This article makes me want to get a DNA test. In my family, it’s very common to sleep in the six-hour range. I personally sleep from 10 pm to 4:25 am every day, often waking up around 4:15 am before my watch vibrates to wake me.
If I sleep eight hours, I feel groggy, jet-lagged, and generally have a day where I’m slogging through molasses to get from one task to the next.
My wife has raised concerns about my sleep pattern, so I started using sleep-tracking tools like Fitbit and, more recently, an Apple Watch. She tracks her sleep too, and the big difference we’ve noticed is that I fall asleep within about two minutes, and my “sleep efficiency” using these tools is 98%. If I’m traveling and feel a bit jet-lagged, I can take a 20-minute nap (often without an alarm) and wake up feeling refreshed. She also seems to wake up a lot, most nights I "sleep like a log" and I only wakeup in the morning.
My mother has the same pattern but stays up later and sleeps about six hours into the morning. I used to do this too, but around age 23, I switched to an earlier bedtime and a consistent daily routine. When I became a “morning person,” I found I could code like crazy in the morning before “starting” my day, and this rewarding experience reinforced the habit.
I’ve tested this pattern in many ways, including not using an alarm (I still wake up around the same time for weeks at a time) and using a “light clock” I built with a Raspberry Pi to slowly brighten the room. Again, I wake up after roughly 6 hours and 20 minutes. Now, I use my Apple Watch to vibrate as a gentle reminder to start the day. On weekends, I keep the same schedule and use the extra time to read or hack away at side projects, often coding until the late afternoon when my wife protests enough that I need to stop and hang out or do my honey-do's.
About 10 years ago, during my annual checkup, my wife asked my doctor about this sleep pattern. The doctor asked me several questions, seemingly looking for signs of sleep deficit or dysfunction. In the end, he said I could do a sleep study but concluded, “If it works, don’t break it.”
As for productivity, I’ve found I can code effectively from 4:30 am to 8:30 am, then shower and work from 9 am to 6 pm without much trouble. I also practice intermittent fasting, typically eating only at 6 pm, with a protein shake around noon. This habit happened by accident—I realized breakfast slowed me down, and eating lots of carbs impaired my cognitive function and ability to code or handle complex tasks in the morning.
Before you ask, I generally don’t use caffeine or other stimulants. Occasionally, I’ll have one cup of coffee around 9 am as a social habit, but I recently stopped that again and actually feel better. I’ll most likely drop it again for a while until it sneaks back in again.
Thanks for sharing! I have severe circadian issues: non-24, except that my body also still in some ways follows the sun and I do much worse when awake at night. I've noticed that other accounts I've read from people who do well with around 6 hours of sleep are similar to yours and feature highly regular sleep times. From the reading I've done it seems there are a number of hormones involved in both sleep and waking activity with strong circadian rhythms and I suspect that at any given time I have a mix of night and day hormones. Of course people can famously fool themselves easily that they are getting enough sleep when they aren't but based on my experience I could easily believe it to be a superpower to have everything unusually well synchronized and I fully agree with your doctor's advice.
Interesting because I have recently been trying to catch a stray cat for a capture-release process and the cat will not walk into a typical trap-door type wire mesh trap. Watching him on video the roof of the trap seems to freak him out. It seems a better trap would have a narrow gap with high door that lets them confidently walk into the trap and trigger would just block the slot perhaps with some sort of sliding door blocking the exit.
Funny to see this here, recently I decided to clean up my personal NAS that had 60 million files and 17 TB used. I tried various tools, but this NAS was the backup target for many of my machines over a decade or more of time. I finally gave up and wrote a multi-threaded c++ program to "inventory" every file and then I imported that into sqlite and started building out scripts to do bulk actions, set a flag on for files to delete and some scripting to show the files that would be deleted etc. It was quite a project and took me "spare" time of a month to trim.
On a related note in 2019 Apple destroyed all my music copies in one of the itunes updates, and part of this process I gathered all forms of media into various zfs datasets and de-duped and managed to find all my mp4's from the '90s lol.
