Readit NewsUnexpected favorite read of the year: Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s popcorn fiction, but
Personal Growth: “15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership”. The encouragement to “feel all your feelings” is insanely difficult for me, but has sent me on a multi-month life arc to be more present to my body sensations.
Related: If you log your books in Goodreads, I built this web app to recommend future books based on reading history and reviews. Was fun for me and may resonate
DoingSomeThings commented on The Hollow Men of Hims alexkesin.com/p/the-hollo... · Posted by u/quadrin
This is a frustrating article. To pick one example:
"The most damning aspect is not their exploitation of loopholes or their willingness to combine dangerous drug cocktails or even their reliance on unvetted Chinese suppliers..."
"unvetted" is doing a lot of work here. There's no evidence provided for this claim of working with shady sources and doing no diligence on the products they are selling. I know that to be false from first-hand connections in the telehealth space.
Hims works with 503B pharmacies. They are FDA inspected. They run batch testing on their source material and require strict compliance. All safe, legal, vetted pathways.
It's bizarre to me that the author is linking Novo Nordisk newswire press releases as sources of truth but is unwilling to to do basic research on how Hims operates. NN is hardly a faultless player here. They're selling this medicine for $1k+ per month!
Separately -- Algorithmic care is fine because most decisions are algorithmic. It's no different than what you receive from the 5-minute dr visit in person.
In a perfect world we'd have primary care doctors to coordinate care, direct you to the perfect pharmacy for each medicine you need, etc. In our real world, convenience and access are a good things. The shift from "patient" to DTC "client" is a net win for the public.
DoingSomeThings commented on Stimulation Clicker neal.fun/stimulation-clic... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
Reminds me of a story I heard as a kid.
Short version, guy can't sleep. Someone tells him get a dog. Dog barks, still can't sleep. Well you'll also need a blah... repeat until the man has a small farm of loud animals going. Then finally "get rid of them" and suddenly it's all so quiet again.
It's pretty fascinating how much more calm everything seems when you finish/stop this game
I felt an immediate, physical relief when I hit the credits screen.
DoingSomeThings commented on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell · Posted by u/cvbox
I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
Fantastic landing page!
Related thought - Is there a good way to search for projects like this? I know there are hundreds of these passion projects that never show up in google.
Ex) This year I want to get better at playing piano. Reddit and google bring up a few consistent big name links. I'd love to support a well-produced course by a creator like this, but have no idea how to find it.
DoingSomeThings commented on Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough swapnilchauhan.com/blog/p... · Posted by u/swapxstar
This speaks volumes for me. I always wondered how as a kid I would bust my face until I can be good at the hardest video games because those happened to be purchased as a present or from myself. And also I have font memories of my first IT job building software for work and would make something working in a few hours.
And my conclusion so far is: standards. I didn't had standards of what constitutes "fair difficulty", "good code", and more. So I would just give myself reps in both activities to become better without care.
Now that I'm older I second guess myself and worry about the things I attempt to build or play, all the time: "is this best practice?", "am I building it right?", "this game is too hard, it must be because it's unfair or poorly game designed".
And so I've decided to give myself room to enjoy myself without a single care in the world: I completed a game called "Metaphor Refantazio" on Hard, without looking at guides, without worrying about "best team comp", "where to get best gear" etc. and when I got stuck instead of looking things up I took a step back, looked what classes and gear I had to work with and figured things out on my own.
Don't get me wrong: the ideas and approaches I came up with were far from optimal (I can find videos of people killing the hardest bosses in one turn). But what matters is that they were my ideas. This game had been therapeutic for me in many ways, and this was only one.
But my point is, just like doing this makes you a better gamer, doing this in moderation can make you a better programmer. I'm not talking about "pretend the standard library, books and docs don't exist" but I mean "pretend tutorials on YouTube don't exist". I feel like tutorial hell can stem from exactly the same insecurities and desire for higher standards.
The video game example resonates. I realized recently that I load up walkthroughs by default. Before I’ve even turned the game on, I’m already following someone else’s ideas of best practice.
I think it comes from a misplaced belief about saving time and optimizing for “best” solutions. Taking a less optimal path is scary, even in a game with 0 real world consequences. I’ll consider that next time.
I'm putting it down to eating less. Regardless of what you think you're eating the reality is that your metabolism and digestion (gut microbiome or whatever) is nothing special. If you actually measure and weigh everything you consume, you'll find the total calories are in the normal range for someone your size.
If you think that there's something else going on, then let's see some hard data.
CICO is the mechanical answer. The question OP is getting at is "why" they naturally eat less. The poster is saying "I eat until I'm full and don't gain weight". For other people, they eat until they're full and gain weight.
Personally, my "satiated" level is very low. When trying to gain weight while weightlifting, it was difficult to eat the amount of calories needed. I know others who can easily eat twice as much as me in a sitting and not feel full. Something different in happening in our bodies to signal "stop".
DoingSomeThings commented on Write a Letter to Your Future Self futureme.org/... · Posted by u/skanderbm
I love this idea. My high school our english program had us write letters to ourself 10 years in the future. Such a joyous surprise when that teacher actually sent the letters 10 years later.
I wonder though - How is this different than journaling? Doesn't a written record from the past you can refer back to in the future accomplish the same goal?
DoingSomeThings commented on A Single Small Map Is Enough for a Lifetime noemamag.com/a-single-sma... · Posted by u/Thevet
Your mileage may vary, but my experience in the South was that most people (especially people with a few to many acres) don't care if you use their land if you ask. I've hunted or fished on a few strangers' land. I've used land I didn't own without asking, but did live in the neighborhood and the woods were largely considered communal if people weren't jackasses.
A lot of people own land because they want access to it, not because they want to deny everyone else access. Just go up to the nearest house and ask if you can walk through their land, or if they know who owns it so you can ask. People are generally nice about it.
You can also largely ignore corporate ownership of large swaths of land for stuff like logging or mining. They don't monitor it, and are unlikely to make a big deal of a hiker crossing through if you don't walk directly through the part they're working.
There's a greater conversation about private ownership and access to nature, but asking is a practical workaround in the mean time.
Corporate ownership rings true. Especially land marked off for future development. You'll likely need to jump a fence, but no one is watching once you're inside.
Private land I'm more concerned about simply due to firearm ownership & laws surrounding it. I'm sure many citizens would welcome respectably sharing. There's just no way to know that in advance and the downside risk feels higher than I'm willing to accept.
Reader Summary: You are a walking existential crisis who oscillates between trying to save your soul with 13th-century Catholic theology and escaping reality via magic-system spreadsheets. Your reading list is essentially a debate between a Trappist monk and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and somehow, they're both currently losing to a talking cat in a death dungeon.
Information Diet: Your media consumption suggests a high-low split. You balance dense, slow-burn philosophy (Josef Pieper) with high-octane, 'popcorn' entertainment (Dungeon Crawler Carl), intentionally using fiction as an escape from heavy systemic analysis.
Life Arc: Your life trajectory appears to be a journey from 'Enchanted Orthodoxy' to 'Humanistic Meaning. You moved from preparing for the priesthood/ministry to a deconstruction of faith, eventually landing in a space of 'Conscious Leadership' and secular contemplative practice.