December 1, 2024

Daily Log Digest – Week 47, 2024

2024-11-24

Keeping Time

The mind-bending new science of measuring time #time #atomic

As late as the middle of the 20th century, our time remained tied to the Sun. A second was officially defined as a fraction of the solar year. But in 1967, deep in the atomic age, the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures in Paris ruled that the second would now be defined according to vibrations of the caesium atom. Ever since, timekeeping has become the domain of physicists, extracted in sunless laboratories with precision optics, synthesised by computers and distributed by satellites.

Caesium atoms, when excited by just the right frequency, resonate, like a wine glass shattered by an opera singer. By measuring this frequency, we measure time. Atoms make for handy clockwork. They don’t have mechanical parts, and they don’t wear out. They are attractively standard. While sunlight and pendulums vary, every caesium atom is identical to any other. And they tick very fast.

and the cutest part

As late as the second world war, Londoners could hire a woman named Ruth Belville. Once a week, Belville set her family’s pocket chronometer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. She then visited her clients around the city, telling them what time it was, and they would set their own clocks. The Belvilles had operated this service since 1836. Now Nist servers respond to more than 100 billion requests a day for the time, synchronising between a quarter and half of all machines connected to the internet.

Lots of interest anecdotes and historical trivia about timekeeping in the article.

Also, on a more technical note this reminded of this fascinting podcast that I heard a long time ago, but still remember fondly, about maintaining accurate time on computers: Signals and Threads | Clock Synchronization

LLMs for Indepth Learning

This is a good Twitter post from Justin Skycak of MathAcademy on his experience trying to get LLMs to teach him biology indepth, from the ground up. His methodology and the prompts he used are instructive

2024-11-25

Spent almost the entire day sleeping and catching up on all the TV show episodes that landed on the weekend.

Meditations for Mortals

“Most successful people,’ as the entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson has observed, ‘are just a walking anxiety disorder, harnessed for productivity.”

– Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman: Amazon.com: Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts eBook : Burkeman, Oliver: Kindle Store

I keep recommended Four Thousand Weeks to anybody I met as the only "productivity" book they should read. I consider it more of an "anti-productivity" book, and to figure out what that means you will have to actually read the book.

Anyway, so Meditations for Mortals is kind of like a followup to Four Thousand Weeks. I finished reading the introduction, and the author recommends reading one page everyday for twenty-eight days, instead of trying to read through multiple chapters.

Loved, this quote from the intro, which should give a sense of what this book is about.

“This isn’t one of those books promising that if you implement its contents flawlessly, you’ll have the ideal system for running your life. Human finitude ensures that’s never coming. Which is exactly the reason to dive wholeheartedly into this life, now.”

2024-11-26

Spent the day flaneuring around Indiranagar and the area around Church St. Visited a lot of bookshops and ate at some cool places.

2024-11-27

Spent the whole day doing Math Academy because I had to catch up for what I missed yest.

Somebody Somewhere

Bingewatched all released S3 episodes so far. This is such an underrated and sweet show: Somebody Somewhere (TV Series 2022–2024) - IMDb #tv

Kendrick Lamar Samplers

The NY Amplifier released this playlist, and I spent the day listening. Not a very knowledgable rap person, so the notes were helpful. Enjoyed it: The Amplifier: Kendrick Lamar's Samples #playlist

2024-11-28

Why I left NYC

why I left nyc - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder #nyc #sf

This randomly showed up in my Twitter, but upon reading I found myself overcome with a feeling of melancholy. I could relate a lot to some of the things said in the article, in my own struggles to find a city/place where I could find my kind of people and feel a shared sense of community.

NYC is also one of my favorite cities in the world, but I never lived there long enough to appreciate the challenges of building community there

in new york, everything felt transient. I constantly met new people, only to never see them again. everyone packs their social schedule, which makes it hard to make spontaneous plans, and some people pack their schedule with multiple social activities in a single night, which makes it hard to have the slow, several-hours-long hangouts I prefer. despite all the work I did to create social spaces that were not just about drinking in dark and loud spaces, it still felt like the “center of gravity” for social life was drinking in dark and loud spaces. I hosted tons of events, but the overlap between “my close friends” and “people who attend my events” was frustratingly small. I had friends in very different worlds, which is nice—but it felt like the worlds they were in were too different, and trying to host one big party where all my friends would be in one place seemed like a recipe for awkwardness, and people not really “getting” each other.

the transience was what got to me. I’ve always wanted something very simple: a small group of close friends that I see consistently, week after week. friends I feel comfortable just sitting with. friends I can make my stupid absurdist jokes with, friends who will prioritize me by setting aside an entire evening rather than just “let’s catch up between 7-8pm three tuesdays from now.” I had a semblance of that kind of community in new york for a while, but by the end of my time there it was nonexistent.

