I've been experiencing similar things recently and have also been making a couple of changes to try and help. Removing caffeine/alcohol has been a huge one for me -- initially I found it very difficult to not drink, because I thought that drinking always leads to 'fun'. After stopping, I tried a couple of times again to drink (a couple of glasses and even one total binge session). I've noticed that I just don't enjoy the feeling anymore, and the hangover effects are just not worth what little gain I now get from it. It was journaling that helped me uncover that -- I could track how I felt after days with caffeine, days after drinking, and then the answer became pretty clear to me. Maybe i'll enjoy drinking again soon, but right now I'm content to skip it.
One thing I still struggle with is being able to give myself downtime after work. I always feel the need to be progressing with something -- completing more video games, reading more books, or getting stronger at the gym. I'm not sure how best to deal with that feeling.
Breaking a habit is usually very hard, so kudos to you for stopping. Everything should be in moderation. Alcohol/Coffee can definitely backfire. And taking a break from them even for a short time can make such a huge difference. It will give you that extra mental energy to get on things that can actually benefit you like exercising, meditating or anything else that will be beneficial!
I have the same issue, with serious migraines if I don't find a way to wind down and stop coding. Vaping THC at night after working out has worked for me. It gets me out talking to my family, playing guitar and singing, and enjoying otherwise boring pastimes like listening to music and watching sports/movies.
I did an undergraduate project based on the same paper as this (not nearly the same quality, but similar enough if you squint).
The procedural method used for this kind of generation is really powerful -- you usually see L-Systems being used to create basic sort of fractals but these sort of implementations can become pretty smart. For example, you can provide a height map of the terrain, and make it so that the roads find smooth paths down hills.
And then that's before you realise that the buildings themselves can be generated via rules which describe how to make buildings. And then, the layout of rooms in a building, and the layout of furniture in each room. There's some really impressive potential here if a group of people were devoted enough.
So, just leaving the issue unsolved for probably around 20 years or so and letting under-represented groups play catch-up.
There are a lot more meaningful and effective actions that can be implemented now, which would correct things in a shorter length of time. I do think that the 'pipeline' is the fundamental way to fix the issue -- but I think that the best way of creating that interest is to present those under-represented groups in our society now, rather than later.
Reddit has the problem where the most popular subreddits (r/gaming for example) have generic content upvoted the most, and so there often isn't actually anything worthwhile there if you have an actual interest besides memes or general industry news.
Then on the other extreme, you have overly niche subreddits for specific video games, where most of the content is just fan art, overly in-depth subreddit drama, or similar memes now just re-skinned for that specific game.
There isn't really a middle ground for a lot of these categories, for the people who want "just enough content for the games I like". I've found either subscribe to r/gaming and get a broad amount of nothing, or subscribe to a list of the games you enjoy and get a very in-depth lot of nothing.
On the second point, the ones that really appealed to me were the indie game dev blogs. They would figure out a unique mechanic or way of implementing a nice graphical effect, and then do a short post about it. Then other developers might pick up on it and adapt it for their projects. Most of the time those blogs were eventually abandoned along with the games they were trying to make but I think that a lot of indie games that have been released probably learnt a lot and sourced inspiration from those blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if a game like Terraria found a lot of inspiration from all the procedural generation blog posts after Minecraft came out.
> The higher a person’s salary, the most likely they are to be able to work from home
and
> employees unable to work from home, such as restaurant servers, personal trainers or manufacturing workers, may be laid off temporarily or permanently, a burden that seems to be falling disproportionately on low-income workers.
People with higher salaries are more likely to be able to still work, whereas people with lower salaries in different sectors are far more likely to have been laid off due to the physical nature of the job. Hence poor people have been disproportionately hit, increasing income inequality.
One thing I still struggle with is being able to give myself downtime after work. I always feel the need to be progressing with something -- completing more video games, reading more books, or getting stronger at the gym. I'm not sure how best to deal with that feeling.