First time I've ever seen "That comment was too long." on HN.
This is part 1 of 2.
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Mentoring is something I'm admittedly a bit lacking in, so this is highly appreciated! The to-the-point approach is an even bigger benefit.
I'm not sure if you'll respond to this - it isn't needed, unless you want to continue this conversation (even in a few weeks or months, maybe) - but I actually agree with most of what you've said.
> 1. Your P/PC balance is completely lopsided. You seem to be focusing only on acquiring ideas and knowledge but not actually using them.
Ah, production vs. production capability. Very interesting concept.
Quite some time ago, when I didn't have a mental map of a new thing, I would glitch out and keep trying to find the edges of that thing so I could conceptualize it, predictably and consistently getting stuck in infinite loops until I'd explode from stress. My ability to summarize has historically been horribly broken, and the side effect of that here was that it took me way too long to realize that a lot of things cannot be summed up without relevant mental mnemonics already in place - so mental-mapping must be multi-pass.
This meant that I was atrociously imbalanced (like, practically vertically so) toward acquisition/observation/spectation over participation. In my case I did want to participate, but my attention span didn't permit me the mental stack space to automatically create and interconnect component details as I went along, making me simply unable to parse some subjects.
The sub-problem was my lack of a toolkit to use to get past the "bah, that particular detail is BORING" phase with certain things. I have quite a backlog of things I need but don't have available because of this...
For example, I still don't know assembly language (I only just recently realized that I saw learning a language as learning its grammar, while asm is all about CPU architecture, which I was never looking at) and I also don't know basic math.
Also, I was standing in a store a while ago completely stumped about what buttons to push on my calculator to figure out how many grams of X I could get because I had $Y to spend. I did figure it out in the end but I don't have any sort of mental map of how to do these tasks because my brain doesn't find them interesting enough to focus on.
An aside: I tried to optimize my (re)typing so typed "production{,} /capability" before. That didn't really work; a) bash doesn't let you remove the space in comma expansion so this canonically doesn't work, and b) typed out like that it isn't very clear and visually looks terrible. I think I inadvertently proved your point before I got 4 words out. lol
> 2. 500+ tabs, 20k bookmarks? Are you aware that at this rate you'll never get anything done because consumption of information will take 100% of your life, with an ever-growing TODO list of things to read? This is borderline addiction.
It definitely looks like that, yes. Some clarification!
This is actually because I'm using a ThinkPad T43, and Chrome on 2GB RAM and a single-core <2GHz CPU doesn't tolerate hundreds of tabs very well. I think my real maximum working tab count is around 50-100 tabs or so, but what ends up happening is that bookmarking those tabs gets uncomfortable after only about 10 tabs are open, because opening the bookmark folder selection popup (I use Better Bookmark) means Chrome has to spawn a new renderer, an operation that makes the system swap to death and can routinely take 10-15 seconds (sometimes 30+ seconds or more). Unfortunately it's easier to just suspend the tab (with The Great Suspender) than do this.... oops, now I have 731 tabs open. Except 680 of those tabs are actually Sad Tabs now because Chrome's broken malloc decided it didn't have enough memory (with only ~1.3GB of my 7.8GB of swap in use...) and it killed all my extensions, and The Great Suspender has no functionality to detect and reload "crashed" tabs when it restarts, and fixing it manually makes the system swap to death easily for 10 minutes (yep).
TL;DR: Chrome encourages me to suspend and forget about tabs rather than get back to them and sort them out. I argue that because no work is being done to fix this, it IS kind of deliberate. But would there be a way to fit into a bug report? No. :(
The real issue is that The Great Suspender is easily 1k+ SLOC because JavaScript, "modern" OOP, and edge-case management immediately lead to verbose, hard-to-learn code. I've looked at the code and it would be quite outside my comfort zone to maintain it.
So, in the end, I'd need to make my own extension - which would need to be a rewrite, since I kinda dislike the GPLv2 for productivity stuff like this, I also don't want to wind up as the maintainer for this extension, and I need an integrated bookmark manager+tab manager+tab suspender, so I can do things like bookmark suspended tabs and get the right thing, unload/close a tab but keep it in a "read later" list, bookmark things out of that list, etc etc.
I'm at the point where I can't deny that I need to do it. I'm working on a crawler for a website that's technically already shut down so I can try and get the data off it - or, more accurately, going round in circles where I can't focus because I don't know whether the site will really shut down in 10 minutes or next week or whatever, and it's messing with my motivation - but once that's done I think I'll be starting on this.
