To watch - true detective
To watch - band of brothers
what self is - exit-the-supersensorium
To buy: Calvin and hobbes comic strips
hmm, something to think about. am I a competence porn worshipper?
Ugh fields!! Wish I had put pen on paper for this concept earlier.
to play: mass effect triology
Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler, part 1 - Austin Z. Henley https://austinhenley.com/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html
To watch: a few good men
Nadia Asparouhova | How to do the jhanas https://nadia.xyz/jhanas
To watch: contact
Nonsense steals my sleeping hours because I know—somewhere in the back of my mind—that if I don’t bring a distraction to bed, I will be alone with myself in the dark. Maybe that sounds grim. All I mean is this: when our thoughts are directed inwards, we weave stories about ourselves. I have simply concluded that there is no value in these stories; be they jubilant or painful, they will always be lies.
Next time someone asks me why I quit as a founding engineer of a yc startup, I'm gonna say "I was eating too many frogs" lmao
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/excuse-me-but-why-are-you-eating
The New Internet https://tailscale.com/blog/new-internet
How does one know he "likes" doing those things unless he does them for an extended period of time. Is there anything better than thinking really hard?
Week review:
Monday - spent the day learning svelte like an idiot. actually I learnt a lot and starting a project in it but it was not the best idea to learn something new to explore a potentially challenging idea. I want to be thinking about interactions but now how to implement them
Tuesday - that idiocy carried over to this day until mid-afternoon, at which point I realizes my mistake. set up remix instead and read remix's technical docs and built a small application in it.
Wednesday - set up sqlite, drizzle and read up on them. for some reason I can't stop myself from reading up on the technologies I'm using instead of just using them.
Thursday - tried to come up with layout ideas and struggled with figma all day.
Friday - Finally came up with a layout and going with it for now.
Saturday - Took a break from journal app and read csapp.
Sunday - People (my roommates' friends) are visiting my flat today and I'm out of my comfort zone
v1 layout for a day
ok layout and design are coming along well now. so glad I persevered in the treches of figma
got the events addition and timeline view working!
db is setups, tables are made, working well with remix. now need to figure out the UI part
oh my god I had forgotten how painful and glorious the starting few days of a project are. just endless staring at the blank screen with brain buzzing with different ideas of what could be.
trying to design the UI in figma and feel like a complete noob. I'll get it though.
done with the basics of remix and made a small app in it. Now on to figma design
it's taking me some time to get a hang of remix, and also to catch up with the flow of making things. I'm overthinking small things and taking a lot of time in doing trivial stuff. will get up to speed soon.
also doesn't help that I decided to change my typing technique couple weeks ago and it hasn't caught up my natural typing speed yet.
I have this terrible habit of getting in my own way and making this unnecessarily hard. need to get rid of it
ok set up drizzle and sqlite after lot of googling and being confused about stuff.
also going with react
starting with tweens
finished with basic svelte and my head is spinning. going for a walk lol
on to stores
on to lifecycles
Having some trouble understanding the event forwarding syntax in svelte. Am I dumb?
ok props syntax is a little weird.
starting to learn svelte and sveltekit from learn.svelte.dev
art, music, writing, programming, and math.
I think it's better when people meet with explicit intention of meeting each other, than just living together or existing together
To do: learn svelte and create a simulator similar to shown in this video
This also seems to be the reason why I and many others like me become so excited and happy on seeing a new resource or book to get cracked
To do: 100 drawings, 100 writings
The problem that I see frequently occurring with me is that I compare myself with people who have been doing the bit for enough time that they're now riding the exponential curve.
Since I'm not in the corporate culture motivated by the incentive structures of companies, I need to reward myself for completing hard tasks. I'm going to order Neal stephenson's Diamong age once I finish k&r the memory allocator at the end of it.
Walk thoughts:
Although I initially get a dopamine hit from discovering a wonderful resource for example like build your own browser from scratch, it eventually turns into a slight anxious feeling which tells me to complete reading/going through that resource as fast as possible in order to become more cracked.
Instead I should think of these things as experiences to be lived through peacefully and deliberately. Treating them as the end rather than means. Like how andy matuschak goes through a book .
To watch: nightcrawler
completed revising first chapter of k&r today. starting with chapter 2
One thing I've learnt working as the founding enginner at a startup is that people who bring about changes in the world are not a magnitude smarter than I am. I could do this too with my friends.
gotta start sprint traning
"After 8 months of rejection"
to watch: tekkonkinkreet
I've lost it, i've lost my will to program, I've lost my will to create. Need to start the process of getting it back.
going through the former righr now
will record myself coding from now on
need to make an alt social graph
To watch: Pantheon
Everyone hates their job. noone is happy. What is happening. Goldilocks zone is too hard to achieve.
My god, it’s one of those days where I have realized I’m incredibly shitty developer right now. This realization doesn’t demoralize me but burns some fire inside. I want to go and study intensely for the next 4-5 months. My incompetence arises from the fact that I’m not a computer science graduate. Actually, I’m not a graduate at all. But nothing that can’t be cured with an intense study schedule.
Rant: a "senior" engineer joined the team and turned a simple codebase containing functions and loops into object oriented style so that it's more "production ready". Introduced some bugs, every change now takes more time.
Ok on may 9, I'm going to quit my current job and prepare for an internship @tinygrad for 4 months. steps:
- go through karpathy's lectures
- go through fast.ai
- keep doing assembly and c
- read micrograd code -> read tinygrad code
- revise probability and statistics, linear algebra to be able to read papers.
The way to get out of current rut - compress the working day to 5 p.m so that it frees up time to revise assembly and c
I don't have full faith in the work I'm doing for my job. I don't think browser agents are that useful. But the best thing I can do right now is to work hard on that project to prove this hypothesis right or wrong. If I'm right, we should fail fast as a startup and then update from that suckerpunch. If I'm wrong, then good - nothing to worry about.
Taking today off from work to reinvigorate my soul and get back to my lovely stream
To read: Musashi
To watch: Ratatouille
I think living amongst smart people helps in becoming smart because being and sounding genuinely smart in front of them is a very very strong incentive.
Like if I was part of a group chat where they're cracking economics jokes, I'll definitely go through courses and assignments to understand and crack those jokes too lol
Let's do this?
I think any new technology just opens up space for new problems to be solved. Two examples:
We made computers because hand-calculating missile trajectories wasn't the best way to win wars. Now that we had computers, we needed to solve a large number of problems - the human-computer interaction problem, new programming languages at different levels of abstractions, new chips to enable even faster computations, make compute cheaper to democratize the computing power - to name a few, and each of these problems required geniuses and visionaries and creation of entire industries on it's own.
We made web to efficiently transfer and view documents stored on different computers. Now that we had web we needed to solve a large number of problems - web browsers, search engines, servers infrastructures, a billion frameworks, a framework to make the previous framework faster, another framework to make that different framework easy to use. Again each of these problems required geniuses , visionaries and creation of entire industries.
Now there's AI. It'll create even more problems to be solved. We will never run out of problems to solve, and therefore I think problems solvers will never be out of demand. Or is AGI different, because it'll be a problem solver which'll itself solve the problems it creates? How will it do so, because those problems can't possibly be in it's training data lol.
I have learned that it is very easy being insightful on the internet without actually doing any work by doing so myself. I wonder how many other people whom I interact with are doing this.
How much of "wanting to work on the hardest and meaningful problems" is really about having fun vs building a narrative of your life
To watch: lost in translation
This is the exact things I was talking about in the telegram bot I was about to build. Something that prompts you at the end of the day
To watch: King Richard
Things are getting bit out of hand lately. Need to setup a minimal static personal website to keep myself sane.
Having completed k&r, time has come for me to understand what a garbage collector is.
Will go through in Baby's first garbage collector in coming days.
As a programmer, I tried to make sure that I was only ever working on one thing at a time. Even if I got stuck on that one thing—say I was blocked on waiting for a tech partner to give me API documentation—I’d let myself stay stuck instead of sliding off to work on something else.
In the short term, this made me less efficient, because I’d spend less time programming and more time staring vacantly at the ceiling. But if I stared vacantly for long enough, I’d eventually get mad enough to, e.g., reverse-engineer the partner’s API in a fit of rage. This resulted in me shipping my most important projects faster, hence getting faster compounding growth. -Attention is your scarcest resource
haha morale boosted for the day
Programming is just incredibly empowering. Imagine making an effect, however small in the world just by typing things.
Ok this drop is a reminder to myself that learning stuff is actually painful. I am incredibly excited for the things that I would be able to do once I have learnt C but at this point in time, I'm finding it hard go through K&R. But this is what I have done in the past time and time again. Going through the boring stuff to unlock exciting new things in the future.
To watch: your name
The days I slack in the morning and don't get much done, I get hungry at around 3:00 p.m . The days where I complete >2 intense pomodoros in the morning, I start feeling it at 1:00 . Is it really because brain consumes more calories when focused? Fascinating
oh that's exactly me.
Strange how brain resists doing some cognitively hard or borsing task at first by vaguely saying "This is not what I should be doing". This sentiment never comes up during gym or sports. Is our body made to resist these things?
Unsubscribing from all the newsletters because I'll proactively visit the ones I like from time to time if I'm curious.
Ok exciting project idea - make a working real-time linux terminal on the web. hook it up to gpt. gpt should generate some fun exercises for me so that I can practice unix programming
should I learn distributed systems or not!!!
To watch: the big lebowski
It reminds me of the enormously damaging idea that success in life is equivalent to making lots of money. One way it's similar to that idea is that when you're in a milieu (like Silicon Valley) where a lot of people believe it, it starts to infect your thinking in ways extremely hard to notice and free yourself from - How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create?
Steps to take If nothing happens after these two interviews:
- Shrug it off
- Go off twitter
- Focus on completing K&R and do the wonderful things I'll be able to do having read the treatise on C.
- learn svelte and build personal website.
- start going through fast.ai and karpathy's videos. become an AI chad again.
- and of course take care of my child Notedown, and try to bear more children.
- and most important of all, get back into meditation again, start a regular meditation practice. Chill down a bit.
The thing I will need to watch out for is the self-loathing. I'll probably start thinking that sidu ponappa didn't find me a fit even for the junior developer role, which means I'm worthless as a programmer, which sounds ludicrous and I think objectively is.
