standup

Newsletter (Sundays)

• im up to a movie/day, basically. nice to finish a story once a day, very cathartic. books are more rewarding overall, but take longer to consume.

Software (Saturdays)

• software is necessary, features are superfluous, most feature requests are asked from people who've never coded, and implemented by people who use code to avoid the agony of feeling under-utilized
• i've been pleasantly surprised by the ux of introducing "new tab" logic to gpt. from user testing, it seems to be pretty intuitive to people

Books (5/month)

• Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
• Command & Control - 26% (+2%)

“DAY AND NIGHT, I HAVE a certain percentage of my command in the air,” General Power told the press, the week after the second Sputnik launch. “These planes are bombed up and they don’t carry bows and arrows.” The message to the Soviet Union was unmistakable: SAC’s ability to retaliate wouldn’t be diminished by intercontinental ballistic missiles. But Power was bluffing. The airborne alert existed only on paper, and the United States didn’t keep bombers in the air, day and night, ready to strike. Carrying nuclear weapons over populated areas was still considered too dangerous.

Democrats in Congress whipped up fears of Soviet missiles and attacked the Eisenhower administration for allowing the United States to fall behind. The Democratic Advisory Council said that President Eisenhower had “weakened the free world” and “starved the national defense.” Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democratic senator from Washington, called Sputnik “a devastating blow to U.S. prestige.” Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Senate majority leader, scheduled hearings to investigate what had gone wrong with America’s defense policies. Johnson’s staff director, George Reedy, urged him “to plunge heavily” into the missile controversy, suggesting that it could “blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic Party, and elect you President.” Another Democratic senator, John F. Kennedy, later accused Eisenhower of putting “fiscal security ahead of national security” and made the existence of a “missile gap” one of the central issues in his presidential campaign.

• At Home in the Universe - 36%
• Napoleon: A Life - 60% (+2%)
• Glass Bead Game - 55% (+4%)

But it happens that cultural creativity is something we cannot participate in quite so fully as some people think. A dialogue of Plato's or a choral movement by Heinrich Isaac—in fact all the things we call a product of the mind or a work of art or objectified spirit—are the outcomes of a struggle for purification and liberation. They are, to use your phrase, escapes from time into timelessness, and in most cases the best such works are those which no longer show any signs of the anguish and effort that preceded them.

• Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming - 30% (+12%)

Seibel: Why do people get so religious about their computer languages? Bloch: I don't know. But when you choose a language, you're choosing more than a set of technical trade-offs—you're choosing a community. It's like choosing a bar. Yes, you want to go to a bar that serves good drinks, but that's not the most important thing. It's who hangs out there and what they talk about.

OO is a funny thing. It means two things. It means modularity. And modularity is great. But I don't think the OO people can claim the right to that. You can look at older literature—for example Parnas's information hiding—and see that the notion of a kind of class as an abstraction predates object-oriented programming.

Not all programmers will say this, a lot of them are solitary, in the corner, but one of the things I realized at Netscape was that I liked interacting with people who actually use my code. And I would miss that if I went back into a corner. I want to be grounded about this. I'm secure enough to think I could go do something that was a fine sky castle for myself, but I'm realist enough to know that it would be only for myself and probably not fine for other people. And what's the point? “If I'm only for myself”, you know, Hillel the elder, “what am I?” I am not JavaScript. In the early days, it was such a rush job and it was buggy and then there was some Usenet post Jamie Zawinski forwarded me. He said, “They're calling your baby ugly.” I have real kids now; I don't have to worry about that.

• Nefertiti - Done! (2/5 ⭐)
• Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier - Done! (4/5 ⭐)
• Permanent Midnight - 34% (+17%)

Newsletter (Sundays)

• i had a thought today about the extreme lack of status signaling reading (the activity) provides compared to something visible. sure, you can extract how many books a person has read by quizzing them, or checking out how "lived in" their library is, or their goodreads, but there isn't really a way to tell how well read a person is by looking at them. knowledge camouflages itself when it is not evoked. therefore, the effort of reading for hours may be hard to justify if the status reward is opaque, and very much not guaranteed. i dont know where this is going, but let me cook
• not to mention, knowing things runs the risks of being a know-it-all (bad), long before the reward of being a know-all (good)

Software (Saturdays)

Peep this new theme for the site, Hakone! I love it. Infinite scroll is basically a requirement for personal blogs post TikTok era.

