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Daily log archive for Dec 2024. Go to the current daily log, or browse the archive index.

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2024-12-31

Fully locked in to something I am working on.

2024-12-30

dotnet versions

I am playing with .NET on OS X, and here are some notes for posterity.

I can install a specific older version of .NET (for e.g. .NET 6) using the following brew command.

brew install dotnet@6
export DOTNET_ROOT="/opt/homebrew/opt/dotnet@6/libexec"
export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/dotnet@6/bin:$PATH"

However, when I do this I cannot access the latest .NET version which I installed previously using brew install dotnet.

I found this homebrew tap: GitHub - isen-ng/homebrew-dotnet-sdk-versions: dotnet-sdk versions HomeBrew Tap

The first thing I was doing slightly wrong was that I was installing dotnet (the runtime) instead of dotnet-sdk.

I realised the correct way to install multiple versions of dotnet-sdk is as follows.

brew install dotnet-sdk
brew tap isen-ng/dotnet-sdk-versions
brew install --cask dotnet-sdk6
brew install --cask dotnet-sdk7

vscode C#

After a bit of trial and error, I figured out that most of what I need for C# development in vscode is available with the C# dev kit extension: C# Dev Kit - Visual Studio Marketplace

Running LLMs locally

How I run LLMs locally - Abishek Muthian #llm #ollama #local

2024-12-29

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Six

This chapter is titled You can't hoard life: On letting the moments pass

Among spiritual traditions, Buddhism is uniquely insightful when it comes to this specific form of suffering – how we make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we wanted them to. That’s what’s going on whenever you fail to savor a moment in nature, or with a newborn, or while eating an exceptional meal, because you’re too focused on trying to savor it, or somehow extend it into the future. It’s also what happens when you’re too busy attempting to ‘make memories’ from an experience so as to be able to reflect upon it later – or, worse, to post pictures on social media. Another version of the same phenomenon occurs when you reach the end of a day on which you’ve been unusually successful in getting your work done, or sticking to your fitness routine, but then instead of thinking ‘What a great day!’ and luxuriating in your achievement, you find yourself thinking: ‘Yes! Now that’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure that this is merely the first of many such days to come!’ Congratulations: you turned a potential source of easy delight into a cause of further stress.

Perhaps all anxiety,’ writes Sarah Manguso, ‘might derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing.’ Our attempt to grip on to fleeting experiences expresses the desire to store them up, use them for future purposes, freeze time in its tracks, or in some other way to resist the truth that this is it. And yet it follows from our finitude that the value of anything good that’s happening now has to lie, at least in part, in our experience of it as it occurs, rather than in how we might co-opt it into our long-term project of trying to feel less finite. When I say I’d like to look out over the valley every morning ‘forever,’ I’m denying my finitude in a rather obvious way, because even if I were never to move house again and to live to the age of 130, there’d be no ‘forever’ about it. That would just be a few more decades of morning coffees, a less-than-invisible speck of time against the backdrop of the eons. All my clenching and grasping would have done precisely nothing to render the experience permanent.

You can have a hundred tea ceremonies; you could even have all of them with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then that stretch of time evaporates forever. If it didn’t – if, in defiance of all logic, it somehow persisted, so that you could return to it whenever you liked, for as long as you liked – it would be vastly less precious. The transience is the whole point.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Seven

This chapter is titled Inconceivable: On the solace of doubt.

Those of us accustomed to relying on our intellects to power us through our days can get jumpy at the idea of relying on them less – of not always stopping to do research or think things through before acting on our intuitions. Yet over the course of humanity’s history, it must have been far more common than not to feel adrift in a world of mysteries, obliged to proceed on the basis of blind hunches alone. So there need be no shame in the feeling that you don’t yet fully understand the field you work in, or how to date, or be in a relationship, or be a parent. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong, and it doesn’t mean you can’t take constructive action – or, alternatively, relax – until all the answers are in. It just means that we’re limited in our capacity to get a grip on our infinitely complex reality. It makes little sense to let that hold you back from living in it.

2024-12-28

Did some cooking and perfected my 5-person chai recipe as we prepped to host guests in the evening today. Another chill day mostly off the screens.

2024-12-27

Went to a cafe to work, but ended up meeting a friend and then more ppl joined and I basically yapped from 9am to 9pm straight.

I went to Mūru Mūru in Indiranagar and had their hot chocolate and it was pretty amazing.

The Lonely Hunter

I heard these lines in a books podcast this morning and have been thinking about it ever since.

Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still, But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.

The Lonely Hunter by William Sharp - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry #poems #loneliness #grief

This poem explores themes of longing, grief, and the search for connection. The speaker, a solitary figure, yearns for a lost love, represented by a white flower. They wander through a verdant landscape, haunted by memories and the hope of reunion.

ghostty

Ghostty released today: Ghostty 1.0 | Hacker News #terminals

I already have it as my terminal with the following minimal config:

theme = GruvboxDarkHard
macos-titlebar-style = hidden
window-decoration = false

Ghostty is revolutionary in many ways, but I found this article about its native platfrom integration particularly compelling: Ghostty Is Native—So What? | g.p. anders

2024-12-26

I am supposed to start grinding on stuff today, but I have visitors coming so might not be able to fully lock in.

The Bookshop Woman

The Bookshop Woman: Nanako Hanada, Cat Anderson: 9781914240812: Amazon.com: Books #books #japan

I have been reading The Bookshop Woman since I got it as a secret santa gift. It's a pity I am reading a physical copy, because I don't usually highlight or copy quotes from it. It has a lot of quotable bits that I believe folks will resonate with a lot.

/images/bookshop_woman.png

Japanese Stationary

This tweet I made about Japanese Stationary seems to have reached a wider audience than normal.