One thing that's reassuring is studying and building wouldn't stop. What else would I do? Watch videos, scroll twitter all day? Nah, I don't like doing anything else. Sitting calmly in front of my laptop is my natural habitat.
"I think the reason meditation decreases sleep demands is pretty simple: If you reduce the energy-intensive habit of generating alternative realities to the now, then you don’t get as tired. Basically, you tune down the simulator so the battery lasts longer. " - https://twitter.com/RubenLaukkonen/status/1749571552369361180
Lately I have been asking myself the wrong question at the end of the day. Each night I wonder "Did I do my best today" in terms of being productive . Most of the days, answer is a resounding no, which makes me feel bad sometimes. But I think the right question to ask is "Do I want to do this again tomorrow?", and I would argue that is a resounding yes. Isn't that the important part ? To not burn out and just keep doing the bit.
Where do I want to reach, what's the finish line towards which I'm racing? There's none. Again I have to remind myself, this is it. This is a good life - studying and tinkering all day long. The anxiety of job search is just a part of life, nothing big. Why worry about giving the best everyday as long as I want to do this all over again the next day. The day I dread waking up and going to the computer is the day alarm bells should start going off.
Haruki Murakami mentions in "What I talk about when I talk about running" that he stops writing each day at a time when he feels he could write more.
Never work to the point where you start hating these holy creative acts. The point is to keep doing them. They are the end, not a means to an end.
Wow, crazy how parent's wealth allows you to be unemployed and wax lyrical about the philosophy of life. But I think I'm not wrong here.
Do something badly and keep iterating over it.
To watch: vinland saga
Analogy at the core of cognition - This might be one of the most influential things I have read recently. Once I have read it I can see it everywhere. Let me try to describe it succinctly.
The argument is that experienced people in any given field don't have a higher brain capacity or larger number of neurons because of which they can come up with brilliant insights or clever ideas. The reasoning ability of a chess novice and chess grandmaster isn't that different as to be granted the sole reason of grandmaster's abilities . What sets a grandmaster apart is that he reasons about larger "chunks" than a novice.
For me it clicked in a software project I'm working on. I don't reason or calculate about minute workings of a single function, although I do have to do that sometimes. I reason about entire files and sets of functions at a time.
I am building my own mini version of React. At first I was working hard on just attaching DOM nodes and displaying something on the webpage. Now I'm reasoning about entire sub-trees of components at a time. It isn't that the latter is more intensive task than former. I would argue it's easier. But it has the most impact. Because of that I'm now seeing the higher level details of React, and how it works. I now see why it has to re-render the whole sub-tree when state changes.
This chunking is exactly why we modularize code. Extract a function in a separate file, test it thoroughly and now you can assume it is a primitive of the environment you are working in. I wrote a function which compares two virtual DOM trees in React and labels each leaf as either new or update. Now having tested this function, I can treat this function as a primitive and think about entire trees at a point. While writing this function I was thinking about single leaves of a tree at a time.
Keep doing this, and eventually you'll start reasoning at much higher levels of abstractions.
Look where we have reached using "chunking". logic gates -> circuits -> ....many steps I don't know.... -> AGI.
New to-do list item just added: Read programming massively parallel processors. I am so grateful for the fact that I have learnt c over the past couple months. Gonna pay dividends
To watch: psycho pass
Ok I might go insane if I don't write down all the things I'm doing right now because I am looking for jobs simulatenously, and it's getting a bit much atm. Also back to full health, now I need to keep doing the bit.
I am currently:
- going through C programming by k&r
- going through pftgu (need to pick it back up cause it's been a while since I have read it)
- going through deep-js book (this is pretty fun because I'm using my app to study and my morale is boosted everytime I run code, also longest I've used my app without cursing it and opening vs-code to debug or improve something on it before continuing on with my note-taking)
- going through intro to microeconomics.
What I hope to do:
- get started with build your own react, next, rsc project.
- see some beautiful things again to bring back that creative state of mind
Recently, I wrote and designed the resume of a friend, and got complement for it's clean and readable design. I've seen a glimmer of immense satisfaction that judah probably gets from designing someone's personal website. I need to design things again. But I think going designing state of mind will come only when I get a job, because posing like steve jobs requires you to be in an non-anxious state.
This drop is all over the place lmao.
Why did it take me so long to realize that doing something badly is miles better than not doing it. I was procrastinating on going through an economics course because "I need to take comprehensive notes and write essays to refine my understanding lol". Recently, I just said screw it and started to binge watch it.
Now the need to write essays has risen from within, out of need to comprehend things better once I watched the 4th lecture. It doesn't feel like an obligation anymore weighing heavy on my shoulders, a reason for me to procrastinate on things I want to do.
Will say "fuck it" and start doing things I want to do rather than overthinking and procrastinating on them. Start doing things badly and you'll automatically find ways to understand or retain the material if you're really honest and curious about it. Also started a networking course using this principle, and 10 lectures in, I realized that I don't really care about the OSI model at this point in time. Will probably come back to it later, but at least I didn't waste large amounts of time making ANKI cards and taking notes for a thing I'm not genuinely interested in right now.
The need for a relationship because you want someone in the world who loves you and to whom you mean everything is just pathological narcissism. Was struck by it for a few days. Then I remembered Alex honnold saying "If I die, people will be sad for a while but they'll move on, life goes on".
Also to keep in mind: "You are not a unique snowflake"
This chapter is profound - https://exploringjs.com/deep-js/ch_environments.html
I should make a "scratchpad" on notedown, which is like an infinite canvas on which you can drop executable code blocks, text nodes, tldraw whiteboards, image, iframes, links etc. When I'm learning something like say "Metaprogramming" in javascript, I usually open up a new note on notedown, to draw diagrams randomly and write and execute snippets of code. But that note doesn't really flow from top to bottom like a finished note does. There should be a scratchpad like thing for this.
But my health keeps getting worse.
https://x.com/alexandereardon/status/1703913372927021326?s=20
This is inspiring. My fear of failure not only stops me from applying for jobs, but also from contributing to some codebases. I start thinking I'm not good enough yet and would return to contributing once I am. This is a good example of what kind of attitude to have while getting out of your comfort zone.
got covid on new year lol, let's get these ailments out of the way as early as possible.
I have a pathological fear of failure. Need to fail a lot in the next year
Now that I'm about to complete the "C programming book" in about a week, it's time to get excited about the projects I'll be able to start:
- Build your own lisp
- kilo text editor
- build your own database
- Computer systems: a programmer's perspective
- Think os book
I need to get started with algorithms soon.
breezed through the pointers and arrays chapter because I already have the battle scars of programming in assembly lol.
Amazed by the levels a good engineer can go to, to debug an error. Hope I become one soon. I don't understand any debug steps they mentioned, but hopefully I'll get there.
There is no sin in software engineering more serious than thinking some behavior of a computer system is magical or beyond our understanding. It may be difficult to understand given the time or resource constraints we face, but given enough time and persistence, all phenomena are reducible to logic. We are engineers and it’s our job to understand the issues we face. Too often we abstract away the details and either assume its someone else’s fault or just take it for granted. Knowing enough about your entire software stack (including networking and operating systems) is invaluable even if you work in high-level programming languages. - Sherlock holmes debugging
completed till exercise 2-6. skipped chapter 3 because I think I know about control flow. I think I can speedrun this book in ~4 days. Let's see.
i'm back
Currently halfway through pftgu. Also learning c on the side. 2 chapters in the computer graphics from scratch.
Decided to stop learning go right now cause c opens many interesting and doable doors. I'll be able to pick up "computer systems: a programmers perspective", build your own lisp, kilo text editor, and build your own database.
Also need to get started with the react/next plan
Coming off of extreme high fever for the past couple days while recovering from leg day. Hope I never have to go through this again.
https://linus.coffee/note/work-burst/ -how Linus gets so much done
Note : This log is for 15 december, 23
Started reading "C programming" by k&r . Completed till exercise 1-13. Highly motivated right now to pick up build your own lisp before new year's.
Small plan on the side:
- Read build your own react again.
- Make my own makeshift nextjs
- Build react server components from scratch
- Modify the makeshift nextjs to include react server components built in previous step.
7 chapters in an assembly language book and I don't know how to print numbers to STDOUT yet. Appreciating life more and more each day
nearing the end of chapter 6. inserting a program which merely adds a newline to the end of a string buffer. god I love high-level languages. any of them, even javascript
Recently judah asked me to work with him on some ideas. I'm honored. I constantly look up to his work. But I was afraid at first. Mainly because of my inclination for solitude, and secondly I thought he would get frustrated by my stupidity and regret his decision.
But thankfully this point from Nabeel's principles steered me in the right direction.
If we do work together hope I don't end up frustrating him too much
https://twitter.com/shuding_/status/1475916082875666441
wild. shu ding is insane.
I just noticed that I'm currently thinking of new ideas as a burden, something that needs to be done and get over with. I need to view them as yet another opportunity to immerse myself in the creative flow state. Making things is more fun than putting them out there; "launching". I've let indie hacker mercenary terms pollute my thought process a bit.
My life isn't a constant march towards the day when one of my project gets some attention, or makes money. This is it. Constantly making things, studying. It's fun.
to watch: margin call
Negative margin can pull an element outside it's parent, and pull an neighbor closer!
Be honest about whether something is learning or entertainment. Real learning is extremely hard and effortful. (Podcasts, Atlantic articles, pop science books, anything that’s a bit too digestible is more “entertainment” than real learning). - Principles
maybe because writing "hey diddle diddle" to a file is important for me
while everybody was busy increasing shareholder value, I was busy writing "hey diddle diddle" to a file.
wrote a simple cat program. everything is a file is so simple and beautiful philosophy. Linus torvalds is an absolute genius.
A snippet of most important lines of code in the program.
Everything is a file. What is a file? Anything that exposes 4 functionalities - open, read, write, and close.
so if your screen display has these 4 functions, it's a file. if your keyboard has these 4 functions, it's a file. if it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, it's a duck
wrote a function to find the maximum in a list. Notice how in line 15 we pass address of the start of the list $list as a parameter to the function. This is what passing by reference actually means. Now the max_list function has full liberty to alter the contents of the list too.
wrote a square function (on the right) and a function to test it, which exits with status code 0 if tests pass and 1 otherwise. Learnt about .extern.
to generate an executable out of these, you need to provide both object files to linker
ld -m elf_i386 square.o square_test.o -o main
wrote factorial recursively in two tries. Nearing the end of chapter 4. Read till chapter 4 two months earlier and then Notedown distracted me. It's terra incognita from now on.
so you can't just do
movl 8(%ebp), -8(%ebp)
I asked chatgpt why and it just blurted out nonsense. Bard came to the rescue. It's answer:
The provided assembly code movl 8(%ebp), -8(%ebp) throws an error because it violates the single memory reference restriction of the mov instruction in most architectures.