Some notes:

To make background images "work" was a bit annoying, and I had to make some local changes.

Due to the powers that be, there is no way to use iOS background-attachment: fixed. This sucks but it is what it is. I had to remove the mobile background integration, and make it plain, but at least desktop users get a spectacle.

<!-- in header --> 
<style>
  @media (max-width: 768px) {
      .u-bg-feature-image.u-exist-feature-image {
        /* your other styles here */
        position: static; /* Default position */
        background: none;
        background-size: auto; /* Default size */
        background-repeat: repeat; /* Default repeat */
      }
  
      .u-color-text-light {
        --color-text: var(--color-dark);
      --button-color-text: var(--color-dark);
      --button-color-border: var(--color-dark);
      }
  }


/* desktop */
  @media (min-width: 768px) {
    .u-bg-feature-image.u-exist-feature-image {
      image-rendering: crisp-edges;
   image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges;          /* Firefox */
   image-rendering: -o-crisp-edges;            /* Opera */
   image-rendering: -webkit-optimize-contrast; /* Webkit (non-standard naming)*/
   -ms-interpolation-mode: nearest-neighbor;   /* IE (non-standard property) */
      background-image: 
    linear-gradient(
      rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5),
      rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5)
    ),
    var(--feature-image--card,var(--feature-image--block));
      

      background-attachment: fixed;
    }
  }
</style>

<!-- in footer -->

<script>
  document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
  function checkViewport() {
    var screenWidth = window.innerWidth;
    var elements = document.querySelectorAll('.u-bg-feature-image.u-exist-feature-image');

    if (screenWidth < 768) { // Adjust this value as needed for your mobile breakpoint
      elements.forEach(function(el) {
        el.classList.remove('u-bg-feature-image', 'u-exist-feature-image');
      });
    } else {
      elements.forEach(function(el) {
        el.classList.add('u-bg-feature-image', 'u-exist-feature-image');
      });
    }
  }

  // Run on load
  checkViewport();

  // Add event listener for window resize
  window.addEventListener('resize', checkViewport);
});
</script>

I'm getting the images from the Met!

Search The Collection - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Search art at the Metropolitan Museum.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

run your python as modules, not scripts. save the headaches.

# no
python src/main.py
# yes
python -m src.main

Books (5/month)

• Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
• Command & Control - 24% (+1%)

THE ENGINEERS AT SANDIA knew that nuclear weapons could never be made perfectly safe. Oskar Morgenstern—an eminent Princeton economist, military strategist, and Pentagon adviser—noted the futility of seeking that goal. “Some day there will be an accidental explosion of a nuclear weapon,” Morgenstern wrote. “The human mind cannot construct something that is infallible . . . the laws of probability virtually guarantee such an accident.”

“a weapon which requires only the receipt of intelligence from the delivery system for arming will accept and respond to such intelligence whether the signals are intentional or not.”

• At Home in the Universe - 36%
• Napoleon: A Life - 58% (+4%)
• Glass Bead Game - 51% (+1%)
• Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way - Done! (3/5 ⭐)

The first of the three dubious virtues is desperation. There are bad ways to be desperate: visible desperation towards people can put you in a bad social position, strain your relationships, or otherwise harm you. Desperation towards a goal, on the other hand, is vital for a guilt-free intrinsic drive. By "desperation towards a goal" I mean the possession of a goal so important to you that you can commit yourself to it fully, without hesitation, without some part of you wondering whether it's really worth all your effort. I mean a goal that you pursue with both reckless abandon and cautious deliberation in fair portions. I mean a goal so important that it does not occur to you to spare time wondering whether you can achieve it, but only whether this path to achieving it is better or worse than that path. In my experience, the really powerful intrinsic motivations require that you're able to struggle as if something of incredible value is on the line. That's much easier if, on a gut level, you believe that's true.

Don't say "I'm trying to solve this math problem," say "I'm transforming the problem into a programming problem so I can see it from a different angle", or "I'm gameifying the problem so that my intuitions can get a better handle on it," or "I'm producing random algebraic manipulations of this equation in desperate hope that one of them happens to be the answer," or "I'm staring at the problem waiting for my gut to say something for enough time to pass that I can give up without losing face." Describe what you're doing on the level of granularity where at each step you describe, it would be silly to say you were "trying" at that step, in the same way it would be silly to say that you wake up and try to dress yourself—describe your actions on a level of granularity where each step is definitely something you're doing, rather than trying.