2024-12-25

Christmas Break Day 3. Caught up on the last two episodes of Dune Prophecy S2, and generally just chilled all day.

2024-12-24

Christmas Break Day 2.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Five

This chapter is titled You can’t hoard life: On letting the moments pass.

Among spiritual traditions, Buddhism is uniquely insightful when it comes to this specific form of suffering – how we make ourselves more miserable than necessary, not just by railing against negative experiences we’re having, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold on to good things that are happening exactly as we wanted them to. That’s what’s going on whenever you fail to savor a moment in nature, or with a newborn, or while eating an exceptional meal, because you’re too focused on trying to savor it, or somehow extend it into the future. It’s also what happens when you’re too busy attempting to ‘make memories’ from an experience so as to be able to reflect upon it later – or, worse, to post pictures on social media. Another version of the same phenomenon occurs when you reach the end of a day on which you’ve been unusually successful in getting your work done, or sticking to your fitness routine, but then instead of thinking ‘What a great day!’ and luxuriating in your achievement, you find yourself thinking: ‘Yes! Now that’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure that this is merely the first of many such days to come!’ Congratulations: you turned a potential source of easy delight into a cause of further stress.

…

Perhaps all anxiety,’ writes Sarah Manguso, ‘might derive from a fixation on moments – an inability to accept life as ongoing.’ Our attempt to grip on to fleeting experiences expresses the desire to store them up, use them for future purposes, freeze time in its tracks, or in some other way to resist the truth that this is it. And yet it follows from our finitude that the value of anything good that’s happening now has to lie, at least in part, in our experience of it as it occurs, rather than in how we might co-opt it into our long-term project of trying to feel less finite. When I say I’d like to look out over the valley every morning ‘forever,’ I’m denying my finitude in a rather obvious way, because even if I were never to move house again and to live to the age of 130, there’d be no ‘forever’ about it. That would just be a few more decades of morning coffees, a less-than-invisible speck of time against the backdrop of the eons. All my clenching and grasping would have done precisely nothing to render the experience permanent.

2024-12-23

Christmas break day 1. Was out the whole day. Went to Thom's Bakery, church hopped to check out the decorations. Also ended up checking out this coffee shop called 6oz coffee in Ulsoor.

2024-12-22

Meditations with Mortals Day Twenty Four

This chapter is titled Scruffy hospitality: On finding connection in the flaws

To put on an impressive show for visitors is to erect a facade, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that: some of us love the challenge of creating the most enchanting one we can. But the idea that such a facade is mandatory, if visitors are to be admitted to your life, must arise from the assumption that there’s something incomplete or inadequate about your life the rest of the time. Since your visitors’ home is presumably likewise usually a mess, it might even imply there’s something wrong with their lives, too. No wonder calling off the whole performance forges a deeper bond. The moment I first see a friend’s chaotic kitchen is like the moment in a blooper reel when two actors can’t help breaking character and collapsing in laughter. Nominally, it shouldn’t be happening, but it always feels delightfully real when it does.

2024-12-21

The funk from yesterday threatened to continue, but I managed to push it away after a bit of effort.

The Bookshop Woman

Read a few pages of this lovely book: The Bookshop Woman: Nanako Hanada, Cat Anderson: 9781914240812: Amazon.com: Books #books #japan

I spotted this book first at Blue Tokai HSR, when somebody was reading it and the title caught my eye. I subsequently had a great conversation with this person about many things, but somehow forgot about the book itself.

Then suddenly, the book came to the top of my mind a few weeks ago and I put it on one of my secret santa lists. Somebody noticed and sent the book to me, and I was super pumped to read it as soon as it arrived.

It's a very sweet book. Very much in the genre of Japanese books like When the Coffee Gets Cold and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Three

This chapter is titled How to start from sanity: On paying yourself first

And yet it appears to be a fundamental rule that if you treat sanity as a state you have to reach by engaging in all manner of preparations, or getting other things out of the way first, then the main effect will be to reinforce the sense of sanity as something that’s out of reach. You’ll entrench the stress and anxiety, rather than uprooting them. You might get all sorts of useful things done – but they’ll never bring peace of mind, because you’ll effectively be telling yourself on a daily basis that peace of mind is something distant and not available right here.

That’s what I mean by ‘striving towards sanity.’ ‘Operating from sanity,’ on the other hand, means embodying a certain kind of orientation towards life first, one that treats the present moment as a place where peace of mind might, in theory, be attainable – and then going about your life from that orientation, rather than treating the activities of your life as things you’re doing in order to one day reach it. In his book Anti-Time Management, Richie Norton boils this philosophy down to two steps. One: ‘Decide who you want to be.’ Two: ‘Act from that identity immediately’.

Treat your to-do list as a menu. In the striving-towards-sanity mindset, a to-do list is always something you’ve got to get to the end of before you’re allowed to relax. But in any context where there are more things that feel like they need doing than there’s time available in which to do them – which is the normal state of affairs, after all – a to-do list is by definition really a menu, a list of tasks to pick from, rather than to get through. And operating from sanity means treating it that way: starting with the acknowledgment that you won’t complete everything you might wish, then making your selections from the menu. Obviously, not every task on every to-do list will be as appetizing as the restaurant analogy suggests. But it’s surprising how many things do become more appetizing once you’re encountering them not as chores you have to plow through, but as options you get to pick.

2024-12-20

Got into a funk and never recovered. Was pretty much a zombie throughout the day!