Here's why:
Single Memory Reference Restriction: The mov instruction is designed to perform a single memory operation. This means it can either load a value from memory or store a value to memory in one instruction.
Multiple Memory References: The provided code attempts to perform two memory operations within a single mov instruction. It tries to:
- Load a value from memory: The source operand
8(%ebp)specifies the memory location from which the value needs to be loaded. - Store the value to memory: The destination operand
-8(%ebp)specifies the memory location where the loaded value needs to be stored. Since both the source and destination operands involve memory references, the instruction violates the single memory reference restriction. This is why the assembler throws an error message.
Solution :
movl 8(%ebp), %eax movl %eax, -8(%ebp)
Wrote the power function with proper rules and conventions. Learnt a lot
# There need to be made some rules for function calling otherwise large programs might spiral out of control
# 1. Every function will put it's return in value in %eax register
# 2. After any function is called and has returned we need to remove it's parameters from call stack
# 3. We can't rely on just the %esp register to get the parameters off the top of stack because it can change (for eg. if we decide to call another function inside a function we will push the parameters on top or we can reserve extra space for local variables by subl $8, %esp), therefore we'll point %ebp register to the top of stack.
# 4. We can't use registers to store local variables because they should be free for use for any other function we might call
.section .data
.section .text
.globl _start
_start:
pushl $2
pushl $3
call power #at this point return address was pushed to the top of stack
addl $8, %esp #remove the parameters of power from the top of stack
movl %eax, %ebx #move the result to %ebx
movl $1, %eax #prepare to call exit system call
int $0x80
#exponent would be at the top of the stack
#base would be second item of the stack
.type power, @function
power:
#first we need to put the old base pointer at the top of stack
pushl %ebp
#now we need to point the new base pointer to the top of the stack
movl %esp, %ebp
#now we'll reserve 2 words for local variables
subl $8, %esp
#we'll store current power in -8 (%ebp) and current result in -4 (%ebp)
movl 8(%ebp),%ebx
movl %ebx, -8(%ebp)
movl 12(%ebp),%ebx
movl %ebx, -4(%ebp) #stack looks like this rn: 3, 2, old bp, retun addr, 3, 2
jmp power_loop_start
power_loop_start:
cmpl $1,-8(%ebp)
je power_loop_end
#prepare to call multiply
pushl -4(%ebp)
pushl 12(%ebp)
call multiply
addl $8, %esp #remove the parameters of multiply from the top of stack
#result of multiply is in %eax
movl %eax, -4(%ebp)
subl $1, -8(%ebp)
jmp power_loop_start
power_loop_end:
movl -4(%ebp), %eax #stores the result in %eax register
movl %ebp, %esp #remove the space reserved for local variables. Now at the top of stack is the old base pointer i.e value of base pointer before calling the power function
popl %ebp #restore the old base pointer
ret
.type multiply, @function
multiply:
movl 4(%esp), %eax
movl 8(%esp), %ebx
imull %ebx, %eax
ret
Implemented a function to calculate power but this time function power itself calls a multiply function. Earlier when I read this chapter I followed the code line by line. The author implements power using C function calling convention. I thought that was the only way. This time I didn't read a line of code from the author and raw-dogged this without any conventions. This way I understand the importance of a convention.
Just completed re-reading the chapter 3 of "Programming from the ground up". Wrote the program to find the maximum in a list correctly on first attempt. I remember the chapter on writing functions in assembly was the most eye-opening one for me. Excited to read that next. Should I post some code snippets for aesthetics and to look cool. why not. Oh also, I've started coding assembly in neovim because masochism is the shortest path to happiness.
just realized that now tags are here, I can use streams to do the thing I so direly need. Daily updates on things I'm currently studying/doing. let's go
One thing I really like in Andreas kling's streams is just how focused his mind is while programming. Programming abstractions are the only thing consuming his brain power. He doesn't want to be anywhere else. He feels so much at peace where he is, totally submerged. You can't lure him away from staring at the monitor. He'll just reply "no thanks" to any distraction.
I don't understand anything he's doing in this video (hopefully not too long before I can), but turn to it for getting inspired by a serene programming face.
Two: how Andreas builds this JIT compiler is endlessly fascinating. It’s clearly visible that he’s spent thousands and thousands of hours of his life programming. It shows up in the large (hey, he knocks out a JIT compiler in 1.5hrs) and in the small – little tricks and moves and shortcuts. The latter is what’s so fascinating, because usually you don’t catch these small things on video, forget that you did them or don’t think they’re even worth mentioning. - Playful programming
To watch: neon genesis evangelion
To watch: attack on Titan
There are two types of days
where I just do one thing, usually fixing a bug or building a feature on Notedown. On these types of days, I don’t usually have the mental capacity to do anything else.
where I randomly study things. Instead of random I hope to turn them into structured study over several months. Self-made curriculum.
If you judge your value solely on output, not subjective things like “being smart”, you will be more productive. - [Smart guy productivity pitfalls]
.
I am built upon the small things I do every day, and the end results are no more than a byproduct of that. - [Haikyuu]
https://ped.ro/ - This is genius. Progress discovery of text felt so close to how my brain actually works. I was engaged till I read the full intro text.
So maybe the thing to teach isn’t a skill but a spirit. I sometimes think of what I might have been doing had I been born in a different time. The coders of the agrarian days probably futzed with waterwheels and crop varietals; in the Newtonian era, they might have been obsessed with glass, and dyes, and timekeeping. I was reading an oral history of neural networks recently, and it struck me how many of the people interviewed—people born in and around the nineteen-thirties—had played with radios when they were little. Maybe the next cohort will spend their late nights in the guts of the A.I.s their parents once regarded as black boxes. I shouldn’t worry that the era of coding is winding down. Hacking is forever. - A coder considers the waning days of the craft
As for Lady Lovelace, she never published another scientific paper. Instead her life spiraled downward, and she became addicted to gambling and opiates.
The goal in life I think is just not to spiral like this ever. Not burn out. Having spent my childhood and teenage years in petty things, I think I have now figured out what I want to do in life.
To watch: City of God
tweeted a lot today. stirring the pot
which is better?
I think you make what I call “bicycle bear websites.” Why? Because my response to both is the same.
“Listen bub,” I say, “it is very impressive that you can teach a bear to ride a bicycle, and it is fascinating and novel. But perhaps it’s cruel? Because that’s not what bears are supposed to do. And look, pal, that bear will never actually be good at riding a bicycle.”
Why does vim feel so natural to me. why do I dislike pointing devices so much. I think this is because a pointing device treats space on the screen as continuous. Any kind of experience on the screen can be broken down into chunks of discrete things (I’m unable to express this concept clearly using words atm) Take tab switching in browser, it feels much more natural to me to switch to third tab using Ctrl-3. If there are tons of tabs open and I want to randomly go to a tab in the middle whose index I don’t know, I just randomly press Ctrl-number and go to that tab using Ctrl -Tab or Ctrl-Shift-Tab.
Vim divides text-editing experience into several levels. You can move character by character using h and l. Rise one level above and you can go forward one whole word using w and back one word using b. Rise above one level and you can move your way around lines using j, k or lineNumber Shift-g. Although having a steep learning curve in the beginning, dividing something into chunks makes you faster or just frees a lot of mental space in the longer run.
I think this is what douglas hofstadter is trying to say in Analogy at the core of cognition when he talks about chunking.
Or maybe I just despise taking my hands off of the keyboard
In Buddhism, there’s something called the beginner’s mind. If you’ve ever done any kind of guided meditation, you’re probably familiar. It refers to having an attitude of openness, of eagerness. You drop your heavy preconceptions and revitalize a practice by finding a new way to look at it. Making things for the web started to feel very heavy to me, so this seemed to be what I needed. - The webs grain
The awe goes—time takes it. - The webs grain
One thing I don’t understand about coffee consumption is whether I should try to cull it so that I’m not dependent on caffeine for that heightened productivity and consciousness, or should I indulge in it with full force because I live in a post-scarcity caffeine world.
What have I just seen. I mean wtf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U&t=34s
I want to see how we go from logic gates to circuits to computers. Inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U&t=34s
Things to do:
- buy josh cameau’s css for developers course
- upload resume to recruit.svs.io
- buy type level typescript course
Ideally we can have the best of both worlds: to be deliberate in choosing to work on projects of our own, and carelessly confident in starting new ones.
If your projects are the kind that make money, it’s easy to work on them. It’s harder when they’re not. And the hardest part, usually, is morale. That’s where adults have it harder than kids. Kids just plunge in and build their treehouse without worrying about whether they’re wasting their time, or how it compares to other treehouses. And frankly we could learn a lot from kids here. The high standards most grownups have for “real” work do not always serve us well.
The most important phase in a project of one’s own is at the beginning: when you go from thinking it might be cool to do x to actually doing x. And at that point high standards are not merely useless but positively harmful. There are a few people who start too many new projects, but far more, I suspect, who are deterred by fear of failure from starting projects that would have succeeded if they had. - A project of one’s own
You have moments of happiness when things work out, but they don’t last long, because then you’re on to the next problem. So why do it at all? Because to the kind of people who like working this way, nothing else feels as right. You feel as if you’re an animal in its natural habitat, doing what you were meant to do — not always happy, maybe, but awake and alive. - A project of one’s own
Being proficient in english I can immediately tell that the symbols “ha” make the ha sound. But learning japanese, I have to think twice before concluding “は” makes ha sound. Feels as if brain too has random access memory and secondary memory. Every time I wake up english language is loaded up in my RAM while japanese still sits there back in secondary memory, only fetched when needed (when I practice on duolingo).
