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I made it through three elections without voting for Trump (nor for the Dems), but truth be told I was hoping he’d win this time around.
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Kamala should have studied for the test, Joe shouldn’t have been so selfish, and the Democrats should have tried being less awful.
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How am I supposed to get better at chess if I don’t understand why the engine says my move was a mistake?
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God is an engineer, but not just a clockwork engineer. He designs a person and their life, making trade-offs between good, comfortable circumstances and bad, uncomfortable circumstances. I believe the 10 years of illness and cascade of problems God has given me–and which I don’t see he has given to many others–was worth the good he would extract from it compared to an easier life he could have given me.
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It’s the controversies like the systemd controvery that makes linux so fun.
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I figured out how to run matlab in a jupyter notebook and it is basically the best thing ever. There is even a way to get around the stupid file-for-function matlab construct!
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I’ve got a beautiful 6 core/12 threaded i7 cpu on my gaming laptop which I almost never turn off. It feels such a waste of computational resources to have so many cores idle most of the time. So I wrote a cron job to log usage and learn to take maximal advantage of resources!
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But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
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Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.
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Create your personal dewey decimal system and get organized! johnnydecimal.com
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When your health limits your energy, you need to get really good at setting priorities. I’m failing at it, but still trying.
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Feeling a sense of urgency to de-bigtechify my life. For one, this means saving and downloading a lot more of what I encounter on the internet, beefing up my home storage, and using more encryption.
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How to self-study a technical textbook
Get very familiar with the table of contents first. Then note and filter out the sections you are less interested in or don’t appear to provide the biggest bang for your buck.
Annotate, annotate, annotate. Active reading is better than passive reading. I use a 2-in-1 chromebook and a passive pen to highlight in the adobe pdf reader.
Write detailed notes in addition to annotating (i.e. in a separate notebook or markdown file). Cull/convert your notes into Anki/Memrise digital flashcards. Drill on your phone when you are lying in bed.
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Our experiences travel beyond the mapping parchment in our brain. If you can be an information sponge, and reinforce the memories of what you’ve learned, you will still not know everything but you will be more efficient. In other words, I feel a compulsion to turn everything I learn into an Anki flashcard.
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Imagine if you could search through your past memories. Losing your car keys would never be a problem. We say Google is the answer to internet search, but there’s a learning advantage to searching against your experiences versus searching against humanity’s experience. Personal knowledge thrives on reinforcement.
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“We have failed to provide additional context” is among the lamest of all lame apologies for a media outlet. Additional context means propping up the conventional narrative. Apologizing for that means saying sorry for upsetting people’s desire for a hegemonic discourse.
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As far as I know, there isn’t a “true” modern day version of Agatha Christie novels–at least one that doesn’t also have the “I was a tramatized child” backstory or “smash down the doors, it’s the bleeping police” type action. Need the mystery without the profane thriller or soppy emotions.
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Dreaming of a personal podcast app that uses my podcast listening history, downloads the ones I listened to, converts audio to text, and allows for search on this text. That way, I could return to the random facts I heard on a podcast.
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Weird how the weather brings back memories. The summer often makes me think of programming, because that was my college summer job. Now that it is a cold November day it reminds me of my grad school research.
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Digital File Management
Been thinking about digital file management and came up with this model. It explains why a messy home folder is uncomfortable: it mixes up tier 1 and tier 2 curation.
Every digital file comes from a source. The source can be your web browser, your email client, your current terminal session, or your photoshop session. I am using file in the loosest possible sense. It is anything that has the potential to become a file, such as an html webpage.
Either it is immediately consumed or ignored or it is cached somewhere. For pdfs from a google search or an email attachment, the place it is cached is usually the downloads folder. In my experience, the downloads folder gets messy real fast because a lot of the cached files are rejected. You look at them once and then never again. It is an implicit rejection.
To move from tier 1 to tier 2, you need to save your file in some sort of basic structure. At the very least, you need to move it out of your cache into something that is not your cache. This is the problem with a cluttered home folder. If you add bajillions of temporary or test files or have many folders you did not create, then you are treating your home folder more like a cache than a place to save something.
The last category is what you treasure. These are the digital files that immediately come to mind when a certain topic comes up. It is anything in your working memory that has value to you. Not everything you save you’ll come back to. You may save it purely for the peace of mind of having a copy. In that case, you are pushing your cache more into your saved files. And eventually, you’ll do a spring cleaning. But given finite human resources, only a select few files, perhaps only the ones you are immediately working on, will be worth something.
I’ll admit there is some slight overlap between these tiers, but I think the continuum is well ordered.
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Local supermarket chicken broccoli alfredo pizza slice to go is chef’s kiss.
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Causation = Correlation + Story. The story may be a prediction from first principles, or it may be a story of experiments being falsified. But there is still a story.
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“This is a judgement free zone, come as you are.” But what if I am a judgmental jerk?
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Trying to master file mangement. Wrote a script to generate a static html gallery of images to make browsing more comfortable. Working on cronjobs to organize my downloads folder.
Current model of data organization is: data stream -> machine organization -> curation level 1 -> curation level 2.
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Okay, I admit to trying to enter in those 6 digit two factor text message codes in one go because I read somewhere that being able to remember 7 or more digits quickly is a sign of being mentally sharp.
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