Fr0styMatt88

Yeah but this doesn’t scale. Like, there’s an assumption in these conversations that okay — glass bottles are better, but does that mean that now I’m going to hold on to and reuse every single glass bottle I ever receive from now on? Realistically? Then extend that to everything you use.

I can imagine ending up with a house full of glass bottles. Where does it reasonably stop for the individual?

The conversation also highlights that our intuitions about what the most environmentally friendly thing is can’t be trusted.

Individuals can’t solve this, that’s for sure.

For those TV/media centre/home server use-cases, I suspect it’s also that enthusiasts might already have a collection of older, good-enough hardware for that purpose as well.

One subtle thing I only realised while writing that comment is that I don’t ever have the TV as the only source of light in the room before going to sleep. The bedside lamp is always the thing that gets turned off. I wonder if psychologically that makes me associate the lamp as the thing that anchors my sleep and not the TV.

I’ve struggled for a long time to have a good sleep routine but over the last few months I’ve found some things that actually work for me, to the point where people now think of me as one of the early people at work. I don’t know if this will specifically help deep sleep but my hunch is that for me it has.

What’s worked for me:

- A good memory foam pillow and a new mattress

- Using light as well as sound for my alarm clock. I have my smart lights gradually turn on in my room over a 15-minute period in the morning and have an alarm set on my watch.

- Counterintuitively, having a TV in my room.

So my night routine now is that I’ll retire to my room, get ready for the next day (put clothes out, go over my reminders/notes if I feel like it, etc), then lay in bed and watch a video or two, then dim my lights to a setting I only use for the last part of the night (bedside lamp only at minimum brightness). It’s turned out to be a surprisingly-good sleep hygiene cue for me. I’ll usually then wind down with some more videos but I’ll inevitably start feeling drowsy and then it’s lights-out and the TV gets switched off.

I also switched showering from the morning to the evening and I also make sure to change out of my work clothes when I get home.

This means that in the morning I have very little to think about. I have to just plant my feet on the floor and get moving. Since everything’s already prepared I can do this pretty mindlessly. I don’t drink a coffee until I get into the office.

After a few days of forcing myself to get up like this consistently, it actually started feeling weird not getting up when I first wake up with the morning lights on. I love travelling in to work before the crowds and having quiet time in the office to get work done. Another awesome benefit is that I can relax the routine a bit on the weekend and yet still get up at a reasonable time to have the whole day to do stuff, while at the same time still feeling like I ‘slept in’.

I always considered myself a ‘night owl’ but this experience has made me reconsider. If I don’t have a good routine my sleep pattern will drift later and later and I’ll feel crap all day, whereas keeping this routine I’m getting up earlier and my energy levels feel way more consistent throughout the day, so I don’t know, maybe I’m an early bird that had poor sleep or something.

I like the Quest 2 but you’re so spot on about the battery. I have to plan a day ahead — ‘maybe I want to use the Quest 2 tomorrow, better plug it into the charger and make sure everything is updated!”.

Although (tangent incoming!) I think omitting the OLED from the Quest 2 was a bit of a mistake. My theory is that the screen actually has more to do with why most games in the library have that same-y bright cartoonish look, rather than just the limitations of the XR2. It’s a relief the Apple headset is going OLED, if this leak is to be believed that is.

The cultural aspect is so, so huge and as a person unable to drive due to my visual disability I’ve felt it very acutely ever since I was a teenager.

Getting your first car is/was essentially a rite of passage into adulthood, not just a way to get around. All the movies and ads told you that. Pick a girl up to take her somewhere? Nope, can’t do that. Are you even dateable if you can’t drive? Watching all your friends get their license and feeling like you missed out on graduating to adulthood? It’s painful. Want to use buses and trains? That’s cool but be careful of all those ‘bad people’ that want to rob you and don’t travel too late at night or too early in the morning, it’s unsafe!

A car is a symbol of freedom, independence and safety for many people. Freedom to roam about wherever you want, whenever you want as you please, without having to rely on your parents. I don’t blame anyone for thinking this way, it’s what we’ve been fed by culture for as long as I can remember.

Not that these perceptions are accurate when I look back on it, they’re as much to do with my own insecurity as a disabled person as they are to do with general society. It’s nice to know that this isn’t a thing everywhere in the world.

FWIW I don’t hate cars (I think I’m as much of a fan as anyone that grew up with gear-head mates) and over the years I’ve come to terms with never driving and quite like the financial convenience of not owning a car, but still. As others here have alluded to, giving up cars is a huge societal zeitgeist change, not just a change to do with infrastructure.

Yeah totally agree.

Your dependency isn’t the problem if you have ADHD and the medication helps you. The actual problem is all the bullshit around getting the drug and the bullshit stigma around it.

The fact the system treats you like a ‘crack addict’ is the problem. Could you imagine how absurd it would be if say, type 1 diabetics got treated like addicts because they depended on insulin?

The system around ADHD drugs is just fucked and needs to change.

WizardLM-7b would be a fantastic model to try out as well. Though that might be out of date tomorrow (or already!) given how many models are being released at the moment :)

Worse than touch screens are those touch buttons (you know, where the thing is just printed on the outside of the TV).

I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.

Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).

The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.

I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?

I’ll give you a concrete example from a few days ago in my job.

I needed a quick utility window in the Unity editor to see what animations could fire animation events and what those were.

I’m somewhat familiar with the editor API, enough to know what to Google and roughly where to go in the docs. I don’t do it enough though to really learn it beyond that point. So I’d estimate I could spend maybe one and a half hours, counting research, coding something, testing it and then context-switching back to what I was working on.

On a whim I asked ChatGPT (GPT-4) if it could do it for me. Formulating the prompt took a few minutes. I included a short bullet list of what I wanted and told it what Unity version I was on.

