I am not mad about it, I am just surprised. It's been a long time since I've met an American of any class or generation who hasn't heard of D&D. D&D isn't Firefly, it's Seinfeld
What I'm curious about is, if you can only be max productive at X for maybe 25-35 hours a week, can you also be max productive at Y and Z for 25 hours each in the same week, and how different do Y and Z have to be from X and from each other for cognitive fatigue not to carry over from one to the others?
Cos if you can be max productive at 3 challenging but sufficiently different cognitive/creative tasks for 15-25 hours per week each, that sounds like a super fun, productive, efficient, sustainable, healthy, and balanced life
Cyberpunk 2077 is definitely a dramatically bigger game than Hades, but it also had 400+ people working on it for twice as long as the couple dozen Supergiant employees worked on Hades
Very odd to read an article in 2021 written for an (American!) audience that the editor judged needs an explanation of what D&D is. Can The New Yorker's audience really be THAT out of touch?
Challenger, Columbia (safety culture at NASA really improved after Challenger huh), Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, recent FL condo collapse, my average five story Brooklyn apartment building's basement and roof after a thunderstorm, Boeing's long and growing list of recent fuckups... is some stuff that comes to mind off the top of my head. Makes you wonder how many close calls, less major incidents, cracks that are noticed and repaired in time, buildings that happen to be demolished twenty years before collapsing to make way for redevelopment, etc we don't even hear about, no?
I doubt "real" engineering is better. It's just that attacking its artifacts doesn't scale, so it looks more secure. In fact, the average bridge or skyscraper is probably absolutely riddled with serious design and manufacturing flaws
The musical instrument practice app Melodics has a streak mechanic that extends your streak if you play at least 5 minutes that day. The interval is NOT adjustable. At first I thought this inability to change the minimum practice time required to continue the streak was a UX bug, but as I started racking up long streaks and finding myself practicing for longer than the minimum five minutes on many days, I realized it was a brilliant feature
What's more surprising (I would say, crazy) is that anyone expects more. Nobody works at their top level for more than 2-3 hours a day. Maaaaaybe 3-4 tops. Doesn't mean you can't be productive for many more hours, but you are not gonna be able to work effectively on tasks that are anywhere near the limit of your ability. You just can't and nobody does it....not athletes, not artists, not writers, not philosophers, not mathematicians, ..- not anyone doing hard creative work
Also, for anyone doing that kind of work, things like walking around and socializing is both vitally recuperative and indirectly productive in its own right
I love this book. At the same time, isn't the whole point of abstraction to make this knowledge irrelevant for people who build applications on top of it? Like, the knowledge should only have utility insofar as the abstraction designers and implementers at the levels below yours did a bad job, unless you have a use case they didn't design for