Can I ask how you find the fastest links between countries and the servers for them? (Background: during my vacation last month I was playing an MMO from the APAC region but with servers in Germany, and it was crazy high latency. It made the experience quite bad. I wanted to rent my own servers and build a faster link for myself.)
While I can't answer your question as asked (and am not OP), I can at least point out that that when I ping my Contabo VPS I see
- 308ms from my landline ADSL2+ (not on the NBN yet, hopefully soon),
- 350ms over 0-bar 4G (house in blind spot, yay),
- 300ms from EC2 running in ap-southeast-2, and
- 312ms from Oracle Cloud in ap-sydney-1 (okay the x86-64 one was 309, the ampere one was 314-317)
which sorta highlights the sore-thumb reality of transatlantic cables: I'm 16,267km/10,108mi away, and there's very very little I can do about it.
The only thing I do really wonder about is if Starlink does p2p backhaul between the satellites, or if they're just floating mirrors... but after just clarifying that radio waves can't go faster than light I'm now unsure whether that would actually make a difference. Hm.
I'm also motivated by small wins. However, at some point you have to face the realization that you need to power through some drudge work to get to those wins. I don't know if there's an easy workaround.
What I found worked best for me was:
1. Being passionate about the goal. This in isolation is not enough, but when you're already working on something, it helps for coping with the inevitable roadblocks and the frustration that follows.
2. Launch asap. Then iterate. Iteration is more fun than launching because the former provides quick wins while the latter requires expending enormous energy upfront before you see a win. The approach that worked for me is to pick the minimal features I need for the end product and build towards that with (metaphorical) blinders on w.r.t. all other features. Really think about the bare minimum features you need, and then slog through till you hit it. It's basically the path of least resistance to get to your MVP. Once I hit that, iteration is more fun.
3. Consistency beats extreme bursts of productivity. Try to improve things a little at a time. This isn't always possible, but still attempting to tackle things in digestible chunks helps me with procrastination. Whenever I do bursts of work, I get the results but also burn out on that particular project. I can't look at it for a while afterwards. It's like squatting five reps of 150kg at the gym and recovering for the rest of the week vs. lifting five reps of 75kg for three days in the week. The difference in total weight moved at the end of the week is huge.
4. Energy management. The above point is one example of energy management over time management. Attempting to micro-manage my time to gain efficiency never seems to work for me in the long run. Instead, thinking about it as managing my overall energy tends to be more fruitful. Eat healthy, daily exercise however little it might be, good sleep, and some social interaction all help. All those will improve overall energy and psychological outlook. Beyond that, work during your peak energy hours and temporarily remove distractions that will waste them.
5. Get feedback. Show it to your target community and gather feedback. This is the best form of external motivation you can get. (Of course this may also be very hard to get depending on the community you're targeting.)
Amazing how Stripe consistently executes fantastic solutions for all the very real and difficult pain points of building commercial products on the web. Fantastic work!
A fifth might even sound off key if you're very used to equal temperament (it's about 2 cents below an equal temperament). You know it by there being no or less "wobbling" between the tones.
For listening tips, look for vocalist groups where there's "One Voice Per Part" (OVPP). Voces8, Vox Luminis, etc. When there's only one voice, you don't get the inherent wobbling happening when two instruments/voices play in unison.
Not all genres are possible to have just (jazz chord colors would sound rubbish).
You basically can look up just intonation versus equal temperament for the basics. https://pages.mtu.edu/~suits/scales.html gives the mathematical answer but doesn't get into the history.
A clause that says "assuming twelve-tone equal temperament" would be sufficient here, but you can really go down the rabbit hole if you start digging into scales (see microtonal), and your page is meant to be more basic.
