2020-10-18

• Started the day with a clear [[todo]], although on paper -- my digital [[todo]] still tends to diverge. Need to think about how to solve that... later though :)
• [[self-organizing intelligent matter]] https://openreview.net/forum?id=160xFQdp7HR as posted by [[maxjaderberg]]: https://twitter.com/maxjaderberg/status/1314208851667808256 pull
• Get back to [[dan-whaley]] (email). I drafted my response but didn't send it yet.
• Got back to [[yakomo]] -- I spaced out for a bit, unfortunately. I need to review my scheduling.
• Struggled to remember the name of [[Moravec's paradox]] again. Wanted to say "Morley's" for some reason. Moravec sounds more like my name, so perhaps I can use that to remember it.
• Worked on [[Agora howto]] further.
• [[self-obituary]]: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/theithacajournal/obituary.aspx?n=michael-morley&pid=196956713
• [[mmmalign]] yesterday: "all links on twitter, however short or long, count as 23 characters" https://twitter.com/MMMalign/status/1317450885627334656 pull
• Read a message by [[Steven Fan]] on [[procrastination]] and [[mattgoldenberg]]'s workshop. Steven mentioned [[logging]] as a strategy; also recommended by https://hbr.org/2017/10/5-research-based-strategies-for-overcoming-procrastination.
• [[ablueaeshna]] recommended the [[Dahlem botanical gardens]] in [[Berlin]]: https://twitter.com/ablueaeshna/status/1317854688331661312 pull
• [[museical]] asked about [[logseq]].
• Tried [[logseq]] today. It is git-based! The setup experience was simple. Interesting.

2020-10-18

Read: To Mend a Broken Internet, Create Online Parks | WIRED

Another greenspace metaphor for better online spaces - the [[online park]]. See also: [[digital gardens]].

https://www.wired.com/story/to-mend-a-broken-internet-create-online-parks/

Clougha Hike

I went for a hike up to [[Clougha Pike]] in the [[Forest of Bowland]] last week. It was gorgeous up there. Quite pleasantly bleak moorland and stone.

The peak of Clougha Pike, looking over towards the Yorkshire Dales I think.

⥅ [[images/clougha-hike/peak.jpg]]

View from a distance of the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture.

⥅ [[images/clougha-hike/goldsworthy2.jpg]]

Another angle on the Andy Goldsworthy sculpture.

⥅ [[images/clougha-hike/goldsworthy.jpg]]

The heather of the moorland in autumn.

⥅ [[images/clougha-hike/heather.jpg]]

A lovely spot at the bottom of Clougha.

⥅ [[images/clougha-hike/20201010_141447.jpg]]

19:11 notes on web

ur/web

god i wish this language had good exceptions. if it had good exceptions and/or a good development cycle, it would be the best ecosystem for full stack web development the guarantees it offers are so so so important

ihp

incredible work. it's the most seamless web dev experience i've seen and is completely succinct

elm

i love how good the compiler is and the development process is i hate all of the boiler plate, the verbosity, and the higher kinded data types

other haskell libraries

most require some form of recompilation; this is killer when it's not done automatically

etc

• Hot reloading is so important! Having to recompile just to view a new site kills the development process for me. With that project, you can't even reload; you have to completely recompile then view the app again. That isn't a sustainable development architecture!
• The installation process is a major blocker. Having an app framework to get started is incredibly good, as is having a tutorial
• Syntax really matters - it mattered for react, it matters now. It's necessary to be able to syntactically distinguish frontend from backend

21:13 your past and being one of the lucky ones

it's good to know and acknowledge just how fortunate you are to meet and know incredible people and keep in touch with them for the rest of our lives

it cna be difficult when parents set expectations for children based on their own lives and shortcomings; if this works against you, deal with it yourself. you are not your past; you may act like it and may be affected by it but are by no means bound to it

parents can mean well and screw it up you will never be happy and satisfied living up to the standards of someone else

where would you be, then, if not hampered by your upbringing? what do you want for yourself - think about how to get there i want to be

• open source contributor
• work for consulting company
• build knowledge of ecosystem
• innovate with developer tools

21:16 reducing context

is incredibly important your environment impacts how you work and think, consciously and subconciously it determines what you are distracted or inspired by it determines what you are able to accomplish it determines your skills and abilities it determines you

curate your environment to represent you and it will urate you and your work

21:18 track consumption

https://rustwasm.github.io/docs/book/game-of-life/introduction.html is this a good idea? it's good to inform others and build an online prescence but may be bad for the individual

curate a personality without public information? it may be better to appear deliberately cryptic to be cool

he also has good signaling as a service article i have notes in my concrete journal on it

something acronym notes

video notes on interview with errolson my personal initial thoughts:

