Substrate

I’d put something on my weekly to-do list, and it’d roll over, one week to the next, haunting me for months. ​ In a marked shift from the generations before, millennials needed to optimize ourselves to be the very best workers possible. ​ I took piano lessons for fun, not for my future. ​ We didn’t think our first job was important; it was just a job and would eventually, meanderingly lead to The Job. But these students were convinced that their first job out of college would not only determine their career trajectory, but also their intrinsic value for the rest of their lives. ​ Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed. ​ And when we don’t feel the satisfaction that we’ve been told we should receive from a good job that’s “fulfilling,” balanced with a personal life that’s equally so, the best way to convince yourself you’re feeling it is to illustrate it for others. ​ Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.” ​ One of the ways to think through the mechanics of millennial burnout is by looking closely at the various objects and industries our generation has supposedly “killed.” ​ At least in its contemporary, commodified iteration, self-care isn’t a solution; it’s exhausting. ​ That’s one of the most ineffable and frustrating expressions of burnout: It takes things that should be enjoyable and flattens them into a list of tasks, intermingled with other obligations that should either be easily or dutifully completed. The end result is that everything, from wedding celebrations to registering to vote, becomes tinged with resentment and anxiety and avoidance. Maybe my inability to get the knives sharpened is less about being lazy and more about being too good, for too long, at being a millennial. ​ or take refuge in avoidance as a way to get off the treadmill of our to-do list. ​ It’s not a problem I can solve, but it’s a reality I can acknowledge, a paradigm through which I can understand my actions.

It is as though we’re only starting to learn what the supposed pleasures of this new level of monitoring are supposed to be. But our conditioning in consumerism is such that many are willing to take it on faith that the pleasures will emerge ​ The ubiquity of a product begins to convey a pleasure in its own right — just as the sheer demonstrable popularity of a song can make it seem “good,” can make participation in it feel inevitable and joyful, a consubstantiation of the zeitgeist.

and throughout the process instilling ownership, confidence, and competence among the students. ​ Under my approach, a student taking an exam is handed a sheaf of all the reading-summaries she’s written, class by class. It’s an open-book exam where each student has written her own book, if she���s availed herself of the opportunity. If the student knows this ahead of time, there’s a big incentive for writing that book, which requires that she keep up with the reading during the weeks preceding the exam. ​ One thing my students tell me is that they often end up not consulting the summaries at all during an exam, but that they’re still glad they wrote them. My students will spend much of their time after graduation solving problems for which no solution-sheet exists and trying to convince others that their solutions will work. To do that well, they need to acquire communication skills, which I can help them cultivate now by having them present solutions to their peers and get feedback on those presentations.

relaxing a notion of “sameness” gives us extra currency with which to explore new phenomena

Stay loose. Let go. There are other bananas.

“Physical fitness and brain performance are tied together, and it shouldn't be a surprise that grandmasters are out there trying to look like soccer players,” Ashley says.

Haskell is a purely functional programming language: by default, Haskell functions do not cause side effects such as system I/O, nondeterminism, or exception handling. As such, Haskell programs are generally expressed in terms of monad transformers, which provide the facility to compose different side effects into a single interface powerful enough to express the programmer's needs. The monad transformer library, mtl, is mature and powerful, but complicates and in some cases constrains the construction and generalization of user-specified monads. A class of libraries known as 'effect systems' have emerged in an attempt to solve the problems associated with monad transformers. Effect systems provide a compositional approach to program construction, generally using a single monadic type specialzed with a programmer-provided list of capabilities. Effect systems are more powerful and flexible than monad transformers, but their adoption in industry has been minimal, due both to their incompatiblity with mtl and their historically poor performance. The new fused-effects library changes the status quo: it provides an extensible and flexible vocabulary for program construction, yielding a more expressive interface than mtl without sacrificing any performance characteristics. I'll describe the history of effect systems, outline the tradeoffs associated with programming with effects, and demonstrate the use of fused-effects in practice. Patrick Thomson GitHub, Inc. @importantshock Patrick is a senior engineer on GitHub's Semantic Code team, building systems to understand and analyze the corpus of code on GitHub. He enjoys peaceful countryside walks and loud rap shows.

With Instagram, self-defining and self-worth-measuring spilled over into the rest of the day, eventually becoming my default mode. I would keep scrolling as though the cure for how I felt was at the bottom of my feed. The landscapes I once Photoshopped my way into were materializing around me. There were a million versions of all of us running around in one another’s heads.

