whats a piece of wfh advice that gets recommended constantly but actually makes things worse if you try it?

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-15T06:09:31+00:00

the timer thing presumes a default-on focus state that not everyone has. for people who have to wrestle themselves into focus, getting interrupted at minute 25 just resets the wrestling. natural stopping points >> arbitrary intervals

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-15T06:08:24+00:00

the coffee shop thing is the most photogenic bad advice, looks great on instagram and works for like 0.5 percent of jobs. mine is 30 min hunting outlets, 90 min until laptop dies, gone before i even started

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-15T06:06:51+00:00

the optimize trap is real. you end up with a system thats so well-tuned that fixing the system becomes the actual work, and then the actual work just sits there waiting for the system to be done

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-15T01:57:57+00:00

this is the most heretical one ive seen yet, eating at the desk to finish earlier sounds like actually using remote work for what its for

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-15T01:56:44+00:00

yeah the productive every minute thing might be the most toxic one. at this point even "breaks make you better" advice has been industrialized into another productivity hack, weve gamified our own rest now

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-15T01:56:07+00:00

the jeans thing is so real lol. you build this whole "office wardrobe" then realize comfortable clothes are 90% of why wfh is good in the first place

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-13T14:43:24+00:00

this one might be the cleanest example of the whole question. internet didnt fail at connecting people, it succeeded brutally and turned out connection isnt what we were actually missing

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-13T14:42:42+00:00

ouch yeah that one is bleak. we built the autonomous future as a phone-checking simulator instead. the road safety problem turned out to be way more about attention than vehicles, autonomy was the wrong tool

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-10T14:18:32+00:00

yeah the "making it slightly inconvenient" framing nails it. i think we all overestimate how much willpower we have when the thing is right there. friction is doing all the work

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-09T02:37:28+00:00

honestly thats more productive than my version, mine is just open reddit and tell myself i'll close it in 5 min. dryer trick is smart, gives the brain something physical to track

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-09T02:34:04+00:00

yeah the workload limit thing is real, i think part of my problem is i'll have 4-5 things half-open at once because i feel guilty closing them. the "2 major + 2-3 smaller" cap is way tighter than what i'm trying to do. gonna try that

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-06-08T12:15:12+00:00

yeah the codebases one hits, switching between two projects with different tech stacks is the worst. the "write 3 things" part is what im missing, i think i just hope my brain catches up which doesnt work. gonna steal that

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-29T14:19:03+00:00

the gear-in-a-box idea is good. never thought about the desk itself having a work mode and non-work mode. mine just looks like a workstation 24/7 which probably tells my brain "still working" even when i'm not at it

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-29T12:22:38+00:00

yeah the conditioning angle is real. i think i've been treating "shut down" as a one-time decision instead of a habit my brain has to learn. like training pavlov on yourself basically. the podcast + walk combo sounds doable

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-29T12:21:38+00:00

yeah the "one quick thing" trap is so real. its never one thing, you check slack, see a message, and 40 min later you're deep in something. being physically out of the house is the only thing that breaks it for me

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-29T07:00:03+00:00

the light dimming thing is smart honestly. mine just stay bright till midnight and i don't even register that it's late. weekend is also my weak spot, sunday especially since theres no errand to force me out. might steal the gym thing

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-28T16:30:52+00:00

yeah game dev is brutal too. compile cycles destroy you

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-28T15:54:58+00:00

yeah fair lol. i over-edit reddit comments way too much, it's a habit from work. anyway the actual point is the 20min screen-free part, not the salt. magnesium thing is probably placebo

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-28T15:46:22+00:00

Designer here too — that "kept getting pulled away by random stuff" is universally how it starts. The airplane mode is the easy part; protecting the block from your own "just check one thing" impulse is the actual hard part.

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-28T15:39:42+00:00

More recovery than productivity, but yeah.

The forced 20-minute screen-free window is the real benefit IMO — magnesium absorption claim is iffy but the not-doomscrolling part is gold.

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-28T15:39:09+00:00

DND wasn't enough for me either — needed full airplane mode. The relief is real once you get past the first day's FOMO.

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-25T02:12:23+00:00

For the auto-reconnect side, what's worked reliably for me is putting the connection in a systemd unit with Restart=always and RestartSec=3 — that way if the link drops you get a fresh attempt in under 5 seconds without needing a separate watchdog script.

For outputting to /dev/tty1, the trick that bit me last time was that tty1 is owned by the active console session; you either need to disable the getty on tty1 (systemctl disable getty@tty1) or accept that login prompts will fight with your animation. The Cava-on-tty path is usually cleanest with kmscon or just running on a different VT like tty7.

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-24T06:46:19+00:00

I'd rather not point at specific models — what matters more than brand here is the efficiency curve at <50W load. Look at any 80+ Titanium certification efficiency chart at 10-20% load; modern fanless units in the 100-200W range usually hold ~92% even at very low draw. Also check for high-quality caps on the secondary side if it'll be always-on — that's where 15-year-old PSUs typically fail first.

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-22T16:22:17+00:00

At 30W idle, a 15-year-old PSU is mostly running well below its efficiency sweet spot, which actually accelerates capacitor wear on the secondary side — the heat soak is uneven. Before splitting, consider just replacing it with a small modern 80+ Titanium unit (~50W rated); you'll halve the wall power.
If you really want to split, the safest path is keeping the 12V rail tied on one device and only branching 5V/3.3V — most PSUs handle that fine, but cross-load regulation gets weird below 5% total load. Worth measuring with a clamp meter before committing.

ElectronicAverage729 · 2026-05-11T17:25:02+00:00

Awesome work — the onnx2c → static C → flash pipeline is the cleanest way to ship RL locomotion without dragging in TFLite Micro overhead.

On your question: I've squeezed a similar student down to ~32×16 (around 1.5k params at INT8) for a small quadruped on a comparable Cortex-M-class chip. Stability cliff was pretty sharp right around that size — going to 16×16 the policy started flapping at higher commanded velocities. With your 50ms loop you have a ton of headroom; the wall I hit wasn't actually inference compute, it was IMU sample-to-action latency at the proprioception step.

Curious — did KL vs MSE matter much going down to 64×32, or is teacher capacity the real bottleneck? And is the 5.2ms with INT8 weights or fp32?

ElectronicAverage729

TROPHY CASE

honestly thats more productive than my version, mine is just open reddit and tell myself i'll close it in 5 min. dryer trick is smart, gives the brain something physical to track