2024-12-19

Meditations for Mortals Day Twenty Two

This chapter is titled Stop being so kind to Future You: On entering time and space completely

If there’s a single truth at the heart of the imperfectionist outlook, it’s the one to which we turn as we begin this final week: that this, here and now, is real life. This is it. This portion of your limited time, the part before you’ve managed to get on top of everything, or dealt with your procrastination problem, or graduated or found a partner or retired; and before the survival of democracy or the climate have been secured: this part matters just as much as any other and arguably even more than any other, since the past is gone and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists. If instead you take the other approach – if you see all of this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself, or feeling good about yourself – then you’ll end up treating your actual life as something to ‘get through,’ until one day it’ll be over, without the meaningful part ever having arrived. We have to show up as fully as possible here, in the swim of things as they are. None of that means you don’t get to harbor ambitious plans as well – about the things you’ll accomplish, the fortune you’ll accumulate, or the difference you’ll make to the world. Far from it. It means you get to pursue those goals and feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them, instead of postponing the aliveness to when or if they’re achieved.

onecompiler

Found this site in a video I was watching: https://onecompiler.com/react #react #javascript #frontend

It's great to just copy paste a React component and have it visualized. I suppose there are other places on the internet that provide this, but I found this to be quite straightforward in that it required no setup.

Copying from remote SSH host to local clipboard

From: Copying to your clipboard over SSH in vim with OSC52 #clipboard #ssh

Dmitry Mazin also told me you can create this script on a remote host, call it pbcopy, and piping into it will copy to your clipboard! I tested it and it works.

#!/bin/bash
printf "\033]52;c;%s\007" "$(base64 | tr -d '\n')"

What We Suffer For

What We Suffer For - by Josh Zlatkus - Living Fossils

Great coming back to one of my fav substack after a long time. In this the author uses the model of evolutionary tradeoffs to explain the reasons why we are willing to suffer in life. Remember evolution only cares about increasing our likelihood to propagate our genes into the next generation. It is agnostic to our suffering (unless it contradicts with the primary goal as stated!).

Over the years, I’ve been able to put together a list of what people are willing to suffer for.

In summary, we suffer for:

How to Promote Equality without Backlash?

How to Promote Equality without Backlash? - by Alice Evans #feminism

Not all cancer treatments work. Likewise, not all feminist activism is effective. So, we can ask,

…

To advance gender equality, it may be more strategic to build inclusive campaigns that gently expand what is considered acceptable while appealing to common values. Gender interventions will have the greatest impact if they tackle locally-binding constraints, with careful sequencing. Delivering shared prosperity is equally vital - especially for disadvantaged young men.

Love the section where she outlines the three things that drive backlash

and then in a subsequent section outlines what can be done to prevent the backlash

Crypto trades on the greater fool theory

A letter in response to crypto skeptic journalist Jemima Kelly's article in the FT caught my eye: Letter: Crypto trades on the greater fool theory

It is a very simple succinct description of why crypto tokens are useless. It is worth reproducing in full.

Once again Jemima Kelly hits the crypto nail on its virtual head (“The grim ghost of crypto future,” Opinion, December 2).

How we name things influences how we understand them, and so I particularly appreciate her avoidance of two words that are often used in articles about crypto: “currency” and “investment”. Crypto “coins” or “tokens” are entries in a digital ledger and do not come close to meeting the basic definition of a currency, which is that it be a unit of account, a means of exchange, and a store of value. And anyone putting money into crypto is a speculator, not an investor. On what basis would you buy a crypto token? It pays no dividend, it is backed by no underlying assets, and it cannot be transported in a money belt when storm troopers kick in your front door as you slip out the back. It can, of course, be stolen by hackers, and is useful for laundering dirty money.

But the only reason for the average Joe to buy any crypto token is the hope of selling it at a higher price to someone else. This is the greater fool theory in a nutshell. Ian Kennedy Naples, FL, US

2024-12-18

Meditations with Mortals Day Twenty One

This chapter is titled What’s an interruption, anyway?: On the importance of staying distractible

As the Zen teacher John Tarrant explains, the way we talk about distraction implies something equally unhelpful: a model of the human mind according to which its default state is one of stability, steadiness and single-pointed focus. ‘Telling myself I’m distracted,’ he writes, ‘is a way of yanking on the leash and struggling to get back to equilibrium.’ But the truth is that fixity of attention isn’t our baseline. The natural state of the mind is often for it to bounce gently around, usually remaining only loosely focused and receptive to new stimuli, the state sometimes known as ‘open awareness,’ which neuroscientific research has shown is associated with incubating creativity. There are sound evolutionary reasons why this should be the case: the prehistoric human who could choose to fix her attention firmly on one thing, and leave it there for hours on end, so that nothing could disturb her, would soon have been devoured by a saber-toothed tiger. Monks in some traditions spend years developing single-pointed focus, in monasteries expressly designed to provide the required seclusion, precisely because it doesn’t come naturally. And so where the idea of interruption defines unanticipated external events as inherently bad, the idea of distraction defines the movements of the mind as similarly problematic.

Going through life with a rigid commitment to the elimination of interruption and distraction might seem like a way to stay more absorbed in what’s happening. Yet in fact it pulls you out of it, by undermining your capacity to respond to reality as it actually unfolds – to seize unexpected opportunities and to be seized by an awe-inspiring landscape or fascinating conversation; to let your mind take an unplanned journey into fertile creative territory, or to find enjoyment, as opposed to annoyance, in a small child bursting into your study, while fulfilling your obligations as a parent. ‘Getting lost and distracted in this way is what life is for,’ Tarrant writes. Looking at things from this angle, you might even argue that what makes modern digital distraction so pernicious isn’t the way it disrupts attention, but the fact that it holds it, with content algorithmically engineered to compel people for hours, thereby rendering them less available for the serendipitous and fruitful kind of distraction.

