> The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.
If you don't mind sharing — why did you not choose to do a big project? I've always imagined that if I were lucky enough to have a sabbatical/retire early, it's not that I wouldn't work, it's that I'd choose to work on stuff that is really important, but undervalued by society (which is the reason I can't do it as a living right now): e.g. activism & lobbying or volunteer work in the community.
I’ve asked myself the same question, because before taking the break I also had visions of working on important/meaningful/undervalued things on my own terms.
I think there were multiple factors. I hadn’t accounted for how much I relied on the work environment for social contact, and I didn’t have the social habits in place to maintain a healthy social life. This felt fine at first because I was also recovering from burnout, and solo road trips and adventures in the mountains felt great.
But every time I’d think about working on something, it felt insurmountable to my brain, and I just got stuck. I’d led huge projects in enterprise environments, but felt incapable of getting something going without some of the structure surrounding that.
I suppose it boils down to a skills issue. Had I realized I’d get so stuck, I may have prioritized a different set of activities. But one thing led to another and I was sliding down the depression slope at which point everything got exponentially more complicated.
I have to conclude that I could have done things differently and that could have led to a better outcome. But all of my professional success hadn’t prepared me for the personal habit changes I needed to implement to have a better outcome.
By risk taking on good ideas rather than always trying to pivot your way from the status quo.
Product-Market fit is great if you're developing a SaaS business but it's not necessarily going to give you new inventions — something new is speaking to a potential gap in the market that doesn't currently exist.
which is also what I feel about the Spotify algorthim at times — no matter what I'm listening to, it invariably brings me back to what it thinks are my "old reliables" once it gets onto recommending stuff.
I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice", but it's a million miles away from, say, listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but they're cherry-picking what to play next.
To this point, I've been using Qobuz as an alternative and it's recommendation engine is laughably bad, but the experience is somehow better. I'll get the most random songs pop up in the list, and sometimes it's a very pleasant surprise.
In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.
FWIW good old Pandora now has options to influence their how their stations explore (so, you can for example pick “discovery” to have it try and find similar artists it hasn’t shown you as often).
> if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice"
I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.
I have something worse. One morally questionable video popped in my Instagram that showed some disabled person doing something outrageously stupid capitalising on their disability for engagement.
I didn't like it, I didn't share it, I didn't do any other thing than just stare at it in shock.
Big mistake.
For over 6 months that became +50% of my feed. Incredible and depressing amount of people monetising the disability of their friends, siblings, children, or their own. Really effed up content that makes you stop and say wtf out loud. But they also earn a living. But they should do it in a honorable manner. But maybe they don't have the chance. So I flag as not interested but that just swaps those videos with new BRAND NEW "content creators" of this kind that I hadn't yet seen. Wow thanks Instagram.
At some point they changed something in the algorithm and now those videos rarely pop anymore, and I'm wary and scroll away fast.
>I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.
None of the music services seem to understand that just because you like multiple genres, that doesn't mean that you want it to randomly jump around between them without any consideration for how they flow together.
That's something I'd actually pay good money for - a streaming music service with a library as extensive as the major contenders (or better yet let me bring my own!), which learns my preferences not in isolation, but tracking how they affect each other and environment - this song is normally followed by that song, or this song usually gets skipped if playing while driving etc.
I'd agree with limiting copyrights but would do it based on money earned rather than time, so something like when you make $X million, the work becomes public ___domain.
As a specific example — _A Game of Thrones_ was released in 1996. It picked up awards early on but only became a NYT best seller in 2011, just before the TV show aired.
It would feel harsh for an author to loose all their copyright because their work was a "slow burn" and 5 years have elapsed but they've made little to no money on it.
It’s a super-interesting idea, but GoT seems highly cherry picked: the vast majority of all works would never leave copyright if the requirement was that they clear even $1000.
> Why should you care how much another country charges its residents to import stuff from the US?
Because tariffs hurt trade — if you charge someone an extra $4 on a $20 bottle of French wine, they _may_ still buy it, or they may buy different wine.
Or they could go, everything's gotten so expensive these days, I'll buy wine less often altogether.
> Because tariffs hurt trade — if you charge someone an extra $4 on a $20 bottle of French wine, they _may_ still buy it, or they may buy different wine.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if the US public is even aware of this. I mean, what is the point of tarrifs other than raising the prices in the domestic market of imported goods and services? That's all they do.
The rationale from the perspective of the central government is that this will finally make foreign goods and services uncompetitive with regards to domestic alternatives, and thus will finally render them viable. But that childish assumption is based on so many absurd notions that are plainly unrealistic. The only thing that's real is the direct impact of tarrifs: increase the price of goods and services in the domestic market.
I think the problem is that because of the huge disparity between the cost of imported and domestic goods which has developed over decades, the choice that people face is not 'oh, now imported goods are a little more expensive, I will instead buy American', it's 'now I can't afford to buy anything at all.'
You have to get more money into the hands of the consumers in order to be able to implement something like this.
Wine is a good example because it’s not fungible: one bottle of red wine is not like any others. If you have a domestic wine industry, it likely can’t compete on quality with French wine.
So if France can export wine at a price that’s reasonable enough, your domestic wine industry will fail, undercut completely by cheap French imports.
Tariffs in and of themselves are not all dreadful. They help level the playing field and support domestic industry.
But you can’t go from decades of offshoring manufacturing to suddenly charging punitive tariffs without making imported goods (which were the only ones your citizens could afford) much more expensive, and therefore, yes, folks might buy wine less often altogether.
IMHO it’s pretty fungible at least outside the high-end stuff. Most people would hardly notice where the wine comes from (aside from specific types of grapes and such)
I'm surprised to hear that. In my experience, most people tend towards the other end (believing themselves to be connoisseurs, etc.) rather than 'just give me the house red'.
> I expect the American feds to pursue the best interests of Americans (though these policies aren’t in those best interests
I think that's the thing — you plan in business for people to operate in _their own_ best interests. If people stop doing that & their behaviour is volatile, then you're going to put your own mid-term plans on pause until you know what's what.
> Trade deficit aside, we shouldn’t let others collect a larger % of their imports from America than we collect of our imports from them.
Is that happening, trade deficit aside, & when you factor in services as well as goods?
> So far nobody in the United States is looking for alternatives to European services and products
Apart from the president, intent on starting a trade war?
US imports are going to be made more expensive because of tit-for-tat tariffs, so of course people are starting to look around elsewhere for alternatives.
What did you expect would happen when your government starts down the road of isolationist policies?
I’m an American and not offended in the least. It is simplified (color vs the obviously incorrect UK variant colour). Gray va grey. y’all is a great addition to the Simplified English.
Despite being told long ago by a drunk English visiting student that “the language is English not American” I’ll stand by our American simplification! Lamentably this simplification seems to be backtracking our political system…but hey we’re going from Discord to Revolt!
Do you want to lie to your users, or do you just want to use unconventional operators? If the latter, you could consider using something like ruby's `unless`.
(the number of times I've noticed code that does `unless !some_condition`... which is of course just the same thing as `if some_condition`)
> Depending on policy, you might not be allowed to transfer it to a personal device.
That's true, but it makes it all the more reason that you want to get that squared off ASAP while you have infinite access to HR/a manager to help you rather than scrambling to try and do it while the clock is ticking on access to your machine/the building etc.
If you don't mind sharing — why did you not choose to do a big project? I've always imagined that if I were lucky enough to have a sabbatical/retire early, it's not that I wouldn't work, it's that I'd choose to work on stuff that is really important, but undervalued by society (which is the reason I can't do it as a living right now): e.g. activism & lobbying or volunteer work in the community.
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