The Swift Programming Language. Contribute to apple/swift development by creating an account on GitHub.

1) the full moon can be glorious, but it's really the moon phasing in and out that is the most interesting to me 2) morning moons sometimes beat evening moons, especially when they hang big and low by the horizon and startle you when you turn a corner or come out from under the shade

You will have the opportunity for unparalleled focus on whatever your research question is. ​ Those who have recently obtained a PhD can outwork virtually any of their peers in terms of duration and efficiency ​ To undertake this vow of poverty voluntarily, while doing work that is more intellectually challenging than most of your peers that are earning average salaries shows superhuman commitment to seeing something through to completion ​ This criticism will either get to you, and you’ll bail out of the program, or you’ll learn to separate the valid criticism from the invalid criticism, a skill that will serve you well in any profession, in any discipline ​ If you work on your degree alone, you’re doing it wrong. Have a side job. ​ Stick to your schedule. Be humble. Don’t expect to get more than 3 hours of high-order intellectual work done per day

How you act — as a manager, as a co-worker, as a partner, as a parent — has ripple effects that extend far past the immediate relationship. ​ Are you willing to have slightly less so that others can have significantly more? Or, as I like to think about it, do you actually care about other people? ​ But we’re removed from the conditions that produce it, the living conditions that result from it, and the realities of the waste it produces. All we see is a deal.

these institutions are also kept intact by those who relish memories of their own survival story — so much so that introducing improvements, or making the path less steep and more efficient threatens their personal worth in some significant way, even if it benefits the greater good.

Scale your engineering power. We enable deep-tech startups to achieve their vision, from research to product delivery.

Catron felt during the staring contest “not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me” — like a recursive reflection of a mirror in a mirror perhaps.

At 8:30am, my phone pinged. There are six of us on a text chain about local mountain lions, road closures, and which house we’re walking to for afternoon beers. This morning, there was an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere between Malibu and Santa Monica delaying commuters by a whopping two hours. I texted an old coworker with the details, knowing she would be caught in the traffic.

For the rest of her life, my grandmother told this story to pretty much everyone she met. When I visited her at the assisted living facility for the next decade—where she loved living as it gave her independence—even the janitors would greet me as the granddaughter who had gone to the United States to get a doctorate, and whose committee had applauded my grandmother. She told this story to people she sat next to in the ferry; she told this to anyone who asked her about her life.

This is why I respect the Functional Programming movement: they get it. Functional Programmers understand that (at a minimum) 50 years of research and refinement is a pretty good thing to stake your data types on. ​ Stick to actual mathematics. You'll have to learn it eventually, you may as well not cloud your own thinking in the process. ​ Mathematics is the simplest and most precise language mankind has ever invented, and you should be able to speak it.

The operator in Haskell is an infix synonym for fmap and has the type

They’re there because they weirdly fell in love with what you’re doing, and they want to see you succeed. ​ But we never stopped to think about whether we repeated these behaviors because they were actually good for creators, or because that’s just how Kickstarter did it. ​ Creators sell intimacy to patrons. They sell “stuff” - perks - to customers.

When picking what I want to cut, I often take a good hard look at any big feature I'm working on and asking what the MVP of that feature-arc is. Often I'll cut parts of a feature-arc, vs an entire feature itself.

But I’m an obedient keeper. When the cat bites my cheeks at five in the morning, I rise naked and make my way to the deck door, hefting up the 35 lb bird seed bag laying next to it to fill the feeder before my body recognizes the cool of the mountain morning. And I call them to me, in lifted whistles and guttural falsettos. I tell my sweets the stores have been refilled, and I hear their whispers turn to chatter before the sun makes its way above the crest across the valley. I feed the cat his own breakfast, put the water on the stove, and snuggle back into bed for the few minutes left of just being. ​ And maybe that’s what I like about birds: the just being part. Their journey seems neither particularly harrowing nor complicated. You make it through the first year and you just get to bird. ​ chattering in delight over found feeders, smashing into windows only to ruffle their feathers out and fly back over the ledge. I want their flutters and frustrations to last as long as they can. As long as I can help them. As long as we can help each other.

In practice, though, this means platforms show us things that it is paid to show us (ads, promoted content, etc.) along with the sorts of content that makes us tolerate it, that convinces us there is no point in trying to search for anything different. In other words, algorithmic sorting is meant to make us indifferent to wanting particular things. It teaches users to enjoy passivity as an end in itself, as a kind of pure convenience in the abstract.