Go Error Handling

This is a good article enumerating the different issues around Go error handling: Errors, Errors Everywhere: How We Centralized and Structured Error Handling | Oliver Nguyen #golang #errors

The solution that they implemented to get around the issues is a bit idiosyncratic and may not be ideal. Here is the HN discussion: How We Centralized and Structured Error Handling in Golang | Hacker News

ad editor

An editor that tries to bring together the concepts in acme and vim editors: GitHub - sminez/ad: an adaptable text editor #acme #vim #editor

git submodules

Good overview of git submodules: Demystifying git submodules #git #tools

In Praise of Writing on the Internet

in praise of writing on the internet - by Celine Nguyen

I began personal canon by accident—and only now, 34 posts and one year later, do I understand why I kept on going. This post is partly about writing a newsletter and building an audience for your writing, especially on Substack. But it’s also about what forms of writing are personally and societally meaningful, and why it’s felt so meaningful to spend the last 12 months writing about my love of literature. Below:

  • All the rules I broke, and all the advice I didn’t take (but maybe should have?)
  • Why write a newsletter, and how it can be valuable to you and others
  • Useful resources and (potentially) useless advice

Celine writes looooong posts but I always try to make time to read them. There is something very relatable about her writing

But what I’ve found is that there are so many people like me—people who studied computer science and then felt some irrepressible longing towards literature and art and the humanities, who exert a great deal of effort to self-educate themselves in these domains. They want to read seriously, but they need a way in, and inviting and accessible discussions of great works mean a lot to them. (They certainly meant a lot to me.)

The first belief is that reading “seriously” matters, especially if you take your taste/intellect/capacity to create seriously. The definition of “serious” is highly personal, of course, but all of us have an instinctive sense of what it means and when we aren’t doing it. We usually know when we’re reading something that’s good for us—and we know…

2024-12-17

Meditations with Mortals Day Twenty

This chapter is titled Set a quantity goal: On firing your inner quality controller. Not a whole lot of new insight for me tbh.

A more pragmatic and imperfectionist way to ease up on a fixation with outcomes is to set a quantity goal. There’s no need to pretend you don’t care about the results of your work, or to eradicate the part of you that seeks control. Give that part something to do – just make sure it has nothing to do with the quality of the result. Eight hundred words per day; one hour on the side business every evening; five potential customers contacted; three pages of the material for the examination turned into flashcards (or the three-hour rule we encountered on Day Thirteen): these are goals anyone with the available time can achieve, so long as you’re willing to accept that, for now, quality isn’t the point.

2024-12-16

Visual Proof a^2 - b^2 = (a-b)(a+b)

Tidy - Futility Closet #math #proof #geometry

Sophie Germain wrote, “It has been said that algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but diagrammatic algebra.”

Meditations for Mortals Day Nineteen

This chapter is titled A good time or a good story: On the upsides of unpredictability

And yet despite the strange benefits that so often seem to arise from our lack of control, we proceed through life – as individuals, but as societies, too – as if the supreme goal should be always and only to obtain more and more of it. ‘The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “modern” is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable,’ writes Hartmut Rosa, the German social theorist we met in the introduction.

…

Rosa certainly doesn’t deny that the quest for controllability has brought incalculable benefits; after all, it’s behind virtually everything that makes life today so much freer from unremitting poverty and pain than it was in medieval times. And he’s clear he’s not arguing that underprivileged people should reconcile themselves to having less control over their lives than wealthier ones. But he shows that, simultaneously, our desire for controllability backfires, undermining our efforts to build happy and fulfilling lives. The human domination of nature has caused nature to escape human control, threatening our flourishing through runaway climate disruption. The more people with whom we’re able to connect digitally, the worse the loneliness epidemic gets; and the more vigilance parents exert over their children’s comfort, the more anxious and uncomfortable they are.

…

The point is a subtle one, he notes, because a resonant relationship with life depends on its being semi-controllable, not totally uncontrollable. You need to engage actively in the world – to connect to others, to make plans, and to pursue opportunities and ambitions – and people need the freedom, and the economic resources, to be able to do that. (Neither good times nor good stories will occur very often if you just sit around, isolated, waiting for them – or if you’re obliged to spend every waking hour struggling to survive.) Still, it’s central to an enjoyable and meaningful life that whenever we reach out to the world in this way, we don’t get to control how it responds. The value and depth of the experience relies on that unknowability. Maybe you’ll get what you wanted, or maybe you won’t – and sometimes, not getting what you wanted will leave life immeasurably better.

WhatsApp chat export

GitHub - Pustur/whatsapp-chat-parser-website: Website to view your exported WhatsApp chat logs 👁‍🗨 #whatsapp

A conversation in a group led me down a rabbit-hole of whether there is a good user interface to visualize WhatsApp chat exports. The text files are rather clunky to look at. A bit of googling led me to this site, which also happens to be open source.

Learning C# Programming Language using Claude

I last wrote code in C# a while ago. Starting today, I started ramping up on C# once again to work on a project. A lot of the core elements of the language have remained largely unchanged. But it was surprising how fast it was for me to pick up the new changes that have happened.

This was possible largely due to me using Claude as a learning tool. Instead of reading a book or hunting down a specific article or piece of documentation, I just gave a lot of context about me and what I know to Clause and asked it to explain things to me.

2024-12-15

Rest day! Did almost nothing the whole day, except watching some shows.

2024-12-14

Bengaluru Literature Festival

Spent the day at the Bengaluru Literature Festival. Met friends, attended sessions and bought books. Fun! #books

Also tried a couple of places in Bengaluru I hadn't been to - the Crescent Rd branch of Nerlu Coffee, and this hole in the wall place called HVR Veg near Sampige Rd metro station. #food #bengaluru

2024-12-13

Meditations for Mortals Day Eighteen

The chapter is titled Allow other people their problems: On minding your own business.

“What I eventually figured out – not that it ever seems to get particularly easy – is that other people’s negative emotions are ultimately a problem that belongs to them. And you have to allow other people their problems. This is one more area in which the best thing to do, as a finite human with limited control, is usually not to meddle, but to let things be.”