It's amazing how much digital garbage we can accumulate, I often wonder what my kids will do when I pass, will they try and sift through all of it, or just toss it in a closet somewhere to be discovered in 1,000 years by some digital archeologist?
I figure our human level general AI assistant (if it doesn't kill us) will sort through my mess of backups in a nanosecond in about ten years, so I'm not gonna start worrying until then lol.
My bet: They will toss it in a closet, but it will not be discovered in 1000 years. It will be gone before then. If you want future generations to see your photos, print them out. People will have too much else to worry about than decrypt old storage media.
My 30 years paper photos are mostly lost now.. too many house moves, too much physical stuff.
On the other hand, my high school projects from decades ago, as well as my first digital photos, are still with me, somewhere in the "archive" folder. They are only a few megabytes after all, an insignificant amount of space for a long time. It's easier to keep copying entire "archive/" to new machines rather than sort it.
And for photos in particular, I know there is an archive on each machine I owned, and on many external drives, at least a dozen copies. I'd say the chances of them surviving 1000 years in are pretty high, much higher than physical photos.
I still believe the physical photos have a larger chance of actually seeing the light of day.
One with is to print albums yearly and send out to friends and family. Some of them will probably survive for a long time. Nothing stops you from hanging on to your digital archive aswell.
> I finally gave up and wrote a multi-threaded c++ program to "inventory" every file and then I imported that into sqlite and started building out scripts to do bulk actions, set a flag on for files to delete and some scripting to show the files that would be deleted etc.
I did something not dissimilar. Basically at some point, years ago, I got fed up of deleting for the ten times that one picture I already had deleted in the past.
So I created a little database of files that are "tagged", based on their size first, then on their hash.
The "tag" is basically: "File with this size and hash can always be deleted, no matter what". Or "File with this size and hash and this name can always be renamed to this-or-that-name".
I've also got a few rules: "Empty directory with that name can always be deleted".
Then I launch my "berzerker" on HDDs/SDDs/SD cards and whatnots I have on shelves and get rid of thousands of files. It always feel insanely good.
When it comes to old CDs/DVDs (I know with your 17TB these aren't going to be a thing for you but I still have CDs and DVDs from the 90s and 2000s and once in a rare while I'll still burn a DVD), I copy them to my computer, run the berzerker, and burn a new DVD. Then when all is good and well, I physically destroy the old CD/DVD.
I also transcode movies (say family movies) for which I don't care that much about the quality to a much smaller size (say to x265) and then immediately tag the old file as "can always be deleted" in my database.
Also I haven't inventoried every single file. But I'll typically use "jdupes" (much faster than "fdupes") to find the worst offenders: biggest files appearing often are the ones I tend to inventory first.
What's really great with such inventories/tags is that it's something you basically do once. Once a file (and its size + hash) is tagged for deletion, that file has lost the war.
It's over: my berzerker shall regularly run and it shall find it. And the file is gone.
The files tagged for deletion are "dead files walking".
> It's amazing how much digital garbage we can accumulate, I often wonder what my kids will do when I pass, will they try and sift through all of it, or just toss it in a closet somewhere to be discovered in 1,000 years by some digital archeologist?
They'll use a dumb but convenient "AI": find me all the pictures, movies and writings from my dad and sort them, de-dupe them, rate them and show all that to me chronologically and nicely sorted.
At times I'm wondering why I even bother cleaning that mess. I could just wait and have some software sort it for me in 20 years (or if I'm dead by then, my kid shall do it).
Now that said: we're not the first ones to come up with our own DB of files that can always be deleted, always be renamed, etc. I'm kinda surprised there's not yet some open-source software out there doing just that.
Mine is not shippable as it's Clojure code I run directly from the REPL.
P.S: for the hash, to be really quick, I use Blake3 (which may not suit everybody as it's kinda recent but, darn, is Blake3 quick -- and automatically running in parallel).
OP did it more professionally than I did though: with a "real" SQL DB. I just have strings (from scripts) with filesize+hash but it's still a DB and it's versioned (in Git).
> But: how do you make sure that the last remaining original doesn't "loose the war" ...?