I'm not saying social goals are intrinsically bad. Wealth and status are useful aids when it comes to determining the future; the accomplishments and expectations of your peers can provide useful measurements of your abilities. But there's a difference between pursuing social goals for the sake of determining the course of our universe-history, and forgetting entirely that success is measured in terms of what actually happens throughout the course of history. I alluded to this when I described defiance as "choosing self-reliance." At the end of the day, each and every one of us is engaged in a personal struggle to determine the future. We are not alone; there are many around us who can be friends and allies and support us in our struggle. But the goal, in the end, is to use what resources we have at our disposal to ensure that the universe-history is filled with light, whatever our light may be. I hope yours includes friends and family and loved ones, but making it happen—that is your personal task. You are encouraged to draw on the support of friends and allies where possible; and ensuring that you have close connections may be one of the properties you're putting into the timeless history of our universe: But even then, the task of ensuring our universe-history is one in which you have close connections is your personal task.

• Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming - 18% (+1%)
• Nefertiti - 62% (+17%)

Nefertiti has not done what she was supposed to, I thought. Instead of risking her place as Chief Wife to sway Pharaoh, she’s protected it by goading him on.

• Permanent Midnight - 17% (+3%)

That’s the trouble with this business. People are always offering you things. And as soon as they’re mentioned—even if the idea never occurred to you before—you feel like you really want them. By the end of the conversation, whatever they’re dangling before you—which you didn’t know existed three minutes ago—has now become an absolute necessity. At which point whoever called you in the first place can feel comfortable taking it away. They’ve done their job… This is Hollywood’s dirty little secret. It’s not about making movies. Are you kidding? Forget that shit about “the Dream Factory.” It’s about manufacturing frustration. Preening movie stars making people out there in Dirtville feel like shit. People in offices making people who don’t have offices bark like dogs. All of them generating their daily quota of hopelessness. That’s the quantity in question. And the factories are always going full blast.

Newsletter (Sundays)

• no updates

Software (Saturdays)

• ill say it again – record programming work sessions with obs. there are so many minor elements to the programming experience that cant be screenshot:
  • how long you spend thinking about some functions vs others
  • how many times you ran a terminal command
  • how much time your programs take to compile and run
  • that answer to your question you found from that code forum at that random url
  • how much you goofed off on the internet since you were by your browser
  • what day did you work on this bug or that bug
  • provable effort outside of git commits
  • fun to watch, especially if paired with music from spotify or apple music or youtube or something
  • easier to stay in flow state longer

the modern work journal is permissive local screen recording

ARBITRAGE

im all in on arbitrage

Bram AdamsBram Adams

Books (5/month)

• Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
• Command & Control - 23%
• At Home in the Universe - 36%
• Napoleon: A Life - 54% (+5%)
• Glass Bead Game - 50% (+6%)
• Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way - 67% (+23%)
• Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming - 17% (+6%)

Seibel: Do you think programmers are overenamored of new things? New languages, new tools, new whatever? Fitzpatrick: They might be. I don't know if that's desperation in hoping the new thing doesn't suck, like the new programming language does what we all want. But users are the same way. Users always like to get the one with the higher version number even if it sucks more.

Seibel: What do you think is the biggest change in the way you think about programming compared to back then? Crockford: There was a period of maybe a decade where efficiency was really, really important. I guess it was in the early microprocessor era when memory was still really small and the CPUs were still really slow. We'd get down into assembly language in order to do things like games and music to make it fit and to make it fast. Eventually we got over that, so today we're writing big applications in JavaScript that run in a browser. It's such a profoundly inefficient environment compared to the stuff that we used to do, but Moore's Law sort of made it all OK.

Seibel: Do you find that you have to teach people how to do code readings? I can imagine it'd be hard to find the right balance of being critical enough to be worthwhile without making the code's author feel personally attacked. Crockford: Yeah, it requires a lot of trust on the part of the team members so there have to be clear rules as to what's in bounds and what's not. If you had a dysfunctional team, you don't want to be doing this, because they'll tear themselves apart. And if you have a dysfunctional team and you're not aware of it, this will reveal it pretty quickly. There's a lot that you can learn, a lot that's revealed by this process. It feels unnatural at first, although once you get into the rhythm of it, it feels extremely natural.

