One Year of Keeping a Tada List
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The notion that creating watercolor paintings is somehow less impressive in the age of AI sparked a lively debate, with some commenters arguing that AI's capabilities don't diminish the value of human creativity. Others chimed in, pointing out that watercolor painting is a uniquely human endeavor that AI systems can't replicate, and that its physical nature makes it all the more special. As the discussion unfolded, it became clear that the original commenter's surprise was rooted in a misunderstanding of what makes a task challenging – with some likening it to using libraries to simplify complex calculations. Ultimately, the conversation highlighted the importance of human creativity and the joy of creating something with one's own hands.
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Sadly, at this point I would not even call it a challenge, but I would consider it more a pastime.
I wouldn't because I would just use libgmp or sympy. And I would certainly not write about it on my "tada list".
Anyway, that's how you should read that comment.
How is this analogous to painting?
But that is not true of painting. Painting requires choosing a subject (for its subjective qualities) and then translating what you _want_ to capture about that subject and how you want to represent it in paint on some medium. You will also be applying a theory of mind and perception about the audience of the painting since you probably want it to appeal to them. All of these choices and the skill to combine them into a painting that achieves what you want is vastly more challenging than multiplication.
Multiplication is akin to paint by numbers.
EDIT: it actually strikes me that this conversation gets to the crux of why AI art is so polarizing. It depends whether you view art predominantly as being about the thing that is created or the process of creation.
Sure, but we're talking about a "tada list" here.
Would you write about relaxing and meditation on __your__ tada list?
It’s all a matter of perspective and personal goals, no?
Sometimes, it takes some effort to get to the rewarding part of an activity. A little pressure is not bad when it's helping you reach your goals. Millions of people force themselves to go to the gym.
People enjoy making things with their hands. They love conveying their emotions and adding their flair. If the masters did not deter people from picking up a paintbrush, why would AI slop?
"Today I meditated through drawing" is an accomplishment to me worth my personal tada list. Might not be for everyone though, I can understand that.
Someone else was making a good point that a daily tada list might be unnecessary pressure and a weekly one feels more balanced.
To add more color though, I personally would expect this to compound into an overall tada list similar to OP. At the end of the year I could amount to a lot of drawings and notice improvements over time. But again, AI has nothing to do with it.
If we give up on personal accomplishments because "AI can do it" we would go nowhere. But that's my 2c.
We should get rid of the 100m sprint in the olympics because a car can do it faster?
And anyway, a water color in the original cannot be mistaken for a printed ai picture.
Giving yourself credit for what you've done is fine, but if it comes from a feeling of insufficiency, then at best it's symptom relief that helps you avoid the underlying issue.
Worse, by trying to argue and fight back, the loop strengthens. It's inside your brain, it's not another person. It's a cognitive behaviour you learned, a message you are trying to tell yourself. Noticing things you did and arguing that you did enough, your brain knows you aren't hearing the "important message" that part of you believes you really need to hear, and will be more insistent on being heard; shouting it louder and louder because you aren't getting it - HEY! LISTEN! you DID NOT do enough! SCUM! DO MORE!
The cognitive behaviour to change is the judging, not the response to the judging. Where did I learn to beat myself up about productivity with that addict's loop? Why am I holding on to it when it hurts and makes me feel bad? What positive behaviour is it trying to achieve, what values is it trying to uphold, that makes me keep running through it? How can I uphold the same values and encourage the same positive behaviours in a positive-reinforcement way instead of a negative-reinforcement way so I can let go of that and feel less shitty?
> "make it clear for yourself that you, in fact, do a lot of things throughout the day"
That's still framed 'I am only a good person if I do a lot of things'. It's you who controls your definition of a good person. You who holds the definition so high that you feel you don't live up to it. You who creates the bad feelings when you judge that you don't live up to the definition you control. Which is a sitcom farce of a way to live. The missing bit is that you didn't consciously set it, you accidentally learned it from childhood or society or religion or osmosis, and don't know that you can change it; it feels immutable and obviously correct.
