I've seen this kind of attitude before, and it's usually justified with something about how the companies don't respect your time so why should you respect theirs. The thing is... the kind of people at these companies who don't care about your time are the kind of people who would do something like this.

I would feel incredibly limited if all my thoughts had to be synthesized into a language before they could be acted on. In fact, i often struggle to find words to express ideas that I can perfectly think about.

Changes to DNA would be the long term changes, not RNA. But yes, look up epigenetics, and especially DNA methylation.

Intelligence is mysterious in the same way chemical biology is mysterious (though perhaps to another degree of complexity)... It's not mysterious in the way people getting sick was mysterious before germ theory. There's no reason to think there's some crucial missing phenomenon without which we can't even reason about intelligence.

What role did France play in the Boston Tea Party? I'm not aware of any at all. Certainly France jumped in once they saw the opportunity happening, but the idea that the revolution was really part of the conflict with France is just wrong.

To answer your question... no they don't. Or perhaps very, very rarely. It doesn't make sense to spend hours at a time on any of those tasks, and you can't anyway because someone always needs something from you.

You also need design, rigor, error handling, common sense, some caffeine, testing, and fast builds. All together... that's enough!

When you get your first yacht, you'll start to notice all the better yachts with mini yachts. It's never ending.

Fuck it and be happy. And while you're working on it, you should consider no longer voicing your negative thoughts. It definitely doesn't help, and there's a good chance it makes it worse. (Or don't, I'm not telling you what to do obviously)

That's fine for code that never changes, or that has no logic in it. As soon as you want to change some code, you'll want a portion of the tests to require modification and a portion to stay passing.

I don't think the average person at the end of the 18th century was having significant, long lasting, publishable correspondences.

It's interesting to me that you expect to have the kinds of experiences Jefferson and Madison did, instead of those the local butcher did. Don't know who you are, but maybe Nassim Taleb just hasn't gotten around to responding to your letters yet? :)

As for me, just like the local butcher of the 18th century, i mostly interact with my family and friends, have a few hobbies no one else really cares about, etc.

There may be good reasons. But they'll need to be explicitly spelled out for most users.