[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488891 (thanks mckirk!)
The reason I admire her isn't that. What caught my attention about her is that she has a sense of purpose. She has a purpose in life and has devoted her life to it.
I used to have one. My goal was to make the legal system cheaper and more accessible. And I devoted the last decade of my life to that. Now that's fallen apart and I'm a little lost and it hurts me alot.
I hope I'll find a purpose soon. That's what I'm passionate about right now, finding a new purpose or a new way to accomplish my past purpose.
It's kinda like watching Planet Earth about another ecosystem, with a strong focus on judgment-free ecology (ie there isn't good and evil, just different flora and fauna and otherwise interacting both with their normal food webs and with human outsiders).
It really tickles the environmental science geek in me. There's such a wonderful assortment of predators, prey, symbiotes, diseases, treatments, and thoughtful little touches everywhere. Beautiful art too.
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That aside, I can't stop thinking about how much fun it is to throw people off cliffs in Baldur's Gate 3. https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm...
Simple pleasures, man.
Solitary and meditative if you want it to be; social and uplifting if you don't.
It's healthy in a variety of ways (including bone density; physical activity; higher BMR and glucose metabolism; improved cardiovascular function). Also being strong is useful surprisingly often.
Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested, with the exception of (hopefully) temporary setbacks like injury. Hitting personal records and milestones feels particularly good because you know you've earned it. It's hard! But it's also not so hard that I'm liable to get discouraged.
Lots of people prefer bodybuilding style training, but there's something magic about the barbell for me. Olympic lifts are also a lot of fun, but they're more technical and you need more gear and space.
Also it's much easier to quantify your strength progress (I have a literal spreadsheet), and it feels less vain than focusing on looks (not that it isn't a significant bonus).
Dunno. Feels good. I'm gonna keep at it. Two thumbs up.
I've started realizing that I don't have much control over the external world, people or events, and only my perception of it can keep me sane or fix my mental issues.
This has effectively forced me to see my relationship with my devices with more scrutiny. I've repeatedly found that digital consumption, whether it is infotainment, knowledge, or mindless Reels or Shorts, has always led me to a more depressed and sad state.
A recent trip in the mountains without any cell reception even further confirmed this hypothesis for me personally.
I try to leave my devices and social media for longer durations, but the eventual FOMO and withdrawals that kick in always bring me back to square one of agony.
Events around a romantic interest recently also made me to rethink on how to effectively control emotions and feelings. The other person can do nothing wrong, but my mind can still feel tormented by their simple actions and events that unfold.
Unless I can achieve some sort of mental and emotional equanimity, I feel all my pursuits of learning and career would still not alleviate me from this joyless state of life.
I got the bug about 12 weeks ago. I had never ran longer than 1.5 miles continuously 12 weeks ago. Now I’m planning my next Sundays long run. 12.5ish miles.
Im a heavy guy. My heaviest was 270, but I’m down to 220 now. I hated running my entire life. But I finally figured out how to run pain free and now it’s the thing I look forward to everyday.
It’s also tremendously rewarding to see such rapid improvement. When I first started I ran a 38 minute 5k, and 10 weeks later I ran a 25:44. I’ve almost improved my 1mi time from 8:30 to 6:30. Signed up for a marathon a couple weeks ago and gave myself 6 months to train.
Sub 4:30, here we come
It's tough but we've been able to start a YIMBY group and encouraging people and organisations to make public comments or send letters of support. A good few didn't dare because they feared reactions, and rightfully so, because some who did (including me) ended up on the receiving end of some bullshit. All bark and no bite - for now - but not great for democracy.
I read a book by the world's first zero-waste restaurant, Silo. The book got me thinking about how different our lives would be if oil were expensive. "Pretend oil is really expensive" is a good proxy for doing things that are "eco-friendly." Since reading the book, I've tried to eliminate single-use plastic from most of my life. It's incredibly hard. Everything from my socks to my vegetable packaging to my dog's toys to my floor is made of plastic.
