My takeaway from the experience was that the bitrate didn’t really matter above 128 Kbps AAC. This was me paying super close attention and trying to find flaws in the encoding, not actually listening to music. I periodically rerun the test in myself as I get better equipment (laptop DACs are quite good now, for example) and get similar results. Age will be a limiting factor soon as it takes my hearing.

Maybe the actual takeaway is to figure out what kind of feedback a child responds best to and use that most of the time. You know, paying attention to the kid.

I would also dispute “no natural disasters”. There are serious winter events in those regions (and crazy floods depending on where you are in the Midwest) that happen basically yearly.

I don’t think any part of the world is without significant tradeoffs, you just have to find the ones that matter to you.

I was terrified of swimming in open water so only joined the group for a deep dive once and my memories are mostly people talking and laughing on the boat, but I remember feeling crazy when people talked about air control. What do you mean I have to exhale into my mask at a certain depth? And I should inhale it back as I’m coming up? I need to take _too big_ of a breath on the surface so I can distribute it as the pressure increases?

With just a little coaching from Alexey’s mother and some encouragement from my family, a high school kid who couldn’t hold his breathe for much more than a minute spent almost 2 minutes underwater and dove to 19 meters on his first day.

I’m still terrified of deep water, but I gained a respect for the “weird” sports out there. It’s often a bunch of people just trying to have fun, and sometimes they turn out to be really, really good at what they do.

Most important to me when I started tinkering with him was the speed/feature tradeoff, and portability. I was working on 7 machines at one point doing pretty quick edits of config files and Python scripts, so launch speed and availability across different environments drive me to vim.

Now there are alternatives, but back in 2015 these were all in their infancy. And now I _know_ vim and it keep adding more features. The incremental cost of adding language server support is much less than the cost of learning how to move around VSCode, so my (neo)vim config keeps growing slowly but surely

I’m in full alignment with the article: squatting is just about balance in the end: how can you keep your center of gravity over mid foot as you bring your hips below (or near) your knees and back up again. You might find cues that help you find a good, repeatable position (break at the hips, stay tall, weight back, drop into your ankles, knees out, etc), but that’s personal to you. If you squat a lot, you’ll find the positions that knock you off balance, or bother your hips, or cause strain on your ankles, or whatever, and learn to avoid them with cues that help you find the groove where nothing hurts.

It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it. Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper. My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!! And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No institution will fight for you because your career doesn't matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not anticipating the issues.

The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...

What do you find missing from the Java tooling world? In my experience it’s been the best built out, and maybe overly so.

How many times do you actually change the default squashed message? If you write a series of garbage commit messages, I don't particularly trust that you'll write a very good squashed message, either. How many times do people skip updating the PR description with new information or features from comments? If your commit messages are good, the auto-squash message will be good and one will have a network dependency on GitHub to figure out what decisions went into that change.

In general I agree with your goal of a great commit log: 1 PR = 1 commit in the main branch. But I feel like GitHub is just the wrong tool to use if you want that. I used to use Gerrit, where commit messages _are_ your PR description. Sure, it makes you interact with git in some unfortunate ways, but the tradeoff is enforced commit cleanliness.

A big problem I had at a former employer was that `git status` would take 2+ seconds to return (for various reasons) and the default oh-my-zsh prompt would parse the results of `git status` to display the repository. People thought it was normal to wait more than half a second to get a prompt back! I lost trust in 3rd party prompts from that experience, and while I have sunk at least a few hours into my own prompt, I know exactly how it works, what calls it's making, and where things go wrong (when they do).

2. Take a day off. No guilt, no thinking about what you should be doing. Don’t schedule anything for that day. I see too many people take “mental health” days and then panic to try to get all their appointments set up for that day.

3. Start forcing yourself to do little things. As someone else mentioned, force yourself into 5 minutes or just reading code. Force yourself to fully grok someone else’s pull request. I went an entire year forcing myself to push code for review every single workday because otherwise I felt like you’re describing yourself. It was brutal some days (“rewrite X class with streams api” was a common change), but it both kept me going and got me some respect from my colleagues.