I am having so many issues with my vision. I don't have a very high prescription(+1.5 on left and +1.25 on my right) but I consulted 3 eye doctors and optometrists last year. I still don't think my prescription is correct as I get headaches and my eyes get tired after few hours. I don't know if there is any better solution around.
You need to specify your working distance. I use reading glasses with my laptop and occupational glasses with desktop LCDs. If I accidentally pick up the wrong glasses I notice the less-clear vision.
High display brightness tends to hurt more with glasses than without.
I think internet was way awesome before digital advertising era. There should be areas of internet which should try to replicate the early internet i.e text-only design, bring back forums and no advertising revenue.
Even with advertising, Google Ads (then called AdSense) was a lot more generous with their revenue share than they are now. Lots of little blogs and forums thrived because the money coming in was enough to keep the proprietors interested in maintaining a community of commenters.
Then comment bot spam started growing out of control, webmasters ceded the comment platform to centralized services like Disqus, and finally Google slashed ad premiums, so websites either started disappearing or getting folded into the properties of 'blog networks' and lost their personality in search of pageviews.
Modern society and work makes people have less free time to form memories. Certainly, people felt time is running fast even in older times but I doubt if time ran faster at the same rate for people from say 50s as much as it is for us today?
I think common wisdom now is don't put too much effort until you validate or test the idea. How do you not invest too much time if the traction takes too long?
Where do you hear that "common wisdom" from, though? Probably the same people that tout and follow the "12 startups in 12 months" mantra. I'd be wary of calling that common wisdom. If you think your idea is a good idea, and you think your business plan is solid, why would you think you're investing too much time in getting traction? All I'm saying is don't expect traction in 1 month. Instead, go in expecting that it'll take 12 months. If you don't have traction by then, or at least a solid direction from user feedback, then you should reevaluate. Ideally, you should be getting user feedback from day 1. And if you aren't, your idea or business plan sucks. (Or you need to grow as a marketer.)
Of course, this isn't a hard and fast rule. Sometimes an idea sucks, and you'll know that just by the fact that you can't get anybody interested in trying your product, even before asking to pay for it. That's where validation and testing come in, so I'm not saying to not validate and test. That's always step 1. All I'm saying is that new founders give up on good ideas way too early. Their expectations of overnight success do not match reality. Validate and test and iterate can take a long time.
And it's worth noting: sometimes iterate is not iterating on your product, but iterating on yourself as a founder. I stood in my own way a lot as a new founder, focusing on the wrong things. It took awhile to get past that. After I did, growth was much easier. But if I gave up early, assuming my product sucked, I would have never gotten to that point.
This is one of the major gripes I have with modern software too. It is becoming overly inefficient. I personally attribute this to two reasons:
1) Product managers have more influence and decision making in prioritizing what should be delivered. I have routinely encountered wherever I worked that any work related to improving efficiency or spending time in non-business related work is constantly de-prioritized. Controlling programmers time means certain system bugs get lower priority and junk accumulates over time and software gets bloated. There are code-path ways which are not being used anymore but no-one bothered to clean up as they have not been instructed to do so yet.
2) I find the explosion of javascript in popularity is a major reason of this inefficiency. Imagine the compute and electricity wasted globally because certain developers don't want to build multi-threaded applications and prefer dynamic typing.
Oftentimes it is make or break for a company/project to get the programmers to follow yagni. Cleaning up old code can very much offer no value (short or long term) to the product, the conpany or the user. And a programmer who is zoning on a task or story should not need to pull himself out of that.
Why are Japanese so adamant and self-sabotaging? What explains this behavior? Their govt simply refuse to tackle population decline. They could easily give tax breaks to families and encourage people to have children. They also seem to be adamant on not opening up immigration. Is there any deep social reasons for this?
Very simply put, there are many more important values in Japanese society than “having as many kids as your parents did.” What these factors are and why they exist is a topic so vast it borders the incomprehensible. All of the reductive, frequently cited reasons are correct individually, but when added up they don’t come to a conclusive answer. That is why Japan is not alone with this problem.
I think however that a trip to Japan would leave a firm impression as to some root causes. In many ways it is staring you in the face while you’re there.
Modern city lifestyle doesn't have much physical activity. This could be the reason why we see increased depression and anxiety. This could also be the reason why people in third world countries don't have this level of depression and anxiety in their society. They have much higher level of physical activity and movement throughout the day.
But "walkable cities" can overdo that. I live in big European city, do not have a car, and I work from home, and I have most of the places that I need to go to (grocery store, dry cleaning, dentist's office, pharmacy, restaurants, etc) within half a mile radius, which means I average like 3500 steps per day, having no need to go any further.
17000 steps is what I did on my vacation in Lisbon, when I did A LOT of sightseeing. Can't imagine walking that much in my home city.
People in underdeveloped nations are also unfit. Mexico has chronic obesity among children, among the worst in the entire world. 1/4 of the Brazilian population is obese. Almost all islands in Polynesia, Micronesia and the Caribbean have more than half of their population obese. There's also a lot of anxiety and depression in underdeveloped nations where you have to struggle to get the most basic things like water, electricity and food, deal with crime, gangs, brutal dictators and war. Just because you don't see mass shootings and suicides it doesn't mean people from many of these countries don't deal with extreme levels of stress, anxiety and mental disorders on a daily basis.
That isn't necessarily true. In cities it may be possible to live without a car by walking almost everywhere. This results in a lot of walking and carrying exercise.
It is hard to do this once you stuck in a job which is not demanding and you have to keep this hobby yourself. I think thats where most programmers/engineers fail. Few side projects but then they lose motivation to keep going.
There are other factors which contribute more to mental health but this is like justifying what the authors want using mental health as a reason. Making cities more walkable would be better for other reason but I doubt if mental health would significantly increase if we make cities more walkable. San Francisco is very much walkable but has highest mental health issues.