I've slowly been adjusting my habits - such as checking whether clothing is natural or oil-based, buying food mostly at the farmers market, and eating in instead of takeaway. These little change have decreased my carbon footprint immensely.
I enjoy playing this game of "pretend oil is expensive" even though it's not because it's revealing problems we will need to tackle as a society. At some point we will run out of oil. When that happens, everything will be impacted. Travel, food delivery, and most of all healthcare.
It is not known whether this problem is NP-hard, or whether it can be solved in polynomial time; apparently the question is open since the early 90s.
(The problem is also open for paths of length p mod q for any fixed p and q (fixed means they are constants, and are not given as input), whenever q>2. The problem is known to be in PTIME for 0 mod 2 and 1 mod 2, and to be NP-hard when the graph is directed. Pointers to related work here: https://gitlab.com/a3nm/modpath)
I read the book alcohol explained https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alcohol-Explained-William-Porter-eb...
Listened to the Huberman podcast about alcohol.
And realised I don't want to drink anymore.
It's really strange, I used to struggle having a single weekend with no booze. Now I actively just don't want to. I look around me and see people boozing and I think it's insane.
I'm 8 weeks in. I doubt I'll drink again. I really regret not realising much earlier in life how shit drinking actually is
This year I've churned through all the introductory level texts from Art Of Problem Solving. Yes, they're written for high schoolers and you need to have some humility to admit you might be missing or have forgotten some fundamentals, but the lesson strucutre really appeals to me. It's the only series I've found that respects the learner and really builds up knowledge one piece at a time.
Before I start the intermediate texts and the calculus book, I've taken a detour to "Linear Algebra: Theory, Intuition, Code" and it's sticking a lot better now than previous attempts on the subject. So that gives me some confidence.
Just like there are small farming collectives out there, I'd love for there to be micro-magazines and short stories on paper, made cheaply and distributed to small mailing lists with a single stamp (not an email newsletter!). PDF versions available for long-distance readers.
Something, anything to counter the overwhelm of ad and email popup-ridden "content blogs" and walled garden platforms sucking everything into their in-house LLMs.
Golf is one of the only sports that can be realistically simulated indoors.
Golf is also one of the only sports where even severe lag has no effect on the accuracy of the play - just the viewing experience. Unlike FPS games in the cloud which become unplayable with even modest lag.
The golf simulation technology landscape today is pre-cloud. People running their own gaming computers with complex lash ups of open source software to connect their launch monitors. All pretty prohibitive to the stereotypical older tech-averse golf player.
How do humans interface with computers and data, from control to visual feedback.
How humans interface with music, perform it, read it, store it. How do birds interface with tones and rhythm?
How software interfaces with other software and hardware.
How humans interface with the world via symbols. I've been reading about Semiotics a bit, and find the field fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics?wprov=sfla1
Birdsong as code: https://youtu.be/OCYU0LtqRH0?si=4DwOKC3oZ6vE-w-y
A few months ago, an iced-rs maintainer[1] recommended I try Elm. So far, this has lead to:
1. A an MVP[2] of a curses[3]-like library for CHIP-8 derivatives (https://github.com/pushfoo/octo-termlib)
2. A growing interest in language design
3. An ongoing re-evaluation of my software development worldview
[1] 13r0ck / Brock on GitHub (https://github.com/13r0ck). Hire him if you get the chance. He has a rare blend of know-how, mentorship, and community management skills.
[2] Unsolved issues with octo-termlib:
1. Finding a license friendly toward beginners editing pre-made template assembly files (Maybe zlib + acknowledgement?)
2. Elegant & efficient syntax for ending screen X / Y parsing before all digits are used
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)
Economies die because of underutilized or wasted resources.
Our educations system is horrible at wasting everyone's time right now. Source: I've been teaching since the 1990's and learning in school since the late 1970's or 1980.
AI can fix most of that.
Example: It has been many years since I looked a C code and I never really understood much about the Linux Kernel, even back when I tried to contribute to it in the 1990's. Yesterday I started chatting with ChatGPT on how I could understand the code in the Linux Kernel. I made some progress towards a previously inscrutable goal.
