Lessons from OS 2
i spent 20 hours on a programming assignment in uni.
it made me realize problem solving is a human activity.
- relying on the background knowledge of others is incredibly, incredibly useful. yeah, theoretically given infinite time you can make any program to solve any problem. in real life however, our time and energy are so very limited it is painful. background knowledge quickly sets you up with an idea of what to do, which massively cuts down on the space you must search for solutions. it’s fun to be 3 steps from the solution, and much harder to be 30 steps from it. a short primer from some articles, youtube, gpt, or your teacher or friends on a problem is the actual 10-100x boost.
- yes, you’ve probably gone your entire life hearing the newton stand on giants quote 100s of times. but for me, actually internalizing that quote continues to be a proverbial sisyphus journey for me.
- at some point you realize that frustration and tiredness from solving problems comes from a fixed mind. whereas, open-mindedness leaves you pretty much always in a good mood when solving problems; you realize the mental model you build of the world must be constantly changed, otherwise problems aren’t problems and learning isn’t learning. its accuracy is not tied to your reputation
- when there is a will, there is a way. timers, diet, sleep, exercise… humans so many years back endured far worse and did more. faith is what matters.
- gdb is a superset of any graphical debugger. you can break at any line, you don’t need to just break at functions! seriously, a good tool like this massively decreases the amount of time you need to spend putting print statements in your code to try and binary search your entire codebase for a problem. so much so it makes impossible projects possible.
- i suspect that currently, wayland linux has evolved to a point where typing input latency is lower across the board than windows, and other things like window switching and shell performance are orders of magnitude higher. working on linux feels a lot closer to working bare metal. but i’ve yet to test this hypothesis with typometer.