Daily Log Digest – Week 50, 2024

2024-12-15

Rest day! Did almost nothing the whole day, except watching some shows.

2024-12-16

Visual Proof a^2 - b^2 = (a-b)(a+b)

Tidy - Futility Closet #math #proof #geometry

Sophie Germain wrote, “It has been said that algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but diagrammatic algebra.”

Meditations for Mortals Day Nineteen

This chapter is titled A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability

And yet despite the strange benefits that so often seem to arise from our lack of control, we proceed through life – as individuals, but as societies, too – as if the supreme goal should be always and only to obtain more and more of it. ‘The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable,’ writes Hartmut Rosa, the German social theorist we met in the introduction.

…

Rosa certainly doesn’t deny that the quest for controllability has brought incalculable benefits; after all, it’s behind virtually everything that makes life today so much freer from unremitting poverty and pain than it was in medieval times. And he’s clear he’s not arguing that underprivileged people should reconcile themselves to having less control over their lives than wealthier ones. But he shows that, simultaneously, our desire for controllability backfires, undermining our efforts to build happy and fulfilling lives. The human domination of nature has caused nature to escape human control, threatening our flourishing through runaway climate disruption. The more people with whom we’re able to connect digitally, the worse the loneliness epidemic gets; and the more vigilance parents exert over their children’s comfort, the more anxious and uncomfortable they are.

…

The point is a subtle one, he notes, because a resonant relationship with life depends on its being semi-controllable, not totally uncontrollable. You need to engage actively in the world – to connect to others, to make plans, and to pursue opportunities and ambitions – and people need the freedom, and the economic resources, to be able to do that. (Neither good times nor good stories will occur very often if you just sit around, isolated, waiting for them – or if you’re obliged to spend every waking hour struggling to survive.) Still, it’s central to an enjoyable and meaningful life that whenever we reach out to the world in this way, we don’t get to control how it responds. The value and depth of the experience relies on that unknowability. Maybe you’ll get what you wanted, or maybe you won’t – and sometimes, not getting what you wanted will leave life immeasurably better.

WhatsApp chat export

GitHub - Pustur/whatsapp-chat-parser-website: Website to view your exported WhatsApp chat logs 👁‍🗨 #whatsapp

A conversation in a group led me down a rabbit-hole of whether there is a good user interface to visualize WhatsApp chat exports. The text files are rather clunky to look at. A bit of googling led me to this site, which also happens to be open source.

Learning C# Programming Language using Claude

I last wrote code in C# a while ago. Starting today, I started ramping up on C# once again to work on a project. A lot of the core elements of the language have remained largely unchanged. But it was surprising how fast it was for me to pick up the new changes that have happened.

This was possible largely due to me using Claude as a learning tool. Instead of reading a book or hunting down a specific article or piece of documentation, I just gave a lot of context about me and what I know to Clause and asked it to explain things to me.

2024-12-17

Meditations with Mortals Day Twenty

This chapter is titled Set a quantity goal: On firing your inner quality controller. Not a whole lot of new insight for me tbh.

A more pragmatic and imperfectionist way to ease up on a fixation with outcomes is to set a quantity goal. There’s no need to pretend you don’t care about the results of your work, or to eradicate the part of you that seeks control. Give that part something to do – just make sure it has nothing to do with the quality of the result. Eight hundred words per day; one hour on the side business every evening; five potential customers contacted; three pages of the material for the examination turned into flashcards (or the three-hour rule we encountered on Day Thirteen): these are goals anyone with the available time can achieve, so long as you’re willing to accept that, for now, quality isn’t the point.

2024-12-18

Meditations with Mortals Day Twenty One

This chapter is titled What’s an interruption, anyway?: On the importance of staying distractible

As the Zen teacher John Tarrant explains, the way we talk about distraction implies something equally unhelpful: a model of the human mind according to which its default state is one of stability, steadiness and single-pointed focus. ‘Telling myself I’m distracted,’ he writes, ‘is a way of yanking on the leash and struggling to get back to equilibrium.’ But the truth is that fixity of attention isn’t our baseline. The natural state of the mind is often for it to bounce gently around, usually remaining only loosely focused and receptive to new stimuli, the state sometimes known as ‘open awareness,’ which neuroscientific research has shown is associated with incubating creativity. There are sound evolutionary reasons why this should be the case: the prehistoric human who could choose to fix her attention firmly on one thing, and leave it there for hours on end, so that nothing could disturb her, would soon have been devoured by a saber-toothed tiger. Monks in some traditions spend years developing single-pointed focus, in monasteries expressly designed to provide the required seclusion, precisely because it doesn’t come naturally. And so where the idea of interruption defines unanticipated external events as inherently bad, the idea of distraction defines the movements of the mind as similarly problematic.