Need to read a book on how our memory works to see if I’m talking bullshit or does the analogy fit correctly.
bug
cool-tag
Ada’s interest in applied science was further stimulated when she met one of Britain’s few noted female mathematicians and scientists, Mary Somerville. Somerville became a friend, teacher, inspiration, and mentor to Ada. She met with Ada regularly, sent her math books, devised problems for her to solve, and patiently explained the correct answers
It’s funny how casual this paragraph is. It’s like someone I look up to starts devoting huge chunks of his/her time to make me a better programmer, selflessly. What a blessing that would be
ना जीत में ना हार में,
किमचित नहीं भयभीत मैं,
कर्तव्य पथ पर जो मिले,
यह भी सही वह भी सही
I’m rewriting large parts of my codebase to replace the shitty code I had written in the first place. If I had a company blog, I would have put it as “we rethought everything from first principles, and have come up with some pretty large speed gains for our lovely customers” lol
It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do. - Cities
agree
I want to learn to draw studio ghibli style drawings.
The wind rises
I once read one of Nick cammarata’s essays about how he goes deep into the works of a genius for an extended period of time.
I too think this is a great thing to do. I want to go deep into the works of Hayao Miyazaki
Just like there are ideas whose time has come, I think in someone’s lifetime there are books who’s time has come. A single book, read at it’s appropriate time, would hit them the hardest instead of if it was read at some other time.
Now that I’m writing and designing apps and playing around with ideas, the steve jobs’ biography is just tingling some part of my brain which it didn’t before when I read it couple years back, when I didn’t have any personality, no skills, no body of work.
A case for buying books mindlessly:
Over the past 3 years, I have accumulated a lot of books in my kindle, with topics ranging from evolution to psychology to history to zen buddhism. Each of those books, I would argue were bought by judging the cover. The books I’ve read in past year have been due to guilt of accumulating them but not reading them to completion. But lately I’ve been reading 2-3 books at once, each driven by my curiosity, not guilt, or not that silly “I need to read 52 books this year” goal. I got curious about why John carmack has this demigod status amongst some of the best programmers I know, and suddenly remembered I have “Masters of doom” lying around in my kindle. I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun reading a book.
Maybe this is a case for “curiosity driven” book reading, rather than the mindless ali abdal type.
Inspiration for applying for jobs has struck:
I want to get weirder and weirder. I want to meditate, I want to hallucinate, I want to code, I want to design, I want to write compilers, I want to create AGI, I want to make art, I want to write music, I want to play guitar, I want to sing sufi songs. For these things I need some personal space, my own room, which I can turn into a reflection of my personality. I don’t want anyone to ask me why do I stare at John carmack’s image for so long, with tears in my eyes.
And for that personal room, I might need some money lol. Hopefully I have some marketable skills, and can milk those. That’s it haha
I’m not close with anyone I deeply, truly respect. Need to fix this.
Don’t fear the pointer — Bitfield Consulting
https://bitfieldconsulting.com/golang/pointers
I wish I was there with John carmack and John romero that night, coding
Nah kidding, at some point the parsing stops and you go back to thinking about her. Fuck this
Only abstract syntax trees are interesting enough things to waver a guy’s attention from a girl. Without them, I would be doomed, doing nothing and just thinking about her.
Lately have been thinking too much about people, and their bullshit behaviors. This is what living with people can do to you. Want to rescind from that thing.
In the desert you can remember your name, cause there ain’t no one to give you no pain
Daily note:
Have spent a lot of unfocused days lately. Need to get the momentum back up again.
At this moment, what’s the most optimal thing I could do.
getting up early in the morning and getting to that focused state as early as possible
don’t checkout twitter at least till new year
Current focus
- Notedown obviously
- Making an accountability telegram bot and hooking it up to graph everything. Bot would be written in go.
- Learn go as fast as possible. The goal is to pick up the interpreter book by November.
- Learn how streams work in nodejs (probably would be better if I read up buffers from programming from the ground up first)
That’s it. Not going to take too many things on my plate. I constantly make that “no resource constraints” mistake visakanv mentions.
Can I squeeze in programming from the ground up in here, lol sorry visa
For everyone asking me what I do for a living
I am going to learn a new programming language (go), new language (japanese), guitar and drawing. I’m going to overwhelm myself with responsibilities. I am going to make sure I go to bed each night tired and dream of writing go in kanji to create a music creation software. I am sure that’s the best way to live. I am pretty sure I’m on a coffee high right now and will regret making this plan because I’m going to feel guilty if I fail to do any of these things hehe
Going to make Notedown work through sheer force of will, and a bit of cringe
I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success. Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything. - Marconi and tesla
looks good
I want to be more chill. Why? Because:
- it’s cool
- when you’re chill, you can immediately start building something even if you think you’re not upto the task.
- you can apply to any job you want, because you don’t care if you get rejected
- you can approach and talk to anyone you want, because you don’t care what they think.
How:
Basically be thinking of one and only one thing at all times, be it a thing you’re building, an idea you’re grappling with, a concept you are pondering over. Rest takes care of itself.
The problem is lately some emotions have been coming in my way of being chill. What do I do
Flex: My most used app nowadays is the one I built.
Two years ago, I was knee deep in reading linear algebra and probability and statistics. I used to prove theorems, I used to rotate shapes in my head. My mind was so alive I was breezing through “The language instinct” by steven pinker. I use to understand DL papers, and improve upon them.
Ah, can’t study, can’t build. what do I do, please suggest. I want instant dopamine hits while simultaneously boost my morale hehe.
Former decreases morale while the latter has the opposite effect. Simple as that
Me scrolling twitter all day and watching impressive people doing cool shit: “I’m a dumbass and a sad one”.
Me implementing promises in js from scratch to understand how async iteration and streams work: “I’m a dumbass but a happy one, I’m a happy dumbass”.
Being dumbass isn’t the source of my sadness . It’s the mental state where my mind isn’t a healthy place which usually happens when I scroll twitter too much. This means I can be dumbass my whole life (and probably will be) but I can be happy, if I keep on reading good stuff and making good things.
To watch: the founder
To watch: guru
There are these sites which look like absolute works of art on a first glance, but they tire your senses and overwhelm your brain with too many animations. These sites are unusable on a day to day basis. Then there are sites which look delightful but also make you want to revisit them again and again. Most (probably all?) of the time they are delightfully minimalistic.
To watch: any of merryl streep’s movie
Now I know this stream is catching some eyes, will I start virtue signalling or will I remain my unbridled self. Let’s see
Going to live a solitary life until I have an annus mirabilis. Friends keep you happy, they keep you entertained, they postpone the agony out of which arise the coping mechanisms which eventually lead to something beautiful.
Will drop this plan in an instance once I come across a pretty girl that makes me think programming is for losers. Then I’ll settle down, have kids and become an obese dad with huge calves.
We commiserate about our hardships while carefully enumerating our blessings. - rh
What would you think if I sang out of tune?
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song
And I’ll try not to sing out of key
Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm, I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm, gonna try with a little help from my friends
What do I do when my love is away?
Does it worry you to be alone?
How do I feel by the end of the day?
Are you sad because you’re on your own?
No, I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm, get high with a little help from my friends
Mm, gonna try with a little help from my friends
After months of basking in the glory of creative momentum, loathing at my incompetence again.
These are the signs I’m going to pick up a course, but need to tackle it in a better way this time.
I’m going to write about tough technical topics on notedown.art. let’s goooooo
I’ve always been fascinated by comb-overs, especially the extreme sort that make a man look as if he’s wearing a beret made of his own hair. Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to be interested in– the sort of superficial quizzing best left to teenage girls. And yet there is something underneath. The key question, I realized, is how does the comber-over not see how odd he looks? And the answer is that he got to look that way incrementally. What began as combing his hair a little carefully over a thin patch has gradually, over 20 years, grown into a monstrosity. Gradualness is very powerful. And that power can be used for constructive purposes too: just as you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can trick yourself into creating something so grand that you would never have dared to plan such a thing. Indeed, this is just how most good software gets created. You start by writing a stripped-down kernel (how hard can it be?) and gradually it grows into a complete operating system. Hence the next leap: could you do the same thing in painting, or in a novel? - Essay
About | Melting Asphalt
https://meltingasphalt.com/about/
To watch: glengarry glenn ross
I direly need my own talk to youtube video app
To Watch: Seven Samurai
Humans are not rational beings, we are rationalizing beings. We make a decision and then afterwards we try to create a story to make what we did seem rational - A Very Brief History of Western Civilization
I want to make github style graphs for everything.
It’s happening. Ideas from three separate books I’ve read are starting to look similar. My mind is about to explode if I don’t write it down. My I don’t think I would be able to do justice to the merge of three beautiful ideas. But I should at least try.
Morality, ESS, and incentives
Overflowing with gratitude towards life at this very moment. I love my parents and friends. What did I ever do to deserve them.
Or is it the coffee high. Idk, but it’s fun
Important to-do: users should have the ability to continue the same rabbit hole session later
Yet another narrative I’ve built for myself. Tyler cowen would be so proud
Or how about if I want to put a different spin on it, I say that “I’m defying the narrative the society has laid out for a guy like me through use of my parent’s money”. I’m comfortable with the mess that my life is.
Why I hesitate in applying for places:
I don’t have a job right now. Most of my friends think this is a conscious decision I made and I can start working anytime I want. This isn’t true. Every time I think of applying somewhere, I go into this self-reflection, imposter syndrome inducing mode where I think “I don’t know how databases work in depth, I can’t write Dijkstra’s algorithm in javascript, I’ve never coded in low-level before, I still don’t know what tf is garbage collection, I don’t know the OSI model, I don’t know software development patterns, I don’t know system design”. Then I come up with plans to address this issue. Here’s two of my current plans:
Plan 1: Read programming from the ground up -> Learn c programming -> Read ThinkOs book -> Build my own database in c -> Build the kilo text editor in c.
Plan 2: Learn go -> Read writing an interpreter in go -> Read writing a compiler in go
I have several other plans like this where the final task is “Build AGI before John Carmack”, and then apply for jobs. I don’t know how long I’ll be stuck in this self-inflicting hell. The funny thing is that these plans are incredibly fun. Right now I write this after having built a chrome extension and having solved a problem I’ve been stuck for 2 days in programming from the ground up and boy am I happy right now. Right now I think of “Build AGI before John Carmack” task as doable. The other sinister thing about each of these plans is that each task can give birth to multitude of other tasks.
I need someone to tell me is this the thing I should be doing right now? Cause my parents would be okay to pay my expenses as long as I like and I don’t have any other motivating forces (“proving a point to someone”, “be able to buy some expensive stuff”, “travel” etc) working in my favor. Or maybe I should set a deadline for having fun till new year, and then start applying to startups I want to work at.
