I’ve been really enjoying Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” because of how he reframes creativity and the act of creation.
Don’t wait for creativity to happen. Cultivate it. Make it happen.
> I lack the creativity to come up with "just for fun" projects
I disagree, primarily because I felt this way about myself for many years and later realized how wrong I was. My issue was that I had misconceptions about what creativity is and where it comes from. I felt like it was just supposed to happen, and that if it didn’t, that said something about my inherent abilities. I’d see other people creating things as if the ideas just flowed naturally, and assumed they just had special brains. And even when those ideas are just flowing, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone without a lot of other factors in their lives all enabling that flow of ideas.
Creativity doesn't always just happen on its own, but can be cultivated. More of a mindset and a way of being than some intrinsic trait that you have or you don’t.
Locking yourself in an empty room sounds like the worst way to spur ideas to be honest. My brain doesn’t get going until I’m moving. Long walks, bike rides, hiking, kayaking. Surrounding myself with new things, the beauty of nature, people who challenge me, trying new software, seeking new experiences for the sake of them.
Creativity for me is the result of my other pursuits in life. When I’m not doing those things, I’m stuck in a rut, even if those things have nothing to do with what I’m trying to create.
top comment: "The credit should be given to poet T S Eliot (1920): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”
and its reply: "So really it has nothing to do with stealing whatsoever"
My favorite quote on the meaning of life, from Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning":
> For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
One life tip I've learned is that the Windwos Store's .msixbundle packages are just zip files that you can extract and usually will run fine.
Change the .msixbundle extension to .zip, and open with 7-zip. Inside the archive, open & extract the appropriate .msix file for your architecture. Now you have Windows Terminal Portable. (I've done this with other apps too)
To obtain a download link for a Windows Store package, you need to go to third party websites where you input the Windows Store URL, and it gives you the download link. Make sure the download link is from Microsoft domain.
But in Windows Terminal's case, the bundle is published on their Github so you can download directly. If you want the Cascadia Code font, you need to install it manually by double clicking on the font from the package.
ah sorry - i cant link the post cos it was on a private alt, but basically over the course of 1 week i had 44m deep sleep, 5h light sleep, 2h rem sleep, 11m awake (total 8h 19m average) - and 4 friends mentioned apnea just taking one look at my chart
they said average should be 80m deep sleep, and one guy had 2 hours deep sleep lol
This is more or less in line with what Dr. Alok Kanojia of HealthyGamerGG is saying.
The feeling of wanting to give up is an evolutionary adaptation to not engage in activities that have a low probability of success.
Unfortunately stuff like filing taxes or getting to work on time are relatively recent things, so our minds can't estimate the benefits of that intuitively.
One way to get out of this is to think about the outcome. It's easier to do something if the end result will be satisfying.
They sure do. InvokeAI is a fork of the original repo CompVis/stable-diffusion and thus shares its fork counter. Those 4.1k forks are coming from CompVis/stable-diffusion, not InvokeAI.
Meanwhile AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui is not a fork itself, and has 511 forks.
This is pretty much equivalent to a technique I used to see people use in Photoshop. I think it's gone out of style recently, but used to be common (IIRC):
* Import a photo as a layer
* Duplicate that layer
* Increase saturation in that layer and then blur it
* Mix that layer by some percent (20-50?) over the base photo
Gives a nice ethereal feel.
You used to see this all the time in photos. But, maybe it's out of fashion now that everyone knows how to do it :/
> Also, there are mods for the Java server which allows both Java and Bedrock clients to connect to the same server and play together.
This is correct. I am running a vanilla SMP for my son, and he plays primarily on the switch. I use a Java server running Fabric and Geyser/Floodgate in order to allow his switch to connect to the server. Everything runs smoothly, so far.