Before we go any further, it bears emphasizing that the people you’re worried might be angry with you or bored by you or disappointed in you almost never are. They’ve got their own troubles to worry about. According to stereotype, people-pleasers are self-effacing types, and yet there’s something strikingly grandiose about the notion that your boss, client or coworker has nothing better to do than pace up and down all day thinking bad thoughts about you – or that your presence at a social gathering has the power to ruin it for anyone else…

The Paradox of Optimization

When Success Isn't Enough: The Paradox of Optimization - YouTube

Some snippets from an AI generated summary

The Modern Fixation on Results The narrative then transitions to examining how modern society measures success almost exclusively through tangible outcomes. We've created a culture where progress is defined by measurable achievements and visible improvements. However, the podcast questions whether this results-oriented approach truly leads to contentment, suggesting that those who find genuine fulfillment are those who can embrace the journey rather than fixating on the destination.

The Optimization Trap The discussion then delves into how modern society has become obsessed with optimization. Every moment of our day has become an opportunity for improvement or productivity - from optimizing our morning routines to maximizing our sleep efficiency. The speaker particularly highlights Silicon Valley as the epicenter of this "hustle culture," where the pressure to constantly innovate and multiply value has become all-consuming.

The Cost of Constant Optimization This section explores the paradox of optimization: the more we try to optimize every aspect of our lives, the more we rob ourselves of genuine satisfaction. The younger generation, in particular, has internalized this mindset, viewing any "wasted" time as a cardinal sin. This perpetual drive for improvement has led to a state of constant restlessness, where people are always looking ahead to the next goal rather than finding joy in the present moment.

The Gender Ideological Divide

I had logged about male loneliness in Nov. On similar lines, I came across this article from Jan 2024 in the FT: A new global gender divide is emerging #masculinity #gender

In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye.

This was accompanied by an interesting X thread.

Ally Louks PhD Thesis Abstract Analysis

Dr Ally Louks, who was trolled on X for her PhD thesis titled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose. Somebody on X did an excellent deconstruction of the abstract, and I feel like this could be a great way to deconstruct any abstract of an academic paper. Very insightful.

2024-12-12

Meditations for Mortals Day Seventeen

This chapter is titled Don’t stand in generosity’s way: On the futility of ‘becoming a better person

Many of us believe we ought to be kinder or more generous, to give more money to charity, spend more time volunteering, or in some vaguer way ‘become a better person’ than we currently are. The Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa’s point is that this isn’t necessary: you needn’t try to transform yourself into someone who feels more love for humanity, and it’s probably impossible anyway. You just need to find where you already feel warmth or tenderness, then go from there. And your penchant for Mexican food is as good a place to start as any other.

2024-12-11

I went to a reading group today, organized by my friend Jasmine. I decided to read my daily quota of Burkeman at the reading group. It was also fun introducing the book to the two other folks that were there.

I also realised I was overextending myself by trying to do my MathAcademy course before Christmas. I was ignoring a lot of other important things and being grumpy to the people around me. So decided to do some replanning and reprioritising.

Which actually brings me right back to the book chapter I read

Meditations for Mortals Day Sixteen

This chapter is titled The reverse golden rule: On not being your own worst enemy

Some might object that it’s a sign of immense privilege even to be able to contemplate spending the day doing what you feel like doing. And of course this is true, so far as it goes: almost everyone’s situation will impose certain limits on their freedom to follow their desires, and it’s much worse for some than for others. But it’s important to see that this objection itself is often the inner taskmaster in disguise, seeking to make you feel bad for taking advantage of whatever freedom you do have. There’s no prize for failing to spend your time as you wish, to whatever extent you’re able, out of a misplaced sense of solidarity with those who cannot.

In any case, treating yourself a little more kindly needn’t be anywhere near as self-indulgent as those of us with an allergy to ‘self-compassion’ tend to assume. It’s not about narcissistically declaring yourself to be any more deserving of an easy life than anyone else. It’s quite sufficient a challenge to seek to follow what the philosopher Iddo Landau calls the ‘reverse golden rule’ – that is, not treating yourself in punishing and poisonous ways in which you’d never dream of treating someone else. Can you imagine berating a friend in the manner that many of us deem it acceptable to screech internally at ourselves, all day long? Adam Phillips is exactly right: were you to meet such a person at a party, they’d immediately strike you as obviously unbalanced. You might try to get them to leave, and possibly also seek help. It might occur to you that they must be damaged – that in Phillips’s words ‘something terrible’ must have happened to them – for them to think it appropriate to act that way.

2024-12-10

Meditations for Mortals Day Fourteen

This chapter is titled Develop a taste for problems: On never reaching the trouble-free phase.

I suspect that most of us, except perhaps the very Zen or the very elderly, move through our days with a similar if largely unconscious assumption that at some point – maybe not soon, but eventually – we’ll make it to the phase of life which won’t involve confronting an endless fusillade of things to deal with. The unfortunate consequence is that we experience our ordinary problems – the bills to pay, the minor conflicts to resolve, each little impediment that stands between us and realizing our goals – as doubly problematic. First, there’s the problem itself. But then there’s the way in which the very existence of any such problems undermines our yearning to feel perfectly secure and in control. So we spend our lives leaning into the future, unconsciously deeming whatever’s happening now to be fundamentally flawed, because it’s marred by too many problems. And quite possibly deeming ourselves to be fundamentally flawed, too – or else wouldn’t we have figured out some way to eliminate all these problems by now? Yet the reality, as Harris goes on, is that ‘… life is an unending series of complications, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the arrival of the next one.’

A friend of mine vividly recalls the uplifting and energizing moment when, feeling burdened like Harris by the endless problems that seemed to get in the way of her doing her job, it dawned on her that the problems were the job. Anyone, or a piece of software, could do her job, if it weren’t for the problems. Her unique contribution lay in her capacity for solving them.