You’re completely welcome to think that I’m full of shit, or that I’m unlikeable, or overwrought, dramatic, annoying, arrogant, all of that stuff. You’d be right! I used to be rattled hard by negative feedback, and I would to twist and bend to try and accommodate everyone, and that actually often made things worse. So now I’m finding that it’s easier to say, look, this is what I care about, this is the game I’m playing, you don’t have to play it, you don’t have to like me, cheers, have a nice day.
[Excited newbie: let’s do all the things!!
Grizzled veteran: we have limited time, energy, morale, goodwill. Keeping this in mind, let’s pick one demonstrably good thing we’re confident we can achieve, and get it done decisively so we unlock more resources to do more things](https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1113158107222253568)
Some people go their whole lives without ever having met anyone else who I might describe as actually serious, so they find it hard to believe that anybody could really mean what they say, since everything everyone says is bullshit. - Are you serious
It just seemed so obvious to me that a serious life is a life well-lived, and it’s always been weird to me how uncommon this perspective really is - Are you serious
Purism is ego. Love when an essay hits so many of my insecurities at once.
Being overly proud and obsessive about the tools with which you do your work is basically a skill issue. It’s a cope for not having anything to show that you created with your precious tools. When someone asks what I’ve built, I’ll just tell them “Nothing, but I code using vim”.
Dexterity is attractive though.
there is a huge diff between avoiding unhappiness and actively seeking happiness - having a good time is good enough
A perk of being unemployed is that you can do weekday hacks instead of weekend hacks
Kind of writer who thinks quality of his writing is directly proportional to the number of times he made the readers look up the dictionary.
Making an extension which visualizes the rabbit holes you went down using an obsidian graph like view
Forgot to mention, rce-blog has a new name - Notedown. Thank god
Intentional attention is a way of being - Unskillful attention outside of work hours harms attention during work hours
I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don’t like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There’s no question about this. - Conscientiousness
Fell for the nerd trap again. Fell for quality rather than quantity again. Started framing each sentence to bamboozle my reader of my literary prowess again. Writing less, and signalling more again. Need to snap out of it. Speed matters
am I a shape rotator trying to be wordcel or the other way round. What I do know is that I’m mid at both
I don’t know why I go walking at night
But now I’m tired and I don’t want to walk anymore
I hope it doesn’t take the rest of my life
Until I find what it is I’ve been looking for
Gregor mendel, you beauty, you absolute genius. How did you remain so dormant after literally turning the notions of heredity on its head from a mere 2 acre garden. What imposter syndrome stopped you from running bare while screaming “Eureka” in streets of Brno.
The moment you decipher the metaphor of a song and it brings you to tears.
Listening to A horse with no name
I think this thought is why I refrain from launching rce-blog. where will I play then. What’ll be the testbed of my hideous ideas. It’s as if my own project will be stolen from me.
The only thing stopping me from working on other things is not rce-blog. Funny how I’m blaming the only source of my self-worth of taking up so much of my time. It’s my skill. It’s a skill issue.
Nah I think we like pen and paper because they are perfect thing to manifest our messy thought processes. There’s no boundations, draw anywhere, write anywhere. Finding structure in thoughts is hard. So there’s some value in note-taking tools, because they force you to squint and think.
Never will I make a tool for thought better than pen and paper.
To watch: captain blood
I need rejuvenation. I’ll probably go insane If I write one more react hook. I need to touch the bare metal. Going to read programming from the ground up and write assembly code for the next few days. Maybe will learn c. I have to stop my brain from rotting. I need to feel that bolt of lightning in my neurons again.
To watch: St elmo’s fire
Writing this as I read a journal entries of Jordan Mechner - creator of prince of persia.
When my brother and I used to play prince of persia for hours on end, why didn’t we drop our jaws in awe of its creator. Why did we never wonder, how much sweat and tears a creation of this magnitude takes. Why did we take art for granted. Why didn’t we admire the creator instead of creation once.
Yes, we enjoyed the game a lot, but not once do I remember thinking “who made this thing ?”. If I would’ve done that, I would have become a creator instead of consumer much earlier in my life.
Still can’t believe the game that led to a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal started out as a single line of code
Writing this as I read a journal entries of Jordan Mechner - creator of prince of persia.
When my brother and I used to play prince of persia for hours on end when we were kids, why didn’t we drop our jaws in awe of its creator. Why did we never wondered, how much sweat and tears a creation of this magnitude takes. Why did we take art for granted.
Yes, we enjoyed the game a lot, but not once do I remember thinking “who made this thing ?”. If I would’ve done that, I would have become a creator instead of consumer much earlier in my life.
Still can’t believe the game that led to a movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal started out as a single line of code
To look back on whenever I get overwhelmed building a new feature. Mostly my overwhelm stems from not planning enough - Making a plan by thorstan ball
Reading selfish gene makes it quite evident that Richard dawkins would be an incredible poaster
There’s two kind of activities that I do:
that whose anticipation gives more joy than actually doing it. for eg, watching a football match. I’m usually excited all day in anticipation of a match , but actually watching it is rather meh.
one that I usually dread anticipating, but enjoy a lot while doing it. Thinking about reading a hard book doesn’t actually spark as much joy as thinking about watching a match, but while reading the world feels more colourful, ideas frolick around in my brain, and life in general feels wonderful, and I’m not even exaggerating.
Hope to do more activities of the latter type
Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.
Why does streams feel like an extension of my brain. I think because it is the digital equivalent of talking to myself.
Maybe 10 github commits a day
A github commit a day, keeps the therapist away
Pendulum has swung towards “I’m a genius” and I’m going to ride this high for a couple of days haha
rce-blog is the most beautiful project in the world.
is it my “passion for building tools for thought” or the sunk-cost fallacy which keeps me working on the rce-blog project?
I’m in my midwit era in economics and going to respond “have you heard about sunk cost fallacy” to anyone who advises me to not give up.
things are being added to my to-do list faster than I’m able to complete them. Sounds like I’m in goldilocks zone, but I’m not. I’m probably experiencing a burn-out. I’m tired. just in time for buildspace s4
Burdens | Slate Star Codex
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/
the reason I’m so mid is that my parents love me regardless
Do we work in order to afford the finer things in life, or do our spending habits necessitate our acquisition of money?
Funny how these lines seem so appealing to me
Psychological Effects of Materialism and Work on Happiness – Matt Brundage
https://www.mattbrundage.com/publications/materialism-happiness/?ref=levels.io
What does “caring about something” mean? Attaching it to your sense of self-worth?
Conversely, if you do not attach something to your self-worth, do you really care about it, or is it just a passing fad?
Reading a javascript book, and laughing at the sheer number of times author prefaces showing a feature of the language with “you can (though you shouldn’t)”
Why does anyone need a progress bar on top mf just look at the scroll bar
And change the hideous name
Now all that’s left to do in rce-blog is design a more minimal profile page and and stress test it by writing all kinds of notes.
A survival guide to design systems
https://saurabhyadav.com/a-survival-guide-to-design-systems
The Grug Brained Developer
https://grugbrain.dev/
Computers and Creativity · Molly Mielke
https://www.mollymielke.com/cc
While writing something, I always wonder how do book writers not writhe in agony at not having the ability to litter their text with hyperlinks, to send the reader down another inescapable rabbit hole.
They do have references but they are not nearly as powerful as the blue and underlined a tags screaming to be clicked and bookmarked “to be read later”
To build : ai generated tasks to help you learn shell scripting better.
Ah no, actually the problem is it never swings the other way. Halfway to “I’m a genius” peak I remember this paragraph and go back to “I’m retarded” again.
I think one of the root of all my problems is that my pendulum swings way too frequently and with way high amplitude.
Sad to report that it’s currently on the “I’m retarded” side
Lord save me from my project
Ok I have to get this out of my system. Rce-blog project has a become a bane for me. Everytime I start learning some go, read linear algebra or economics, I reach out for a note taking tool. Then, what better tool to pick up than the one you built yourself. And as soon as I start writing on it, I notice little things I want to add, or some extra gimmicks. I just spent 2 hours fucking around with intersection observers because I wanted to highlight the heading in table of contents on which I’m currently at.
Are images fixed? Yes they are!!!!
Ok I have to consider the fact that rce-blog is a project that can go on for ages. I’ll always have new things and new features to add to it. But I can’t devote 100% of my time to it. I was in a delusion until now that it’ll be a project which’ll be finished sometime in the future and was working round the clock to reach that finishing line. I need to put it in a stable place and then slow the pace a little.
Play a little with other things ffs.
Ok if I want to do this, I would need to start diving into some codebase already. From 1 august, I’ll peruse the codemirror codebase. I think this’ll be a very important project (it already is) in the future.
I have all the things in place to build a WISIWYG editor
I feel like all my childhood I didn’t “live”. I just went through the motions. Studied, got good grades, played a little, got played a little. I wasn’t really passionate about anything. I used to spend no time building or creating anything. There was no single thread that tied my days around like pearls to reveal a necklace at some point. Every day was an entity on its own.
Nowadays, I wake up and and pour my heart and soul into some project of mine - something I deeply care about, something that grabs my attention first thing in the morning, something that is a consistent theme in my day to day life. And that something originates as a consequence of having a lot of free time.
With free time on my hands, I usually wander around the internet. I see beautiful stuff and am inspired to build some of my own. I am so grateful for my parents to allow me to do what I’m doing now.
Struggling has way better aesthetics than succeeding - [https://ftlsid.com/notes/micro/1690234316/]
Lol yes.
To read: https://rauno.me/craft/nextjs
Very rarely do I feel proud of myself. Last few days have been good.
Got much needed “preview -> markdown editor” data flow working today. This thing is turning out to be so fine❤️
To Read: Putting the “You” in the cpu
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit.
“I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.”
Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery. - In praise of idleness
Going to quote this whenever someone asks me why I don’t work lol
Movies to watch: October sky,gattaca,cyclo(1995)
It’s wonderful where tight feedback loops can lead you. The pace of experiments I’ve been performing after setting supabase locally is just increasing day by day.
Ok this is legit massive. Feeling proud of myself right now. This is going to be such a nice feature.
Massively improved that tldraw component on rce-blog today. I guess this was my only remaining qualm about the project.
