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So, firstly, I’m amazed anyone can do that in bed and then sleep properly. I’d be dreaming in assembly all night. When the author talked about reading the enti

So, firstly, I’m amazed anyone can do that in bed and then sleep properly. I’d be dreaming in assembly all night. When the author talked about reading the entire GNU Screen manual I did think “this sounds like stressful overkill” for a personal project, but I see their point about focusing on process rather than goal. Does it ever really matter than personal projects don’t get finished?

ptsneves 5y ago
I also absolutely do not allow myself to learn new things before going to sleep otherwise I will be thinking and dreaming about it in a kind of sick way. This is specially harmful on week days where it disrupts my sleep. Sleep is essential for my well being and professional ability.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Same boat. Exercising my brain before sleep basically means I'll sleep very late because I just have to figure it out or figure out that I can't figure it out in a few hours. The author seems to possess some super human power to cool down whenever he wants, or he is super good with assembly.
- adamddev1 5y ago
  Ya same here, if I dive into some programming task it usually delays my sleep by 2 hours at least. I've had to avoid it for my health.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    I wonder how to learn to cool down whenever you want. Going to be a HUGE advantage.
    - jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Might try Wim Hof breathing techniques: hyperventilate + breath hold, and repeat. Can’t stay up thinking if you starve your brain of oxygen taps temple
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    I'm thinking, maybe the trick is to pick an exercise that can be easily decomposed into steps, each of them requires very little time and energy. For example, translating one assembly to another with the same architecture might fit the description because most of the time you are just doing "translation". Of course I'm not an assembly professional so I might be underestimating the difficulty here. Another good example is carpentry. As long as you finish step X you can leave it there. There is no need to burn candles to finish all steps at once. A bad example is algorithm design. Unless it's second nature to you, it's really difficult to decompose it into steps (because maybe they are wrong steps), and even if you can, picking up from where you left off last night might actually be more difficult than starting over from the beginning.
    - bambataa 5y ago
      I’ve tried this and it sort of works, but what happens is that I get excited by the sense of achievement and want to do more, and/or get wrapped up in thinking through the next steps.
matbatt38 5y ago
What's wrong about dreaming about assembly? Your brain needs to process all that learning
- bambataa 5y ago
  Because my mind will be racing before I go to sleep, making it harder to get to sleep, and then my dreams are really dull but repetitive and I wake up mentally frazzled and worn out. Almost as if I’ve mentally computed a long loop for hours. The other evening I did a small amount of work on a compiler I’m making and for ages all I could think was “compilers! So cool! Making those basic blocks! Yeah!”. It would be cool if I had a dream where I intuitively understood whatever I was designing, but my dreams aren’t that insightful…

ptsneves 5y ago

I also absolutely do not allow myself to learn new things before going to sleep otherwise I will be thinking and dreaming about it in a kind of sick way. This is specially harmful on week days where it disrupts my sleep. Sleep is essential for my well being and professional ability.

markus_zhang 5y ago

Same boat. Exercising my brain before sleep basically means I'll sleep very late because I just have to figure it out or figure out that I can't figure it out in a few hours. The author seems to possess some super human power to cool down whenever he wants, or he is super good with assembly.

adamddev1 5y ago
Ya same here, if I dive into some programming task it usually delays my sleep by 2 hours at least. I've had to avoid it for my health.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  I wonder how to learn to cool down whenever you want. Going to be a HUGE advantage.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    Might try Wim Hof breathing techniques: hyperventilate + breath hold, and repeat. Can’t stay up thinking if you starve your brain of oxygen taps temple
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  I'm thinking, maybe the trick is to pick an exercise that can be easily decomposed into steps, each of them requires very little time and energy. For example, translating one assembly to another with the same architecture might fit the description because most of the time you are just doing "translation". Of course I'm not an assembly professional so I might be underestimating the difficulty here. Another good example is carpentry. As long as you finish step X you can leave it there. There is no need to burn candles to finish all steps at once. A bad example is algorithm design. Unless it's second nature to you, it's really difficult to decompose it into steps (because maybe they are wrong steps), and even if you can, picking up from where you left off last night might actually be more difficult than starting over from the beginning.
  - bambataa 5y ago
    I’ve tried this and it sort of works, but what happens is that I get excited by the sense of achievement and want to do more, and/or get wrapped up in thinking through the next steps.

matbatt38 5y ago

What's wrong about dreaming about assembly? Your brain needs to process all that learning

bambataa 5y ago
Because my mind will be racing before I go to sleep, making it harder to get to sleep, and then my dreams are really dull but repetitive and I wake up mentally frazzled and worn out. Almost as if I’ve mentally computed a long loop for hours. The other evening I did a small amount of work on a compiler I’m making and for ages all I could think was “compilers! So cool! Making those basic blocks! Yeah!”. It would be cool if I had a dream where I intuitively understood whatever I was designing, but my dreams aren’t that insightful…