It's even harder to detach when your shed is your idea of "making something out of your life", when you imagine the alternative being years of wasted potential suppressing your life's true desires. Don't people always say to never put off what you want to do right now until it's too late? But for someone unable to detach, I'm still not sure if remaining dispassionate is worse than the chronic issues that arise from lack of sleep and similar from never giving up and earning the label of "tenacious".
Anyway, I didn't start this as a project I was going to sell or even one that had a defined deadline, it's a hobby. I've learned lots of things along the way. I think of it as a nice wooden contraption I'm building that I sand and polish as I go. I recently (early this year, I think?) rebuilt my bots dna based on what I'd learned about how the last batch fared. Every day I come home and see how they did against gnugo and make sure the scripts have enough commands to perform so I can let them do their thing without intervention. I work on other projects but still keep this one going because I enjoy it. My "goal", such as it is, is to evolve a bot that can beat gnugo more than 50% of the time on an even playing field, without looking down any sort of move tree.
So this is my shed, I guess.
edit: grammar
The Guide first says "The results of the spell are supposed to be independent." And I took that at face value, since I figured this is an educational page rather than a page of brain teasers and trick questions. But then when it asks "in my last 100 casts of the spell, I got the gross potion all 100 times, what do you think the next cast would yield?", I guess I was supposed to have remembered that the original statement said "supposed to be independent", and figure out the lesson was that this indicates a problem with the spell not being independent as opposed to stressing that regardless of results, independent means independent. I feel annoyed rather than enlightened.
Or, from another point of view, it's worthless to ask what is the probability of something that has already happened. Once something has happened (i.e., if you constrain to that thing having happened) its probability is one, full stop. You have to ask a question before running the experiment.
No criticism intended of the question itself. Every stats course should have it in there somewhere, it's a very important one. But I'v personally tried my hand at how to phrase it exactly right a couple of times and it's really, really hard.
(Since this is an invitation for 50 people to post their attempts, I would also point out it's easy to phrase it in a way that works for you, who wrote the question. You might find if you take it out for testing that it doesn't work as well as you thought, though. But by all means, smash that reply button. I can't stop you. :) )
If you expect the "why the hell does she want to do that", you can't ask that in a quiz form. Why the hell are we collecting potions: I couldn't care less, right? And then you suspend your disbelief, and then suddenly, "uh-uh, that's too unlikely, you should have questioned your assumptions."
This is such an early point to attempt to highlight features in purportedly random behaviour that is not really random.
It didn't annoy me, it just made me quit at that point, especially as I was already battling the spell terminology.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Basically, the guy wasn't a perfectionist. He didn't build and tear down 5 different sheds. It just wasn't a priority. It was really important to him that he DIY his shed, but "life" happened. Every time he set aside a weekend or some funds for the shed, something came up.
If he really needed a shed, he could have just ordered one from Home Depot. They aren't that expensive and are dropped off, fully assembled.
> the shed consumed their free cycles and mind space for 9 years.
No, it was more like a running joke. The shed was an unfinished project that was never gotten around to. My dad started finishing his basement before I was born, and only finished it over 20 years later! It was also a running joke in my family.
Ironically, I have a grass-free spot of land in my yard that was supposed to be for a dog run. My dog died a few years after I built my house. Maybe in 9 years I'll put a shed there.
> It just wasn't a priority
Pretty much this!
This is the link:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/czg04y/shed_is_finally...
Although it did take 9 years from start to finish, nothing was done for most of that time. It sat as a slab for a few years, then as a half-finished skeleton for a few more. In between, life happened.
There seems to be two contradictory lessons here:
1. Actually work on your project or it will never be finished and it will haunt your dreams. Don't just review the plans - actually take action to close the gap to shipping.
2. If you keep working on your project without shipping, it will haunt your dreams and mutate from cake into shed and you will be sad.
That mutation in (2) can happen through a mis-estimate of the resources required to finish a cake:
> ... Shed projects seem to start out with an underestimate. You think it’s only going to take a few months, and then it drags into a year. But you acquired some new skills in the meantime, so then you think it’s really just a month more. But then it didn’t pan out the way you envisioned it, so you want to spend a few months redoing it.
