Tuesday, 11/08/2022

23:20 Usual day

Godel's completeness theorem this morning, followed by some waffling and some wandering and some email clearing and some unrelated work. Glad the wiki is mostly shaping up; occasionally performing some BFS "groom" of the system is already paying dividends. Learning a lot about my writing, how to keep it terse and focused and cut and cut and cut until I get to what really matters.

Still believe that computing and education is one of the biggest problems to be solved today, but not as big as the energy crisis. What else is there that can be solved outside of governance?

Not sure where I stand on "cool". Cool is a great way to understand what people find culturally interesting, and it's this pyramid of obsession with cool that peaks with characters who make meaningful creative contributions, but is really held together by those who act as "glue", showing up to every party and knowing everyone interesting and connecting them to one another and to people who are ostensibly "less cool". Chasing cool seems silly for my role, but incidental cool seems incredibly useful.

Noticing that I usually have a great decision making ability after a few minutes of insight; my first impression is usually not correct, but continuing to waffle wastes a ton of time for me without producing any reasonable insight. The boots I buy really don't matter that much, but I think I've made the right decision for something sustainable and repairable going forward that'll fit my look (a bit academic, a bit Rick, a bit retro; as if I stepped out of Apple's R&D in the 80s but someone threw Ricks on my feet). Leveraging traditional "educational" looks with interesting sillhouettes. Still waffling about making clothing down this path. No graphics though. Or very few. Just make impulse purchases, rotate them through, and drop them when they don't fit the wardrobe. Gym will come through soon enough.

Still dreaming about compact function stores and lisp methods of computing. I'll build these. Window manager as papertian metaphor still interesting, but definitely have to use browser DOM and run some JS to render these things. My compromise will be not using React and building my own thing. Maybe I'll come up with some novel notion of state but I'll probably reimplement reactive programming somewhere down the line.

In same vein as cool - maybe optimizing for cash is good. Short term it's great to have more flexibility and choice in life. Long term it gives you more options, choices and agency. Cost is that you "compromise" by optimising for arbitrage that makes money without providing value; fear is that you are capturing far more value than you are creating for others without working towards some global goal. Lots of very smart people spend their whole lives working on very noble projects that don't matter, though - maybe these contributions to the literature are okay, and who's to say who knows what's worth betting on - not me.

23:44 teaching is social problem

so much of teaching computers is social. most of the teachers i know when faced with teaching computing are going to ask the people they know and their friends, and the acquaintance who works at intel is going to tell them that yeah, I use C, and my buddies all do machine learning python things, and the teacher is going to take one look at smalltalk or gtoolkit or "beginner student language" and say fuck, i'll read some coding bootcamp medium articles and teach my kids how to program with the C language. hard to express or understand that what is in vogue now isn't necessarily the best for learning from first principles, and may not be necessary for learning at all now or forever because tech changes so so so so fast. can't sell another language or framework or technology to teachers unless they're particularly inventive or agentic. this is a social problem reliant on external perceptions of computing; because people don't understand their computers beyond these programming language things and hacking and terminals, then also use these complete apps, they never develop agency for themselves and as such never really understand what it is to control something they own, and never really understand what it means to control another comptuer and use computing with agency. it's vicious!