You can plot all activities on a spectrum of dopamine 'cheapness'. On one side of the spectrum is slot machines, various drugs, and doomscrolling. These generally involve little effort, and involve 'variable ratio reinforcement' which is where you get rewards at unpredictable intervals in such a way that you get addicted. Generally, after a long session of one of these activities, you feel like crap.
On the other side of the spectrum is more wholesome long-horizon activities like a challenging side project, career progression, or fitness goals. There's certainly an element of variable ratio reinforcement in all of these, but because the rewards are so much more tangible, and you get to exercise more of your agency, these activities generally feel quite meaningful on reflection.
Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum. Introspective people can generally reflect on a session and decide whether it was a good use of their time or not.
I really think that 'how do you feel after a long session of this' is a good measuring stick. Very few people will tell you that they feel good after a long session of social media scrolling or short-form content.
Another good measuring stick is 'do you want to want to be doing this?'. I want to want to go to the gym and gain 10kg of muscle. I do not want to want to spend hours on tiktok every day.
I've seen a lot of AI 'arena's around but nothing that actually puts embodied agents in a space and lets them fight eachother, cooperate, etc. I built this in my week off work, and figured some of you may find it interesting. Feedback welcome!
It appears that RedwoodJS as we know it is being wound down. I've never used Redwood JS but I've watched it from a distance as it was (to my knowledge) striving to be a proper fullstack JS framework akin to rails, which is a noble pursuit. Seems like they had some challenges getting traction and supporting React Server Components and now they're pivoting to a new project which revolves around cloudflare workers.
Yeah, both RedwoodJS and BlitzJS appeared at about the same time as we started Wasp (https://github.com/wasp-lang/wasp), with the same mission of being Rails/Laravel for JS.
We were excited to see that several instances of the same core idea appeared at the same time, and it gave us validation that we're on the right path. A bit sad about Redwood moving away from the original vision, but interested to see where this new direction takes it.
Lazygit has its own built-in approach to this problem which is much more strict than what git-absorb does (it explicitly asks for confirmation if there's any ambiguity). There's an extensive writeup about it here: https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/de...
In this interview I had the chance to ask Bob many questions that had been stewing in my mind for a while, such as:
* Are there some domains where Object-oriented programming is better suited than functional programming?
* Is the Single Responsibility Principle supposed to be taken literally?
* Is the Dependency Inversion Principle still useful if you have fast compile times and it’s easy to test dependencies without injection
* Testing private methods: surely sometimes it’s okay
* Is 100% code coverage actually a good goal?
* How does Bob feel about programmers who just see their job as a job and aren’t passionate about it
* Is a call for professionalism just unproductive gatekeeping?
* Comparison as a thought leader to Martin Fowler
* Does AI threaten programmer jobs
* Will we have an AI singularity?
If any of the above questions have been or your mind too, you might find this interview valuable.
On the other side of the spectrum is more wholesome long-horizon activities like a challenging side project, career progression, or fitness goals. There's certainly an element of variable ratio reinforcement in all of these, but because the rewards are so much more tangible, and you get to exercise more of your agency, these activities generally feel quite meaningful on reflection.
Playing pinball is somewhere in the middle, probably on the cheaper side of the spectrum. Introspective people can generally reflect on a session and decide whether it was a good use of their time or not.
I really think that 'how do you feel after a long session of this' is a good measuring stick. Very few people will tell you that they feel good after a long session of social media scrolling or short-form content.
Another good measuring stick is 'do you want to want to be doing this?'. I want to want to go to the gym and gain 10kg of muscle. I do not want to want to spend hours on tiktok every day.