Conversation

Realized something about making: technical shopping is the dopamine-hit-loop completion step. When you can legit buy something that’s the next step for a project because you’re ready to use it and know how to, it’s the payoff of the previous step. Like likes/RTs are for tweets.
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Ie I’m unreasonably excited about some cheap cables that just arrived. Marks my ascension to green belt in battery nerdery.
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I’m extremely wary of this syndrome but slip up on occasion. Still I’ve been 90% good about it. I subconsciously treat the next thing to buy as the “test” for the last thing. Sometimes it is self-enforcing since you don’t know what comes next till you buy and grok previous thing.
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Meant to QT this on previous. The danger is skipping the “earn the right to buy.” If it’s not something you’ll use in the next 2-3 steps, don’t buy.
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Replying to @vgr
haha, and at some point you start to bypass the original loop and want to buy tools _just in case_ a project comes up for them. you've completed nothing, but you spent the money. womp womp
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Exceptions are: really good sales, and bundling job lots of things coming from China. But even then, the deal better be really good.
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This applies most to building up inventory for the first time I think. The rule in a dicey supply chain world is: build up lean, replenish fat. Once you *know* what you tend to use, why, and how, you can buy more than a just-in-time supply. This is buying time with shelf space.
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To a first approximation you can actually just replace all project planning with shopping and inventory planning. Your inventory state is embodied project state. Shopping *is* how you persist state and build system memory.
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Accumulation of unused tools and supplies is more than good fodder for jokes. It’s an effective diagnostic tool to troubleshoot problems with your learning curve. It means you’re not capturing the full learning from things you do.
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Very close parallels to processor architecture. Shopping and inventory is branch prediction and speculative execution. The more you know, the more you can do out-of-order stunts. Sequentiality is a measure of your ignorance.
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