• scalper, costs lots of money etc

current uniform: P30A, LA6B, sleeveless tee

slackbot on perosnal server

prompt with questions at times import into data collector integrate with cal for feedback?

ava

desire and optimism

article

peak experience; changed life, somehow. buddhism suggests best solution to pain is to give up wanting the object of desire is never object enough; not even actual objects. we are always feeling urgent desire; the physical attempt to reach the other with the acknowledgement that they will be forever out of reach

we try to be formed and held onto and kept by him, but instead he offers us freedom

Schopenhauer: man can do what he wills, but not will what he wills. it is not up to us to stop wanting, and it is a gift to want things, to get what you want and to lose it. the lord gives everything and charges by taking it back. what a bargain - jack gilbert we will always lose time, and chapters of life, and it is inevitable for us to lose our characteristics, possessions, relationships and knowledge

our optimism can only ever be a cruel optimism. no feeling is final. the bad news is that you are tumbling thoruhg empty air; the good news is that there is no ground to hit

it is important to live with all of our wanting and appreciate it for what it is; to be comfortable and confident in the moment .

ash is purest white

article a movie dovetails well with kafka's letters to milena the sentiment that passion can burn you but leave you clean

wearing clothes

article zazen is the art of doing self we have a naked self :: an awareness that is just you .pure and unprocessed but we wear all sorts of clothes as we progress through life. the entire problem of most of our lives is deciding which clothes we should wear

Uchiyama's point is that the clothes don't matter; the delusions of self should not impact your real relationship with the world. to believe that nothing that matters more than internal experience and still have the flesh to dress and ahve a job and feel desires; how do you reconcile this concept of putting on masks and concrete specific desires?

what if you enjoy living in such a complex world and falling in love with the wrong people?

self improvement and self esteem are just materialism - the self does not exist in the way we think it really does

we should enjoy living in the world and having these experiences; we should enjoy living life and gathering these collections of concrete memories without any sort of ephemeralism it is okay to express our desires and loves of all of these points and it is okay to keep lists of everyone you are ever going to love and will

to be in the world; it is important to try to be in the world

passion economy and future of work

article the creator stack, or enterprization of consumer, allows individuals to pilot their own individual companies and accept lots of income online market places permit 'turnkey' ways for people to make money, trading their time for hourly or per opportunity pages on a website and allowing the consumer and provided to move with more liquidity

though this is being your own boss, you are the boss of a one dimensional world for these people, we crave living a livelihood in a way that highlights our individuality

unbundling work from employment

article often monolithic entities distintigrate into many single purpose entities; craigslist attempting to fill every niche spawned so many services to serve many of its vertical goals, and unbundling the idea to execute verticaly generated tons of revenue

the 'organization man' - the subsuming of agency for large corporation - is collapsing to micro entreprenuers who are leveraging skills and knowledge outside of the context of an employee relationship

we have removed gatekeepers through technology and spawned independent work efforts; 20-30$ of the wrking age population of the US is engaged in independent work

some are shifting quickly to digitally mediated self employment, not just for hobbies but for traditional careers as well! catalyzed by innate human desire; the primary motivation for self employment is often financial Daniel Pink's theoryu of motivation – humans are driven by autonomy, mastery and purpose, all of which independent work may be able to better facilitate than alternatives

tech platforms remove gatekeepers and democratize access to customers worldwide horizontal or vertical unbundling? i.e. patreon: horizontal; substack: vertical. what is the best approach?

focus on a particular industry provides greater value, allowing non producers to turn into producers and actually expand the market of people who can function in a particular industry

they provide deeper value to help the worker manage and glow the business, taking much of the load off of the individual and benefitting the the group and collective. provide depth of value challenging for horizontal to communicate

reintroduce services and benefits workers lose when they choose to unbundle from their companies, forming a better support system for independent workers

horizontal approaches act as discovery services and destinations; often social media is seen as marketing for this action of unbundling the work environment.

22:22 you and your research

article characteristics

• having courage
• having confidence

only a man of 'infinite courage' could dare to have thoughts like shannon has had!

age is a big factor; some are disgustingly young with their best work, and others accomplish brilliance when they are young in STEM, but those in the arts (music, politics) accomplish their work very late

it is hard to work on small problems when you are famous or view yourself in such an imprtant fashion

genius is clearly primarily determination, with the inspiration as a necessary, but often kind of trivial, benefit . it is only when these things combine that people really become successful

one trait is ambiguity and the tolerance of ambiguity; avoiding the belief of whether something is or is not true, instead believe the theory enough to go ahead but double it enough to notice the flaws and faults. great contributions are not made with another decimal place;. being very aware of what is very true and what doesn't quite fit is important; write down every ambiguity, everything that is unclear and may not align with our perception of the worl must be written down, recorded and expanded upon.

all flaws must be tracked and we must explain them and how the theory can be changed to fit them; expanding to handle these edge cases can very well be the great contributions of the framework.

this extreme emotional committment is practically necessary; we know little of our subconscious other than that our dreams come out of it, and if our subconcious is able to work on the problem, we can awaken to the answer. it's so so so important to focus and commit to a current problem, truly thinking about the solution

Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

it is so important to ask what the most important problems are! if you aren't aware of important problems it is unlikely that you'll ever do important work great scientists have thought through a number of important problems and how to attack them important problem has a very caerful phrasing; important problems have an attack. not time travel but tangible approaches with problems

planting acorns so that oaks will grow - you can't always know exactly whre to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. it is okay to stand on top of the mountain where lightning strikes, to take risks for such inspiration; to do great work you must work on important problems and you must have an idea

'great thoughts time' – what will be the role of computers? what will be the goal?

when an opportunity opens, great scientists drop everything and pursue it. they already had the idea and had to find the opportunity; as they understand the problem, they find the in

work with the door open or the door closed: if you work with the door closed, you get more work done and are more productive, but later you don't know what problems are worth working on! the people who work with the door open are constantly interrupted, but always get clues as to what the world is and what might be important

you must also sell your solution, and sell it to other scientists; these people are all busy with their own work, and as such they do not have the time to entertain others' ideas, work and ambitions.

on math: the effort to generalize often means that the solution is simple it is a poor workman who blames his tools; the good man gets the job done with what he's got and gets the best answer he can. by altering the problem you can make a big difference to allow other people to either build on what you've done or duplicate what you have done – just as easy to do a general job as a special case!

selling is:

• clear writing
• reasonably formal talks
• informal talks

'back room scientists'; keeping quiet, would speak up after a decision has been made rather than speaking up impromptu and advocating for specific things

give speeches, and gie good speeches; why are siome papers remembered and most are not? technical person wants a highly limited technical talk, while the audience wants more survey and background; the conversation is a mediation between these two extremes, and finding the proper words makes a talk great

you must work on important problems; pasteur: luck favors the prepared mind. understand the meta problems the bigger problems, and mediate your work; take control if what you'd like to work on when you become more successful, and as more is demanded of you you have more power of choice as to what to work on

is the effort to be a great scientist worth it? doing first class work certainly is, but bosses are often in the way of such discovery – and yet those who accomplish want it to do it again. those who have done great work still enjoy the slog, as the value is in the struggle moreso than the result

drive and committment - doing great work with less ability but with deep committment to the first class work is vital to its success personality defects: i.e. wanting total control of the system and not recognizing need for support often good scientists will fight the system rather than working with the system and its advantages ego assertion: assert your ego and personal appearance or learn to conform properly? don't let your personal desires get in the way of accomplishing what you care about but we cannot always give in; often futzing the system is part of the fun of it originality is being different! often this originality costs

self delusion is very common;; there are so many alibis must know yourself, your weaknesses, strengths, and bad faults, often converting them to assets

talking to other people is important, but a session strictly for 'brainstorming' is often not whrthwhile; if it's necessary you need capable people. reduce the sound absorbers, get the critical mass in action but without the sound absorbers who will stimulate. get people who will respond, interact; look for stimulation and interaction when you talk to others. ask questions and leave stimulated [i feel this has happened to me with lerner, or with a couple of other professors i've interacted with]

do not echo ideas, contribute to them, doube them, interact with them if you read all the time what others have done you will think the way they thought if you want to think new thoughts that are different, get the problem reasonably clear, then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought it through carefully.

you need to keep up to find out what the problems are; do not keep up to find out the solutions. the reading is necessary to discover what is possible but reading to get the solutions is not the way to do great research

books show us how to find the way; while papers stimulate someone tomorrow expect a good job, and expect good work, and have pride in what you do; it is valuable to have first class people around of course there is always luck. there is always determination adn there is alwasy skill

the time is long past for me to stop reading and start doing