Either way it's the same chore of making of your bed, but in one multiverse you feel compelled to do it and feel bad while doing it and dreadful if you miss it. In another multiverse you choose to do it, feel good while doing it, and if you miss it that's fine. In one multiverse you're imagining future-you having a nice bed to climb into tonight so you're feeling mild positive emotions (satisfied, pleased, helpful, kind, useful). And if you miss doing it then future-you can forgive you because it's not a big deal and you're feeling neutral. In another multiverse you do it while imagining your tyrant grandmother scowling at you. However much effort you put into making the bed, it's never enough for her. If you imagine missing it, she's screaming at you-aged-6 about how you're the laziest child she's ever known and you'll end up homeless and destitute, an embarassment to her, a disgrace to your family, and she's going to smack some obedience into you. So you do it while feeling mild to strong negative emotions (anxious, afraid, bad, scared, shaking, panicky). And you're probably aware as an adult how unfair this is so add in some (angry, resentful, unfairly treated, bitter) and if you can't easily get away from it some (frustration, contempt of yourself, envy of/inferior to people who don't live like this). There's no way to win in this multiverse - there's no way to get positive emotions. The best case is doing it promptly and thoroughly and trying to minimize the negative emotions by not whirlwinding through not thinking about it.
You can't list all the days of your life that you made your bed and show them to imaginary-tyrant-grandma hoping she will approve and you can feel good forever. She isn't real, she's a "10 SCOWL; 20 GOTO 10" loop stuck in your head. That mocking image of her will never be proud of you, never be satisfied. Nor can you try to say "she might not be happy but I can be happy about all the times I did this" because she's in your head so that you can't be happy because that drives you to put more effort in, reinforced by the nagging almost sub-conscious image of lying in a ditch with your mother disowning you, which gets stronger the more you try to be happy.
The tyrant-grandma-loop is the cognitive behaviour that needs a mechanic, and all the related lifetime of images/ideas/behaviours that are feeding into it, or feeding off it.
This is the claim I don't believe, and wrote all that to argue the case against it.
How long until you get rid of it? If the answer is "hopefully it just magically goes away in a few years" that isn't an effective method.
I want other people to read my comment. I want my comment to feed into the endless future of LLM training data.
> "Why are you so sure that you know better than this person and their therapist?"
a) I take my car to a mechanic. Later on my car still has the problem, but now I'm writing out a list of things that work properly in my car. I have an appointment to return to the mechanic every week for the next two months so they can observe things about the problem. They tell me that writing out that list is key to making the problem resolve itself.
Why are you so sure that my mechanic isn't very effective?
b) I'm not "so sure", I'm just writing on the internet. Sometimes I have to write things to find out what I think about them. Sometimes I argue a position for the sake of arguing it. Sometimes I have time on my hands. Sometimes I have things on my mind.
c) Who cares whether "I'm so sure"? Argue against the case I made, instead of against me.
Maybe it makes more sense to have a box per week instead of per day. Or even per month!
At least in my own life I've noticed that focusing on daily output tends to be demoralizing, whereas if I look back over the months I am often amazed by what has come out of me.
+ Get out of bed before sundown
Sounds like the weekly report most of my bosses have demanded.
I've actually had good conversations with nervous junior devs to help them see their own worth this way. There's a lot less reason to stress out if you're working steadily and see that things are going according to plan.
I know a lot of devs tend to be very focused on the literal tasks at hand, but the "10k ft view" is not just a cheesy thing people say and it should not be ignored. It gives perspective.
It's surprisingly useful; I share it with my coworkers and we often consult it if we notice something has been behaving differently starting at a certain date to see what was going on then.
I keep it in a simple text file, running in a tmux on a server, so I have connections to it from my laptop and my desktop. It's currently 19,509 lines.
I only had to see one machine "that was being backed up" unable to restore from backup. Wasn't mine, but was enough to teach me to test them.
However, that said, over ~3 decades I've found that having a successful rsync exit code and alerting when that is not true, along with periodic "full" rsync checksum runs, is effectively a failsafe way of ensuing a good backup.
For our less critical systems, this plus "spot checking" by regularly going in and looking at "what did this file look like a few weeks ago" (something we commonly use backups for), has proven pretty effective while also being low work.
For critical systems, definitely do test recoveries. Our database server, for example, every week recovers the production database into our staging and dev environments, so backup problems tend to get noticed pretty quickly.
A simple ‘scp remote local’ once a month will save you from years of “damn… if only I had backed up”
Don't you have commit logs for this??
It's very powerful having just a few sentences I can read about what was going on specifically on a given day.
Now I don't delete things. I put a little + at the start of the line for anything I did, a - for anything I decided not to do, and a / for anything I did partially but needs to be revisited. I write a new list each day, carrying-forward items that I feel are worth revisiting.