I am teaching my students how to use AI to learn anything they need to know.
A fair balance of relax time but also enjoying the time off. There is so much I want to do and get excited for, but I still suffer a lot of procrastination related problems or else I feel like I could have done a tremendous amount more.
I feel like there is lifetimes of things I get excited about and want to do, but spend so little time doing them. :( It sucks
When I was young I spent a lot of time blinded by rappers with their spinning wheels and crowds of hangers-on which drastically lead me astray — being from a single parented poverty stricken family in the London it wasn’t exactly hard.
Since then I have been through so many different stages to get to the point of contentment with whatever life throws my way.
Within this contentment I have found that the things I truly care about are (as cliché as it sounds) not the things which can be bought but the things which connect me to other beings.
The realisation and acceptance of the inevitable end of life has made me realise that we will all cease to exist within a generation, our memory will cease within two, our entire footprint within three.
From this I found my passion was not buying things to distract me nor was my desire to be remembered long after I pass. It is to enjoy the now, make others feel the love I never felt until I reached my mid 30s, lift people out of bad places where possible and do my utmost to appreciate this breathtakingly beautiful planet we call home.
Cheesy, I know
Started as a small project on wanting to learn C# better and being interested about how much sensors collect information about us and how we could analyze that, but it really got out of hand. I've been working on it for a ~month (with some breaks), sometimes all day, built a lot of tooling (like webassembly & android app to tag current activities for ML training data) and analysis things for it and am nearing a burnout point :P but been fun and I've definitely learned a lot about C# and ML.
It’s been a journey. For about a year I was trying to do it all by myself.
Then one former band mate moved back, another reached out and we reunited to make new music.
This is gonna sound corny, but after that first time we got back together to jam, later that night I was in tears because it playing with them again was such a large emotional release for me.
Now we’re in a great place, we all want the same thing. We’re all in on making new music, no one is trying to make this a career or go on tour. It has to be fun, that’s number one.
Been starting various projects to quickly figure out what I like and don’t like. Realized that I miss working on highly technical projects after working on consumer apps for a couple of years. So as a result been revamping my resume and planning my next steps in my software engineering career. There are some really cool companies out there in the space of databases and distributed systems.
As part of scouting for jobs built some little tools with help of LLMs to tailor my resume to job positions.
Also, rediscovered that I enjoy solving little algorithm problems after practicing with LeetCode. ChatGPT makes as if I have my own tutor to explain and hint when necessary, reminded me of university and study groups.
I've been looking for offline hobbies and recently got into solo board gaming, on top of playing games with my wife a couple of times a month. I work in gamesdev and I want to retain a creative outlet in the direction of gaming, because I just really enjoy it, but I also want to stop spending my entire life in front of a screen. So far it's been a lot of fun, I'm going to be printing play test cards later this week to start dialing in my first game.
If it goes well I plan to release it as a cheap print and play (PnP), and if it turns out to be boring I'll release it as a free PnP.
After seeing a friend with young kids post candid photos of his family for the last few years, I decided to give it a try. Purchased a Retina IIIc rangefinder camera (from the 1950s, preceded SLRs) and it's one of the most amazing purely mechanical, consumer-focused engineered products I've held in my hands. Got a scanner, successfully booted the Nikon Scan abandonware on a virtualized Windows XP environment, and saw my first roll of photos appear last weekend. Wife and extended family absolutely loved it. I've reviewed those 36 photos (standard roll length) more in the past week than the 1,000 family photos of the past 2 years on my cell phone. Excited for more.
Ever heard a pair of speakers that didn’t sound like hearing a recording of an instrument, but rather hearing the instrument itself? Me neither, but it’s apparently possible.
The DIY speaker/audio hobby is highly specific but also fortunately has a lot of informative available online. I’d recommend diyaudio.com and partsexpressforums for anyone interested, I have more resources if curious.