An experiment I want to conduct -start from an obscure Wikipedia article and make a graph of all the Wikipedia links outgoing from it and carry on doing it for them as well. Basically bfs. I want to see how the tree grows
Something I can build in a couple of days and have an immense need of: store any highlight of paragraph of an internet blog I’m reading with the site, scroll position etc.
Something like this might exist but why not build one on my own
cause that’s the “trend”
Should I wait for a spark of creativity, a moment of inspiration, a call from the heavens to design my landing page.
Or should I create one with purple gradients and text that fades
Fun rabbit hole to go down to tomorrow - https://withorbit.com/. Too tired rn
I am so tired of working on rce-blog. Want to outsource landing page design to someone. But it seems like a lack of care on my part. Do I not care about it enough to brainstorm and design up a good landing page which conveys the purpose of website convincingly while being classy and minimalistic. Do I not care enough about the only source of my self-worth atm. haha I do. Will design landing page tomorrow
the sympathetic truth is that intellectual gifts are distributed unequally, no more virtuous to possess them than height or red hair, and in fact that possessors of these gifts owe a great duty to mankind - roon
That’s what I thought after reading biographies of einstein, da vinci, von neumann.
Everyone can try and figure out how these people became so great and how to create more like them. But time and time again, I think it boils down to “they’re just built different”.
Ah, but who am I kidding. Each time I read a biography of a great man, I am more impressed by their work ethic than their natural intellect. Maybe I’m just coping for being an idiot.
typind speed is now a consistent 100+ on typeracer. All I need to do now is find worthwhile things to type
Me everytime I use an open source package - “Thank you giants, for letting me sit on your shoulders”
Creator of zig ~15 years ago
Or when my parents stop giving me money
Ok I promise I’ll apply for jobs once I’m done building a physics engine, ray tracer, an interpreter and a compiler. Seems doable in the next ~4-5 months. Intense but doable.
Also tired of judging any activity on the basis of whether it has potential of becoming a source of income.
Mf, how about how fun it is.
Nothing in My Way Except Myself - by Thorsten Ball
https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/nothing-in-my-way-except-myself
I heard someone say that reading newsletters doesn’t get you anywhere.
How could you not be motivated to build a compiler after reading this
https://twitter.com/poetofgrindset/status/1680459970582814721?s=20
Ah, there it is. Someone said it. Good thing I disagree with it now, cause I don’t think I would’ve stopped reading though. Just would be doing it laden with guilt
Welcome! | Vipassana for Hackers
https://www.vipassana-for-hackers.org/
Why have I never felt like, “ooh, I wish I had one more brain”. Why don’t I have notes which accrete.
Thinking of writing something about every piece of content I consume. It’ll help me filter out the content which I don’t care about, cause I’m for sure not goin write a single word about MKBHD’s review of nothing phone.
Never realized the importance of micro-apps which are tailor made for one specific task and do that well.
It’s not like I did not have any micro-thoughts before. But something about pulling up a new notion page or opening an obsidian vault for jotting them down felt wrong.
Now that I have an app which is made and designed specifically for that purpose, I instantly turn to it to write down any frivolous thought my brain spews up.
To do: since I’ve built my own html parser, I can build like quartz. Just need to write a very crude physics engine
Some days are different. On some days the cumulative work of the past months and years breaches the surface of my mind and surges skyward in a torrent of heroic creation. In an instant the blindfold comes off and the rocks I’d been faithfully stacking in the dark take shape as crenellated parapets of the greatest of forts. Those special days swell into the paragraphs and chapters of my life, forcing everything else unceremoniously into the margins. - Intentionally nothing
This is such a beautifully written prose.
Set up supabase locally thereby tightening the feedback loops. Now just need to bang my head to get a good design out of it. What is the best way to display bunch of posts ?
Inspired to read biographies of dead people and design their personal websites after seeing some of Judah’s work.
What kind of website would Chaucer make? What about a Pharaoh? What would a 1600s colonial town hall want to make? A Vienna coffeehouse from the same time period? - https://webcraft.joodaloop.com/#postscript
Finally found out the reason why my box-shadows were awful. How to create beautiful shadows:
What is the point of the blogosphere?
Nerd-bait. Insight porn. Whatever you call it. It’s great, it entertains and delights, leads you into novel thought-experiments and fun rabbit-holes. But surely, there’s a more productive outcome than just that? Does it do anything out in the real world other than change a few indivdual trajectories here and there?
My answer: it provides the best discussion material. With the intent of pushing the boundaries of regular discourse, to enable more playful, exploratory avenues for conversation. Thinking for the sake of thinking. Debate for the sake of moving the local Overton window. - Four Fairly Frivolous Flights of Fancy
Brute-forcing my way to higher intellect by consuming good content.
Incredibly awful poem I wrote some time ago:
Right now, as I sit here, as a 24 year old jobless guy with no obligations and too much time to ponder,
I open up my browser, opening one tab after another,
each one overwhelming me more than other,
by showing me how much there is to know, how much there is to wonder.
I think I can get by all my life just going down the rabbit holes,
one thing my dumb mind is good for, is that it has so many things which it yet doesn’t know or even thought of.
The works and essays of greatest programmers and thinkers of my generations are right at my fingertips, AI revolution is on the rise, and I can’t help but think I am going to have a wonderful time.
Will I ever create anything of value, will I ever make my parents proud ?
Will I ever walk with my head held high in a prestigious crowd?
Actually no one cares, that’s too narcissistic me,
But one thing I realize is I just need a job to pay the bills, and to have a modicum of self-respect
and then I should be left alone to frolick around on the web and let it be.
And that’s my friends, is how you put a positive spin on the fact that you don’t have any users.
Once you have lots of users with lots of use cases, it’s more difficult to change anything or to pursue radical experiments. You’ve got to make sure you don’t break things for people or else carefully communicate and manage change. - Andy matuschak on why his note-taking system is not available to the public
Lol, was just thinking about this the other day. Thankfully, no one except couple of my friends use rce-blog right now which gives me the freedom to experiment. Had there been a marketer in me who would’ve coaxed people into using it, I probably would’ve been tied to shackles of design which I absolutely hate. Yesterday I removed the upvotes table from my database cause why tf do we need to upvote each other’s notes. I like what Jacky zhao did with Quartz, and thinking of doing something similar. Also thinking of giving it a more a desktop like feel. Let’s see
Evergreen notes
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes
Letting go of self
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This is how I used to be though. After enough time, I slowly realized there’s no virtue in being better at anything. Everything is a result of some kind of privilege and environment I’ve been subjected to.
The only thing that matters in the end is “Am I nice to be around”.
I find that, most of the time, I like to stay well within the limits of my abilities. Repeated frustration is the enemy of motivation, and I’m playing the longest of games - Intentionally-nothing
Also during reading anything remotely esoteric, I’m always plotting up ways in my mind to bring that content up in normal conversations with my friends so that I can signal to them how intelligent and eccentric and cool I am. You measly people whose information source is random youtube shorts and reels are no match to me, the great me who just read a critic of Adam smiths views and now subscribes to the theories of Friedrich list.
I am always giving a Patrick bateman’s dinner speech in my head.
Okay, I think I am gaining some clarity on this thing. The reason I keep going back to reading random things on the internet is once in a while, I find something which alters the way I think about things, gives me a new perspective, sheds light on the idiocy of my previous thought patterns. This serendipitous nature of random reading is what keeps pulling me back to this habit.
Yesterday, one link led to another and I stumbled upon What screens want by Frank chimero. Although I don’t think I quite get what he’s trying to say in this, but I’m sure once I fully grasp his message, it’ll change the way I view design.
This same thing is what keeps me pulling back to twitter I think. How else would I find eccentric people like this guy who quit tech job to make art (ironic enough, he was an early engineer at midjourney), someone who makes computers in a figma file, or someone who you though was an economist after reading his substack but turns out he’s an athlete, musician and designer and is just playing around on the web. (I too should make a people’s list)
The wariness around reading things arose from the fact that I read “What screen want” and then closed the tab and continued reading other random blogs. What’s the point of it if I don’t ruminate on the things I just read, giving it some time to fiddle some neurons in my brain, and then putting it to practice by creating some things on screens.
What’s the point of being inspired by will depue’s figma computer if I don’t then put in time to understand what tf turing complete even means?
I think I got attracted to the aesthetic of reading esoteric things on the web just for the sake of it.
Everyone has a philosopher in them, waiting to be manifested in real world through a frictionless micro-blogging service built on a chat app.
Don’t confuse ‘doing a thing because I like it’ with ‘doing a thing because I want to be seen as the sort of person who does such things’ - 100 tips for a better life
To refute this point, I think it’s totally reasonable to start something good with not so good motives. I started programming cause I wanted to be seen as smart and technical. I started reading because I wanted to be seen as an intellectual. But gradually at some point I stopped caring about being seen as smart intellectual (maybe because I realized I’ll always be dumb, cause knowledge is not intelligence) and started really caring about peeling the abstraction layers of computers. I do still virtue signal though, and I cringe at that, but I don’t know how to stop it.
There are some virtues worth signalling cause they lead you down interesting paths, and then I think most people naturally drop the signalling part and keep on indulging in those virtues. I don’t think Steve Jobs started out by envisioning to be the whisperer of personal computer revolution and creating delightful products. I think at the time he just wanted to make some quick money off of his brilliant friend’s creation and get laid (Idk, this maybe factually incorrect, but that’s what I assumed when I read his biography).
What’s more important I think is the selection of virtues you want to signal. Choosing to signal “Look how rich I am” would probably lead you down a debt-laden life.
Do I like doing things, or do I like having done them?
after learning and re-learning linear algebra for past 2 years, I’m finally in awe of the SVD. why did it take so long? Do I just read things to get by and not really really understand and appreciate them?
Ah, I think it finally became clear what I want Rce-blog to be. I want it to be like Cosma’s notebooks. A repository of people’s haphazard notes on things they care about.
Do good writers feel more too? I thought good writers are just better at articulating their thoughts. But it seems to me that being articulate also changes your subjective experience? Steven pinker refutes this thought though. Like I can’t for the life of me describe a perfume’s scent like sasha chapin does here. I guess the first reason why is I’m not so weirdly interested in perfumes. second is even if I was I don’t have the skills to grasp what I’m feeling, or probably wouldn’t feel that way cause I don’t have his literary skills.
Does he feel so vividly a thing as trivial as a perfume’s scent just because he can put pen to paper on those feelings?