Going through life with a rigid commitment to the elimination of interruption and distraction might seem like a way to stay more absorbed in what’s happening. Yet in fact it pulls you out of it, by undermining your capacity to respond to reality as it actually unfolds – to seize unexpected opportunities and to be seized by an awe-inspiring landscape or fascinating conversation; to let your mind take an unplanned journey into fertile creative territory, or to find enjoyment, as opposed to annoyance, in a small child bursting into your study, while fulfilling your obligations as a parent. ‘Getting lost and distracted in this way is what life is for,’ Tarrant writes. Looking at things from this angle, you might even argue that what makes modern digital distraction so pernicious isn’t the way it disrupts attention, but the fact that it holds it, with content algorithmically engineered to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and fruitful kind of distraction.

Go Error Handling

This is a good article enumerating the different issues around Go error handling: Errors, Errors Everywhere: How We Centralized and Structured Error Handling | Oliver Nguyen #golang #errors

The solution that they implemented to get around the issues is a bit idiosyncratic and may not be ideal. Here is the HN discussion: How We Centralized and Structured Error Handling in Golang | Hacker News

ad editor

An editor that tries to bring together the concepts in acme and vim editors: GitHub - sminez/ad: an adaptable text editor #acme #vim #editor

git submodules

Good overview of git submodules: Demystifying git submodules #git #tools

• git clone --recursive will checkout submodules as well
• git config submodule.recurse true will make git pull update submodules as well.
• git submodule update --remote will update all submodules to their latest upstream commits.

In Praise of Writing on the Internet

in praise of writing on the internet - by Celine Nguyen

I began personal canon by accident—and only now, 34 posts and one year later, do I understand why I kept on going. This post is partly about writing a newsletter and building an audience for your writing, especially on Substack. But it’s also about what forms of writing are personally and societally meaningful, and why it’s felt so meaningful to spend the last 12 months writing about my love of literature. Below:

• All the rules I broke, and all the advice I didn’t take (but maybe should have?)
• Why write a newsletter, and how it can be valuable to you and others
• Useful resources and (potentially) useless advice

Celine writes looooong posts but I always try to make time to read them. There is something very relatable about her writing

But what I’ve found is that there are so many people like me—people who studied computer science and then felt some irrepressible longing towards literature and art and the humanities, who exert a great deal of effort to self-educate themselves in these domains. They want to read seriously, but they need a way in, and inviting and accessible discussions of great works mean a lot to them. (They certainly meant a lot to me.)

The first belief is that reading “seriously” matters, especially if you take your taste/intellect/capacity to create seriously. The definition of “serious” is highly personal, of course, but all of us have an instinctive sense of what it means and when we aren’t doing it. We usually know when we’re reading something that’s good for us—and we know…

2024-12-19

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Two

This chapter is titled Stop being so kind to Future You: On entering time and space completely

If there’s a single truth at the heart of the imperfectionist outlook, it’s the one to which we turn as we begin this final week: that this, here and now, is real life. This is it. This portion of your limited time, the part before you’ve managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with your procrastination problem, or graduated or found a partner or retired; and before the survival of democracy or the climate have been secured: this part matters just as much as any other and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists. If instead you take the other approach – if you see all of this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself, or feeling good about yourself – then you’ll end up treating your actual life as something to ‘get through,’ until one day it’ll be over, without the meaningful part ever having arrived. We have to show up as fully as possible here, in the swim of things as they are. None of that means you don’t get to harbor ambitious plans as well – about the things you’ll accomplish, the fortune you’ll accumulate, or the difference you’ll make to the world. Far from it. It means you get to pursue those goals and feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them, instead of postponing the aliveness to when or if they’re achieved.

onecompiler

Found this site in a video I was watching: https://onecompiler.com/react #react #javascript #frontend

It's great to just copy paste a React component and have it visualized. I suppose there are other places on the internet that provide this, but I found this to be quite straightforward in that it required no setup.

Copying from remote SSH host to local clipboard

From: Copying to your clipboard over SSH in vim with OSC52 #clipboard #ssh

Dmitry Mazin also told me you can create this script on a remote host, call it pbcopy, and piping into it will copy to your clipboard! I tested it and it works.

#!/bin/bash
printf "\033]52;c;%s\007" "$(base64 | tr -d '\n')"

What We Suffer For

What We Suffer For - by Josh Zlatkus - Living Fossils

Great coming back to one of my fav substack after a long time. In this the author uses the model of evolutionary tradeoffs to explain the reasons why we are willing to suffer in life. Remember evolution only cares about increasing our likelihood to propagate our genes into the next generation. It is agnostic to our suffering (unless it contradicts with the primary goal as stated!).