- The utility of randomness: returning from a machine learning conference in Italy where I had a pretty random (if you do not believe in fate) conversation with a stranger, where suddenly more people stood around and joined in. It basically started with me commenting on one poster "Isn't it amazing how useful randomness is, given there is no pattern/structure in a random sequence, and it costs me nothing to make up?" What I meant is how can something as arbitrary still be useful. Suddenly we started collecting examples: randomized algorthms like the random walker model behind PageRank, Random Forests in machine learning, random numbers for perfect encryption (one time pad), Pentti Kanerva's "Hyperdimensional Computing: An Introduction to Computing in Distributed Representation with High-Dimensional Random Vectors" (thanks to an anonymous Finnish bystander, for I could not recall Kanerva's name at the time) etc. Today, I found a book that studies how random people's travel decisions are: Ennio Cascetta (2009) Random Utility Theory, Heidelberg: Springer.
- hypergraphs: graphs have been very useful representations for so many things in work and life, but they are only for expressing dyadic relations between nodes, whereas their generalizations, hypergraphs can express n-ary relations between nodes.
- how to bring people back to a culture of books & libraries: I collect books and I read a lot. As I teach/lecture also, I often ask my students about their reading habits, and find it shocking that many have never been to a library, and most do not read books. I would like to contribute to changing that (seems harder than finding out whether P = NP?).
I'm really enjoying having a different type of challenge than I'm used to. Mostly approaching it with Duolingo and Anki vocab cards with moderate success so far. We both have our own careers, kids, various responsibilities...so I don't get much time to practice with her. And practicing memorization at the end of a long day is tough, so I'd love to hear any tips you all may have to improve my memorization techniques and mnemonics.
• diving into plant law; writing a series on plants and property
• research clamping mechanisms and jigs for woodworking with handtools
• sadly smitten with all the genai advancements
• plotting multiple "chaos for social good" projects
• trying to figure out therapists can be so attuned to feelings while staying neutral
• promoting tiny blogs and the "small web": https://blogs.hn
For me, at the moment, it is internet governance. Kinda like getting involved in local city council politics, but at internet scale. There are so many ways to get involved it is confusing... and it often seems so abstract for an everyday dev, especially if you are just a frontender like me. I have been interested in governance for a while, but had my first participation opportunity at the UN Internet Governance Forum in Kyoto last month, and have been slowly blogging some of my learnings:
https://micro.chadkohalyk.com/2023/10/30/attending-the-inter...
It has motivated me to interact more with the IETF and W3Cs. Like local politics, this stuff actually is important... even if the entire community does not participate.
My main focus for the past two years has been solo fingerstyle guitar, especially classical. The two full pieces I've learned so far are "The Water Is Wide" arranged by Yenne Lee[1] and "Home" by Andrew York[2]. I've almost finished memorizing "Tango Azul" by Nemanja Bogunovic[3], and I'm working on learning "Autumn Leaves" also arranged by Yenne Lee[4], and "Blackwood Lullaby" by Justin Johnson[5]. And I've learned a bunch of short studies and pieces, a recent favorite being "Vals Frances" by Francis Kleynjans[6].
In addition to playing, I also attend classical concerts put on by the Minnesota Guitar Society[7] and do a little bit of volunteering for them, primarily editing full concert videos for their YouTube channel (which, sadly, are mostly taken down after a brief viewing due to contractual stuff).
[1] "The Water Is Wide" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bufc2HY9F2U
[2] "Home" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ajTcwJBbw4
[3] "Tango Azul" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZgTsKrluE
[4] "Autumn Leaves" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxGT5z6d-GA
[5] "Blackwood Lullaby" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC58eXL-MJY
[6] "Vals Frances" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSNmwn54vEI
I got hung up around country 55, feeling that I hadn't found my "editing voice" and have had difficulty finding the motivation over the last year to edit and post my most recent 41 countries worth of content. I want to say that part of it is because I'm overwhelmed with how much there is to go through? I also get in my head and have to consistently reassure myself that I'm ultimately editing this for my future self/family to watch, and that I shouldn't necessarily be optimizing for viewership (though passive income through travel vlogs would be nice.)
There's a definitive, "what's up brand gang, immranderson here!" blueprint that could be followed, but I have no interest in ever doing something like that.
