In a game, you’re constantly unlocking benefits and upgrades, or at least getting a clear message that you’ve done something right. How often does this happen in real life? I think this is why people get obsessed with money, because money is a quantitative reward that’s at least sort of related to the quality of your actions.
Finally, I don’t see any way to get over the fact that games are much easier. How long does it take, in a game, before you understand how stuff works and you feel like you know what you’re doing? Minutes for an easy game, and maybe a few weeks for a hard game. In life, even after decades, you’re still unlocking new levels of your own incompetence.
When Ross Perot ran for president in 1992, his supporters exclaimed “He can get things done!” So I’d ask “What does he want to get done that you’d like to see happen?” I don’t recall ever getting an answer. What he wanted to get done didn’t matter. (I’m not saying that Perot’s platform was dumb. I’ll stay out of that discussion. I’m only saying that it could have been dumb and some people would not know or care.)
A post I made on Mastodon as advice to a younger indie app developer based on my three decades of experience working for smaller software businesses – mostly as a freelance software engineer – and watching which ones succeeded and which ones did not.
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If your idea doesn’t pass the first 5, find a different problem to solve because this one isn’t likely to succeed.
Great, hard-won advice from my friend Tyler about product fit.
They allowed us to be the kids that auditioned for the movie. Of course, it may not have been our story fully, but the personality, that was us. That’s why it never felt like work.
This was delightful, just as the movie is — pure fun.
She said it carefully, just as she’d planned to: as if she had the most amazing news. Their dad was getting help, she told them. He’d learn new tools, find the right medicine, be an example to others — to seek care when you need it. Gisele felt relief. Inside her family, this would be news to celebrate. “Great news,” she said, “like, the best news ever.”
I really appreciate that they are handling mental health like physical health and just putting it out there.
The Wireless Interface for the Commodore 64 - aka WiC64 - is a parallel WLAN interface for Commodore computers with user port connection. In contrast to the previously known “modems”, the WiC64 works in parallel mode with 8 data lines, 2 handshake lines and one control line. That speeds up data transmission by a factor of 20: The WiC64 can load 202 blocks / 50kb in 2.5 seconds from the internet - via HTTP:// or TCP connection. It gives the computer full access to the internet and the possible applications are almost unlimited.
That’s why it’s such a challenge to be a perpetual student — as our society becomes atomized and polarized, the informal educational spaces for adults to learn from people who have different points of view are fewer and farther between. And it gets harder to exercise the intellectual humility that being a student requires when one is supposed to have the authority, the certainty, of adulthood.