But I can’t let this urge distract me for doing what’s truly important. Wrap my pure components in React.memo and import them dynamically when needed. It’s the small details that matter
Some of the reading which I’m doing nowadays, feels like porn - intellectual porn. I am enjoying it too much and it’s distracting me from getting actual work done (self-directed work cause I’m unemployed rn). Somebody please tell me it’s not that. Well it probably is. It isn’t getting me anywhere. But does anything that doesn’t get you anywhere but you enjoy doing should be categorized as porn. It has a lot of similarities to porn though:
- It’s available at the tap of a few fingers.
- It tingles some part of my brain
- Every essay I read is littered with dozens of hyperlinks to other ones, each sucking you deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole.
One quality that differentiated it from porn is that it didn’t make me feel like shit after consuming it. But today’s the first day I’m feeling wary of the effects this voracious reading is having on me.
At some point in time, someone from my generation would have to take charge of maintaining things on which our civilization depends (probably someone my age is already doing this) such as nodejs, v8 engine, git etc. I think I would like to become one of those persons.
Feel like entering into an era which every upper middle class kid has gone through in their teens. Go to soccer practice, go to band practice, go to poetry and literature class,then come home and work on your side project which might get you into YC. Get a taste of being messi, hendrix, chauser and chesky all in one day.
Things I want to build:
An application to write books which have spaced repition engrained in their form. Most basic way I could think of is to give the writers options to embed thoughtful questions in their prose, and each reader would receive a mail at particular intervals quizzing him on those questions. Basically what Quantom country is doing.
An app built on principles of spaced repitition . I write down the things I want to remember as questions and answer them at intervals governed by practive of spaced repition
A svg playground just like https://www.nan.fyi/svg-paths
Given that we forget everything we read in a few weeks time if we don’t encounter that material repeatedly, then how are some people’s personalities so reflective of what they consume. Do they consume content which conforms to their personalities or is that content shaping up personality in some way?
That said, how is mine formed? What content has shaped my thinking? If I think about it, my personality is basically what I’ve been trained for since my childhood. My love for competence, hard work (it does not show cause I’m dumb, but it’s there) has been engrained in me by my parents.
Things I want to build:
An application to write books which have spaced repition engrained in their form. Most basic way I could think of is to give the writers options to embed thoughtful questions in their prose, and each reader would receive a mail at particular intervals quizzing him on those questions. Basically what Quantom country is doing.
An app built on principles of spaced repitition . I write down the things I want to remember as questions and answer them at intervals governed by practive of spaced repition
To-Do:
I think I know what’s cool. Having an unfathomable amount of interesting knowledge about an esoteric topic, with enough understanding that you can explain that to your younger brother in simple language without making him feel dumb. I want to be that cool.
Reading random blogs is getting me nowhere although it’s fun. I need to dive deep into a subject from basics and build some foundation. Maybe economics?
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - Gay Talese - Best Profile of Sinatra
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold-gay-talese/
The Manual by Epictetus
https://www.amazon.com/Manual-Philosophers-Guide-Life/dp/1545461112/
Subrahma’s Problem
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_37.html
Day 1
Ok no it’s design has grown on me. I was probably affected by dunning-kruger after reading a little bit of practical typography and set out to critic one of the most thoughtfully designed site to exist.
Why do I salivate at websites which have event listeners set on scroll
Hope I can coax someone into using it.
using my note-taking app to take linear algebra notes, and it’s everything I ever wanted ! Feels so good. I just summon up a canvas using canvas-1 command. Write latex by describing it in pure english. Write code and run it right then and there.
Eastern philosophy says there is no “self.” Science agrees - Big Think
https://bigthink.com/the-well/eastern-philosophy-neuroscience-no-self/
Optimizing you components is fun though. It feels good when they don’t re-render on every fucking keypress haha
I’ve been talking like a migratory bird for the past month.
I think that too much focus is a bad thing. A good environment has a mix of focus and experimentation. - Tom Macwright
Wholeheartedly agree. For past one and a half months, I’ve been too focused on just one thing. Inertia and momentum built by working on rce-blog kept me from experimenting on things, reading and just playing around.
Looks like I’m done with the migration
Home | Alex Sidorenko
https://alexsidorenko.com/
Competence is more fulfilling than love, more delicious than rest — it’s so tangible, measurable. The euphoria of feeling useful, valued. in love with competence
What is rce-blog really? I use it as a note-taking app. One of my friend uses it as a note-taking app. If I was writing those notes with the intent of publishing them sometime in the future my writing flow would be broken. I think I should guide it to being a note-taking app rather than a blogging platform with a share button for occasional sharing your polished notes with the audience. It’s read page is pretty useless. Even on blogging platforms like medium or substack I personally never browse the posts feed.
One thing I could do would be to guide a new user to the landing page which shows its features and lures them into using the product. And signed-in users should be directed straight to their profile pages. No one cares about reading the most recently published blog. It’ll be good to get some kind of subdomain working for individual profile pages.
Maybe sometime in the future this will turn into a repository of good enough blog posts on technical topics that someone cares to search specifically for a particular author or a blog posts which’ll demand yet another redesign but that is too far-fetched into the future right now.
People often say to each other that they are bored, but to me this is almost a shocking, shameful admission.
Why should it be somebody else‟s duty to entertain us? People who can‟t find anything
of interest in what they are doing, who constantly need external sources of stimulation
and amusement, are missing most of life‟s pleasures. - Donald Knuth
Just realised I should be using do100things for my workout logs
It’s name is hideous though
Did 2 good workouts in past two days but too lazy to write them down
Workout Log :
Note: This workout was actually done on **26-05-23
**Bulgarian split squats with 20 kg weight: 3 sets of 15 reps
Normal squats with 15 kg weight: 3 sets of 15 reps
Workout Log :
Note: This workout was actually done on 25-05-23 after recovering from fever
Pull up - 15
Push ups : 30
Bench press with 10kg weight: 2 sets of 10 reps
Tricep pull downs with 20 kg weight for first set and then 15 kg weight for last two: 3 sets of 15 reps
This rce-blog project is slowly turning into a thing which I’m generally proud of and will probably use daily. What a nice feeling!
Once I’m done with the migration, the goal is to just have fun writing dirty css and js. And the way to do that is spin up a codepen and try to recreate these. Or why not completely numb my dopamine receptors and try reading Practical typography
Did I just call myself an expert at web development?
When I was just learning javascript, my brain was overflowing with all the things I would be able to build with these new powers that are being bestowed upon me.
Now after having learnt almost everything to create a functioning webapp, all i think about is which of my zillion components should I wrap in a useMemo.
I’m not trying to say details are unimportant, but I think my wonder for all the possibilities that come with having learnt programming has dried out. I don’t imagine anymore.
Is this what that book zen mind, beginner’s mind is about?
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
Workout Log :
Pull up - 15
Ring Chin Ups: 12
Push ups : 30
As I go back to my past writings, I feel a sense of pride while reading them. I find they were good. Is this supposed to be a bad sign? Am I not supposed to cringe at my past self which signals that I’m getting better?
I don’t particularly like gwern’s site. Some of the reasons why:
- the words are too bright on a dark background.
- distance between individual letters seems too small for some reason. maybe because of the font.
- the words are too heavy. Maybe their weights should be sligtly lower?
Workout Log :
Ring Chin Ups: ~20
Lat Pull downs: 102
Barbell rows: 103
Bicep curls: 123
Hammer curls with isometrics: 102
Probably more inhibiting than anything else is a feeling of responsibility. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues. - Isaac Asimov
Also did a chest/tricep workout between last two workout logs but it was meh.
Workout Log :
Finally a leg day because I have gym downstairs and have no excuses left.
Squats with 15kg weight: ~60
Bulgarian split squats: 3 sets of ~10 reps each for each leg
Explosive lunges with 7.5 kg weight: ~15
I wonder if this stream can be used for real-time book summaries or thoughts while reading the book. Currently reading “The selfish gene”. Let’s see
Since I’m the king of consistency, getting back to working out again after 20 days.
Workout Log :
Ring pull-up/chin-ups: 26
Push Ups: 30
Why do I feel relief at publishing drafts to an archives blog that I don’t particularly intend to point anybody to? It’s one of the great mysteries of the creative process. I’m reminded of a story from Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, where he describes being stuck for about 10 days, with the dishes piling up, and then eventually he sits at the typewriter, bangs out a couple of pages of nonsense, trashes those pages, and then notices his mood lifting, so much so that next thing he knows he’s whistling and cheerfully doing the dishes.
Ok this is so true. I feel like an absolute piece of shit when I spend my days doing nothing. But as soon as I write an absolute piece of shit code, or learn something new no matter how much trivial it is, I feel elated. There’s something magical in that git push origin branch-name.
I virtue signal a lot, like a lot
Did none of these but just shipped a bunch of code all day.
Some things to do today:
- shave & take a bath
- start working out again
- improve the miserable sleep cycle.
This drop refers itself
The very fact that I have to think so hard about the design when adding any new page, component etc on rce-blog is a proof that I don’t have a consistent design-system in place.
If users try out a new site and find out some bugs, do they see it as a lack of care or do they have sympathy for the developer (in case he’s a solo developer and site is not a product of some large corp).
self referencing drop?
Enthusiastically added some todos in my rce-blog project after a long long time. Felt good
Daily log:
This was supposed to be “daily log” but the last log was 3 days ago. Pretty much sums up my consistency in life lol.
Anyways, I wiped some dust off my rce-blog project lol. The advice that “don’t build extra features till you haven’t made a dollar off of the project”, “release the mvp and wait for your first customer” really messed me up. That project started as a way for me to challenge myself and something fun, and in past few months it turned into something not fun. Felt good working on it again. Did some small design changes and a bug fix. Going to use it as my primary note taking tool from now on.
Was a good day today. Self-loathing was pretty minimal since I was absorbed by the project. Although overwhelmed myself around day time by reading too many blogs and consuming too much content.
Played cricket with friends. I suck at it but I enjoy it, idk why. What happened to all the training my father gave me when I was young. Did he just spoil me over-pitched deliveries, which I drove straight everytime and thought of myself as the reincarnation of sachin tendulkar?
Daily log:
Struggling a lot with extremely low sense of self-worth. There’s a voice in my head saying I’m an absolute piece of shit. I feel incredibly incompetent right now at anything. Earlier me would have taken a course or something which would have helped cull this feeling for a bit but I don’t think that’s the solution.