How they have kept the same frame shape and size and design, but vary the colour scheme in special editions making it more of a consumer product than a cyclist product - like Swatch watches used to be, and with the stylised logos. I could argue why it's a great product and why it's a bad product.
I have no idea why; I have no commute. I don't use much public transport. I already have a bike. I wouldn't fit well on one. I have no need of one. I've never ridden one, never seen one except in passing, but I'm obsessing over them recently for a couple of months. (Likely some avoidance / dream that $product will improve my life involved).
The Kwiggle[3] is a more interesting design, a standup bike that's even more portable.
[1] e.g. Everyday Cycling's video "What makes it SO SPECIAL" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6bmuJ98Zc8
No, seriously.
As a life long loner/introvert with high anxiety, I kinda discovered recently (after a long marriage/divorce/several years of not dating) that dating is actually kind of amazing.
I never even knew this side of myself. I actually enjoy talking to random people about random stuff. Even if it doesn’t lead to a relationship, making any kind of connection with someone is deeply satisfying.
I kind of wonder why I didn’t do this for the last 40 years.
Anyways, if you’re like me, I really recommend pushing through your awkwardness and anxiety and just try to make connections with people. It’s one of the best things I’ve experienced.
I feel like I spent the prior 40 years denying myself of a basic human experience. I’m glad that’s over.
It’s pushing me out of my comfort zone. For example, leading me to improve my math skills in order to understand some of the concepts and notations that are used in research papers. Also gives me some context into learning C, a language which I consider low-level as a web developer, and it’s been fun to have to think about things like memory management, along with other things I don’t generally need to consider. It gives me an appreciation for when I’m writing high level code like Elixir or JS, etc.
Compression, which I’d say is an application of information theory is just really interesting to learn about for some reason.
It feels great to have a direct output from effort put in. The combination of physical and concentrated mental effort leaves me feeling refreshed after a good practice.
Finally found the trifecta of an engaging lecturer with recorded lectures, an excellent textbook, and a solid set of exercises.
I just finished Poverty, By America. It's really moving and seemingly well-researched and honest.
I don't know if I'll stick with it. I don't have a good track record of sticking with social activism stuff. Deep-down in my bones I know however that poverty is wrong and really doesn't need to exist at the levels we have collectively accepted as "natural".
I have been captivated by all aspects of waterfowl, dog training, being in nature, finding public lands accessible to me and preparing the game for consumption - and it keeps me intrigued in some capacity throughout the year.
https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Pontryagins-Principle-Optimal-...
Explains optimal control theory and the pontryagin minimum principle from a geometrical perspective rather than the confusing derivation from calculus of variations that is more typical. Also explains it at an "Engineering" or applied math level rather than at a mathematical foundations level so the results are more usable.
[ I'd describe this book as the "Div, Grad Curl and All That" of Optimal Control Theory if that makes sense to you ]
Right now in the state of Ohio a father has 0 default rights to his own children, even AFTER paternity. Ohio is a "mothers rights" state meaning that be default the mother has 100% custody so it is always an uphill batter to get time with your kids if the mother doesnt want you to.
The other big thing this year is walking, it’s simple exercise that has helped me lose 30 pounds since July 1st.
On my 5th batch and it's an awesome hobby. Very easy and inexpensive to get started, the process is slow-paced, but not glacial, not hard to follow, but with a depth to it if it's your thing ... and then you get to drink the result!
I have been passionate about programming for a long while, figured it out at 14, slowly kept going upwards doing online courses, ended up doing CS in Uni at 19, did an industrial placement where I felt like I grew tremendously. At 22 it felt like my fuel has ran out, I had a terrible final year in Uni, Covid hit, I was terribly burnt out and I have not felt as passionate at my job since.
I'm just now slowly getting back into actually loving computing and delving deep into the things that I didn't have a chance to so far, like IoT projects, functional programming, compilers etc. I'm also really lucky to be working for a company and in a team where it's understood and accepted that we don't run at full capacity all the time, and given freedom to put as much as I want on my plate for a while.