It's especially useful for blocking ads or unwanted elements of a website that has cryptic and ever-changing IDs and classes. With the :has() selector, you can now block an element by its structure, instead of IDs or classes. Some of my personal uBlock filters that might be useful for others:
! Hide question suggestions
www.quora.com##div.qu-borderAll:has(div:has-text(/^Questions for you$/))
! Hide space suggestions
www.quora.com##div.qu-borderAll:has(div:has-text(/^Discover New Spaces$/))
! Hide 1) left nav bar, 2) footer (clap, comment), 3) right side bar
medium.com##div:has(> nav)
medium.com##div:has(> div:has(> article)) ~ div:last-child
medium.com##div:has(> div:has(> div:has(> div:has(> a[href^="https://help.medium.com"]))))
! Hide non-relevant seach results
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-shelf-renderer:has(h2:has-text(People also watched))
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-shelf-renderer:has(h2:has-text(For you))
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-shelf-renderer:has(h2:has-text(Previously watched))
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-shelf-renderer:has(h2:has-text(Results for similar searches))
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-shelf-renderer:has(h2:has-text(New for you))
! Hide unused buttons (useful for vertical monitors)
www.youtube.com##ytd-toggle-button-renderer:has(yt-formatted-string:has-text(Dislike))
www.youtube.com##ytd-button-renderer:has(yt-formatted-string:has-text(Share))
www.youtube.com##ytd-button-renderer:has(yt-formatted-string:has-text(Thanks))
www.youtube.com##ytd-button-renderer:has(yt-formatted-string:has-text(Clip))
Sounds similar to many encrypted HLS streams you see on the internet.
If you're savvy enough to watch the network tab in the browser devtools, you can grab the key and easily decrypt and assemble the chunks. You can even find reference implementations on github (hls.js for instance).
Ignore any recommendation of React, TypeScript, Vite, or Tailwind. Here are some recommendations that don't require NPM/Node.
Pick a "classless" CSS library from a site like CSSBed[1]. These are kind of like Bootstrap, except you don't need to write any CSS or apply any CSS classes in your HTML for them to work. No tooling necessary; just include a <link> tag in your HTML document. If you'd like to try something similar to this "Tailwind" hotness everyone keeps talking about, try Basscss[2]. Again, no tooling, just need a <link> tag.
Once you start needing to add interactivity to your site, htmx[3] is nice and decently simple. If you really want something React-like, Mithril.js[4] is very similar but much simpler.
I recommend people with similar interests take a look at uBlock's filter language (yes, the ad blocker). It's a short and shallow learning curve until you can inject your personal CSS into webpages, and incrementally tweak them.
7GUIs – A Notational Usability Benchmark for GUI Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9050480 - Feb 2015 (17 comments including "Very cool to see my master's project here on hn")
It's fine for personal projects using something like usbfluxd to talk to your iphone from the docker container. I wouldn't rely on it to do commercial work.
It's a good idea to run SVGs through SVGO before you use them. In this case, the robot SVG data can be shrunk by almost 50% by using SVGO (or svgomg https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/) with a precision of 0 and using the 'prefers viewbox' option. I didn't try the others.
The best way to change your habits is to really understand and appreciate what they're doing for you. You're not running towards whatever your procrastination mechanism of choice may be; you're running _away_ from something else. This is why procrastinating has that tepid feeling of boredom, as you don't really want to click onto the next video / reddit / HN page, but you feel compelled to do so.
I highly recommend How We Change [0]. It was the first book in my long journey of trying to "read my self out of my depression" that was really insightful. It lays out why people choose to not change (tethered by their procrastination or other habits they deem to be fruitless), and only by seeing and appreciating that _fear of hope_ can you start to approach the (at times) extremely difficult task of authoring your life.
> Most people try quitting their addiction by banning themselves from doing it.
After some failed attempts I quit smoking 7 months a go and this change in the way of thinking made the difference for me. During the failed attempts I used to repeat to myself "I can't smoke", this last time my thought was more like "I don't want to smoke", I didn't even tell to my wife that I was trying to quit so that I would fell less the pressure of being forbidden to smoke. Somehow it worked better for me and whenever I had cravings my thoughts were usually something like "I could smoke if I wanted to, I'm 5 minutes away from a pack of cigarets, but I don't want."
I'm not saying that this was the only factor that made me stop or this is the "secret to quit smoking" or that's easy, it just worked better for me.
I do something similar. If I'm being lazy or procrastinating I ask myself to rate on a scale of ten how much I don't want to do said thing, then I ask myself why it's not a 10/10, those reasons push me to start.
Example - how badly do you not want to run today (6/10). Why not 10/10? Because I'll feel better after, because it's part of my marathon training and because dinner will feel more rewarding. Ok, go run.
I have found it very useful to frame things in terms of my future self. This works for both things I want to do, and things I want to stop doing.