Over the years, I’ve been able to put together a list of what people are willing to suffer for.

In summary, we suffer for: - To fit in - Not having a good enough reason - To avoid a loss - To maintain a relationship - To meet expectations

How to Promote Equality without Backlash?

How to Promote Equality without Backlash? - by Alice Evans #feminism

Not all cancer treatments work. Likewise, not all feminist activism is effective. So, we can ask,

…

To advance gender equality, it may be more strategic to build inclusive campaigns that gently expand what is considered acceptable while appealing to common values. Gender interventions will have the greatest impact if they tackle locally-binding constraints, with careful sequencing. Delivering shared prosperity is equally vital - especially for disadvantaged young men.

Love the section where she outlines the three things that drive backlash

• Assaulting Core Values
• Exclusionary Tribalism
• Status Threats

and then in a subsequent section outlines what can be done to prevent the backlash

• Inclusive Coalitions
• Female Co-Workers Demonstrate Talent
• Charismatic Television can Expand the Boundaries of Permissibility
• Supporting Disadvantaged Young Men

Crypto trades on the greater fool theory

A letter in response to crypto skeptic journalist Jemima Kelly's article in the FT caught my eye: Letter: Crypto trades on the greater fool theory

It is a very simple succinct description of why crypto tokens are useless. It is worth reproducing in full.

Once again Jemima Kelly hits the crypto nail on its virtual head (“The grim ghost of crypto future,” Opinion, December 2).

How we name things influences how we understand them, and so I particularly appreciate her avoidance of two words that are often used in articles about crypto: “currency” and “investment”. Crypto “coins” or “tokens” are entries in a digital ledger and do not come close to meeting the basic definition of a currency, which is that it be a unit of account, a means of exchange, and a store of value. And anyone putting money into crypto is a speculator, not an investor. On what basis would you buy a crypto token? It pays no dividend, it is backed by no underlying assets, and it cannot be transported in a money belt when storm troopers kick in your front door as you slip out the back. It can, of course, be stolen by hackers, and is useful for laundering dirty money.

But the only reason for the average Joe to buy any crypto token is the hope of selling it at a higher price to someone else. This is the greater fool theory in a nutshell. Ian Kennedy Naples, FL, US

2024-12-20

Got into a funk and never recovered. Was pretty much a zombie throughout the day!

2024-12-21

The funk from yesterday threatened to continue, but I managed to push it away after a bit of effort.

The Bookshop Woman

Read a few pages of this lovely book: The Bookshop Woman: Nanako Hanada, Cat Anderson: 9781914240812: Amazon.com: Books #books #japan

I spotted this book first at Blue Tokai HSR, when somebody was reading it and the title caught my eye. I subsequently had a great conversation with this person about many things, but somehow forgot about the book itself.

Then suddenly, the book came to the top of my mind a few weeks ago and I put it on one of my secret santa lists. Somebody noticed and sent the book to me, and I was super pumped to read it as soon as it arrived.

It's a very sweet book. Very much in the genre of Japanese books like When the Coffee Gets Cold and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Three

This chapter is titled How to start from sanity: On paying yourself first

And yet it appears to be a fundamental rule that if you treat sanity as a state you have to reach by engaging in all manner of preparations, or getting other things out of the way first, then the main effect will be to reinforce the sense of sanity as something that’s out of reach. You’ll entrench the stress and anxiety, rather than uprooting them. You might get all sorts of useful things done – but they’ll never bring peace of mind, because you’ll effectively be telling yourself on a daily basis that peace of mind is something distant and not available right here.

That’s what I mean by ‘striving towards sanity.’ ‘Operating from sanity,’ on the other hand, means embodying a certain kind of orientation towards life first, one that treats the present moment as a place where peace of mind might, in theory, be attainable – and then going about your life from that orientation, rather than treating the activities of your life as things you’re doing in order to one day reach it. In his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately’.

Treat your to-do list as a menu. In the striving-towards-sanity mindset, a to-do list is always something you’ve got to get to the end of before you’re allowed to relax. But in any context where there are more things that feel like they need doing than there’s time available in which to do them – which is the normal state of affairs, after all – a to-do list is by definition really a menu, a list of tasks to pick from, rather than to get through. And operating from sanity means treating it that way: starting with the acknowledgment that you won’t complete everything you might wish, then making your selections from the menu. Obviously, not every task on every to-do list will be as appetizing as the restaurant analogy suggests. But it’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plow through, but as options you get to pick.