teodorlu

Beautifully written! I want to live in a world where we strive towards perfection, rather than strive to destroy it.

Very interesting!

Latency numbers are written with three significant digits (4.21 ms). I'm curious about the accuracy of the measurement device. If it can measure tens of microseconds, I'm impressed. If it can't, the conclusions in this article should be taken more coarsely.

I prefer «reduces uncertainty» to «reduces ambiguity». The problem isn't ambiguous specifications, it's simply that there are too many unknowns to just do the work at this point.

The author talks about the shaping of the work, so I guess this is implicit.

Not annoyed. But curious!

I agree that mentoring is hard, and I want to read your take.

I wonder if we agree on expert aesthetics or not. You write:

Experts tend to have an aesthetic preference towards technically challenging work rather than simple-but-interesting work, and I’ve written more about this phenomenon here: expert aesthetics.

When I read the passage the first time, I thought you meant "experts prefer to work on hard problems in order to arrive at simple solutions". But that's not what you're saying!

Any idea where to find the "Hard" and "Expert aesthetics" articles mentioned in the article?

The links are giving me 404s.

https://boydkane.com/hard https://boydkane.com/expert_aesthetics

History of Clojure is also available in video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nD-QHbRWcoM

I would love a language that has this gradual evolutional abstracting as a core concern. That makes it easy. Where you can start from simplest imperative code and easily abstract it as the need for this arises.

This is about how I write Clojure.

I start out with some code that does the thing I want. Either effectfull code that "does the thing" or functions from data to data.

After a while, I feel like I'm missing a domain operation or two. At that point I've got an idea about what kind of abstraction I'm missing.

Rafael Dittwald describes the process of looking for domain operations and domain entities nicely here:

https://youtu.be/vK1DazRK_a0

Consider sending him an E-mail, he responded when I thanked him for exactly this book a few years ago! There's an "E-mail me" link on the left sidebar at http://www.catb.org/~esr/.

Might I ask for a link?

I searched around, but didn't find anything. Perhaps the title is something different than "go minimal feature set".

https://play.teod.eu/

Though I'd rather call it a personal memex than a personal blog!

If you mash together two ideas, is the new composite idea yours?

I'd say it's yours. In that frame, there are lots of ideas.

Lets assume there are 10 000 known ideas. Then there's 10^8 combinations of two ideas, and 10^12 combinations of three ideas. That's a lot of ideas, even for the internet! I bet not all of them are named. And different people are going to frame ideas differently.

I also believe trying to form your ideas in reference to existing knowledge is a great way to learn existing knowledge.

No, don't summarize. Remix! Write about your own ideas!

Your mind is a living collection of your own ideas, and a history of their significance to your prior life. Not a dead library of pointers to other dead libraries.

Books are great. But you shoudn't outsource your brain. The learning happens when you think for yourself. Reading is good. Thinking about what you've read is even better. But don't stop with the summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.

Great idea!

Personally, I want an even higher signal to noise ratio and even fewer articles. Perhaps significance > 7, and articles from the last week.

Or "read eval browse loop", in contrast to a "read eval print loop".

REBL let's you browse complex data structures and move around in them. In a REPL, printing a megabyte of JSON can be ... hard to read.

The great mistake that this article makes is thinking that people need to be constantly expressing themselves in some unique way that nobody's ever done before. But the world has almost 8 billion people, few things are as unique as you think.

I'd like to riff on this.

People's attention is limited. People's capacity for novel stuff is limited. And things are bound to be commoditized.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Firefox is a tool that just works for me. It doesn't crash and delete my tabs when it visits a random web site. Sure, that's predictable.

But that frees up my attention to go elsewhere. To do /brand new/ stuff, not just mess around with web browsers.

If every airbnb looks the same, perhaps that's just because people get out of the airbnb to do the stuff they actually want to do?

Stability enables movement.

Thanks!

Care to recommend a video to start with?

I think "reintroduced" makes sense.

I thought there were factory problems, a page with information about product returns, and possibly a story around that.

I've written about how to ask for help: https://play.teod.eu/interaction-value-differential/

I'm going to assume you don't have people on your team / in your organization you can learn from.

In short, I'd:

1. Make something that reflects the things that I'm curious to learn

2. Then ask specific people for specific advice about the thing I've made.

Here's a recently compiled list of good Clojure learning resources:

https://gist.github.com/ssrihari/0bf159afb781eef7cc552a1a0b1...