In almost an instant, it did it. I copied the code into a new file, added it to my project and it worked.

Time from idea to the first working version was around 10 minutes.

I asked for some minor refinement and then asked how I could extend it. It gave me starting points and taught me something new about Unity. All that slow doc searching, Google searching and forum-trawling was gone.

It’s like having my own personal dev assistant.

To that point, humans have a whole proprioception system (as well as the direct sense of touch) and auditory system to help feed that spatial reasoning system.

This is so timely. I’ve recently had a performance review and distractibility and ending sprints with multiple, unfinished tasks is a huge problem that got flagged and that I need to work on.

The frustrating thing is I’ve done multiple ADHD self-tests and quizzes (like the ASRS) and Asperger tests (like the Aspie Quiz) and I’m always just on the border or right in the middle for both (eg- two grey boxes on the top of the ASRS instead of three IIRC and almost equal parts Aspie and equal parts normal on the Aspie Quiz). Even still I can relate to this. I know people with really severe ADHD that affects all aspects of their lives and I don’t think I fit that category, but at the same time I have to look at the external indicators (current job performance, being told by multiple people I’m likely ‘on the spectrum’, etc) and they make me unsure of my own judgement of myself.

This is more complicated by the fact I was blind for some time after I was born and people in that situation often have autistic traits (‘blindisms’) so it’s really hard to know what traits come from where.

The social thing is really interesting to me; we’re inherently social creatures but why don’t we want to be social? As in, why does social anxiety seem so rampant?

Even in non-tech circles I notice it; people get anxious about talking on the phone, people don’t speak to their neighbours. We were taught ‘stranger danger’ as kids. People are nervous about asking others for directions. On the bus nobody wants to talk to anybody else.

It seems so counterintuitive. In my experience it pre-dates the smartphone age too. If people didn’t find socialising inherently unpleasant, would they have flocked to avoid it en-masse?

Yep. I didn’t even associate Spotify with podcasts. Then they went and bought Joe Rogan, a show I enjoyed listening to on YouTube. That just made me think ‘screw them’.

Oh just to clarify - I didn’t think you were looking down on the trades at all, it’s the sentiment expressed by the school guidance counsellor that I found strange. I’ve heard it is a very culturally-dependent thing, to be fair.

Your comment reminded me of going with my dad to a place that had a huge laser-cutting machine when I was young. They were awesome!

A bit of an aside but it’s so strange to me seeing ‘trades’ referred to as a lowly thing. Here in Australia, tradies are admired, often earn really good money and get a lot of good attention. They can work hard and put in the hours to get ahead whereas us IT guys on salary have a much more ‘fixed’ earning potential.

Thank you so much for posting this. ADHD is not just 'young schoolboys behaving badly disrupting the class'.

I never finished my 4th year Honours thesis. It was just a point in my life where so much was changing - moving out of home, getting my first full-time job, etc. I already had my Bachelor's degree and life just.... out-ran it I guess.

Looking back now I feel a little bad but I honestly don't regret it. You kind of look back a decade later (it's been much longer than that by now, but I realized this a long while ago) and it just seems insignificant, like a past life. It doesn't actually matter in a sense any more, nobody cares about my degree.

It was a wonderful, formative experience at the time and I don't for a second regret doing it. It's just that life moves on and people change over the years, ESPECIALLY if they started university as young adults. I actually think there should be a hard limit on the time you can spend doing a Masters given what I've heard about them. Or at least there should be more sanely-spaced deliverables. I was lucky in a way that Hons. was only one extra year on my degree, so there was no swamp to fall into at least. I wasn't going to pay for another year and by that time I didn't want to do it anymore.

Or combine it with that engine noise generator that uses a full physical simulation:

https://youtu.be/RKT-sKtR970

That would be pretty sweet! I’m guessing with the ECU sensors you could feed in the data to a simulation of a different engine to get really authentic different engine noises.

Like a patent thing?

It always annoyed me you had to explicitly go to smile.amazon.com. Couldn’t they just have made it a user preference or an option at checkout? It made me think they purposefully didn’t want people to use it.

Example use in a DIY digital dashboard for a car:

https://youtu.be/iH9lp-Nms-o

I believe as per this link they actually support VideoCore IV and the associated libraries (not ported to Pascal though) and that allows access to the camera module as well:

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=193560

If you haven't read Masters of Doom before, I highly recommend it! Your comment reminded me of it.

This is great. I joked to a workmate about asking ChatGPT to write a Unity GameObject in COBOL; ChatGPT did so after some persuasion (essentially it saying "I can't write COBOL code for Unity because Unity doesn't support COBOL" followed by me saying something like "Just pretend that Unity does support COBOL and write it anyway").

I wonder if this would make COBOL GameObjects actually possible :)

I was hoping I’d missed something, but I just tried again in TIC-80 and this doesn’t work:

>print(“Hello world!”)

unknown command: print(“hello

It’s the same for variations with spaces and without brackets.

The same applies for functions defined in my program, with the sample cart loaded:

>tic

unknown command: tic

The same applies with brackets also.

I used to love the playful nature of programming on the Commodore 64. I think it was the immediacy of the environment and the screen editor that made it feel that way.

Stuff like PICO-8 and TIC-80 are great and are _almost there_ in my opinion. If you took those and made their whole API available from their immediate modes, as well as make their immediate modes aware of the program you've typed in their code editors so you can call your program's defined functions from the immediate modes, I think you'd have something really special.

I have to wonder if mirror neurons play a part in this. Perhaps there’s something that’s fundamentally common to both ‘real’ tics and these types of non-Tourette’s tics. A person could already be predisposed to something like Tourette’s and seeing these videos could be the thing that ignites the kindling for them.

‘DOWNLOAD NOW’ hahahahaha