For example — get home from work, tired, don’t want to go row. Instead of saying to myself “You really should go row, you said you wanted to do it 4 times a week.” I say “1 hour from now do I want to be a person who has sat on the couch for an hour or do I want to be the person who has worked out, taken a shower, and feels good”. Same thing for stopping mindless doom scrolling or making dinner vs ordering deliver or whatever.
I know it’s just a mental trick — but reframing things in terms of my future self has been incredibly powerful for me.
This is somewhat tangential but I was hoping the hive mind here might have some good ideas.
Does anyone know of a modern equivalent -- of course, as equivalent as it can be in a world where shareware isn't quite what it was -- to these infamous shareware CD-ROMs (e.g. http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/640_studio_v/index.html )? Or, to make it somewhat easier for younger (!?) audiences, of a modern-ish equivalent to Freshmeat.net?
By this, I mean something that would include:
a) New software (either newly-written programs or new versions of programs), or at least news about new software
b) In a somewhat organised fashion?
A humongous part of what I know today originated in tinkering with programs like these, from various fields, or from digging around things like the NightOwl archive ( http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/nightowl-007/index.html ), reading source code, wondering how various demos are made and so on. And, of course, later, from browsing Freshmeat.
The best I can do right now is bookmark a bunch of search pages on Github and Gitlab, visit a bunch of subreddits like /r/linux which will probably give me eye cancer sooner or later, and -- as much as I hate it -- subscribing to the AppKed RSS feed, not because I want to touch any of their downloads but because it's pretty much the only way I get to learn about new programs for macOS.
This is sub-optimal to say the least. Except for AppKed, these meet neither a) nor b), and I really don't want to rely on something like fsckin AppKed for something that I suspect can be done from legitimate sources.
I know about app stores and the like but they're not exactly useful for discovering new software even on mobile, where they're actually a thing.
tl;dr does anyone know of a modern equivalent to either Freshmeat or 640 MB of Shareware?
I've definitely noticed that this works for me on occasion - staying up all night to see the sunrise and then going about as usual seems to be a cleansing experience of sorts.
In such a state, it feels that the mind is too exhausted to lend itself to worry or anxiety. The troubles seem far less consequential through the haze.
I didn't keep track of what happens the day after catching up on sleep, but in general, being lifted even for a single day out of the quagmire is very helpful: one can make plans for the future (in a depressed state, people tend to not make any plans because they don't want anything, and what they want, they think they can't do), and one can feel contrast between their good and bad states of mind (depression tricks people into thinking that their depressed state is actually their normal state).
That said, sometimes staying up all night just meant sleeping all day -- and I don't know to which extent my experience even compares with the one of the people in the article.
Still, it's something everyone suffering from the symptoms can try for free. Beats a night of restlessness and bad sleep hands down, and there's little to lose if you experiment on a weekend.
There’s a fictional story about a girl going off to college and writing a letter to her parents (pre internet days). She laments about getting injured, her dormitory catching fire, and getting pregnant. But at the end of the letter, she reveals that none of those things happened and in reality she is just getting some bad grades.
Even though it’s not real, I find this kind of framing to be useful in real life situations. When something bad happens, it can easily feel like that was the worst possible thing that could have happened. And your reaction might match that feeling. But the reality is if you’re still alive, it probably wasn’t such a big deal and you think about it in the context of what would actually be the worst thing that could have happened.
Don’t wait for creativity to happen. Cultivate it. Make it happen.
> I lack the creativity to come up with "just for fun" projects
I disagree, primarily because I felt this way about myself for many years and later realized how wrong I was. My issue was that I had misconceptions about what creativity is and where it comes from. I felt like it was just supposed to happen, and that if it didn’t, that said something about my inherent abilities. I’d see other people creating things as if the ideas just flowed naturally, and assumed they just had special brains. And even when those ideas are just flowing, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone without a lot of other factors in their lives all enabling that flow of ideas.
Creativity doesn't always just happen on its own, but can be cultivated. More of a mindset and a way of being than some intrinsic trait that you have or you don’t.
Locking yourself in an empty room sounds like the worst way to spur ideas to be honest. My brain doesn’t get going until I’m moving. Long walks, bike rides, hiking, kayaking. Surrounding myself with new things, the beauty of nature, people who challenge me, trying new software, seeking new experiences for the sake of them.
Creativity for me is the result of my other pursuits in life. When I’m not doing those things, I’m stuck in a rut, even if those things have nothing to do with what I’m trying to create.