It reminds me of the Epicurean hierarchy of desires, the genius Epicurus had it figured out more then a couple of millenia ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism

The thing about "apps for one" actually resonated with me quite a bit.

The last year I've struggled finding freelance work and I've found myself with more time (and less money) that I would like. I feel guilty, because one side of me feels like I should have spent this time to learn ML or to make an app that makes passive income. The thing is: I have no interest in making "apps" to make money. I wouldn't even know what app to make, because there is no quotidian problem for which I think an app would make my life easier. On the contrary, I don't have a smartphone and apps are making my life harder, as we move towards a world where apps are expected for everything. But instead, I have made a couple of games for my girlfriend's birthdays, and I also made her web portfolio, all forms, I guess, of "apps for one" made for love. Other than that, perhaps, I enjoy tuning my Linux system (recently migrated from Xmonad to Hyprland), a form of making, perhaps, an app for one, in the only tech device that still feels like I can control instead of it trying to control myself. Other than that, I use my time to go to the gym and sometimes to paint or DJ or just party, even though I often spend on Hacker News, Youtube, Wikipedia and other media way more time that I would like to.

So all in all, I find it difficult to write code these days with the joy of when I was younger, and it is hard to motivate myself if there's no money involved, with the exception of those gestures of love. It saddens me, because I believe it is such a powerful and beautiful skill. But I just find the current state of world and how "technology" is used to extract capital out of all human relationships rather depressing. The current wave of "AI" only makes the problem worse, and adds an dark sense of impending doom...

I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.

I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.

But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.

Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.

The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.

I started using my IT and data management skills on film sets to provide data security around the footage. It’s been a breath of fresh air to use advanced concepts in a field that’s very hands on and a big team effort. A lot of communication and working together. It’s been great.

I lived exactly the same thing also two years ago.

What changed everything to me was, impulsively, enrolling myself to a rollerblading course in a skate park. I was 34, overweight (still am) and never did anything like this (I never did barely any sport at all tbh). Oh boy was this transformative.

I'm still in the course every week and like you, it feels good because it's tangible : not in the material way like sculpting but rather by doing things with my body (and my brain) I would'nt believe I could do at all even when I was younger. That's an amazing feeling after decades of watching things on screens (yes, I know how that sounds pathetic, but that's my story).

Like: The oven light. It's an incandescent bulb, which is also to say that it's waaaay better at being a heater than it is at being a source of light.

I found that leaving the light switched on in the oven, and the oven door closed, kept the temperature right around 100F. It varied a bit depending on ambient, but never by more than a few degrees.

---

[1]: It was an old Frigidaire-built electric range that someone gave me for free. It worked, until one day when I switched it on at a sensible temperature setting and put a frozen pizza in there. The temperature control then failed, and it failed stuck in the on position. The pizza was very badly burned and looked pretty crispy when I came back to it a short time later.

And when I tried to retrieve the pizza, the hotpad in my hand was converted directly from fabric into smoke as soon as it touched the pan.

While I lamented about the lost pizza and the expense of buying new replacement parts for an old freebie oven, a friend suggested using a PID controller and an SSR instead.

So I did exactly that: I bought the parts (including ceramic wire nuts and fiberglass-insulated wire), cut a square hole in the panel with a grinder and a deathwheel for the new controls, mounted an SSR in a recess on the back with an enormous heatsink, and it all went together splendidly. I put the new bits in series with the old bits, so it was never any less-safe than it had become on its own accord.

I miss that oven sometimes. It was actually kind of fun learning how to tune the PID, and to be able to reliably get a consistent temperature from it.

The oven-light discovery was just an accident; if I actually wanted 100F for some reason, I'd have just set the PID box to that temperature.

Anyway, I should probably imitate you, every time I see some people crafting real things I have a little blip of envy.

“Thin bread.”

No sourdough enthusiast or artisanal bread baker would agree. You even get a different metabolic pathway active at higher temps.

Try the “low and slow” method, rise then let it sit a day in the fridge, see if it’s really the same taste.

While making stuff is only a side thing, it makes the grind during the week tolerable. I feel like I have something meaningful in my life (outside of my family) and it has given me purpose. I'm grateful for it. And it is so damn fun!

We use different temperature profiles during proofing for different products (we have fancy proofing fridges where we set temperature profiles over a 12 to 36 hour period depending on the product). Low and slow is good for certain types of bread, or pizza base. But not so much for a brioche or croissant dough.

I personally love slow fermented, heavy rye based sourdough, but lots of our customers don't and the bread we sell most is a classic white sourdough fermented comparatively quickly at higher temperature for a lighter and less sour taste. It's still very slow fermentation compared to commercial yeast, of course.

The proofing temperature profile for this bread isn't as simple as "start warm and gradually cool down" (i.e. the warm oven method), but that is a reasonable approximation for a home baker.

I discovered later that the length of time it spends rising matters. Room temperature (15-19 degrees Celsius) is optimal and will take a couple of hours for the first rise and less than an hour for the second. It is of course necessary to keep the dough away from any drafts. I keep it wrapped in a blanket or towel.

35 degrees Celsius is far too warm and won't give it enough time to develop the flavour and texture of good bread.

Interestingly he recently discussed how using LLMs tends to remove this desirable difficulty: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/a-risk-of-cognitive-conv...

This means that the results (both of the task and of the learning by the student) are lower if the student uses an LLM first, but slightly improves if they use it second

Computing was a thing by geeks, for geeks. It was revolutionary. It was fun. Now it's the lowest common denominator. Instagram.

Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.

Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.

You can write things which sound pretty. It's the equivalent of wordy sugar. It's much harder to to write things you've learned from life experience or thought deeply about.

Subject your beliefs to the Socratic method. If they've survived your own criticism to the fullest extent and can be validated by your own lived experience, then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.

An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style.

The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.

"No-knead" recipes usually involve 20-30 minute cadence of "fold-and-stretch" followed by a rise to allow the gluten to develop naturally without kneading. Usually about four times.

I use like 65% or maybe 70% hydration for bread, little more for whole wheat. Like 25:1 sugar (or less?), 100:1 salt, 100:1 yeast. High protein flour if you can.

For just basic bread, no sourdough, not a sandwich loaf, etc.

I get it.

One sentence pragraphs feel punchy.

It feels like you're writing copy for an Apple ad.

..but it only works when it's in another medium, in a shorter format. In this form, it's just exhausting.

Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.

But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.

Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.

sometimes it does seem to work

your mileage may vary

His destiny was just too big to spend / So he broke it into smaller bills and change

By the time he'd try to buy the things he needed / He had spent it all on loosies and weed and

He had spent it all on chips and Coca-Cola / He had spent it all on chocolate and vanilla

He had spent it all and didn't even feel it / He had spent it all and didn't even feel it

The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.

How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.

Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly

Consider the following excerpt of the post:

  The thick life doesn't scale.

  That's the whole point.

  So: bake bread.

There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.

PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).

Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."

Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?

> then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.

Ideas don't have to be infallible to be worth writing about. It's a slippery slope to not writing at all.

See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/

I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.

Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.

#strawmanning

My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)

I've never baked a loaf of bread.

I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.

Baking has always been someone else's problem.

But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.

(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)