This is part 1 of 2.
---
Mentoring is something I'm admittedly a bit lacking in, so this is highly appreciated! The to-the-point approach is an even bigger benefit.
I'm not sure if you'll respond to this - it isn't needed, unless you want to continue this conversation (even in a few weeks or months, maybe) - but I actually agree with most of what you've said.
> 1. Your P/PC balance is completely lopsided. You seem to be focusing only on acquiring ideas and knowledge but not actually using them.
Ah, production vs. production capability. Very interesting concept.
Quite some time ago, when I didn't have a mental map of a new thing, I would glitch out and keep trying to find the edges of that thing so I could conceptualize it, predictably and consistently getting stuck in infinite loops until I'd explode from stress. My ability to summarize has historically been horribly broken, and the side effect of that here was that it took me way too long to realize that a lot of things cannot be summed up without relevant mental mnemonics already in place - so mental-mapping must be multi-pass.
This meant that I was atrociously imbalanced (like, practically vertically so) toward acquisition/observation/spectation over participation. In my case I did want to participate, but my attention span didn't permit me the mental stack space to automatically create and interconnect component details as I went along, making me simply unable to parse some subjects.
The sub-problem was my lack of a toolkit to use to get past the "bah, that particular detail is BORING" phase with certain things. I have quite a backlog of things I need but don't have available because of this...
For example, I still don't know assembly language (I only just recently realized that I saw learning a language as learning its grammar, while asm is all about CPU architecture, which I was never looking at) and I also don't know basic math.
Also, I was standing in a store a while ago completely stumped about what buttons to push on my calculator to figure out how many grams of X I could get because I had $Y to spend. I did figure it out in the end but I don't have any sort of mental map of how to do these tasks because my brain doesn't find them interesting enough to focus on.
An aside: I tried to optimize my (re)typing so typed "production{,} /capability" before. That didn't really work; a) bash doesn't let you remove the space in comma expansion so this canonically doesn't work, and b) typed out like that it isn't very clear and visually looks terrible. I think I inadvertently proved your point before I got 4 words out. lol
> 2. 500+ tabs, 20k bookmarks? Are you aware that at this rate you'll never get anything done because consumption of information will take 100% of your life, with an ever-growing TODO list of things to read? This is borderline addiction.
It definitely looks like that, yes. Some clarification!
This is actually because I'm using a ThinkPad T43, and Chrome on 2GB RAM and a single-core <2GHz CPU doesn't tolerate hundreds of tabs very well. I think my real maximum working tab count is around 50-100 tabs or so, but what ends up happening is that bookmarking those tabs gets uncomfortable after only about 10 tabs are open, because opening the bookmark folder selection popup (I use Better Bookmark) means Chrome has to spawn a new renderer, an operation that makes the system swap to death and can routinely take 10-15 seconds (sometimes 30+ seconds or more). Unfortunately it's easier to just suspend the tab (with The Great Suspender) than do this.... oops, now I have 731 tabs open. Except 680 of those tabs are actually Sad Tabs now because Chrome's broken malloc decided it didn't have enough memory (with only ~1.3GB of my 7.8GB of swap in use...) and it killed all my extensions, and The Great Suspender has no functionality to detect and reload "crashed" tabs when it restarts, and fixing it manually makes the system swap to death easily for 10 minutes (yep).
TL;DR: Chrome encourages me to suspend and forget about tabs rather than get back to them and sort them out. I argue that because no work is being done to fix this, it IS kind of deliberate. But would there be a way to fit into a bug report? No. :(
The real issue is that The Great Suspender is easily 1k+ SLOC because JavaScript, "modern" OOP, and edge-case management immediately lead to verbose, hard-to-learn code. I've looked at the code and it would be quite outside my comfort zone to maintain it.
So, in the end, I'd need to make my own extension - which would need to be a rewrite, since I kinda dislike the GPLv2 for productivity stuff like this, I also don't want to wind up as the maintainer for this extension, and I need an integrated bookmark manager+tab manager+tab suspender, so I can do things like bookmark suspended tabs and get the right thing, unload/close a tab but keep it in a "read later" list, bookmark things out of that list, etc etc.
I'm at the point where I can't deny that I need to do it. I'm working on a crawler for a website that's technically already shut down so I can try and get the data off it - or, more accurately, going round in circles where I can't focus because I don't know whether the site will really shut down in 10 minutes or next week or whatever, and it's messing with my motivation - but once that's done I think I'll be starting on this.