Hi Ben, after yet another (3rd I think? could be 4th) round of binge-watching all your videos, I was wondering if you made any progress with "Wire EDM" that you mention in one of your videos. That process is (for me, at least) pretty much pure magic. And the resulting cuts are just unbelievable.

I haven't worked on EDM in a while. Check out BaxEDM and his other customers for a DIY wire EDM design. The BaxEDM channel recently showed one of those ultra right tolerance sliding parts where the joint disappears.

>Procrastination is serious problem and anything that helps someone deal with it should not be dismissed.

You don't typically deal with something by making it worse, in this case spending more time not doing work...

I'm pretty sure plenty of people addicted to MMORPGs don't forget leveling up their character, and going to the "ruins at 7 pm with their teamspeak party to raid for magic staff wand XYZ" ; to peddle the tool they use to procrastinate as a _cure_, because at least you're doing something diligently? Sorry, I am a nice person, but I am able to have strong opinions: This is nonsense.

The implication, that "procrastination" means "no due diligence" in anything is _WRONG_. It's due diligence in things that should take no priority as the very means to avoid the things you should be doing instead!

"Play Factorio, it has benefits for you that help you be productive" in response to someone dealing with procrastination? If that isn't absurd, I don't know what is.

> I'm pretty sure plenty of people addicted to MMORPGs don't forget leveling up their character

I've been this person - I spent almost two years playing Everquest to the detriment of my own goals and wellbeing.

MMOs are a special class of hazard in that area, IMO. I feel like I'm particularly apt to getting "sucked into" games, there is always a point where it becomes significantly less fun and I lose interest. In most games that's around 20-50 hours. For "good" games, it's around 200 hours. For MMOs... I don't know because I've never found it. With EQ I only stopped playing because my PC finally died and I couldn't afford to replace it (because I couldn't hold down a job). With others I stopped because I saw the feedback loop had begun that would lead to that sort of issue and forced myself to do so.

> "Play Factorio, it has benefits for you that help you be productive" in response to someone dealing with procrastination? If that isn't absurd, I don't know what is.

I totally understand and respect your point here, but I didn't come to the article through the series. As a result, I didn't make any connections to trying to see Factorio as a tool to combat procrastination.

Instead, I saw the article as advocating Factorio as a means of developing your problem-solving skills. For that purpose... honestly, it's pretty good. The article makes a good case for this and my own experience aligns with it.

I would have no issues encouraging my daughters to play Factorio (or similar games like Satisfactory), because I believe there are important skills that can be learned there. Like most things, the Pareto Principle applies: you're going to learn a lot more on your first playthrough than your forty-second. Even so... as a software engineer, I see many parallels in building and maintaining complex systems in the real world that can be drawn from the game.

For example - and I'm playing Satisfactory these days, so the items come from that, not Factorio - in the early game you need a ton of iron plates and iron rods. Mid-game you need reinforced iron plates, screws, and modular frames, all of which are made from iron plates and iron rods. Even though you know you'll shortly need several multiples of the number of iron plates and rods that you need in the beginning, it doesn't make sense to build a massive factory to create them in bulk yet. Doing so means that it takes you longer to get through the early game, and invariably your needs change as you progress: maybe you need fewer iron plates and rods than you thought; maybe you need more; maybe you need them halfway across the map. You just don't know enough in the early game to accurately predict what you're going to need and where.

This has strong corollaries with software engineering, both within a single application and when building more complex systems. It's almost always better to build the minimal structures necessary to deliver what you need at the time. There are a few cases where it makes sense to optimize early, but those cases all require experience in building the thing you're working on and the burden of early optimization is much more difficult to justify than it may seem.

>In Factorio, if you don't have enough let's say steel plates, you _HAVE_ to go and increase your ore production.

No you don't. Unless you have literally zero supply. You can always settle for "good enough" and live on less than perfect supply of any resource.

Except OP was explaining how it doesn't solve procrastination, at all. Procrastination problems don't get solved by having a new method of procrastination. That's like trying to combat crack addiction by switching to heroin. Nothing in their comment seemed like, "just stop being poor".

There is a reason why those hopelessly addicted to it call it Cracktorio :)

I find it similar to Civilization one more turn syndrome.

There is always something small you meant to do, one more improvements that will take only a min... suddenly you hear birds singing outside... its 4am...

Never again.

Yes I had the same feeling, although in Civilization there were at least discrete turns. Each one presents a logical stopping point. Factorio just keeps going, there is never a logical stopping point because there is always a resource bottleneck to solve. I remember staying up late for Civ, but I never (almost) completely skipped sleep all together & blew off other commitments.

I can imagine that sooner or later reply to threats like this would be a Tomahawk or two.

That's exactly how Google ads worked in the very beginning. Text only, all in one place, it was great! If we could somehow return that type of ads, I'd consider disabling adblocker.

It's also important to distinguish between 'knowing' and 'understanding'.

If someone tells me how to says Good morning in, let's say, Mongolian, I 'know' how to greet people, but dont 'understand' how it works (can't tell which part of the sound/symbol represents what, etc.)

This is still happening? It used to be very annoying decade or so ago, but I thought it was already solved/fixed/improved.

Are there really no option to make a domain registration without expiration?

There's lot of different TLDs each with their own rules, fees, and registrars. It's hard to unify that landscape, particularly when a bunch of ccTLDs have very little infrastructure behind them.

The closest you can really get is hiring a mark protection firm like MarkMonitor which themselves are registrars for a handful of TLDs (namely .com) and can basically indefinitely extend registrations for everything they have contracts for.

But parent post is arguing that to become a doctor you need to memorize ungodly amount of things, which is absolutely true. And about that wall of reference material .. yeah, it's usually there to impress patients, most of those books were never touched :) (I'm from family with too many MDs)

It might be true, but I'm arguing it isn't necessarily the best.

We need more doctors, if that means changing the culture within the profession so they're more inclined to use those reference material that would be good thing.

By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like Freedom is Slavery when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. (Gorge Orwell - 1984)