Beyond the mountains, there are always more mountains, at least until you reach the final mountain before your time on earth comes to an end. In the meantime, few things are more exhilarating than mountaineering.

2024-12-09

Spent the whole day swimming in matrix math. I am trying to finish up the Math Academy course Mathematics for Machine Learning by Christmas. This means I have to do around 300 XP worth of work a day. Matrix math is laborious and prone to mistakes, and I am a champion at making blunders while solving math. I sometimes feel like beyond a point, you can't control your ability to make these blunders. It's just how my brain is built.

2024-12-08

Missed reading a chapter for Meditations for Mortals yesterday. I ended up reading two chapters today to make up.

Meditations for Mortals Day Twelve

This chapter is titled Rules that serve life: On doing things dailyish, which seems kinda on point given I did not read a book chapter yesterday.

A much better rule – indeed, one I think more accurately reflects Seinfeld’s approach to his work – is to do things dailyish. I’m borrowing the word from Dan Harris, host of the meditation podcast Ten Percent Happier, who suggests it whenever people ask him how often they ought to be meditating. If you’re the ambitious type, ‘dailyish’ might strike you as a little self-indulgent. It isn’t. If anything, it’s the Seinfeld Strategy that’s self-indulgent, because at the moment you set it in motion, you flatter yourself that you’re going to be able to follow it impeccably, day after day – even though, were you to reflect on it, you’d probably agree that your life is too unpredictable for that, and your moods too much of a rollercoaster. ‘Dailyish’ is a much more resilient rule: it’s less of a high-wire act, where one mistake could end everything. But emotionally speaking, it’s an unsettling rule to follow – because doing something dailyish requires sacrificing your fantasies of perfection in favor of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete, imperfect progress, here and now. In any case, ‘dailyish’ isn’t synonymous with ‘just do it whenever you feel like it.’ Deep down, you know that doing something twice per week doesn’t qualify as dailyish, while five times per week does, and in busy periods, three or four times per week might get to count. So you’re still putting some pressure on yourself. But, crucially, what you’re not doing is expecting the rule to somehow force the action.

Meditations for Mortals Day Thirteen

This chapter is titled Three hours: On finding focus in the chaos

The three-to-four-hour rule functions, too, as a reminder of the profound truth that for finite humans the work is never done. A central point of the Jewish and Christian tradition of the Sabbath is that you have to stop anyway – not because you’ve finished, but just because it’s time to stop. How far you can check out of the culture of overwork will be context-dependent, of course. But regardless of context, you can choose not to psychologically collaborate with that culture. You can abandon the delusion that if you just managed to squeeze in a couple more hours of focused work, you’d finally reach the commanding position of mastering it all. The truly valuable skill is the one the three-to-four-hour rule helps to instill: not the capacity to push yourself harder, but the capacity to stop and recuperate, despite the discomfort of knowing that the work remains unfinished.

2024-12-07

Spent a lot of the day at the ETHIndia hackathon. Didn't really have anything to build in crypto, but I ended up hacking on some features for my website.

Shipped a feature to display a form for folks to subscribe to my weekly email digest: Add form for newsletter subscription · deepakjois/debugjois.dev@c19c0d3 · GitHub

/images/sub_form.png

2024-12-06

Meditations with Mortals Chapter Day Eleven

Read the chapter titled Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear, in which the author unpacks the concept of the gnawing rats we have in our lives.

I learned this way of thinking about avoidance from Paul Loomans, a Dutch Zen monk who explains it in a lovely book entitled Time Surfing. Loomans refers metaphorically to the tasks or areas of life you’re avoiding as ‘gnawing rats.’ But he rejects the conventional advice about dealing with them, which is to man/woman up and confront your rats – to get over yourself, in other words, and to attack the problem with brute force. The trouble is that this simply replaces one kind of adversarial relationship with your gnawing rats (‘Stay away from me!’) with another (‘I’m going to destroy you!’). And that’s a recipe for more avoidance over the long term, because who wants to spend their life fighting rats? Loomans’s surprising advice is to befriend them instead. Turn towards your gnawing rats. Forge a relationship with them.

…

It’s worth noting, I think, that ‘befriending your rats’ isn’t just another way of expressing the timeworn advice to break an intimidating task down into smaller, more manageable chunks. When you do that, you’re reducing the anxiety you feel by reducing the scale of the threat; it’s like separating one rat off from the rest of the pack, in order to more effectively stab it to death. By contrast, to befriend a rat is to defuse the anxiety you feel by transforming the kind of relationship you have with it. You turn it into an unobjectionable part of your reality. Whereupon a gnawing rat, in Loomans’s terminology, becomes a ‘white sheep’ – a harmless, docile, fluffy creature that follows you around until you decide to do something about it. Everyone has an assortment of not-yet-begun or not-yet-completed projects that would benefit from their attention, because that’s the nature of being a finite human. But there’s no need for them to torment you. Once you’ve established a relationship with them, they become white sheep, and can just patiently wait their turn.

…

Asking yourself what it would actually entail to befriend the gnawing rats in your life is an act requiring real courage – more courage, perhaps, than the standard confrontational approach, which feels less like reconciling yourself to reality and more like getting into a bar fight with it. Befriending your rats is a gentle strategy, but there’s nothing submissive about it. It’s a pragmatic way to maximize your room for maneuver, and your capacity to make progress on the work you care about, by becoming ever more willing to acknowledge that things are as they are, whether you like it or not.

Definitive List of 50 Books

Definitive List of 50 Books to Understand Everything in the Universe | by Hemant Mohapatra | The Startup | Medium

Thanks to Rutvi for sending this along.

