I'll use what I'll have to use, it's a tool like you said. But I don't have to love it. Configuration is a necessary evil and whatever I end up using, I'm never fully satisfied with the end result.
I'll just come out and say that I hate every single configuration language. All of them suck in their own unique way and every time a new one comes out it fixes some issues of the language it's supposed to supersede but never without introducing new problems. And eventually you're left thinking that you should've just used a .ini file.
I actually really like the fact that my Garmin Instinct is not really a smart watch, it makes connecting it to your phone optional. Mine has never connected to a phone because I don't like to run Google's spyware on my phone. Yet, I can use most of it's functions I care about (time & date, GPS, moon & sun, compass, steps, heart rate, temperature, sports-specific stuff) without giving up my soul to Big Tech.
That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week.
I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.
I'll second the recommendation of fiction (I love the classics) and add a recommendation for reading philosophy and specifically the history of philosophy. Learning how our frame thinking evolved from the time of the Greeks to the middle ages to more modern times has been nothing short of illuminating for me personally. I don't think you need to read the original works or the really academic stuff (you can if you want to) but having a feel of how our thinking got to be is really useful.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to their cats' behaviour when another pet dies. I remember when one of our four cats didn't come home, there were definitely changes in how the remaining three behaved. Apparently the cat got hit by a car and was found by someone and dumped in one of those bins where they dump dead animals for rendering. We took her home and laid her on the lawn so the other cats could know that she was dead. Each of the cats came one by one, giving it a sniff and concluding that she was dead. One of them however stayed with her until we took her away to bury her, an incredibly endearing display. It took a while before they all started acting like they did before.
And with the subsequent deaths of all the remaining cats, as they are all sadly deceased, I saw similar things happen.
We should not anthropomorphise animals, but that doesn't mean they don't have complex feelings or thoughts. If we find that even bees can "play", it's not that weird if cats can "grieve".
There is a difference between tenacity and doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results when there are no signs of progress.
Ideas like "never give up" and "the power of habit" are not universally true, they are heuristics you can apply to your daily life.
In complex systems there are no absolutes. If you have an idea that can be applied to all things equally you're in a cult.
The problem with these alternative shells (to me) is that you'll have to install the shell on other machines before you can use the script you wrote. Bash being present on just about all Linux distros makes it useful, even if the scripting is quite terrible. And if I'll have to do something more complicated I'll use a proper scripting language like Python instead of learning another shell language.
It would be great if bash was a little less crap though.
Can't say I like the attitude in this post. It seems to me that either he thinks that criticism on the software is criticism of the developer, or he spends too much time reading posts by people using the kind of language he's using.
There will always be people who'll criticize what you do, especially on the internet. You can't let it get to you.
The only thing that jumped out to me is a lack of a panic button that stops all sound.