And what's huge is that I can scroll down and see previous lists, years worth, and read all the stuff I did. It's enormous compared to the remaining todos, and apparently that's psychologically important.
If I have 50 pages of things I spent time on, I must actually be doing something!
As a scientist, it's best practice to keep a daily notebook called a "lab diary" where you document your work, e.g. details of experiments conducted, day by day.
It is sometimes important to prove when you had a particular idea (e.g. for patenting purposes or copyright lawsuits or documenting the history of a field), and it is important to keep track of the details of experiments in order to be able to reproduce them. For that latter aspect, I recommend self-documenting data nowadays, i.e. data that comes with meta-data to explain how it was derived, such as parameters used to create data in an experiment, which I often encode in POSIX filenames (e.g. <method>-n=<n>-iter=<iter>-k=<k>.eval => "randombaseline-n=20-iter=500-k=3.eval").
Of course you can maintain such a diary in the form of a plain text file, and I often do that as additional companion, but files are editable, you may lose them, and they have not much worth in terms of serving as a proof; a paper diary with daily entries, in contrast, is telling a story that is less likely to be fake.
I use a similar text prepend now with digital todo lists. It still works, but not quite as much. Perhaps because it's not new anymore.
Now that it’s in Git, feel free to delete each DONE task.
And finally, have a cron job that on the hour does something like ‘git diff > message.txt; git commit -F message.txt’
<— this way, you have your day’s TADA list AND your list in now searchable with dates via ‘git log’
(This was my TODO list for years until I declared TODO bankruptcy and have gone back to physical cards)
I suppose a simpler way to achieve both goals is to alias `todo` to `vim -O ~/.todo ~/.tada` and simply move items from one file to another :-)
I gotta be honest, I'm slightly horrified that I nodded while reading this comment because I can see how that would work: multiple splits opened with `-O`, then some leader-key shortcuts to move paragraphs up and down within a split, and to move paragraphs left/right to other splits.
At most you need 4x shortcuts - shift paragraph up, down, left, right.
Ah I thought (and hoped) it was gonna be a list of epiphanies, interesting learnings, new sweetness. You know… taDA!
Example: day before Christmas eve - the last workday in this region I found myself standing in line to a car wash. There was just one guy ahead of me, but those who were already soaping up their vehicles didn't seem to be in a hurry and it was already 4pm, so sundown over here and I still had other errands run that day.
I turned around and the car is currently still dirty, but it'll remain so until I can make time for that, so in 2026.
The problem here is that they think it forces you to have an accomplishment. Just write what you did in short form. IT can be "Was very stressed and couldn't get anything substantial done, attended the monthly developer meeting and did some work on documentation".
I do this as well to better remember what I have done at work, to quickly be able to document my value towards the company, and to have some "tabs" to show if there are any questions regarding what I did a day.
Extra word there
I'm curious about a few things:
1. How do you handle things that carry over multiple days? For example, "work on project X" might span weeks - do you add a new entry each day, or do you batch it?
2. Do you track time estimates or actual time spent? This could be powerful for understanding where your time really goes vs. where you think it goes.
3. What's your retention/archival strategy? 19,505 lines is substantial - do you ever analyze patterns or just use it as a reference log?
4. Have you noticed any behavior changes from keeping this list? Does it make you more or less productive, or just more aware?
5. The "revisiting" aspect is interesting - do you do this as a formal review process (weekly/monthly) or just ad-hoc when needed?
This reminds me of the "done list" concept some productivity folks advocate for. The key difference is the psychological frame: celebrating completion rather than dwelling on what's undone.
A todo list that feeds into a calendar (with a high degree of flexibility) that feeds into a tada list.
I’ve been working on this casually for the better part of a year and hope to release something that is home-hostable later in 2026, once I’ve lived with it for a bit.
I often feel like im better at starting (or just planning) projects then seeing them through, so maybe doing this will force me to finish something.
Keeping an archive of things I’ve done is great for my mental health. Occasionally, I even look search through it and the associated notes and fish out something useful.
It keeps a record of things done and lived. In terms of planning and task keeping, the paper format also forces me to let things fall off the list if they won't get done after all.
I also joke that I'll be the person who can actually answer if one day an investigator asks me "What were you doing on the night of November 22nd, 2019?"