So I'm very cautious when I tag files for deletion: for example a copy of all the tagged files is first sent to a directory where I do a review before confirming it's to be always deleted. If I'm not cautious, I can potentially tag for deletion a file that I want to keep and then I'm kinda toast.
Now as to not lose the last file due to de-duplication: I do have lots and lots of backups (online/on-site [several computers], online/off-site [dedicated servers], offline/on-site [HDDs/SSDs on shelves, DVDs and probably soon BluRay discs] and offline/off-site [family members' house, wife's SME, etc.]).
I mean, in a way backups are what prompted me to go the "forever delete + de-deduplicate". Which is a bit ironic but...
I don't care too much if some backup somewhere contains a file I want to be deleted / de-duplicated but which is not. What's important to me is that should I need to reach for all the files on the backup I can then quickly delete all the files I already tagged for deletion.
This reminds me of Metaplace[0][1] back in 2007 created by a MMO veteran Raph Koster. Not sure how they will avoid the same issues that killed Metaplace and other attempts at this over the years.
While this looks nice, I really loved https://livingcomputers.org/ when it was alive. Sadly it's in stasis now, I was lucky enough to visit while it was still open and I ran around to all these old machines punching in code and showing my wife all the old machines I've worked on in my 40yr+ career.
Sadly "in stasis" is pretty generous. I know several people who were in that win of the Allen org and they've all said that Jody Allen viewed it as a waste of time and money and was delighted at the opportunity to close it and never reopen courtesy of the pandemic.
It's sad. The LCM was magical. It's weird Jody Allen couldn't have just shoved off the LCM onto some other staffers or something if she was bored of it.
After who knows how many people donated the hardware they’d carefully preserved for years with the expectation it would be preserved at the museum as part of Paul Allen’s legacy.
If I sleep eight hours, I feel groggy, jet-lagged, and generally have a day where I’m slogging through molasses to get from one task to the next.
My wife has raised concerns about my sleep pattern, so I started using sleep-tracking tools like Fitbit and, more recently, an Apple Watch. She tracks her sleep too, and the big difference we’ve noticed is that I fall asleep within about two minutes, and my “sleep efficiency” using these tools is 98%. If I’m traveling and feel a bit jet-lagged, I can take a 20-minute nap (often without an alarm) and wake up feeling refreshed. She also seems to wake up a lot, most nights I "sleep like a log" and I only wakeup in the morning.
My mother has the same pattern but stays up later and sleeps about six hours into the morning. I used to do this too, but around age 23, I switched to an earlier bedtime and a consistent daily routine. When I became a “morning person,” I found I could code like crazy in the morning before “starting” my day, and this rewarding experience reinforced the habit.
I’ve tested this pattern in many ways, including not using an alarm (I still wake up around the same time for weeks at a time) and using a “light clock” I built with a Raspberry Pi to slowly brighten the room. Again, I wake up after roughly 6 hours and 20 minutes. Now, I use my Apple Watch to vibrate as a gentle reminder to start the day. On weekends, I keep the same schedule and use the extra time to read or hack away at side projects, often coding until the late afternoon when my wife protests enough that I need to stop and hang out or do my honey-do's.
About 10 years ago, during my annual checkup, my wife asked my doctor about this sleep pattern. The doctor asked me several questions, seemingly looking for signs of sleep deficit or dysfunction. In the end, he said I could do a sleep study but concluded, “If it works, don’t break it.”
As for productivity, I’ve found I can code effectively from 4:30 am to 8:30 am, then shower and work from 9 am to 6 pm without much trouble. I also practice intermittent fasting, typically eating only at 6 pm, with a protein shake around noon. This habit happened by accident—I realized breakfast slowed me down, and eating lots of carbs impaired my cognitive function and ability to code or handle complex tasks in the morning.
Before you ask, I generally don’t use caffeine or other stimulants. Occasionally, I’ll have one cup of coffee around 9 am as a social habit, but I recently stopped that again and actually feel better. I’ll most likely drop it again for a while until it sneaks back in again.