Meditations for Mortals Chapter 3

Continuing the daily ritual of reading one chapter from Meditations for Mortals, here are a few quotes from Chapter 3 titled You need only face the consequences On paying the price.

“At some point, as you seek to spend more of your finite existence in the ways that feel most meaningful to you, the thought will inevitably occur to you that you can’t make a certain choice about your time, however much you’d like to, because the circumstances simply don’t allow it. The obstacle could be as weighty as the belief that you can’t walk away from a marriage or a dispiriting career, because of the emotional or financial impact on yourself or on others. Or it might be as mundane as the notion that you can’t spend half an hour on an exhilarating creative project today, because there are too many emails to be answered, or too many household chores that need completing first. These are valid concerns. But the idea that they eliminate all room for choice isn’t entirely correct. The truth, though it often makes people indignant to hear it, is that it’s almost never literally the case that you have to meet a work deadline, honor a commitment, answer an email, fulfill a family obligation, or anything else. The astounding reality – in the words of Sheldon B. Kopp, a genial and brilliant American psychotherapist who died[…]”

“Freedom isn’t a matter of somehow wriggling free of the costs of your choice – that’s never an option – but of realizing, as Kopp points out, that nothing stops you doing anything at all, so long as you’re willing to pay those costs. ”

“(It’s a particular peril among the progressive-minded, I’ve noticed, to take the fact that a given choice might be unfeasible for the underprivileged as a reason not to make it yourself. But unless it’s you who’s underprivileged, that’s an alibi, not an argument.) ”

“Whatever choice you make, so long as you make it in the spirit of facing the consequences, the result will be freedom in the only sense that finite humans ever get to enjoy it. Not freedom from limitation, which is something we unfortunately never get to experience, but freedom in limitation. Freedom to examine the trade-offs – because there will always be trade-offs – and then to opt for whichever trade-off you like.”

ffmpeg sprites

Love this short post which gives the ffmpeg command to extract sprites from a video and gives a detailed breakdown of each command option: Generate video sprites using just Ffmpeg | steelcm.com #ffmpeg #tools

Denis Villeneuve on the cycle of violence

Mathew Beloni interviewed Denis Villeneuve for the latest episode of The Town podcast: ‘Dune’ Director Denis Villeneuve on Plans for Part 3, ‘Star Wars’ Interest, and Art Vs. Commerce | The Town

I was quite struck by his thoughts on the cycle of violence that plagues humanity.

Beloni: What would you say are the kinds of themes that you are drawn to? If someone was going to predict what your next film or three films down the line would be, would they say he's attracted to these types of scripts?

Villeneuve: I would say existential anxiety, for sure.

Beloni: Existential anxiety. You know, like Nolan seems to be attracted to the concepts of time. Spielberg. It's always about the relationship between family and their kids, and what is it about your…what do you think?

Villeneuve: I see a cycle of violence.

Beloni: A cycle of violence?

Villeneuve: Yeah. Projects that are talking about the cycle of the repetition of history. Cycle of violence. That's something that I'm obsessed by.

Beloni: Hmm. Why?

Villeneuve: Because we're stuck with it. Because I want to find a way out.

Beloni: And what do you mean by a cycle of violence? You mean wars? Do you mean personal violence? Crime? That kind of thing?

Villeneuve: Everything. It's like the idea that we are like, in our genes, the heritage from our ancestors, through our education, to how we are raised, the transmission of anger. How can we get rid of that anger? Of that hate? It's something that is very profound. And it's like we are spinning on ourselves like a dryer. It's like, how can we stop being so stupid? It's a very primitive force, but there's a way out. And slowly.

2024-11-29

Full day of MathAcademy. Hit my all time daily record of points earned! 🎉

2024-11-30

Was out and about most of the day.

Went to a nice Kerala food restaurant in HSR Layout called Kumarakom.