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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 30th, 2023

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  • Second this. Vanlife stuff is focused on size, mass, durability, efficiency, replaceability, repairability, modularity, price. There is nothing better than vanlife videos for learning how to live minimally within an apartment.

    Some additional tips,

    • folding furniture.
    • Human baseline happiness returns to set points. Remove something non-essential and you may be sad at first, but will eventually stop caring.
    • No couch or TV: if it cant fit on/in my car or is fragile, I’m not buying it.
    • if you don’t mind appearing “poor”, you may realize that the products that best fit all the above criteria are just basic things from walmart, target, etc. Those folding plastic tables and metal bed frames, plastic tubs and drawers, actually solve their problems 90% as well as traditional products at 10% the price, while being readily available everywhere. You don’t worry about damaging them either.
    • take or leave advice. Maybe you want a nice desk. I have a nice office chair. It will be hard to move, but it’s worth it. The point is you can be minimal in unimportant areas.

  • I’ve noticed that too. Is it related to covid you think? As in it was like this before and now we’re returning to normal progression as people rebuild social connections and lose time. Or is it that the whole dev economy is changing with layoffs and such that devs are leaving the industry altogether? Or something else even?









  • For privacy.com:

    • great for anyone in the USA
    • don’t worry about difficult subscription cancellations again, just turn that one’s dedicated card off
    • I have personally blown past the daily spend limit of 250$ without issue, idk if that limit is real. The 1000$/mo may be though I’ve never hit that.
    • I’ve used privacy.com for everything from Amazon to car insurance to gym memberships.

    On credit freezes:

    • a freeze means that your consumer report will not be shared, which means applications for credit in your name will be denied
    • all USA consumer reporting agencies (data brokers) are legally required to freeze sharing of your reports for free upon your request
    • you can temporarily unfreeze when you get a new credit card, apply for rental property, etc.
    • don’t let them upsell it or try to direct you to another page with similar language, it is free
    • credit monitoring products need to request your report to see if any new accounts have opened. Don’t monitor it, prevent it by freezing the reports
    • freezes are required for any data broker, not just credit. This includes LexisNexis (job history), and presumably the ones that do rental and vehicle ownership history though i don’t know their names.



  • For most people, big breaks in habits fall apart fast, while more gradual changes stick.

    For example, many make resolutions to get fit, and start a bunch of related things. But since none of it is habitual, it requires mental effort to do consistently. Soon, something else important requires that mental attention, and the plan falls apart.

    The successful ones aren’t special, but they created one, little, achievable metric to hit:

    1. “Subscribe to 2 science-based fitness influencers and watch their content regularly”.

    Because it was easy, it became habit. Then, they chose another simple thing to build on:

    1. “Change evening commute to pass by gym”
    2. “On Tuesdays, go into gym”
    3. “Learn proper form for one excercise”
    4. “Bring a protein shake”
    5. etc.

    Each of these is so small they don’t really feel significant at all. And they’re not. The important thing to understand is we’re all lazy. The real challenge isn’t getting yourself onto a diet or into the gym, it’s designing your habits so that the diet isn’t “a diet”, it’s just what you eat. It’s designing your life so that going to the gym requires less mental effort than not going.

    I could write a lot more about this but it’s already getting long. Atomic Habits is a good book on how to design your habits and habit chains, if you have the time.