• Nefertiti - 45% (+6%)
• Permanent Midnight - 14% (+4%)

Newsletter (Sundays)

• the well read series begins...im thinking 3 parts?
• next part im going to contort class dynamics from economic theory to talk about reading books, the meme below basically
• why reading more than 25 books puts you in a class with ultra marathoners

Software (Saturdays)

• the function calls from requires_action basically are a side effect. this will cause some unique threading/sync issues that will make parallel computing issues from 1000+ cloud servers look like a joke in comparison
• coaxing assistants to call functions is much like trying to force a kid to clean their room. the more explicit the reward and task, the higher the likelihood of success. in some instructions, i've literally had to beg the model to call the functions. i wish i were kidding

Books (5/month)

• Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
• Command & Control - 23%
• At Home in the Universe - 36%
• Napoleon: A Life - 54% (+5%)
• Glass Bead Game - 50% (+6%)

"My mouth felt dry. There sat the man I revered, my patron, my friend, whom I had loved and trusted ever since I could think, who had always responded to whatever I might say—there he sat and listened to me talk, or perhaps did not listen to me, and had barricaded himself completely behind his radiance and smile, behind his golden mask, unreachable, belonging to a different world with different laws; and everything I tried to bring by speech from our world to his ran off him like rain from a stone. At last—I had already given up hope—he broke through the magic wall; at last he helped me; at last he said a few words. Those were the only words I heard him speak today. " 'You are tiring yourself, Joseph,' he said softly, his voice full of that touching friendliness and solicitude you know so well. That was all. 'You are tiring yourself, Joseph.' As if he had long been watching me engaged in a too-strenuous task and wanted to admonish me to stop."

"Outside, beyond the boundaries of the Province, was a way of life which ran counter to Castalia and its laws, which did not abide by the Castalian system and could not be tamed and sublimated by it. And of course he was aware of the presence of this world in his own heart also. He too had impulses, fantasies, and desires which ran counter to the laws that governed him, impulses which he had only gradually managed to subdue by hard effort."

• Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way - 67% (+23%)

"Life is not a game of "wind up good at the end"; life is about steering the future. Look not to whether you are good or bad. Look to where you are, and what you can do from there."

"I've met many who are under the impression that when you realize the world is in deep trouble, you're obligated to respond by feeling more and more grim. Like a movie about a detective that's trying to save a kidnapped child: as the detective learns that the child is in more and more danger, they lock their jaw and become more and more grim and determined. Their respite comes only when the child is rescued. That's narrative thinking, and we aren't in a narrative. You can break the trope. (In fact, I encourage you to break tropes as soon as you realize that you're acting them out.)"

"In fact, personal effectiveness is all about having the right demeanor at the right time. I suggest a mix of playfulness, curiosity, relaxation, calm, and yes, grim determination. I also personally recommend a healthy dose of dark humor. Everybody's dying, after all."

• Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming - 11% (+9%)

"But I've always seen (programming having) much more in common with writing prose than math. It feels like you're writing a story and you're trying to express a concept to a very dumb person—the computer—who has a limited vocabulary. You've got this concept you want to express and limited tools to express it with. What words do you use and what does your introductory and summary statement look like? That sort of thing."

"Seibel: And why does that matter? Is that just for the satisfaction of it or is tasteful code also better in some practical way? Zawinski: To a large degree, tasteful and maintainable are similar. Or very closely related. One of the things that makes a piece of writing tasteful is if it's structured in a way that's easy to grasp. Are the facts loaded up at the front or are they scattered around? If you're referring back—if you're flipping through a book, can you figure out where in the book is the thing you kind of remember? “This was somewhere near the middle because that's where he talked about this thing.” Or is it just scattered all through. And that's the same sort of thing that goes on with programming a lot."

"I've also done a lot of testing since LiveJournal. Once I started working with other people especially. And once I realized that code I write never fucking goes away and I'm going to be a maintainer for life. I get comments about blog posts that are almost 10 years old. “Hey, I found this code. I found a bug,” and I'm suddenly maintaining code. I now maintain so much code, and there's other people working with it, if there's anything halfway clever at all, I just assume that somebody else is going to not understand some invariants I have. So basically anytime I do something clever, I make sure I have a test in there to break really loudly and to tell them that they messed up. I had to force a lot of people to write tests, mostly people who were working for me. I would write tests to guard against my own code breaking, and then once they wrote code, I was like, “Are you even sure that works? Write a test. Prove it to me.” At a certain point, people realize, “Holy crap, it does pay off,” especially maintenance costs later."