But there are also times when you're certain you're working on a cake, but it turns into a shed anyway. One way to find yourself there is if you under-specify the cake.
One way to prevent this from happening is to practice Readme-driven development,[1] or some other approach that forces you to clearly state what's in scope and what is not, and who is the intended audience.
[1] https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-deve...
The second one was as simplest as I could possibly make it. I had basically 2 hours per weekend in 2021 (kids & all) and I rigorously stuck within my estimated scope. I was really focused on making cake. I use the app all the time; it’s at least cake to me. In 2022 I’ll have to figure out if other people think it’s cake, too. But at least no will able to say I over-scoped it, or over-estimated it.
My contribution is https://www.chronos-desk.com/
Personally I wanted a task app that was local-first[1] (integrated with my desktop; one-time license/no subscription fee; no saas/web browser), had great keyboard shortcut support, and had first-class support for task estimates.
I enjoy designing and making things I actually want. If someone else 'gets it', that's okay. If not pfffft.
> won’t amount to much.
Don't want to sound crass, but very very little of anything truly 'amounts to much', not in its own time, or ever. Now and then (rarely enough) it takes decades or centuries for creative work to find its audience. What's behind 'what people want'?
"You see, ya can't please everyone / So ya got to please yourself." And if the world ever feels lucky? Lucky them.
> Casting each of the spells in the set is finicky and doesn't always succeed. A cast succeeds 20% of the time and is independent of previous casts. I need 3 successful casts in a row to summon the animal familiar. > What is the probability that I summon a familiar on my first try?
I tried inputting the answer as a percentage with "%" and as percentage without "%" before I tried inputing it as fraction and was able to proceed.
It'd be a good idea to indicate what format the answer needs to be in.
Personally I've never made it past the first paragraph of a story without deleting it, so I salute them for shipping _something_.
> Sheds are never finished. You just decide you are done.
This is what everybody should take from this. It's easy to iterate over and over again.
And btw your (unfinished) shed looks pretty good!
So far, I'm liking it a lot.
Then they closed their API and had some PR drama so I started up again. Rewrote the whole thing. I've got it about 90% of the way there, and I was getting ready to open it up for a public beta and suddenly GDPR happened.
I don't even want names if I can avoid it, but the core data of the product could be construed to be PII, which means I want to get some sort of encryption on it before I open it… And I just haven't come up with a way to do that that doesn't involve rewriting the whole thing.
So right now, I've got a project I spent 12 years on that only I am using - and using heavily - and love. I generally put a couple hours a week into it.
If anything it's been a fun testbed for keeping my frontend skills up to snuff, especially as I've moved from full-stack to backend in my professional career over the last 5 years.
( Other options exist)
I don't want the possibility a miswritten SELECT potentially revealing anything.
I don't want to be able to read their data, at all.
Quite like the cute npcs though
Year 1: dig, place and level footings. Put down floor joists: it's just a little 8x10 shed, so they're 2x4's
Year 2: find some scrap 3/4" plywood left over from another project for a floor. Realize that it'll just get wet and rot if placed, so leave it where it is. Instead frame and raise the walls.
Year 3: realize that you should have built the south wall a bit higher so the roof can slope, shrug and figure out a way to frame the roof so there's a small slope anyway.
Year 4: (I think). Find leftover metal siding and nail it in place for a roof. Now that we have a roof, put the plywood down, but don't nail it down since without walls, it could still get wet and rot.
Year 4.5: realize that the proto-shed is usable as is, and start throwing crap in there that needs to be out of the way, but can take getting wet.
Years 5 - present. Look at the shed and realize that with less than a day's work you could finish it but don't have the motivation to go find more siding, drive over there, drive back and then nail it up. Maybe next summer...
Summary: The guy bought a house and decided he wanted to build a shed. He bought the plans, poured the slab, and then life happened.
Basically, every time he had time / money to work on his shed, some kind of obligation came up or some kind of emergency ate away at his shed funds.
IMO, I think it's just a case of the shed not being that important, but the joke being "worth it." If it really was important he'd have figured out how to finish it more quickly. (It's not that expensive to have someone deliver a small shed to a home.)