I think, I feel, I am out of this rat race of fighting for that next promotion, learning that new language, earning more money, wanting that ${THING}. No, I am not a monk, nor do I want to become one, but I am passionate about how to be content and grateful for whatever I have; I am relatively at peace for a good while since I started to train & reinforce my brain to behave this way. Thanks to Almighty.
Everyone is passionate about the project, you can feel the care that’s being poured into the ecosystem.
Am working on some large scale authorship attribution stuff on the side and have an Arty A7 that I want to make do something besides flash purple LEDs but I have some health bullshit that's killing my motivation. But I'm working on it.
Even with an initial sloppy mockup I found the wife loved playing pinball. So I went all in and built a new gaming PC, bought a 120 Hz TV just for a stand-alone pinball cab build.
(Oh, and found that using the previous gaming PC and a few other things lying around I could also build a mini-pinball-cab — so I have that one coming together as well.)
I find Python to be useful but excruciatingly verbose, particularly when you get to using NumPy and Pandas. I like the syntax of Fortran/MATLAB/GNU Octave so here's to hoping that Julia can take over some of this workload. I also use R extensively (and love it) for data analysis; glad to see Julia's capability in this space also.
In my ignorance, I used to see knowledge of knots as this complex, hard to learn thing, but one thing I've been learning is that the more common, practical, knots tend to be fairly easy to tie. There's just different knots for different purposes.
The decorative ones can get very complex, though.
I started about a year ago. Prior to starting I had never owned a car or done any sort of mechanic task. My first oil change was on a friend's car before I actually owned a car (getting to his place with a jack, jackstands and other tools in a rental mechanic bike was an experience in itself).
Getting into that hobby was a key factor in my battle with depression. While I've not recovered my pre-covid energy, I'm in a much better place.
Since then, I've done minor operations on 5 cars, and lots of things, including non-trivial operations (suspension overhaul, gearbox replacement) on the car I bought to be my "test dummy" (though it's by no means a beater, I bought it running and driving, it's just 20 years old with a fair mileage).
I would definitely recommend that hobby, especially if you already own a car and have a space to do it (living in an appartment, I had neither and still figured it out)
I also started a Youtube channel of filming myself doing those operations, but I'm not that passionate about it. I'm still on the fence of whether to stop or continue it. While I'm proud of it, it's a time sink and the few bad comments (it's the internet after all) leave a bitter taste.
I played electric in high school and developed some chops in jazz band. Loved it, but like many others, dropped it completely in college. Years later, I moved to SF for a FAANG and had an impossible time developing a new friend group; I wanted to reignite my old love in a new style, so I filled the time with weekly lessons with a well-known teacher in the area.
Fast forward 8 years later, that hobby’s turned into an obsession, and I’m now playing at a fairly high level. Am studying privately with a conservatory professor (not SF), who’s trying to get me to join for a Master’s degree. I’m performing regularly at public events & retirement homes, streaming most of my practice sessions on Twitch/YouTube, posting progress clips to other socials, and even built my own metronome/practice journal app to track time & organize notes (mujoapp.com). I love it all dearly as a lifelong and infinitely-deep hobby.
All socials:
Capricho Arabe by Francisco Tarrega:
https://youtu.be/l3203CvetCs?si=Zf4BmjsvWo3BGi15
Sales pitch for Mujo:
I'd been writing reviews on Goodreads for years so it was kind of a logical next step. Also have found it interesting to learn how to edit videos and improve my confidence in speaking.
PS there is a review of Gerald Weinberg's "Are Your Lights On?" in there, so it's tangentially related to coding. Currently reading Code Complete.
I’m also writing my own tools in Elixir for playing around with LLMs. Currently exploring ways to efficiently chunk documents/code/webpages so that I can create embeddings for them.
[1] https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing
These combined with the experience of exploring the natural world in my kids' school's makerspace, has made me come back to making sensor tools for the people - would love to hear from others how they use sensor data for change: https://supermechanical.com/pickup
It's really time to get out of the introversion bubble again.