2024-12-05

Meditations with Mortals Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten is titled Just go to the shed: On befriending what you fear

This is one of my favorite chapters so far, and also the most confronting. Why does it feel like with every chapter I read, that the advice in the chapter came at just the right time (see note after the quote). It elaborates on the Jungian concept of a "life task" (sidenote: Jung seems to be coming up everywhere for me after my friend Jasmine mentioned it a few days ago.)

How can you identify your current life task? That must always be a matter of intuition. But there are two signposts that may help. The first is that a life task will be something you can do ‘only by effort and with difficulty,’ as Jung puts it – and specifically with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes from pushing back against your long-established preference for comfort and security. In the words of another Jungian, James Hollis, it may be the kind of endeavor that ‘enlarges’ you, rather than making you feel immediately happy. This is where you’ll need to be honest with yourself. For some people, honoring a life task might mean mustering the boldness to leave a relationship, or a job. But perhaps you’re someone for whom running away from difficult situations is your default behavior; in that case, your task might entail mustering the boldness to stay. Likewise, it might mean walking away from your life to become a humanitarian aid worker; but the equally uncomfortable possibility is that the voice telling you to become an aid worker is the internalized voice of societal morality, the one that thinks it knows better than you the sort of contribution you should make. Perhaps your real contribution will be designing jewelry, or writing songs.

The second signpost is that a true life task, though it might be difficult, will be something you can do. If you only have a hundred dollars in the bank, your life task won’t require the immediate purchase of thousands of dollars’ worth of moviemaking equipment (although it might involve doing something to raise the cash). If you’re the single parent of three small children, it won’t involve working eighteen-hour days for a tech start-up; and by the same token, if you’re unable to have children, it won’t involve becoming a biological parent. “This helps distinguish the idea of a life task from certain popular notions of ‘destiny’ or ‘calling,’ which can leave people feeling as though there’s something they’re meant to be doing with their lives, but that their life circumstances make it impossible. That can’t be the case with a life task, which emerges, by definition, from whatever your life circumstances are. It’s what’s being asked of you, with your particular skills, resources and personality traits, in the place where you actually find yourself.

quoting a tweet which I replied to flippantly the other day.

It's interesting to relate the courage to act on something with the "life task", which nicely brings me to the last paragraph in the chapter.

The most remarkable part is that while you might have assumed that complying with a life task would feel oppressive – you’re ‘complying’ with a ‘task,’ after all – it never does. It gives you the feeling of getting a handle on life, because the life to which you’re addressing the question is the one you actually have. It is never the case that there’s no next step to take. On some level, I think we always already know when we’re hiding out in some domain of life, flinching from a challenge reality has placed before us. The purpose of a question like ‘What’s the life task here?’ is just to haul that knowledge up into the daylight of consciousness, where we can finally do something about it.

2024-12-04

Meditations with Mortals Chapter 9

Read Chapter 9 of the book titled “Finish things On the magic of completion”

Social psychologists describe what’s going on here using the language of ‘construal level theory,’ which refers to the way we conceive of objects and events as if from different mental altitudes. The classic example concerns summer vacations. Consider how you’d like to spend yours next year, and you’re likely to picture it, figuratively speaking, from 30,000 feet: you might see yourself ‘going to the beach,’ or ‘hiking in the mountains,’ or ‘relaxing as a family.’ But when the vacation draws closer, you’ll descend a few thousand feet and start focusing in on details: which beach, which mountain trails, which restaurants to eat at, and so forth. Similarly, at the start of any major undertaking, we see it in outline, smooth if a little blurry; it’s only as we dig in that we begin to encounter the flaws, the compromises, and the grunt-work involved. At which point we make the error of assuming that a new endeavor might be free of such imperfections. Really, of course, what makes the new endeavor more appealing is just that we’re seeing it at a mental distance; we fail to realize, in the words of the psychology writer Jude King, that ‘every worthwhile goal is supposed to feel hard, unglamorous, unsexy,’ at least for some of the time you’re actually putting in the work.

…

Each ending provides an energy-boost for the next. It works so well, I suspect, because it means acting in harmony with reality: for finite humans, every moment is an endpoint of sorts, experienced once then done with forever. Treating what you do with your time as a sequence of tiny completions means falling into line with how things really are. ‘Work is done, then forgotten,’ says the Tao Te Ching. ‘Therefore it lasts forever.’ You’re no longer fighting the current, but letting it carry you forward. Life is less effort that way.

Litany Against Fear

It was while listening to the Dune Prophecy podcasts, I realised that the commonly encountered quote below is known as the Litany Against Fear. Even found a wiki entry about it: Litany Against Fear | Dune Wiki | Fandom

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

2024-12-03

Meditations for Mortals Chapter 8

Read Chapter Eight titled Decision-hunting: On choosing a path through the woods

The topic of deciding and choosing naturally calls to mind one of the most famous poems ever written, Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’ You know the one: about the two paths diverging in a ‘yellow wood,’ and how the speaker chooses ‘the one less traveled by,’ a choice that he says ‘made all the difference.’ On the standard interpretation, Frost’s poem is little more than a clichéd celebration of the American dream. Spurn convention! Do your own thing, believe in yourself, and success is guaranteed! But as the poet David Orr explains, in his book also entitled The Road Not Taken, it’s really something much stranger. Frost’s poem undermines the conventional reading on almost every line. No sooner has the speaker told us about the road less traveled than he admits that, in fact, previous travelers had left the two paths worn ‘really about the same.’ And on closer examination, he never asserts that his choice of path ‘made all the difference’ in his life, either. How could he know, since he never got to compare it to the other one? What the speaker of the poem may be saying is that ‘ages and ages hence,’ when he’s an old man, he expects that’s what he’ll claim. Because he’ll want to rationalize the choices he made – like everyone always does.

The true insight of Frost’s poem, on this interpretation, isn’t that you should opt for an unconventional life. It’s that the only way to live authentically is to acknowledge that you’re inevitably always making decision after decision, decisions that will shape your life in lasting ways, even though you can’t ever know in advance what the best choice might be. In fact, you’ll never know in hindsight, either – because no matter how great or appalling the consequences of heading down any given path, you’ll never learn whether heading down a different one might have brought something better or worse. Even so, to move forward, you still have to choose, and keep on choosing. If the speaker in ‘The Road Not Taken’ hadn’t consciously made some choice, he’d have made a different, unconscious one instead – to remain standing at that fork in the path, frozen in ambivalence, waiting for something to happen.

The Dune Prophecy Podcast

The Official Dune: Prophecy Podcast | HBO - YouTube #tv #dune

I had somehow missed checking for the official podcast before starting the show. But I am glad I remembered yesterday. Spent the morning binge-listening to three episodes and realised there is a lot of detail that I did not fully notice while watching the show. There is also some interesting trivia from the Dune lore that really clarifies the plotlines in the show. Loved it!

The Agency

Watched the first two episodes of The Agency (TV Series 2024– ) - IMDb #tv

A lot of discourse online is focusing on how Le Bureau (the French show this is based on) was so much better. That is likely true, but I feel like to get most out of it, it's best to watch the show without the filter of the original. I enjoyed the first two episodes.

2024-12-02

Another day of doing a lot of Math Academy and watching several shows while taking breaks.

Meditations for Mortals Chapter 5

Read Chapter 5 today titled Let the future be the future On crossing bridges when you come to them, and it feels like I needed it because I found myself worrying about 2025 and what it will bring for me.

There’s a tendency, in self-help circles, to portray worry as an act of irrational foolishness; but in the prehistoric environment in which humans evolved, it made perfect sense. Things happened fast there. If you heard a rustling in the bushes, it was vital to fixate on wondering what might be causing it, a reaction that was accompanied by a spike of anxiety: that response would have kept you alert until a few seconds later, when you could confirm it was only a harmless bird. The trouble is that today we live in what’s been called a ‘delayed-return environment,’ in which it can take weeks or months to discover if a potential problem is real or not. If your worry concerns something less immediate than a rustling in the bushes – if it’s about, say, whether your application for funding will be approved when the grants committee meets the month after next – then there’s no useful behavior for your anxiety to motivate, and nowhere for it to go. So it lingers and loops, distracting you from the tasks that might actually have helped you construct a more secure future.

…

The fact that you can’t cross bridges before you come to them is liable to seem dispiriting, as if it leaves us with no option but to keep trudging vulnerably into the fog, trying not to think about sinkholes. But it contains a hidden gift. After all, if you’re hopelessly trapped in the present, it follows that your responsibility can only ever be to the very next moment – that your job is always simply to do what Carl Jung calls ‘the next and most necessary thing’ as best you can. Now and then, to be sure, the next most necessary thing might be a little judicious planning for the future. But you can do that, then let go of it, and move on; you needn’t try to live mentally ten steps ahead of yourself, straining to feel sure about what’s coming later. You get to stop fretting about literally everything other than how to spend the next instant in a wise, enjoyable or otherwise meaningful fashion. Finite human beings need never worry about anything else.

2024-12-01

Intellectual Obesity Crisis

a tweet from a mutual brought this article back into my current working memory: The Intellectual Obesity Crisis - by Gurwinder - The Prism

Common types of junk info include gossip, trivia, clickbait, hackery, marketing, churnalism, and babble. But in fact, any information that you can't use is junk info. A typical example on social media would be a photo of a freshly cooked burger, captioned with “Look what I just made!” but posted without a recipe so you can't even recreate it. Such an image might make you briefly salivate, and possibly spur you to make a burger of your own, but it provides no discernible value to your life.

The vast majority of the online content you consume today won't improve your understanding of the world. In fact, it may just do the opposite; recent research suggests that people browsing social media tend to experience “normative dissociation” in which they become less aware and less able to process information, to such an extent that they often can’t recall what they just read.

It's interesting to contrast this with a slightly counterintuitive insight from Oliver Burkeman's Meditations for Mortals, which I am reading at the rate of chapter a day. A excerpt from Chapter 5, in which he offers three pieces of advice about reading

“Fortunately, there are three pieces of advice for navigating a world of infinite information that are more genuinely helpful. The first is to treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.”

…

“The second piece of advice is to resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. At least where non-fiction sources are concerned, it’s easy to fall into the assumption that the point of reading or listening to things is to add to your storehouse of knowledge and insights, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, in preparation for a future when you’ll finally get to take advantage of it all. (This attitude prompts some people to develop complicated systems for taking notes on everything they read, which turns reading into a chore, which then perversely leads to their not reading books they’d otherwise enjoy or benefit from, because they can’t face taking the notes.) Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good work and good ideas will later flow. ‘Every book makes a mark,’ says the art consultant Katarina Janoskova, ‘even if it doesn’t stay in your conscious memory.”

…

“The closely related final rule is to remember that consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else. It’s not merely that a fixation on retaining facts is a poor way to reap the benefits of reading. It’s also that any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now. So you needn’t always choose to read what’s most edifying, or professionally useful, or most enthusiastically endorsed by the arbiters of culture. Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.”

Meditations for Mortals - “DAY SIX: You can’t care about everything”

Read Chapter Six of the book today.

It was in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum result, that I first began to notice a bizarre effect of all this in myself, and more acutely in certain friends and acquaintances. It wasn’t simply that people were addicted to doomscrolling (although they certainly were). It was that they’d started ‘living inside the news.’ The news had become the psychological center of gravity in their lives – more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event…Living inside the news feels like doing your duty and being a good citizen. But you can stay informed on ten minutes a day; scrolling any more than that risks becoming disempowering and paralyzing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference

…

In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.