions. So I herded these things into places where they make more sense. Made a shopping list and a wishlist. The shopping list gets synced to my phone and I have a widget for it via the orgzly app(which I also use as my mobile inbox). These things are not on my agenda, because whenever I'm looking at my agenda I'm not in a position to buy milk. "Config stuff" is now its own list, and I have a weekly habit item where I spend a couple hours on stuff in that list. I don't touch it otherwise and it doesn't clog up my agenda. More tedious, less urgent chores have their own list as well, and I similarly try to spend at least an hour a week on those.

Now, the block of my agenda with these "single tasks" will rarely be more than 5 tasks, most of them taking less than 10 minutes. I can easily clear it almost every day. And if I have a bad day and do nothing, the list is still manageable the next day. And ofc I made a daily habit item to that effect. That contributes to a sense of mastery, and I also get to work on the "fun stuff" without being plagued by guilt about all the other tasks I'm neglecting. Fuck yes.

Now I'm noticing another issue, that I'm getting an increasing list of these multistep projects. And I'm currently working on making a weekly review process where i prioritise projects. Ideally, I want a list of active projects with an explicit goal that I should check off at least one subtask in every active project in a week. And a procedure to manage which projects are active, not active, etc. that way I can keep my agenda free of projects that I've fallen out of love with that just sit in my agenda making me guilty.

Of course, the GTD book goes into all of this in detail. But I don't have the book. I prefer to develop this system myself, incrementally. One major issue I've had in the past with these systems is a sort of "system overwhelm", where the ADHD tendency to take things too far leads me to "commit" to adopting some ambitious, complicated system virtually overnight, and it's good for a couple days. Then I have a bad day, fail to follow it, and the ADHD propensity to see myself as a failure takes over, leading me to discard the system because I think I'm just not capable of following it. No more. Start with something dead simple, that you can do even on your shittiest days. Write some stuff down, go through it the next day. Just do that one thing. If after processing the inbox, all you can manage is to fuck off and play video games all day, fine. It's ok to have bad days. I certainly still have them. But even people with ADHD can develop habits. We're just bad at the initial phase ehere the habit isn't automatic yet. So make it at simole as possible at first, and then build on it slowly over time is my main advice.

In Stockfish, there will only be one full-fledged board state in memory per search thread. So the size of the board state is pretty much irrelevant to performance. What's important is reducing the overhead of generating possible moves, applying those moves to the board state, and hashing the board state, which is what magic bitboards are for.

Because indeed, one of the first times i played around with claude, I asked it to make a change to my emacs config, which is in a non-standard location. It then wanted to search my entire home directory for it(it did ask permission though).

It's definitely the case that there is undue paranoia about stimulants.

One case you only briefly touch on, addiction. Let me elaborate. I have struggled with severe ADHD(largely untreated during childhood, mainting severity into adulthood as a result) for all my life. I've struggled with drug addiction for most of my adult life(mainly cannabis). The amount of hoops addicts are made to jump through to get access to amphetamines is insane. Generally the requirements in my country(Norway) are to deliver weekly clean drug tests for 3 months. In the case of heavy cannabis use, it takes up to 3 months from going cold turkey until tests are negative. So, a 6 month commitment before treatment can even begin. Now, the relationship between ADHD and cannabis is interesting. I know some ADHDers who swear by it as a treatment. These tend to be of the predominantly hyperactive/impulsive type.

For me, it can't really be called a treatment. It actively worsens my condition in terms of executive dysfunction. Although it does improve some of the aspects like hyperactivity and emotional lability and helps make things bearable.

By the time I'm a year into a binge, my life is such a mess that getting myself out of it without meds is completely hopeless. Here I'm talking my apartment being such a mess I'm generally expecting to be woken up by people in biohazard suits any day now, and wondering how the hell I haven't contracted some kinda crazy bacterial disease by now. Cleaning it up is weeks if not months of work even with meds. Without it's inherently impossible. And the cannabis at least numbs me to the horror of it all.

So for 6 months I have to abandon that small comfort and just exist in this hellish life until I can even begin to improve things. Try to imagine how hard that makes going cold turkey in the first place. Not to mention the fact that meds significantly help me manage the addiction in the first place. I've successfully made it through this 6 month purgatory 3 separate times in the last 13 years. I've made more failed attempts than I can count. Wasted most of my 20s hiding from the purgatory inside a bong. I often wonder ehat my life would've been like if the rules weren't so strict. There's no evidence supported medical justification for waiting any longer than about 4 weeks. Out of the bajillion or so failed attempts, I reckon maybe 3/4 made it that far. Go figure.

I'm currently, close to 2 years semi-sober(doing a new moderation based approach to my addiction, very successfully, smoking exactly once every 4 weeks. Bit unrelated to the stimulant thing, it's more about relapse avoidance. But it's worked wonders so far.) and doing better than ever, but I still have a long way to go. And I will fight anyone who sows FUD about amphetamine or methylphenidate. These are wonder drugs. If you want to freak out about psych meds, go read up on neuroleptics. Now there's something truly horrifying. But of course, that only happens to crazy people hidden away in mental wards, so no one cares about them. I've been to those mental wards and I have seen some shit I will never forget. People whose lives were destroyed, reduced to an unbearable living hell for the remainder, by a supposed "treatment". These people are treated like animals. Go talk about that. Shut the fuck up about stimulants and SSRIs already, jesus. And go touch some grass.

Small, well integrated base system, with excellent documentation. Jails, ZFS, pf, bhyve, Dtrace are very well integrated with eachother, which differs from linux where sure there's docker, btrfs, iptables, bpftrace and several different hypervisors to choose from, but they all come from different sources and so they don't play together as neatly.

The ports tree is very nice for when you need to build things with custom options.

The system is simple and easy to understand if you're a seasoned unix-like user. Linux distros keep changing, and I don't have the time to keep up. I have more than 2 decades of experience daily driving linux at this point, and about 3 years total daily driving FreeBSD. And yet, the last time I had a distro install shit itself(pop os), I had no idea how to fix it, due to the rube-goldberg machine of systemd, dbus, polkit, wayland AND X, etc etc that sits underneath the easy to use GUI(which was not working). On boot I was dropped into a root shell with some confusing systemd error message. The boot log was full of crazy messages from daemons I hadn't even heard of before. I was completely lost. On modern Linux distros, my significant experience is effectively useless. On FreeBSD, it remains useful.

Second, when it comes to OpenBSD, I don't actually agree that security is its main selling point. For me, the main selling point of OpenBSD is as a batteries included server/router OS, again extremely well documented in manpages, and it has all the basic network daemons installed, you just enable them. They have very simple configuration files where often all you need is a single digit number of lines, and the config files have their own manpages explaining everything. For use cases like "I just want an HTTP server to serve some static content", "I just want a router with dhcpd and a firewall", etc, OpenBSD is golden.