Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 42

@CobaltVelvet My parents never taught me to save money, at least not very persistently or consistently. They never threatened to take my computer away if I didn't clean my room. They never did any of the things I see depicted as common child rearing techniques in fiction. They just kind of made a half-hearted attempt at discipline and then let it slide.

@CobaltVelvet There's always been a disconnect between what I rationally believe and what I do. It could be that your parents had already managed to instill some self discipline in you. Personally, it's always been very difficult for me to do the right thing, and especially to persist in doing the right thing, and I think there are things parents can do to train that ability in a child. Reward and punishment. Delayed reward to teach long term goal oriented behaviour. Stuff like that.

@CobaltVelvet And my parents were nowhere near as persistent in that discipline as they should've been, possibly because they themselves were raised by parents who weren't resourceful. I suspect that this is why wealth and poverty passes through families. A solid amount of loving discipline can get you very far in life, because it sets you up for success.

@CobaltVelvet And I think that a lot of good habits are like that. They were instilled in you because your parents were very persistent about it and you suffered the consequences if you disobeyed, and that's what authority is. Authority out of love, not a hunger for power.

@CobaltVelvet What you are like now is partly a product of the parenting you received, though. Kids feel exactly like that when disciplined by their parents. They resist and try to do the opposite. However, I think a bit of force used by parents in childhood will help form good habits. You may have hated brushing your teeth as a kid, but as an adult, you're grateful that they made you do it, because the habit stuck with you until you were old enough to finally agree with the decision.

@lnxw48a1 Of course, if you ask what the wingers think of centrists, the answer is probably that they are smug bastards who think they're better than everyone else.

As a centrist, I admit that there is a grain of truth to this...

@Ricardus He is somewhat prone to sensationalism and hyperbole, though.

This turns my ideas of authority versus independence on its head.

All along, I thought that refusing to submit to authority would teach me independence. As it turns out, you need authority in early childhood in order to be able to be your own boss later in life. Or it could turn you into a mindless slave to the system. Perhaps I would not view it in such a way if I was raised with more firmness, so this is very hypothetical and self-referential.

Your opinions about what good or normal parenting is are basically determined by how your parents raised you. Their idea of normalcy shapes your idea of normalcy well into adulthood, and unless you have some kind of revelation, that's going to stick with you until the day you die.

I still don't know how I'm going to instill the things in myself that my parents never did. It's a shame that I was disqualified for mandatory millitary service on medical grounds. Maybe that would've helped me.

I once told my sister that I wish my parents would've been stricter, and that I'd be stricter to my kids if I ever had them. Her response was "Poor kids!".

At the time, I didn't know precisely why I felt this way, except that I seemed to be lacking discipline and couldn't explain why.

Now that these pieces have fallen in place, the conclusion is that my sister's been perpetuating the same lack of structure to her kids, and doesn't see the problem or its origin.

I always knew that my parents had a dysfunctional relationship but it never really dawned on me how damaging this was to their child rearing. They never worked together to create structure around their kids. My mother has said on several occasions that dad mostly wanted children just to prove that he could. He always avoided the hard part of child rearing and didn't support my mother in her efforts at all.

It also means that no one was there to instill any sense of discipline in me. Dad didn't give two hoots about my room being messy, and as we've already established, mom wasn't a threat, so I never developed a habit of keeping my place clean, and this is a consistent pattern across every area across my entire childhood. My parents barely created any structure around me. That's why I have such a hard time creating structure around myself and existing within societal structures.

The problem with my mother was that she'd threaten consequences but never come through on them, so I didn't listen to her. The most important woman a young boy interacts with is his mother, so if she's too soft on him, the boy will project that characteristic onto women in general, and he'll struggle to take them seriously. Dad was far more intimidating, but mostly stayed out of the child rearing. This means that I didn't have any strong parental figures and could mostly do what I wanted to.

I suspect I'm unusually resistant to forming new habits. There are certain essential habits that my mother tried to teach me as a kid that never really stuck.

My mother.

Maybe that was the problem. I looked up to my father, not my mother, and he didn't have those habits internalised either. She was trying to teach me to be better than my father. If my father had been strict about it, that would've made an impression.

The thing about being able to form permanent habits in a few weeks is apparently an urban myth. The real number is closer to 1 year.

I don't think I've ever managed to maintain anything for as long as a year without it already being a habit to begin with.

If it takes a year to form a new habit, I don't see how I'm ever going to manage to introduce any new habits at all. I get tired of doing things repeatedly way sooner than that.

@CobaltVelvet That kind of processing would've taken me probably 3-5 times longer if done in a language like C or Java. It won't run as fast as the C/Java stuff, but it's much quicker to get it running, and sometimes that's all that matters.

@CobaltVelvet Mmm, it's rare for me to improvise when I'm writing production code anymore. I plan things out before I code them... But if I do need something quick and hackish to run on the command line, I reach for node.js. I've used node.js to write up data processing tools very quickly. It's quite incredible how efficiently you can work. A rudimentary CSV parser can be done by chaining a few string splits and perhaps some map/reduce to boil it down to an object array.

@CobaltVelvet There are also aspects of it that strike me as a bit hackish, like the use of underscores to compensate for the lack of private variables. (This is missing in JavaScript as well, but at least the standard library doesn't put this limitation on display.)

@CobaltVelvet I can't wrap my head around why Python is so popular. Yes, it's easy to get started with, but it seems to lack a number of features that I've come to expect to find in a modern programming language, like multi-line lambda functions. I suppose a Python afficinado would tell me to use async/await if it's asynchronous code I'm trying to do, but what if I just need to write a compare function with criteria that can't easily be described with a single expression?

@MightyBigCar I saw this stuff as quite glamorous, knew little about large scale data processing, and wouldn't have been interested in it if somebody had shown it to me, because that was "boring stuff for businesses".

I admit that, to a certain extent, I still feel this way deep down, but you don't make money by only doing fun things...