• Nefertiti - 39% (+31%)

"“You don’t belong here,” he said, looking at the open doors to the Great Hall. “You belong with nicer people.” My voice rose with indignation. “Are you saying—” “I’m saying none of that, miw-sher. But these games are not for you.” We stopped at the verge of the courtyard. “I leave tomorrow morning,” he said. He paused, and then added quietly, “Be careful here, my lady. Let history forget your name. For if your deeds are to live in eternity, you will have to become exactly what your family wants you to be.” “And what is that?” I demanded. “A slave to the throne.”"

• Permanent Midnight - 14% (+12%)

"It wasn’t until we’d actually shared living space for a while that I understood what she was not saying. Zoe herself, I noticed, never seemed to eat at all. If a stray loaf of rye bread did happen to end up in the cupboard, it would be gone immediately. In classic fashion, I found out the truth one day when I slipped into the apartment unnoticed and caught her. Other guys might walk in on the little woman riding sidesaddle with the gas man—I caught Zoe with something else down her throat. Her finger. The sounds emanating from the toilet were so hellish, I thought she was being stabbed. Clearly she wasn’t expecting me. I had a meeting at Club International, yet another “men’s mag,” but got the days mixed up and slimed back home on the IRT. I heard lamp-rattling gasps and dashed to the bathroom. There was Zoe, naked, on her knees before the porcelain throne, jamming her forefinger in and out of her mouth. Her long hair hung over her face. Her breasts rested against the bowl. I couldn’t tell if she was actually expelling, because her back was to me. Besides which, I couldn’t really take my eyes off her ass. Zoe had olive skin, incredibly soft, despite the phenomenal tone derived from entire days of stretching, working out, swimming, and, of course, pas de deux–ing until she dropped. Her bottom kind of humped up and down as she pumped her own stomach. Her retches tore out of her. It was like watching a car accident: I couldn’t look and I couldn’t look away. I don’t know how long I’d been staring before I noticed that her left hand, while her right poked down her throat, had a task of its own. Her humping grew even more furious. And I realized that as she was heaving, her fingers worked like drunken maggots between her legs. She began to rock on her haunches. Her head whipped back and forth, the sounds coming out of her more animal than human. It was such a private moment. Ferociously intimate. I had no doubt no human had ever seen this woman’s secret ritual. I didn’t know I had dropped my pants—didn’t even know I was standing there nursing a throbbing hard-on—until a groan of my own must have tipped her off. She swung around, hand still planted in her thicket of pubic hair, and screamed through a mouth that looked half melted. “Zoe,” I cried when her shrieking ceased. “Zoe!” But she was beyond hearing. Her eyes flashed like a trapped animal’s. The smear of vomit around her lips gave off a primal sheen. She might have been feasting on living entrails. In fact, she was—but they were her own. Without thinking, I took a step toward her. She leaped up from her crouch by the toilet. Sopping fingers tore at my chest. Strange, wild snarls escaped her lips. I grabbed her shoulders. She took a swipe at my face. I tasted her bile, like salt and mud. Then she dropped back to her knees. She jammed her right hand back between her glistening labia, grabbed my cock with her left, and guided it between those puke-moistened lips. Her clutch was so violent that I fell backward, hit the wall, and ended up on my back as she gulped and sucked, feeding off my hard-on like a starving jackal. It was over in minutes, but she remained over me, mouth cupped around my sucked-dry penis. Eyes squeezed shut, she continued working those bruised, shiny lips in a kind of hypnotic rhythm, trying to draw whatever last, remaining drop of sperm might be left. It got too painful and I had to move her head. Finally she collapsed between my legs, rolled her face onto my thigh, and opened her glassy eyes. “Protein,” she mumbled, and we both fell asleep on the bathroom floor."

Newsletter (Sundays)

no updates. today has been an effort in staying true to the ideas i laid out yesterday on deep leisure and reading a ton:

Graphs on Deep Leisure

time wasted -- perhaps not?

Bram AdamsBram Adams

Software (Saturdays)

instead of having an actual back and forth with gpt, consider just asking it to simulate its own example conversation in an assistant:

...follow the previous run through an example convo simulating user and assistant given a starting message. consider alternate cases.

