mtpn

A few things:

I'm sorry for all the pains you have been through.

Yes, people assume things based on how you express yourself, and what you choose to mention or not. This is normal. Especially when you leave room for ambiguity. What the other person gets from your words is the words themselves plus their own baggage and assumptions. This feature of language is a lot of the problem, and why I would encourage people to take pains to be more clear with their words.

I'm not really trying to argue with you. I'm trying to give you a perspective that I think you should consider, but instead what you do is react, if not overreact, to each piece of information. I don't want you to agree, all I want is that you maybe understand, and accept that people who are different to you might see everything, including your words, differently, and that you might want to accommodate those people even though they are "wrong" in your view.

By oversimplifying, I mean simplifying so much that essential steps are omitted, thus the simplification becomes untrue.

I'm not, of course, saying that choice and resolve are not important parts of change. Just that people who currently don't have the resolve to follow through on what they need to do, and can't see all the reasons, need to know that that is a part of what depression feels like. And they are not to blame for having nothing in the tank right then. You need choice, motivation, determination/trying hard and opportunity - either some spiritual fuel, a break in the fog, a close call that scares you, maybe the right medication or therapy, or just random luck, whatever it is that gives you a foothold and a little bit of light. You need to know that this opportunity is coming, eventually, and you can get yourself out. That clear moment in time you talk about can't be forced through deciding things.

Anyhoo, I hope I have managed to be clear enough about why I think your post is not effective as advice, and potentially harmful. I think Andy Richter does a decent job of tweeting about depression in this thread: https://twitter.com/andyrichter/status/931546890901925888

And I actually see a lot of writing that is brief but still strikes me as effective. Brevity itself is not your obstacle. You might just have a really strong conviction that you know best.

I'm more concerned with, when you discount the studies that have been shown to be poor, does the overall system 1/system 2 model become weaker? I think it does, a bit, but he takes pains to point out that it is just a shorthand and not a real thing, so we should already be skeptical of taking it too far? How about the thinking vs remembering selves? I think that holds up ok.

We're early in our understanding of human behavior. Many of our ideas are wrong. Everything is hard to test. But though the book has flaws and should be evaluated again (would love to see it rewritten), I still think there is usefulness in the models he suggested. And in behavioral economics in general. I think we're far away from having enough replicated studies to be really "sure" of anything, especially with this crisis, but moving in a reasonable direction.

This comment itself seems much more accurate than your original post. It allows for the fact that - sometimes - you don't have the power to change things right then. Sometimes the best you can do is survive, endure, and accept. You can only fix things when you can fix things.

It seems like you don't know how your first post got me thinking "try harder" so I want to highlight the things you said that gave me this impression.

>I was determined to end this trend, no matter what. After a few months (literally) of me not raising my voice, unless it was totally and completely justified (which I discovered was very rare) I could then say to my kids (and wife), I expect you to talk nice and decently to eachother, and as soon as they accused me of being grouchy, I pointed out that I hadn't been for months, and something changed, everyone started to listen to me, even when I talked quietly.

- Your determination seems to be the key factor in how you tell this. You made a choice and tried really hard to to follow through.

> I've become a morning person, I started jogging about 5 years ago (I hated exercise), I stopped eating white sugar in 1995 (because it was controlling me like a narcotic), and I have worked on many of my other bad habits and traits. I think anyone can change anything.

- this is a list of great accomplishments but avoids expressing that any of this was difficult. Just that anybody can change anything. I disagree, but so far we are just talking about behavior changes, you haven't mentioned depression yet, so fair enough.

> We just need enough of a reason to do something, and then we can do it.

- This is where I think you are just plain wrong. It oversimplifies the situation. Dismisses the many factors that effect motivation and mental health.

> The trick seems to be, can you make up your own reasons? I know we can.

- this is your own personal framework that worked for you. To my mind, reasons require logic to be available to the person.

> (also I defeated crippling life long depression, food addictions, weight loss, and few other things many people want to label "diseases" we have no cure for or control over, I call bologna on that, we can change anything

- This is where you bring up depression, which was my main problem. You put quotes around "diseases" and call bologna on the whole list, again offering that that "anyone" can change anything, presumably using that single method you have described. "Have a reason, make a choice, be determined." It's so dismissive, and I believe it's inherently false, plus it also sounds like it's not even what you really think?

You didn't, in the first post, mention anything at all about asking for help, or going through periods where you could not help yourself or change at the time. You only suggested that if the person thinks right, they can change literally anything.

People feel such guilt when they are engaged in behavior that hurts the people they love, and watch themselves make the bad choices in spite of knowing better. Family members wonder how their parent could ever sure by suicide, unless they hated their family. Etc etc. Reasons, alone, are not sufficient.

> But telling someone they can face their problems, and having that person feeling guilt or worthless because of that is not the same thing.

That depends on who is listening, which is why, initially, I urged care to be taken in how we frame these things. On the internet we don't know who is reading or what they need to get better. At the right moment, for the right person, your advice could be just what they need, but at the wrong moment, it could add to their despair. Because we can't choose who is reading.

> The ones that are meant to program would flourish under a computer with just a black and white Terminal app on their disposal.