Scrolling twitter too much these days due to anxiety. Don’t want to exist right now. Wish humanity had developed a cheap solution to do that cause I think there’s a dire need for this thing (to not exist temporarily). What do I do?
Focusing on one thing would help probably. Would try to write a blog on how langchain works for myself, cause I’m pretty confused by abstractions provided by that library. Not because it’s a bad library, but because I’m dumb lol.
Or should I have done more with what has life given to me (insane levels of comfort and freedom)
Wondering if I can use “I probably suffer from anxiety, depression, excessive self-loathing” as an excuse for me being such a loser lol.
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 27
Pull Ups - 30
Push Ups - 72
it would be cool to somehow give access to gpt to entire .git folder, and ask random questions about your project history. Maybe that’s what I’ll build next
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 20
Pull Ups - 25
Push Ups - 60
testing some new updates to this stream
Don’t worry if you understand computers as enchanted aluminum boxes: everyone does. It’s not really a problem for your programming career. - Advice to the newish programmer
Really needed this advice. I would probably ruin my career, peeling the layers of abstractions and never shipping anything of value or creating value of the shareholder.
What about web dev and design, and react and typescript and blah blah. I might go insane if I don’t get a job soon.
I do think having a project that you are absorbed by is good for mental well-being. I for one will probably go insane if I don’t have one, which has been the case for past few days. On that note, what is one project that I can do that’ll keep me busy for foreseeable future? Oh, idk, let’s build an OS lol . Here are some steps I need take for that:
- Read programming from the ground up
- Read the C programming language
- Build kilo text editor
- Read Operating system 0-1 or Think OS or both.
- Brushing up on operating systems and C programming
Why TF didn’t i record myself while working out earlier. Noticed I was doing decline pushups horribly. Core wasn’t tight at all.
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 25
Pull Ups - 28
Push Ups - 60
This guy treats objects like women.
Some things to build:
I want a webapp where I can just say “I want an intermediate level lesson in Bash scripts with exercises and quizzes”, and I get a detailed prose and with some exercises at the end.
A normal talk to any youtube video webapp.
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 23
Dips - 0
Pull Ups - 23
Push Ups - 68
Studying AI again lol after 1.5 years
My mind is beyond blown right now. Wtf ?!!!
I think mostly I should view it as a means to get to an end, but occasionally, just for fun, go deep into things I find interesting,maybe?. Idk
Ok this is the most fascinating thing I’ve read in a while - https://rauchg.com/2017/2016-in-review#evolution-hacks-reality.
What we normally call reality is just the interface to reality that evolution has given us.
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 20
Dips - 0
Pull Ups - 20
Push Ups - 55
One drawback i can think of living with friends is that you can’t just sit randomly anywhere and “do nothing”. One of them is bound to ask you “what are you thinking” or “are you getting bored, let’s divert our attention to this thing”. I think even I myself would be uncomfortable sitting like a ghost in the middle of a room visibly doing nothing. I would plug in my earphones, start my laptop or start doing something. This isn’t ideal.
Why I’m i talking in git terms though? Maybe it’s because I re-read this - https://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html
Maybe if I commit to writing my thoughts regularly on this stream, this’ll act as version control system of my brain haha.
I like how software your interact with frequently and stores some information becomes a repository which you can look back later and get a good idea of what kind of person you were at that time or what you were going through, or what your were predominantly thinking. For me it’s my gallery. for some people it may be their tweets. I think this stream is similar. I would love to read all my streams at some point in the future.
Half my life is gone, and I have let The years slip from me and have not fulfilled The aspiration of my youth, to build Some tower of song with lofty parapet. Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret Of restless passions that would not be stilled, But sorrow, and a care that almost killed, Kept me from what I may accomplish yet; Though, half-way up the hill, I see the Past Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights,– A city in the twilight dim and vast, With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights,– And hear above me on the autumnal blast The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Interesting - Essays of Michel de montaigne
I just want to note that at this point of time I’m going through extremely torrid times. I’m the kind of guy that genuinely respects hard working high achieving people, and that means I judge my self worth on that basis too. And for some time, i haven’t been doing anything I’m proud of. I’ve turned my brain into mush by constantly scrolling Twitter. The last time i was happy was when I did nothing but read the book “programming from the ground up” for three days. Hope i get back into that mental state again
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 25
Dips - 0
Pull Ups - 15
Push Ups - 65
building something which isn’t along the theme of put data in database & read data from database, and my mind has completely stopped working lol. how dumb am I. Good thing gpt4 is here to save the world from dumbfucks like me
It’s scary how if you don’t put in the effort nothing in life is a given. Or right now at least for me that’s the case.
A little female dog died today. Bitch walked right into an oncoming bike. Crying and sobbing writing this. I miss her. The way she put her two little paws on me whenever I opened a packet of Parle-G, those cute little barks of excitement. Strangely these moments fill me with gratefulness for life. How everyone I love is safe at this very moment, despite all the things that could go wrong. Moments like these come up once in a while, but they are still rare.
Also at these moments I just can’t feel but notice how truly lonely a human is. We may spend time doing things to divert our attention, maybe we can talk to a friend, but really it’s only us and our inner voice. Trying to overcome these deep pangs of sadness by distracting myself but I know I would have to go through this.
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 20
Dips - 22
Pull Ups - 12
Push Ups - 32
What a waste. That’s what happens if you don’t eat properly. Also next time leg day, otherwise I’ll start looking like SquarePants.
I need to have some guiding principles of design, or some design sense. I get mentally drained just thinking of what the webpage should look like.
Future’s looking more bleak, fresh poison each week
Dynamic form generator seems an interesting web dev problem. Can’t immediately think of a way to let the user insert logic inside his form flow. Let’s try and build a typeform clone
Can’t focus at all. Is it going to be a L day or will I be able to turn it around. Can’t even put my finger at what is causing this distracted mind.
Sometimes, when I go deep into some thing, like assembly language right now or linear algebra, after some point I feel like I’m just manipulating symbols and notation, without like really really understanding what’s going on. Like why the fuck did it take a 3b1b video for me to realize that when we multiply a matrix and a vector we are essentially rotating a vector. I’ve to stay vigilant about my manipulate smybols-feel intelligent part of brain and give it a reality check once in a while.
Chris Sawyer built rollercoaster tycoon in assembly. My mind is beyond blown right now. I can’t even.. i can’t comprehend the level of work ethic and genius.
Oh are blockquotes here?
Writing recursive functions in assembly wasn’t too hard !!
Ok, flow state is enjoyable. But I think it is precious enough that we just don’t get it that easily. We have to put some energy into the system to decrease the entropy, so that we reach that holy grail of flow state. And that need to put initial activation energy is off putting enough, that most people never get to the flow state regularly.
Happened to me for past few months. I was just looking for some kind of activity that would gripe me and calm my stupid brain. But no activity just gripes you as soon as you start doing it. Ok no activity except maybe sex. But that isn’t long lasting, so there’s that. In every other activity you first need to slog for some hours or days, and then comes that flow state which makes it all worthwhile. When me and my brother played that long-ball kippie uppies, we needed to get through some minutes before getting into that zone. So yeah, from next time maybe don’t dread any activity too much and just put some hours or days or weeks in to get to that precious flow state. It’ll be worth it.
Yes, that’s what I did all day today. Wrote a function to calculate 2^3 + 3^4 in assembly. Did it make me a better programmer? No. Did it increase my chances to secure a cushy high paying software job? No. But, most importantly, did I enjoy doing it? Also no.
A piece of code to calculate 2^3 + 3^4:
Javascript:
console.log(2**3 + 3**4)
Fucking Assembly:
.section .data .section .text .globl _start _start: # this function computer 2^3 + 3^4. We'll calculate power using a function # which takes the two numbers as parameters. #pushl $3 #the line below automatically pushes the address of the next instruction to the top of stack. #at the end of function call we need to deallocate memory taken for these two parameters pushl $2 pushl $3 call power addl $8, %esp pushl %eax pushl $3 pushl $4 call power addl $8, %esp popl %ebx addl %eax, %ebx exit: movl $1, %eax int $0x80 .type power, @function power: #we need to save the current base pointer value at the top of stack pushl %ebp #Now, we can safely save the address of top of stack in the ebp. can't rely #on esp since it may change during execution movl %esp,%ebp movl 12 (%ebp), %ebx #this is currently 2 movl 8 (%ebp), %ecx #this is currently 3 subl $4, %esp #make space for local variable movl %ebx, -4 (%ebp) start_loop: cmpl $1, %ecx #if power is 1 we store our answer in after %ebp je loop_exit cmpl $1, %ebx #if exponent is 1 answer is 1 je loop_exit movl -4 (%ebp), %eax imull %ebx, %eax movl %eax, -4 (%ebp) decl %ecx jmp start_loop loop_exit: #move the top of stack to base pointer to get rid of local variables movl -4 (%ebp), %eax movl %ebp, %esp popl %ebp #load to old valueof ebp into base pointer, also stack pointer points at return address now ret
Writing functions in assembly immediately makes you feel grateful for all these higher level languages. How easily do we make those functions go brrr… without even thinking of what the poor call stack and all these pointer registers are going through. All hail the abstractions 🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️
Chicken legs incoming💪
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 25
Dips - 25
Pull Ups - 21
Push Ups - 60
Wrote a program to find the maximum of a list using assembly. Becoming more & more unhireable by the day
if a piece of matter can have 1-1 correspondence with the state of something, then that piece of matter is basically a storage device.
Or I can look at this week as a week where I go against all my natural instincts, because my natural instincts haven’t led me anywhere good lol.
The goal of this week is to get bored as much as I can, to the point where I want to kill myself. Let’s see what good comes of it.
want to start studying linear algebra and probability and stats again. If I am unemployed,at least be a smart unemployed
Workout Log :
Chin ups - 25
Dips - ~20
Pull Ups - 15
Push Ups - ~45
learning the awk programming language now. Goal is to make myself unemployable by learning these esoteric dark arts
You can change the internal field seperator in a bash for loop by using IFS=$'pattern'.
Ok cleaned up my stream, going to use it store some links and micro thoughts (as if I have any that are worth putting pen to paper)
Gpt 4 this, gpt 4 that, how about a pity for me who is watching his career being automated right in front of his eyes
Built a gpt wrapper today. Loathing myself