Books (5/month)

• Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
• Command & Control - 23%
• At Home in the Universe - 36%
• Napoleon: A Life - 49%
• Glass Bead Game - 44%
• River of the Gods - (5/5⭐️)
  • thought: speke found the nile, burton was in de-nile
  • thought: spekes commitment to hating is legendary, and the cause of his downfall
  • "When Burton’s translation of The Lusiads was finally released, Isabel feared that, like her brilliant if deeply flawed husband, it would never be understood. “If a thousand buy it, will a hundred read it, and will ten understand it?” she wondered. “To the unaesthetic, to non-poets, non-linguists, non-musicians, non-artists, Burton’s Lusiads will be an unknown land, an unknown tongue.”"
  • "Burton, intimidated neither by the art nor the artist, did not hesitate. Isabel, who was with him in the studio, later explained that her husband “had learnt something of sculpting when a boy in Italy.” Taking Papworth’s sculpting pencil from his hand, he immediately set to work. “With a few touches here and there,” Isabel wrote, he “made a perfect likeness and expression.” Isabel, who had watched as her husband carved life into the bust of a man who had been both his intimate friend and greatest foe, would later memorialize the moment in a poem she titled “Who Last Wins.” A Moulded mask at my feet I found With the drawn-down mouth and the deepen’d eye, More lifeless still than the marbles round—Very death amid life’s mimicry"
• Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way - 44% (+25%)
  • "Guilt is the same way: if you find yourself regularly experiencing guilt, then you're using guilt incorrectly. Guilt works only when you wield it in such a way that it doesn't happen. Guilt is costly when deployed. Once activated, it's usually strongly demotivating, and can easily lead to failure spirals or vicious cycles of depression."
  • "I would say that, if you keep finding yourself carrying out a threat, then you really need to consider whether or not your threats are really capable of steering the future in the way you hoped."
  • "As a matter of fact, guilt and sunk cost fallacy are closely related: both are about suffering for costs that were paid in the past. The only difference is that guilt carries with it a lesson, an instruction to alter your environment and your mind so that similar actions don't occur in the future. With practice, it is possible to reflexively treat the initial gut-wrenching guilt as an instruction to update your behavioral patterns, and then dismiss the lingering guilt immediately."
• Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (new!) - 2%
  • "Leaving aside the work of Ada Lovelace—the 19th century countess who devised algorithms for Charles Babbage's never-completed Analytical Engine—computer programming has existed as a human endeavor for less than one human lifetime: it has been only 68 years (~2008) since Konrad Zuse unveiled his Z3 electro-mechanical computer in 1941, the first working general-purpose computer. And it's been only 64 years since six women—Kay Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum—were pulled from the ranks of the U.S. Army's “computer corps”, the women who computed ballistics tables by hand, to become the first programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer."
  • "There were, however, some common themes: almost everybody emphasized the importance of writing readable code; most of my subjects have found that the hardest bugs to track down are in concurrent code; and nobody seemed to think programming is a solved problem: most are still looking for a better way to write software, whether by finding ways to automatically analyze code, coming up with better ways for programmers to work together, or finding (or designing) better programming languages. And almost everyone seemed to think that ubiquitous multi-core CPUs are going to force some serious changes in the way software is written."
• Nefertiti (new!) - 8%
  • "Our family was too close to the Pharaohs of Egypt to believe in their divinity the way the common people did, the way they were told to believe so they wouldn’t challenge their authority. My father explained it one night, and I was afraid that next he would tell us that Amun-Re was not real, either, but he never did that. There were things you believed in for convenience’s sake, and things too sacred to speak against."
• Permanent Midnight (new!) - 2%
  • "The one time I set foot in Cedars when they didn’t want to chop off my arms at the shoulder blades—just to keep the needles out. Not that it would have helped. I would, if one-armed and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes. (I met a double amputee in San Francisco whose girlfriend slapped a bra strap around his throat and geezed him in the neck. Another triumph of the human spirit. But slap me if I get sentimental…)"
  • "The truth: This book, for me, is less an exercise in recall than an exorcism. And a schizophrenic exorcism at that. Opiates are, by their very nature, about forgetting. When you’re in that narcotic haze, memory functions like some mutant projector, a Hell-tuned Bell & Howell. As the film goes in one end, at the other it’s immediately eaten by some kind of acid, dissolving the second the events transpire. That was my life on drugs. Experience lived, more or less, then the soothing hiss of oblivion as instantly the moments are burned away… Banished."

