Experiment 5

Goal: Go 21 straight days without complaining or uttering non-constructive criticism. (If I catch myself doing it, I must start again at day zero.)

This was inspired by Will Bowen’s book A Complaint Free World, in which he claims that if you stop pronouncing your negative thoughts, you stop having those kinds of thoughts, and that if everyone did this the world would change completely.

What happened: It took 55 days to get 21 complaint-free days in a row, but I did it. This experiment really does teach you not to complain, and I think everyone should do it once in their lives. But it didn’t create much of an inner change. My negative thoughts were unaffected, I just got more polite about whether to pass them on to others. Complaining can even be a worthwhile form of bonding, as I learned while I was working a painful manual labor job with new friends, and could never join in on the lighthearted griping. Still, it’s better to never complain than to complain freely.

Where I am with it today: Even though the exercise didn’t eliminate internal negativity like the book promised, the experiment left me much more conscious about expressing needless negativity, and I am pretty good at keeping it to myself most of the time. I’m also more patient with others when they’re complaining. This is one experiment I would recommend to almost anybody.

The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green

Pretty pictures! Reminds of Merveilles' seafoam green and of Soviet half-wall-tall colouring. Due to the latter, this colour also bears additional doomer connotations.

I wonder if this colour could work well in computer UIs? Does it work the same on glowing screens?

This is the first result to break the O(m+ n log n) time bound of Dijkstra’s algorithm on sparse graphs, showing that Dijkstra’s algorithm is not optimal for SSSP.

We all know that naming things in programming is hard. If you’ve read this entire post it just got a little bit harder.

Fast, powerful, yet easy to use template engine for Go. Optimized for speed, zero memory allocations in hot paths. Up to 20x faster than html/template

SQL Polyglot is a quick way to see if a particular SQL feature is supported in different database systems. Write a query and see it run anywhere from PostgreSQL to DuckDB without leaving your browser.

Trying to make the case for permanent irrevocable digital identities, which unfortunately today, by de-facto, are email addresses.

Может, вы сидели и думали, что в Осло нет трамваев. А они есть!

from bouncepaw:

Alex tells us that, for him, baking and cooking are easier than programming and soldering, because the errors there average out. As for me, this is completely inverse.

In programming, an error never fixes itself. You can observe it and fix it, you can write tests. You can run the program multiple times. It's you who fixes it, and you can understand how it's done. It's measurable!

Meanwhile, cooking is a nightmare. Burning something is routine for me. Is that too much or too little oil? For how long do I fry? What do I do with these spices? Do they really affect the taste? And to observe something, I can't rely on symbolic things like text. No, I have to look (is this color good? No idea!), smell (as if I know the difference) and taste (nothing more inaccurate).

I'm happy when something can be cooked with a timer. 15 min for buckwheat? I'm in. I'm more happy when the time is short. 4 min for this thin kind of spaghetti? Already boiling water!

I mean, even boiling water is not simple. My parents told me to wait until the correct bubbles appear. I'm waiting for the scary ones. Also, salt is supposed to make it boil faster. How much salt do I add?

And I didn't even talk about plants, which Alex also considers easy. They're not 😭

Totally agree!

Федресурс — официальный портал раскрытия существенных фактов деятельности субъектов экономической деятельности.

Free Encyclopedia of Programming Languages.

Коллекция карт

I write almost everything important in my life: thoughts, plans, notes, diaries, correspondence, code, articles, and entire books.

They are my extended memory — my noted self — my organized thoughts. I refer to them often. I search them, update them, and learn from them. I convert them into HTML to make websites, or LaTeX to make books.

My written words are my most precious asset. They are also a history of my life. That’s why I only use plain text files. They are the most reliable, flexible, and long-lasting option. Here’s why.