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Morning moon
Morning moon
1) the full moon can be glorious, but it's really the moon phasing in and out that is the most interesting to me 2) morning moons sometimes beat evening moons, especially when they hang big and low by the horizon and startle you when you turn a corner or come out from under the shade
·austinkleon.com·
Morning moon
Reasons for Getting a PhD
Reasons for Getting a PhD
You will have the opportunity for unparalleled focus on whatever your research question is. ​ Those who have recently obtained a PhD can outwork virtually any of their peers in terms of duration and efficiency ​ To undertake this vow of poverty voluntarily, while doing work that is more intellectually challenging than most of your peers that are earning average salaries shows superhuman commitment to seeing something through to completion ​ This criticism will either get to you, and you’ll bail out of the program, or you’ll learn to separate the valid criticism from the invalid criticism, a skill that will serve you well in any profession, in any discipline ​ If you work on your degree alone, you’re doing it wrong. Have a side job. ​ Stick to your schedule. Be humble. Don’t expect to get more than 3 hours of high-order intellectual work done per day
·joshcsimmons.com·
Reasons for Getting a PhD
what great inconvenience
what great inconvenience
How you act — as a manager, as a co-worker, as a partner, as a parent — has ripple effects that extend far past the immediate relationship. ​ Are you willing to have slightly less so that others can have significantly more? Or, as I like to think about it, do you actually care about other people? ​ But we’re removed from the conditions that produce it, the living conditions that result from it, and the realities of the waste it produces. All we see is a deal.
·annehelen.substack.com·
what great inconvenience
Survivor’s flex and manufactured obstacles
Survivor’s flex and manufactured obstacles
these institutions are also kept intact by those who relish memories of their own survival story — so much so that introducing improvements, or making the path less steep and more efficient threatens their personal worth in some significant way, even if it benefits the greater good.
·medium.com·
Survivor’s flex and manufactured obstacles
True Love Ways
True Love Ways
Catron felt during the staring contest “not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me” — like a recursive reflection of a mirror in a mirror perhaps.
·tinyletter.com·
True Love Ways
when you’re looking for a revelation
when you’re looking for a revelation
At 8:30am, my phone pinged. There are six of us on a text chain about local mountain lions, road closures, and which house we’re walking to for afternoon beers. This morning, there was an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere between Malibu and Santa Monica delaying commuters by a whopping two hours. I texted an old coworker with the details, knowing she would be caught in the traffic.
·keltonwrites.tumblr.com·
when you’re looking for a revelation
In Memory of my Grandmother: “Educate Your Girls, Cherish Your Good Memories”
In Memory of my Grandmother: “Educate Your Girls, Cherish Your Good Memories”
For the rest of her life, my grandmother told this story to pretty much everyone she met. When I visited her at the assisted living facility for the next decade—where she loved living as it gave her independence—even the janitors would greet me as the granddaughter who had gone to the United States to get a doctorate, and whose committee had applauded my grandmother. She told this story to people she sat next to in the ferry; she told this to anyone who asked her about her life.
·tinyletter.com·
In Memory of my Grandmother: “Educate Your Girls, Cherish Your Good Memories”
Programming is Mathematics
Programming is Mathematics
This is why I respect the Functional Programming movement: they get it. Functional Programmers understand that (at a minimum) 50 years of research and refinement is a pretty good thing to stake your data types on. ​ Stick to actual mathematics. You'll have to learn it eventually, you may as well not cloud your own thinking in the process. ​ Mathematics is the simplest and most precise language mankind has ever invented, and you should be able to speak it.
·λπω.com·
Programming is Mathematics
The perks of patronage
The perks of patronage
They’re there because they weirdly fell in love with what you’re doing, and they want to see you succeed. ​ But we never stopped to think about whether we repeated these behaviors because they were actually good for creators, or because that’s just how Kickstarter did it. ​ Creators sell intimacy to patrons. They sell “stuff” - perks - to customers.
·nadiaeghbal.com·
The perks of patronage
Slopes Diaries #30: Planning Ahead
Slopes Diaries #30: Planning Ahead
When picking what I want to cut, I often take a good hard look at any big feature I'm working on and asking what the MVP of that feature-arc is. Often I'll cut parts of a feature-arc, vs an entire feature itself.
·blog.curtisherbert.com·
Slopes Diaries #30: Planning Ahead
in the oaks
in the oaks
But I’m an obedient keeper. When the cat bites my cheeks at five in the morning, I rise naked and make my way to the deck door, hefting up the 35 lb bird seed bag laying next to it to fill the feeder before my body recognizes the cool of the mountain morning. And I call them to me, in lifted whistles and guttural falsettos. I tell my sweets the stores have been refilled, and I hear their whispers turn to chatter before the sun makes its way above the crest across the valley. I feed the cat his own breakfast, put the water on the stove, and snuggle back into bed for the few minutes left of just being. ​ And maybe that’s what I like about birds: the just being part. Their journey seems neither particularly harrowing nor complicated. You make it through the first year and you just get to bird. ​ chattering in delight over found feeders, smashing into windows only to ruffle their feathers out and fly back over the ledge. I want their flutters and frustrations to last as long as they can. As long as I can help them. As long as we can help each other.
