AriseAndPass

I really like the look of diff.blog , signed up! Is there any way to subscribe to my feed as an RSS feed?

!! the day has come :)

I use Roam, and I've had my eye on your project for many months now, so I'm super excited to see you come so far. I'm also passionate about privacy and having control over my data - IIRC the way Roam handles image uploads is by uploading the image to firebase and giving you a link that anyone can use to view your image, with no way to delete that image, so you just have to trust in the 'unlisted' nature of the link. Not a big fan of this.

One thing I think was missing when I last looked at Athens was a working high-fidelity import of a Roam EDN export - without this I can't see an easy way to migrate, and I'm guessing there are other Roam users in the same boat? I'm sure it'll come along, until then I'll sit tight in anticipation :)

I think your reply reinforces a conclusion I drew from the OP's reply - that the common thread here is to work on _building_ things that exist at lower levels of abstraction, rather than just knowing how to use them as a black box. And in building things, I guess you learn the ins and outs of how they work, which makes you better at using them?

Thanks for the examples. I'd never even think of being able to build my own programming language, or clone of Flask - which I guess is the point, I shouldn't treat these things like black boxes :)

I have heard of Nand2tetris, but I always thought it fell more into the 'read a textbook' bucket than the 'do your own technically challenging project to reinforce the learning' one. But I guess it's a project-based textbook, which kind of blurs the lines.

Thanks for sharing those examples. I guess the common thread here is to work on _building_ things that exist at lower levels of abstraction, rather than just knowing how to use them as a black box. I guess most project ideas that satisfy that criteria would teach some fundamental skills too.

I wish the author went into more detail about how to come up with "high leverage side projects" that help cultivate the type of fundamental CS knowledge he emphasises.

Most of the suggestions I see for potential side projects are for some kind of consumer-facing (web/mobile/desktop) app - probably because most people in this context are prioritising the potential of generating side income, but this sounds more like what the author calls "plumbing" style backend/API work rather than something that would develop fundamental CS skills.

So, any ideas? I've seen https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x which is a great collection of ideas all based on piercing an abstraction by building your own version of lower-level tools. Are there any other categories of side project that someone who wants to move technically deeper than a full-stack web app would do well to consider?

She did actually use tags, not mutually exclusive categories:

Another cool feature of the way I was logging my data was that I could log more than one activity into a single time slot (walking and listening to a podcast is a classic). This means that the total time spent on all activities sums up to more than 365 days - you can see this as 'extra days' on the plot above. Turns out that this year, I had 395 surplus hours or 16.5 surplus days. I hope I didn't spend them on human function.

Thanks for commenting! I hear what you're saying, but I think it's perfectly possible to injure your back with bodyweight exercises over time. Even if we're just talking about yoga, there's a good amount of evidence that incorrectly practiced yoga can and does cause back injuries over time.

Now I'm sure that the optimal answer to that would be to make sure you correctly practice yoga. But the back is probably the worst joint I can think of injuring, and at the same time I'm basically just watching youtube videos and copying them - which isn't really a guarantee of correct practice. So I try to err on the side of caution by keeping my spine neutral :)

Thanks for the tips, much appreciated :)

This is great to hear, that currently is me in various forms - start doing squats in the gym and my knees hurt, play a lot of tennis and something else hurts, etc. I really enjoy the few 10 minute yoga videos I've tried so it's great to hear that something I actually enjoy could be the trick to getting me exercise-ready.

Can I ask you two questions from the other side of this?

- I've spent quite a while searching through yoga videos on YouTube without being able to figure out what a good progression from easy to difficult might look like. Mind sharing some of the ones you found worked the best for you on a regular basis?

- I noticed a lot of yoga videos involve rounding your back eg in toe touching movements. This really put me off because from everything I've read (a lot of Stuart McGill), movements that take your spine out of neutral position and put load on it are bad for the long term health of your back. Did the yoga you practiced involve these movements? Did you notice any ill effects on your back health?

Wow. Super comprehensive guide, thank you so much. I'm going to try this out by cooking my rice in the microwave next time, and try and take it from there. I already did vegetables and sweet potatoes in there, but didn't think about doing rice/cereals and even meat in there.

I'm also very curious to hear how a meal can be cooked in just a microwave. I have severe food allergies and this would be great especially when I travel and stay in places that don't have a full kitchen. Can you point me to a recipe book you'd recommend, if you don't want to post the recipes here?

I see (and agree) with the appeal for simplicity in microwaves. But having owned microwaves of both types, I did really like the ability to precisely set/see the amount of time a microwave program would run via a digital display. I found lots of these time dials imprecise, especially for <90 second jobs.

I spent around 7 years at 30 mins/day - I was happy with it there, it was more of a casual thing for me at that time. Then I read some books, starting with The Mind Illuminated, and increased to 1hr/day over 4-5 months.

I find the act of effort or willpower for me is starting to meditate in the first place. Once I'm meditating, 60 mins doesn't require any more discipline than 30 mins, in fact it feels better.

Very cool to see an ex-monk here. I've had a regular 2hr/day practice for a decade now but no retreats yet. What kind of meditation did you practice? Would you say that you achieved some level of Awakening, and that any of these insights/benefits have improved the quality of your consciousness in a permanent sense?

I know bodyweight is no perfect substitute and you probably already know this, but you can still have progressions of bodyweight exercise variants in a way that mimics progressive overload of weight to some extent. Check out the infographic here - http://www.startbodyweight.com/2014/01/basic-routine-infogra... - 8 types of exercise with progressively tougher variants. If nothing else it helps keeps things interesting

Very cool story. Thank you for whatever you've done to help :) (and your spelling looks perfect to me).

I grew up in Tanzania! Can I ask where you were, and what you were doing?

BTW - I had malaria about 5-6 times while growing up. What you describe sounds like a particularly bad case (1-2 of mine were like that). My experience, and that of my peer group (lower-middle class by western standards, top 0.1% by Tanzanian standards) was that if you got an early diagnosis and had access to drugs it was usually akin to a severe flu unless you got unlucky with the strain/severity.

It was culturally very normalised to get two malaria tests any time anyone felt sick, because the commonly accepted belief was that anything could be malaria, and false negatives were too common.

I always thought the main problem with malaria in Tanzania was that 99.9% of the country (especially rural areas) does not have access to quick testing and easy drugs, and for them it's a death sentence. That's not to downplay it, but more to emphasise the socioeconomic dimension.