Pamela’s entry on “what does it mean to be ‘behind’?”
Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5aw8dd4v685skns/PJH%20%E2%80%94%C2%A0What%20does%20it%20mean%20to%20be%20behind%3F.pdf?dl=0 If you always feel behind, and never ahead or (better yet) neutral, then that sure is suspicious. Your behind beliefs might not be accurate, and anyways — who can feel motivated to run a race they’ve already lost?
On the good days, everything feels connected—a giant wall of conspiracy string. But on the bad days, every gesture and thought sits in isolation. It’s like I’m looking at the same board, but someone has turned off the layer containing the string. Rather than an electric galaxy of potential I just see…a mess. Those are the moments when I miss the drip-feed of social validation that comes from sharing things on public platforms. It’s a steady piping cry of “Yes! Keep going! This matters!” that can make all the difference between enthusiasm and despair. But I don’t want to rely on it. I don’t want to give away that kind of power.
Lindsey Kuper’s CSE138 Distributed Systems Spring ‘21 lectures
This is a playlist of lecture videos from my undergrad distributed systems course at UC Santa Cruz in spring 2021. Course website: http://decomposition.al/CS...
Yes, we give feedback and encouragement and suggestions, but we also bond over our art, letting each other in on the oft-solitary process of figuring out our thoughts and our stories. We push each other, teach each other, and ultimately shape each other and our work. A page to remind everyone what art is — love from many sources, shaped by an individual, to be shared. You release your belief that everything has to do with you and that you are in complete control. This is not a passive act. It involves working in favor of things that you surrender to and accepting that the results of your actions are not in your control. Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cwujmj6y3ezn6lu/ripple01.pdf?dl=0
To be deeply lazy is to be truly settled. Mainly, it is to eliminate the distance between your ideal and your actual self. It is not so much about relaxation or effort as it is about the absence of internal conflict.
The most important difference between Level 1 and Level 2 actions is that Level 1 actions tend to be additive, while Level 2 actions tend to be multiplicative. What levels of action should I spend more or less time in, given my stage of life?
I’ve also started asking, before I pull out my phone or tablet if I have something I need to do, or if I'm just using the device to hide from what’s actually bothering me.
One potential lesson here is that you should only work on projects that are immediately meaningful to you as ends in themselves. Write if you have things to say, or if you have stories to tell, but not because you want to be A Writer.
“But,” I continued, “if you find yourself in a situation where the instability or flux or stuckness is somewhat open-ended, if the issue is less that you’re spending six weeks moving into a house and more that you don’t know what your life is going to look like in six months, let your creative practice be your anchor. Make the time, keep the time, do the work. Your anchor can keep you in place, even if you’re in the middle of some very rough water.”
Most importantly, however, when you make it up as you go, you get to do what you think, not what you thought. All plans are rooted in the past — they're never what you think right now, they're what you thought back then. And at best, they're merely guesses about the future. I know a whole lot more about today, today, than I did three months ago. Why not take advantage of that reality?
And perhaps a bigger benefit, my brain can let it go when it’s done, and give my full focus to relaxing or doing housework or exercising. We talk a lot about work/life balance, and perhaps hobby/life balance is just as important.
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/143309/how-do-you-not-forget-old-math/143335#143335 …if I were trying to remember everything in a particular book, I might start by memorizing the table of contents, and then I’d work on remembering the theorem statements, and then finally the proofs.
Her poems are courageous, intimate and quietly disruptive of the systems we operate with in. What if you felt the invisible tug between you and everything?
Summarized in this last piece, Rosenthal determines the cause of death: Lack of anti-trust enforcement, pervasive short-termism, driven by Wall Street’s focus on quarterly results, and management’s focus on manipulating the stock price to maximize the value of their options Without this understanding of how it all interacts, attempts to recreate a single piece of the 1960s without the supporting context are doomed from the start.
I can only allow myself to create new. Too many times I’ve revisited old attempts at works, miring myself in past writing and thoughts. No more. No more reinventing, no more trying to salvage. Enough.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers — One person per task
One person per task has the “nobody can help” disadvantage already mentioned. In fact, people are disincentivized from helping, because their task has their name on it and your task has your name on it.
It shifts the time spent going through and evaluating images away from the moments when they are being taken to the next day, which presumably is meant to help preserve the integrity of the experience being documented rather than burdening it with the self-awareness of how well it is coming across on the screen. The photos aren’t made “social” by posting them to a feed or snapping them directly to a person or group; instead their sociality is in how they behave as one part in a larger gallery of themed shots.
42/ So stop blaming the media platforms for your own wallowing in small-minded Twitter gossip about people. [Train] to the point where you decide whether to be there or elsewhere.
I think there’s a more general point here about the tendency to teach specific knowledge, rather than fundamental knowledge along with the skills to generalize it, but I’m too tired to come to any real conclusion right now.
Bluesky is an opportunity to “bring in more physics”, designing in friction on the protocol-level as a proactive way to avoid downstream moderation issues. …we highlight the importance of allowing users to freely “plug in” a moderation filter so that users can see what the resulting content looks like before committing to it. This should include asking ourselves: - Is the team designing the protocol and assessing proposals representative of the people who are most hurt/marginalized by these technologies? - Are the initial clients of the protocol diverse? This shouldn’t be another case of US-based initial clients and the rest of the world follows.
There’s a metaphor here, if you want there to be, about how to structure your life to make things easy on yourself. Starting a bike tour is a hard decision, but once you’re on a bike, pedaling is all you can do. If you want to be able to do things that are hard, structure them so that the difficult choices are made up front, and the automatic action to take moves you towards your goal. Figuring out how to apply this lesson to your life is left as an exercise for the reader.
What educational startups are missing — Nicole Williams
Although project-based learning holds some place in a large percentage of edtech startups today — potentially because the lack of administrative burden makes it more economically efficient — I think the lasting value of this type of education is largely overhyped. …they often attempt to pack too many disparate kinds of learning into the project-based model. In doing so, they can inadvertently make it harder to master fundamental concepts by strengthening strengths and not pushing students to improve their weaknesses. The general level of excitement over revisiting the foundations of education today is super interesting, but it could also be very easy for us to reinvent the wheel in a worse way.
This also tangentially relates to my slippers as portals theory — that the act of eating a meal is a portal back to the home, not something tied to work…A reminder that there is more to life than AWS infrastructure, that there is food, love, and home.
Every strategy has two components to it that are super important. One of them is that you have to be able to see it. Not every feature of a release or a product is visible but everybody should be able to watch a visualization of the product and understand where their work will contribute to that visualization. Which brings us to the second point. The easiest way for people to understand it is to write something like a press release. That’s an interesting question and there is an easy answer, which is, that deadlines are what the team wants it to be. Now a big part about coming up with a deadline is that it is as much about the start as it is about the end date. Because the start date for work should also be the start date for which the end date has integrity. My first rule of meetings is to just not have them and then work backwards. And I don’t mean cliches like we have no meetings on Wednesdays, I mean don’t have meetings until you know what you’re going to accomplish. And the rhythm of the work is very different from the rhythm of the calendar. Things that you just say are weekly or daily or biweekly, they’re never connected to anything except the calendar. This is generally the path that people take: first they divide the product into a frontend and backend. Of course computer science people love that because you have an API, and you have a user interface that’s separate from the data, and it all sounds great—except in all systems for all of software history, the best, most innovative features come from breaking the abstraction layers between the frontend and the backend. The truth is once you have product-market fit, it’s unwise to listen too closely to your users. Because your users are so vested in incrementally improving the product that you’re going to incrementally improve your product to death.