I don't know about "meant to". I avoided writing anything but plain HTML and CSS for years because I thought I wasn't a programming type person (wasn't smart in the right way, didn't like math, hit brick walls with basic as a teenager, etc). The terminal did nothing for me and still isn't my favorite place to be, but I do really like writing little web apps that solve problems and work. Programming, like most things, is available to anybody who wants to do the work to understand it and can put in the hours to get competent.

I see the risk in Scratch turning some kids off and would never suggest just providing anybody with one option for how to learn a skill. But I don't know about this "meant to program" idea. I'm more in favor of fostering the curiosity that can fuel real learning by any means that work.

Man, as I continue to try to see the shades and subtleties in what you are saying, statements like this gross oversimplification get in the way:

> If you do that, it's not possible to be depressed. If you try this and it doesn't work, keep worrying about other people more than yourself until it does.

Some good recommendations here! I do think that in the original parent post, but not in yours, the implication is that people who had problems had simply not found the correct motivation to solve them. I appreciate your take too though, and think I was maybe too hard on first poster, who maybe didn’t mean it the way it sounded.

> If that person reads my writing, they don't get any value from it.

To be fair, they may well think you are referring to them, because of your words here and how you don't seem to acknowledge the reality of their condition:

> also I defeated crippling life long depression, food addictions, weight loss, and few other things many people want to label "diseases" we have no cure for or control over

Sometimes really all the person can do is avoid suicide for another day. That's the only choice available. To keep living or not. Traditional logic is not available to the suicidal person at that point. Only depression logic, and as the saying goes: depression lies. People who love their families end up feeling that their family would be better off without them dragging them down and instead of asking for a hug, they kill themselves. Depression blinds you to what your options really are, and what the truth is. You can't rationalize your way out of it with facts because depression destroys facts and replaces them with the conviction that you aren't worth anything.

> But for everyone else, I hope they can see that real change is possible, and ignore all the neigh sayers that will give them an excuse not to try.

I agree with you that the availability of an illness to be used as an excuse for poor choices comes with some baggage. And many people can improve their quality of life and relationships through making better choices in what to do, and allowing those better choices the time to accumulate into meaningful change. I am proud of you for improving life for you and your family.

In terms of professional help, I do believe it starts with taking and listening to a therapist and trying to create change based on thinking differently. It often works. If that fails, a trial-and-error journey with medication begins. If that also fails, the person is screwed until further notice, or they can try a bunch of experimental things. All of this is only possible if they can afford the costs of therapy and treatment, which is by no means a given.

I know people who escaped severe depression and suicidal thoughts only through medication, after trying all the talky-thinky stuff they could. I also know people who manage their depression with just cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, exercise, etc and are broadly successful at keeping things together. I'm all for ignoring advice that doesn't speak to you. I'm against a suicidal person reading something that increases their level of guilt and worthlessness.

> I call bologna on that, we can change anything.

Please be cautious about making such statements. I respect your experience and success at changing things for yourself with this model. I don't for a second doubt your sincerity. But the belief that a depressed/addicted person could get better if they just tried harder is part of a very dangerous feedback loop when you are down. You can't control everything you experience or the feelings you have. You can, sometimes, control your interpretation and response to those things, if you are careful. You can do everything right and still not be able to break the cycle. We're all different, I'm glad this worked for you but it doesn't necessarily follow that your approach would help others.

It's essentially an ad that gets you to click it by making you think you are somehow logged in on a site you don't have an account on. I emailed them about this because I think it's an awful pattern, and did get a response but not one that indicated they understood the problem with this deceptive marketing technique. It makes me avoid clicking links to dev.to.

Good to hear- I’m hoping to switch to full time web development some time in the new year. It's actually my favorite thing at these other jobs.

I’m a web developer in my spare time. I write little things that solve problems in my two day jobs, they haven’t tended to be pretty because often I’m learning as I go and when it works then it’s truly time to move on to the next problem, even though I now know enough to solve the old problem again more elegantly. I’m trying to use better practices and modern JS frameworks in new projects just for experience, even though they are actually overkill in many cases. Certainly the people I work for would rather have two useful utilities written in plain es5 and php than one useful utility plus a story about the code quality. I’m gradually finding the middle ground where somebody call look at my code and not instantly want to take a shower.

When a customer is burned by a bad product with excellent reviews, especially more than once, ordering from Amazon could quickly become more trouble than it's worth.

(please ignore this, I apparently didn't read your comment fully!)

> It must have been the introduction of the typewriter that brought the idea of "two spaces" instead of "wider space".

Come to think about it, why not the movable type printing press as the starting point?

> Proportional fonts help pack letters within a word, not pack words within/between sentences.

I was probably wrong to try and fuzzily remember an anecdote rather than look it up :) but my understanding was that in a proportional font the combination of a period and space was good enough to show the end of the sentence clearly for whatever reason.

> It sends a signal to me that a person looks for bizarre ways to feel superior to others, instead of trying to understand why someone behaves differently.

This is fair. Though I promise I don’t feel superior to pretty much anybody if that helps. Learning about this actually came from wondering why some people used two spaces after sentences, not starting out judgmental. I think I was mainly thinking of formal contexts where you would already be judging somebody's choices (resume, professional portfolio, publications) more so than just random language use in comments or whatever. But I didn't put my finger on that last night!

I had this uneasiness writing my own comment and reading your comment, and did some actual reading this morning, and this turns out to be one of those things where the story I absorbed about it was too simple. There seems to be ongoing debate about this just like everything else, and even though most publishers and editors prefer 1 space after a sentence. I had though I heard that spaces after periods actually render a little wider anyway but that seems to be wrong?

I knew I worded my comment kind of badly and probably shouldn’t have made it in the first place. But at lest posting it helped me get corrected on my assumptions.

The anecdote I heard was that the extra space made it more clear when sentences were ending based on how the fixed-width typeface would read. With proportional fonts the spacing is already clear enough with 1 space, and that has become the conventional thing. So adding the extra space creates too much space now. It certainly sends a signal to me that the person has absorbed a “rule”, but not its purpose, which I think doesn’t reflect well on that person. But on the whole that’s a minor side note and I try to not go overboard interpreting details like that.

I came to vue liking JSX pretty well, but it does seem that culturally (or maybe just among newer developers like me) the single-file component with directives in the markup is more popular. Especially in tutorials. I haven’t really felt any pain with the default vue tenplating style that made me think switching to JSX again would be useful to me.

I’ve heard this so many times, and don’t get me wrong I really like Vue, but I’m so surprised people find it easy to learn compared to the others. It wasn’t an uphill battle but I found getting started with vue to be about the same, if not little more overhead, than react, ember, or angular 1, all of which I’ve played with a little.

Thanks! And also, ugh. The line between business and residential shipping has blurred enough that this distinction, though convenient for UPS, does not reflect the reality of how many small businesses like ours run. Bummer. But thank you for the advice on access points for critical shipments.

Once, I made an SPA for an interview with plain JS and handlebars for templating. It was for a react team and I was not big into react but wanted to show I get how all the pieces fit together, but still be able to understand and debug what I had written for them. Instead of being in unfamiliar territory with react debugging. Anyhoo, the switch-statement router based on changes in the URL hash was just about where they couldn't take it anymore. They couldn't see why I hadn't used some library for the routing. I had genuine flubs aside from that in the interview and definitely wasn't right for them, but it was funny to see heads quizzically turn to the side during that portion. I was like "well, what a weird little detail to get hung up on".

Not to detail this too much, but can you confirm a story my boss was told last week is possible? We've had the same stuff "out for delivery" for several days to a residential address. They told my boss "well, you're near the end of the route so if the driver doesn't get to you in his 12 hours it stays on the truck overnight" ... This seems daft. And repeats for days and days. I'm trying all my January stuff with FedEx but we like UPS because of the union.

I bet that for folks who are designers and get the reference his choice makes perfect sense and it might even be nice. But for me, most importantly, after loading the page it was unclear what to do. Use the menu? Scroll? I don't think it's good design for users to have to guess where the content is or what they are expected to do.

Indeed. Certainly most useful for getting a ballpark idea of where, in general, your users are located. I would guess anything that really depends on knowing an individual user's location oughta use something more specific. But you could, say, put certain countries or languages as the default of a drop-down based on IP and be right and bunch of the time, while still allowing the user to make a different choice easily.

Unkown, but very probably within a certain range whose boundaries are known.

> I'm imagining a stereotypical hipster sipping kombucha, going "Ugh, tax reform used to be cool before all the fucking college kids got into it. I've been into legalizing meth lately--it's so real, y'know?"

I realize this is a side note to a side note, but I think the attractiveness of this stereotype is a problem. I wonder if your prior judgements/experience lead you to misread the parent post and put them in that readily-available “hipster” box, where you could then safely roll your eyes at them for a point that I don’t think they were actually trying to make.

Windows phone nailed this. As you change volume, a panel comes in with two sliders: one media, one ringer, so if you were in the wrong context and changed the wrong volume, you right away have access to the other one. I find (on iOS now) I fiddle with the ringer volume a lot throughout the day. Loudest possible is waaaay too loud for me, unless I’m in a noisy place.

Rachel Andrew has a great presentation on this that you can find on YouTube. But the summary of comparing them is this: flexbox is designed to help with 1-dimensional layout. It gets a bunch of elements to behave well when laid out in a row (and you can orient that row in all kinds of ways). Grid is designed for 2 dimensions, so rows and columns together. You can implement grids with Flexbox but it’s hacky. Whereas implementing grids with Grid, you will be working with the grain.

My favorite thing about grid is that using grid overrides floats, so you can have a kind-of-ok floated layout as a fallback on browsers that don’t support grid, and it’s very little work to do so.

> I'm fairly sure that if you tried to get approval for using lots of micro-clips it would be incredibly time-consuming, prohibitively expensive, or both.

But approval is not needed. These videos are pretty much textbook examples of legally-protected fair use of the content they discuss. The labor necessary to get such content through the gates at YouTube is stifling others who can’t dedicate the kind of time needed to skirt their overzealous copyright protections.