·keltonwrites.tumblr.com·
in the oaks
Vanity metrics
Vanity metrics
In practice, though, this means platforms show us things that it is paid to show us (ads, promoted content, etc.) along with the sorts of content that makes us tolerate it, that convinces us there is no point in trying to search for anything different. In other words, algorithmic sorting is meant to make us indifferent to wanting particular things. It teaches users to enjoy passivity as an end in itself, as a kind of pure convenience in the abstract.
·tinyletter.com·
Vanity metrics
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer
You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay. You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat. (After you’ve escaped the mind-warping miasma of academia, you might rightfully question whether Published In A Journal is really personally or societally significant as opposed to close approximations like Wrote A Blog Post And Showed It To Smart People.) ​ Your career is important, and right now it might seem like the most important thing in your life, but odds are that is not what you’ll believe forever. Work to live, don’t live to work.
·kalzumeus.com·
Don't Call Yourself A Programmer
I quit
I quit
All I have, for the first time in a long time, is that feeling of mischief, of chaotic good, of rolling down the windows on the first summer night, driving to the party, knowing your crush already is there.
·tinyletter.com·
I quit
Being basic as a virtue
Being basic as a virtue
Lately I’ve been feeling sort of exhausted by the familiar dance of idea propagation that manifests over coffees, dinners, Twitter, and parties in my corner of the world. A late friend and gifted programmer once told me his most creative days were spent working in a bookstore. The work wasn’t challenging, but it was meditative, and it gave him space to let his mind wander. Sometimes it feels like I can’t think in here, because people are constantly asking me to externalize my thoughts all the time. I’m not ready to externalize everything I think about. Sometimes it takes years for me to articulate what I’m trying to say. (It took me several months to figure out how to write this post, for example.) While I think my writing has gotten sharper over the years, I also can’t help but feel it’s gotten worse somehow: invoking the things I hear other people say, instead of the things I happened across in dreams, hazy days that slip away at the park, or reading some dumb fiction I found from a free box that I picked up on the side of the road. I’m not sure it’s that I want to disappear from the internet, but just to get some distance between me and the existential “publish or perish” treadmill of mining each others’ brains for pithy insights that fit into 280 characters. Mediocrity is about making an active choice to say “screw it, good enough”: the decision to keep moving forward instead of trying to get that last 10%. At first, I rationalized doing basic (and while I’m at it, degenerate) things as a form of active mental recovery. As one friend phrased it, it’s cross-training your brain to balance out the hypertrophy elsewhere. The irony has not been lost on me that I’ve written a blog post about thinking less.
·nadiaeghbal.com·
Being basic as a virtue
The False Dichotomy Stunting Tech
The False Dichotomy Stunting Tech
This is a false dichotomy because communication is a technical skill. The ability to articulate complex ideas is a hallmark of deep understanding. ​ In other words, they are commended for having to deal with the debris of leftover chaos they usually didn’t create, nor had very much control over. ​ Communication skills allow an individual to understand and be understood. They combine self-awareness, empathy, active listening, speaking, and observing into a cocktail of abilities that grease the wheels of every interaction, but often go undetected. Dissociating communication and technical skills, while seemingly innocuous and even pragmatic, can create a harmful dichotomy, one that stunts corners of the industry. ​ Lexical double-booking ​ let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do. ​ but it also allows incompetence to hide behind unnecessarily intellectualized terminology. ​ Those with strong communication skills are capable of using domain-specific language appropriately while also being capable of context-switching to adapt their message to their audience. ​ Being clear is not about being dumb, but, as Eugenia Cheng said, about identifying a problem with the precision and clarity that is appropriate for the context. ​ The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
·medium.com·
The False Dichotomy Stunting Tech
27
27
and doing things without a sense of traffic flying overhead, feels much better and much more sustainable. ​ mostly, though, i catch myself happy, and i do what Vonnegut tells me to do: And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’ ​ i’m going to bed earlier and earlier; i’m going to bed happier and happier. there is so much to be done it is perfect
·jmduke.com·
27
Why there is no Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers
Why there is no Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers
Unfortunately this sentiment is mirrored among most programmers who claim to be interested in mathematics. Mathematics is fascinating and useful and doing it makes you smarter and better at problem solving. But a lot of programmers think they want to do mathematics, and they either don’t know what “doing mathematics” means, or they don’t really mean they want to do mathematics. ​ Honestly, it sounds ridiculously obvious to say it directly like this, but the fact remains that people feel like they can understand the content of mathematics without being able to write or read proofs. ​ So read on, and welcome to the community. ​ I honestly do believe that the struggle and confusion builds mathematical character, just as the arduous bug-hunt builds programming character. ​ I’m talking, of course, about the four basics: direct implication, proof by contradiction, contrapositive, and induction. These are the loops, if statements, pointers, and structs of rigorous argument, and there is simply no way to understand the mathematics without a native fluency in this language. ​ And so it stands for mathematics: without others doing mathematics with you, its very hard to identify your issues and see how to fix them. ​ And finally, find others who are interested in seriously learning some mathematics, and work on exercises (perhaps a weekly set) with them.
·jeremykun.com·
Why there is no Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers