...I keep forgetting that for normal people, sleeping in is actually lazy, and not a survival tactic to recover from the sleep deprivation of doing 12 hour rotating day-night shifts in time to do more shifts.

I've had this attitude of "do hard things" for a while, although the hard things I've done (mainly jumping into critical care nursing as a new grad) aren't super typical for LW. I guess technically I work a wage job, but it's also incredibly meaningful work that pushes me to my limits every single day and is gradually transforming me into the kind of person I want to be; y'know, calm under pressure, smiling in the face of adversity, organized, good at teamwork, good at empathy and reading people's emotions, etc.

I've considered joining the army for a similar reason of pushing myself to become stronger. Unsure if I will still do this, as moving to the Bay Area is probably higher value.

However, just a little bit into the first chapter, he throws in stuff about covariance and regression coefficients that go way over my head.

M, my usual reflex in situations like that is to pause, look up the terms in question, as well as associated wikipedia pages, and see if I'm missing any basic knowledge; and once I'm more comfortable with those, go back to the more advanced book/article.

I am beginning to track my motivation so I can have something of an idea of how often I ought to 'refuel' as well as what sorts of things work for 'refueling.'

I began to schedule a chunk of time to make a to-do list for the next day in my daily to-do lists. They work great when I actually make them, but I remember to make them less than half the time.

I did not see this up there. I cannot think of a dense was of saying this at the moment, so I'll go ahead and ramble and hope someone finds it useful.

I am currently slogging through Causality by Pearl. It's probably a little above my level, but I'm getting most of it. However, just a little bit into the first chapter, he throws in stuff about covariance and regression coefficients that go way over my head. I almost gave up. Fortunately, I recognized them as terms from statistics. I inferred from his rapid coverage of it that it was included as an 'ooh, shiny!' moment for people who are already familiar with the terms. So I glazed over it and moved on. So far it hasn't been a problem, but I'm not terribly far into it either.

So maybe, don't dwell on stuff that you don't really need to? Focus on the important stuff?

When you said to suppose that "everything we want is [impossible]", did you mean that literally? Because normally if what you want is impossible, you should start wanting a different thing (or do that super-saiyan effort thing if it's that kind of impossible), but if everything is impossible, you couldn't do that either. If there is no possible action that produces a favorable outcome, I can think of no reason to act at all.

(Of course, if I found myself in that situation, I would assume I made a math error or something and start trying to do things that I want and that I think I messed up when I decided that the thing was impossible.)

If you didn't mean -everything-, then why not just start pursuing the thing which gives the most value which is possible to do?

Perhaps I misunderstood the question?

My experiment in massively curtailing my use of Twitter and Facebook is going well. Objectively, I'm completing more items on my to-do list on a daily basis; subjectively, it appears that my ability to focus has improved, which I'm willing to chalk up to not feeling compelled to check new-message notifications and therefore just not having that distraction, though I would like to be able to measure this in some way.

I was expecting to feel rather cut off from the world, but fortunately this has not been the case. I've been more responsive to more personal methods of contact (email, IM, in-person interaction) that I had previously felt spread too thin to deal with, and this has been hedonically rewarding (e.g., answering email from person asking for some software design advice -> nice thank-you email -> warm fuzzies).

I also started the Tiny Habits course that I saw mentioned in the Useful Habits Repository.

it might be more impressive to switch to something less ridiculously simple than Python.

Why? Do you get extra points for doing things the hard way? As opposed to: choosing the right tool for the job.

(I am not familiar enough with Python, so this is not a comment endorsing Python, just a reaction to the "less ridiculously simple" part. If two programs do the same thing, what's wrong with the simpler one?)

I consistently forget to account for the halo effect, and that it may be in part because I wish to believe it does not exist.

Yeah. We programmers are proud of our ability to write complex code, so we wish complex code was the most admired thing about computer programs. Unfortunately, most people are impressed by nice screenshots. (At the first moment. When they use the program for some time, they start caring also about things like working properly, not crashing, etc. But to get them there, you need a nice screenshot first.)

I think this is a very good plan. It is good to make simple games (or merely demos of the concept) first, because the distance between no game and a simple game is probably greater than between a simple game and a complex game. So if you make a simple game, you solve the problems on simple instances, and then you are ready to deal with them in more complex situations, because the core ideas are now clear.

For example, even very simple games usually contain a lot of the following: loading bitmaps from files, displaying bitmaps, loading music from files, playing music, reading user input, calculating coordinates, calculating movement, calculating collisions, timing and animations, keeping values in variables, switching between introductory screen and game screen and victory/defeat screen. -- Which is a lot of things, especially if you are doing it for the first time. And each of those things can become a separate problem, with subproblems, such as: "what to display on the screen while the bitmaps are loading, and what to do if the loading fails". Also, the language and libraries may create additional problems, for example to make animations in Java you have to understand the thread model and synchonization, otherwise mysterious bugs can happen. And I am still speaking about a Pong-like game.

Then a complex game contains more of the previous things, plus: reading configuration files, saving and loading a game, AI opponents, perhaps an installation program. (And nicer graphics and music, but that is outside of the programming scope.)

So doing the simple game properly -- not just on the "it works (most of the time)" level, but having a clear design and understanding how and why the parts cooperate -- is a very good start for making a complex game.

(Here is a trick you may find useful: After making the algorithm, you can hugely improve the impression of the game by adding nice graphics, even when some parts of graphics are completely irrelevant to the algorithm. For examples if different levels have different background images; or if the level contains pictures that don't interact with anything; or if the same thing is represented by different bitmaps in different levels, like trees with different shapes and colors, a level with things covered by snow, etc. A textbook example is the game Knytt. Also, nice screenshots create a good halo effect.)

Just to make sure, by "building portfolio" you mean making computer programs, or what? What kind of programs?

Are there any details on this that you would like to share that you think might be useful to others?