Edit: if by "learning Lisp" you mean lisps other than Clojure, I don't know :)

That depends a lot. I live in Oslo now, and have lived in Trondheim and Finnmark near Kirkenes before.

Never used blackout curtains in Oslo or Trondheim, absolutely needed them in Finnmark. I wouldn't say that blackout curtains are the norm in the Nordic countries, especially not Denmark.

But if you're in a place where there's midnight sun, I suggest getting some.

Start by asking yourself what you like! Then dig into that. Don't consume passively, consume actively. When you see something that makes you feel joy, explore why. Explore what part of the thing you saw made something light up in you.

If this makes sense to you, you can explore Visa's writing. I used to neglect taste and aesthetics. I get that you're asking for purpose. But those are related. In order to find your purpose, you must know what you value, and what you like. Visa has an angle on taste that works for me.

https://mobile.twitter.com/visakanv/status/13309873667150643...

Note that https://www.orgroam.com/ gives you both plaintext and knowledge graph features.

I recommend having an explicit plan for how you intend to use Emacs or Vim.

I've been using Emacs for five years. When I got started, I also started journaling daily with Org-mode. That gave me a reason to open Emacs every day.

but I would definitely be interested in some docs which helped guide me hook all of them together. Is there such a thing as a documentation framework? :)

What's the first step to making those docs?

There are resources floating around, but they can be hard to find. I really like the docs for http-kit and luminous - they are cohesive.

I don't really think about it as linking notes. At least, "creating links" isn't the goal. Mostly, I'm trying to explore what I'm curious about.

I create links in two situations: (A) when I'm reading someone else's content, or (B) when I'm working on my own content.

When I'm reading someone else's content, I want to understand what they mean. I try to do that by building on other things I know. I also want to think further than the author. Apply it to my context.

When I'm creating my own content, I want to build on ideas. Refer to examples, compare to other ideas.

1. Make sure your note taking system supports your goals. My goals: (A) assist my learning, (B) easily share content and get feedback from others.

2. When you produce content, consider (A) what you want to achieve by producing the content, and (B) how you want to find the content later.

3. Use one global namespace for named concepts. Category / taxonomy / tags belongs in metadata.

Why the goals? If your system supports your goals, you will continue to use it and get value from it. If your system doesn't support your goals, it becomes tedious to use, and you'll abandon your notes.

I encourage you to put your notes publicly on the web. Public notes have URLs, and there's no easier way to read content. You're going to remember notes.yourname.com/THING, or just go via notes.yourname.com to list / search.

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My information architecture consists of named concepts, journals and metadata.

Named concepts is the top level. Wikipedia uses this structure. There's one global namespace with sufficiently qualified names. You are going to remember your note by this name. Disambiguate in your global names.

Journals are organized by date. The advantage of journals is that you don't have to name anything. In general, it's nice to start with a journal, and collect named concepts on demand. Journals don't have to be discoverable.

Metadata helps you discover and index your notes. Categories and tags go here. But don't go nuts on categorization, think about what those categories should achieve. Remember the fact boxes on Wikipedia? Those are driven by concept metadata. Sometimes it's better to embed a table or a nested list on a concept page than introduce metadata. "Is this helpful to understand the concept?" - put it on the page. "Is this helpful to find/index your content?" - it's metadata.

Let's say you want to learn FUSE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace). Create a journal page for learning FUSE, and tag it as "open problem". Make sure you can list open problems. Each time you've got some time, open your FUSE journal, and work to understand something. Read the man page. Read wikipedia. Read the source. But annotate! Take notes in your journal as you go. When you revisit your FUSE journal, you can easily rediscover where you were last time, and decide where you want to go next.

Yes. But not until I made my own thing from scratch / just using Pandoc. I have two previous sites that have seen zero activity in four years. They collapsed under the hassle of the build system.

Now I've aimed for:

- minimal friction to post or edit.

- useful for my thinking process.

I touch on what I like about my process here: https://play.teod.eu/documentation/

I get the impression that the author criticizes bad planning, or estimation.

To me, a good plan is a map of dependencies in time.

I think entr handles some things more cleanly, though:

1. Some bash is allowed, which has been confusing me. I'd rather call 'bash -c "echo stuff > file"' myself. 2. Watchexec has its own interface for "filter which files to watch". Entr just relies on unix tools.