Newsletter (Sundays)

issue 43 was truly composed on a whim, but i think has interesting philosophical implications on the role (or lack thereof) of free will. specifically interesting to consider arrows from the future pointing to the present instead of the present pointing to the future.

Software (Saturdays)

when coding with cursor and copilot, think top down from the comment level instead of thinking bottom up from the individual line of code level. use your compiler to handle that kind of thing

Other Stuff

PDF Version:

Books (5/month)

• Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
• Command & Control - 23%
• At Home in the Universe - 36%
• Napoleon: A Life - 54% (+5%)
  • "So affected was Ferdinand by what is today known as Stockholm Syndrome that he wrote to Napoleon in November 1808 to congratulate him on a French victory over the Spanish army at the battle of Tudela, and once again tried to solicit marriage with a Bonaparte."
• Glass Bead Game - 44%
• River of the Gods - 54% (+8%)
  • "So shocked was Isabel that she had been unable even to cry, her eyes wide, dry, and staring, her heart painfully pounding. Struggling to recover, she had pulled from a pocket the picture of Burton that she had carried with her for three years, an icon, a talisman, a symbol of hope. Without hesitating, he had reached into his own pocket and taken out a picture of her. Both pictures, Isabel would later insist, were in perfect condition, showing “how carefully we had always kept them.”"
  • "As Burton was still sick, complaining that “the fever… clung to me like the shirt of Nessus,” Steinhaüser advised that he stay in Aden until his health improved."
  • "I taught him archery by day—when his arm waxed strong, ’twas me he shot."
• Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way - 34% (+15%)
  • "Rest is not a reward for getting through all your obligations. Rather, rest (and personal health, and personal time) are part of the goal. Both because most people care about their personal comfort, and because taking care of yourself is very important in order to do all the other things you want to do. Rest isn't something you do when everything else is finished. Everything else doesn't get finished. Rather, there are lots of activities that you do, some which are more fun than others, and rest is an important one to do in appropriate proportions. Disconnect your impulse to rest from whether or not the world is in a stable state, because, spoiler alert, the world isn't going to be in a stable state for a long time. Rest isn't a reward for good behavior! It's not something you get to do when all the work is finished! That's finite task thinking. Rather, rest and health are just two of the unending streams that you move through."
  • "Most guilt-motivated people I meet would do well to worry less about whether they're going fast enough now, and worry more about whether the amount of work they're doing day-to-day is ideal in the long term, taking psychological constraints into account. You don't get points for pushing your body and mind as hard as you can, you get good outcomes from using your resources as wisely as you can. That usually entails stopping well before you drop each day, while steadily improving your capabilities."

Newsletter (Sundays)

• meta business thoughts: considering adding a podcast component to the newsletter where i basically just talk shit for 30-45 mins
  • spotify supports video for podcasts, and i could upload it to apple too and farm for yt clips
  • but i would want it to have high quality video + audio and sound as interesting as a guy like me can be on camera (spoiler: not much)

Software (Saturdays)

life is short. buy the box set.

Books (5/month)

• Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
• Command & Control - 23%
• At Home in the Universe - 36%
• Napoleon: A Life - 49%
• Glass Bead Game - 44%
• River of the Gods - 46%
• Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way (new!) - 19%
  • Don't say "I really should finish this paper." Say "if I don't finish this paper, I'll get a worse grade than I was planning to, and my teacher will frown at me, and my parents will frown at me." Then weigh your options. Then choose.
  • If you find yourself unable to think about a certain outcome, it can be very useful to think all the way through the painful outcome—not to convince yourself that everything would actually be fine, but just so that you can actually think about it. It's the thoughts you can't think that really screw you.
  • If you often suffer from guilt, then I strongly suggest cashing out your shoulds. Get a tally counter and start training yourself to notice when you say the word "should," and then once you're noticing it, start training yourself to unpack the sentence. "I should call my father this week" might cash out to "if I don't call my father this week, he'll feel disappointed and lonely." "I shouldn't play that video game" might cash out to "if I play that video game, I'll lose lots of time that I was planning to use for studying."

New Quotes Added!

13 quotes from Replacing Guilt: Minding Our Way by Nate Soares
29 quotes from River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard
77 quotes from Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human by Grant Morrison
12 quotes from At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart A. Kauffman
69 quotes from Black Rednecks & White Liberals: Hope, Mercy, Justice and Autonomy in the American Health Care System by Thomas Sowell
11 quotes from The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
20 quotes from Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts