Post things that motivate you, to-do list items you're aiming for, strategies for self-improvement and workflow, etc

A thread for all anons that are interested in foreign languages to share their advice, tips, and help others that are embarking on the same journey. Feel free to state the current language(s) that you know and the ones that you're learning or wish to learn, share resources and apps that you find helpful. I believe in you all and good luck!

Based or anti based?

"If you aren't going to use it, don't buy it." Last year, I realized I've been wasting my money on useless things or things I could go without but I buy on a whim. Going outside is like a trial, where all the good shops and nice cafes try to charm me into buying something I don't really need. Looking at social media is frustating, as everyone seems to enjoy boasting about their collections of things they don't use. Even hanging out with friends seems to revolve around consuming: going to a cafe and buying sweets and drinks, going shopping, etc. ITT you can: >discuss consumerism and trends >criticize people/communities who encourage this "lifestyle" (hoarders, influencers, fandoms, etc.) >recommend books/guides/tips to consume less >propose activities/hobbies that don't revolve around spending money >vent or talk about your experiences regarding the use of money

Genes, Circumstances, and Volitional Activities are Not Independent Additive Factors The conceptualization of the happiness pie and its underlying variance decomposition is only correct when all three factors are independent (i.e., they do not interact and do not covary). As Krueger (2015) has pointed out, this assumption is unlikely to hold. As an example of an interaction, lower well-being due to anxiety might be the result of the interaction of childhood stress with a genetic predisposition (cf. Swann and Seyle 2005). Considering covariation between the factors influencing happiness, the simple additive model ignores the possibility that the effects of genes on happiness might be largely mediated by circumstantial factors and volitional activities (e.g., Lykken 1999, p. 81). Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) acknowledged that genes influence happiness indirectly through experiences and environments, but they seemed to interpret this only in terms of mitigation of negative genetic influences, as in the claim that “unwanted effects of genes could be minimized by active efforts” (p. 114). It seems equally plausible, however, that positive genetic influences on happiness might be mediated through behaviors that could be classified as volitional activities. For example, Lyubomirsky et al. mentioned exercising regularly and striving for important personal goals as volitional activities, but both the inclination to perform daily physical activity and the tendency to persevere in one’s efforts seem to be partly heritable (Moore-Harrison and Lightfoot 2010; Rimfeld et al. 2016). This is neither particularly surprising (cf. Turkheimer 2000), nor does it constitute support for genetic determinism, but merely demonstrates that the simple breakdown of the three factors into proportions that sum to 100% is unjustified from an empirical point of view. Furthermore, the distinction between the slices of the happiness pie might reify common misunderstandings regarding the nature of heritability estimates. While it seems popular to assume that high heritability implies low malleability, this is not the case: A trait can be both highly heritable and malleable at the same time. For example, the heritability of general intelligence is high, but education reliably increases intelligence (Plomin and Deary 2015; Ritchie and Tucker-Drob 2018).

First Step: Learn Python. Python is easy to learn. It's made so that you can begin making your own projects by having rudimentary knowledge regarding programming. Links of interest: Learn by doing. You can make progressively complex code by solving problems here. https://www.codeabbey.com Same thing, a little more math oriented: https://projecteuler.net For actual tutorials on the language you can visit: https://www.kaggle.com https://www.jetbrains.com/es-es/edu-products/learning/python/ https://www.hackerrank.com

You will hear a lot of programmers talk about JavaScript with disdain - because most programmers are male and have to tell the world how their dick (programming language) is bigger than yours. There is more or less nothing wrong with it though, and IMO it's a great choice for beginners for a few reasons; You don't have to install anything, if you are reading this post on a PC you have a browser and therefore you already have a JavaScript runtime installed. It works outside of webpages too so skills you gain are transferable. Node.js is a platform for running JavaScript programs directly on a machine's operating system. This is an important difference because unlike a webpage you can access the filesystem and other OS functions. The imageboard software for this site was written in JavaScript. There are also ways to use it to write desktop applications, eg electron.js - the Discord desktop client is written with electron. So with one language you can learn to design webpages, work on servers, or write apps that work on any OS. Another big advantage JavaScript has is how it integrates with HTML and CSS, which is by far the easiest way to build user interfaces (they can be a nightmare with other languages). https://www.w3schools.com/ is a great site to start learning, they have tutorials which guide you through everything you need to know step by step. They also have complete references for all the standard JavaScript functions, as well as HTML and CSS. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ is the definitive reference and goes into much more technical detail but is often harder to follow and w3schools has most of the same information. The only thing you need to get started is a text editor - for windows I would recommend Notepad++. You can just use notepad but Notepad++ has a ton of features (like syntax highlighting) which make things easier. It is also much easier to share your results using JavaScript since nobody else has to install anything or download an exe to see what you've made.