I recently made this webapp: https://foodchoices.app
Trying to build something for businesses like thrift stores, vintage stores, secondhand stores, used furniture, consignment, etc. I started working at a vintage shop a few months ago after leaving my SWE job, and it's a pretty analog industry. No updated inventory, digital presence, business intelligence, etc. (not for lack of usefulness or lack of trying, just because digitizing hundreds or thousands of unique one-off items is really labor intensive and not ergonomic on existing tools). Hoping to build something purpose built for the use case that can also make shopping secondhand more accessible to end consumers.
Feel like the social stigma against "used goods" is dissipating, and shopping secondhand/vintage is seen as a viable or even preferable option b/c of cost, uniqueness, cyclical nature of trends, or sustainability efforts.
If anyone has any thoughts or tips, I'd love to hear them!
Noise cancelling headphones, breathing exercises, generally no social interactions. So wonderful.
About to goto the range with my 22lr for some group therapy. 2inch groups at 50yards.
I built a bad fence, a less bad gate, and a little shed. A lot was learned, they have issues but damn I’m proud of my creations.
Although I've played sports my whole life, this is the first sport where I have really dedicated myself to training my skills and studying how to get better (as opposed to just playing pick up games all the time as I did with basketball). The volleyball community is exceptional. My wife and I moved to Arizona a few years ago, and we now have an extensive network of friends, all of whom we met through the sport.
About a year ago, my friend who played at a very high level in Iran decided to try out for the semi-pro team here in Phoenix. I was going to watch the tryout, but he encouraged me to try out as a libero (defensive specialist). I was originally a hitter, but it is exceptionally difficult to play in the front row at at the professional level when you are 5'7".
To my surprise, I made the team. The starting and backup liberos are significantly better than I am, but in the past year I have improved tremendously from being able to practice regularly at a high level.
Although it is growing fast in the US, there isn't nearly the same interest in volleyball as there is in mainstream sports like basketball or football. This means that very, very few people in the US make a living playing volleyball, but it also means that someone like me who never played in college has access to volleyball at a very competitive level.
I've also been able to help grow the sport by using my skills as a software developer. I threw together a little website for the team using a bootstrap template and it looks significantly better than our old website. Check us out at http://www.ascensionvolley.com and take a look at our YouTube channel!
This is the focus of my latest venture. Market is global. Our first installation went online earlier this year. All self-funded so far. Working on raising a round to scale.
Fully deployed, in the US alone, we can free-up enough energy to support over 30 million electric vehicles without having to build a single new power plant of any kind.
Yes, applied to YC multiple times as we were developing the technology. Rejected every time. My guess is that the combination of an older solo founder and a complex hardware/software model just didn't pass the filters. I get it. Hardware is hard. We are past the YC level of startup funding at this stage (need ~$5MM), so that's no longer an option.
Still in stealth.
There are several papers/books in math, economics, logic, philosophy, etc. from the past 200 years that I've been interested in reading but have never had a structured plan to go about it. I've occasionally just read random stuff.
This year I started a project where I write some thoughts on a handful of papers/books from 100, 150, and 200 years ago. Here's the result from 1923 [1], and I'm nearly finished with 1873.
Organizing the reading like this has kept the scope manageable and the project fun. Hopefully, it's something I'll continue into the future.
I maintain https://cuetorials.com and am heading up the CUE sig-infra group for the time being
A good buddy of mine had been itching to get back into the hobby that he played as a teen but I wasn't interested in it. Until I got the Ultimate Starter Box from my game store as it was basically calling out to me.
It's been an incredibly fun (and yes, expensive) hobby.
The people are great, especially in my local area they're suuuper friendly and welcoming to new people. They want cool people to play with and enjoy the hobby with so there's little gatekeeping that I've actually run into.
Learning new skills (assembly, priming, painting) and learning the rules has been really fun as well.
My passion for coding has been at an all time low, so it's good to have something to channel my passion into.
Surfing -Finding remote point breaks and surfing northern latitudes with nobody around.
I'm tired of being productive and "on".
In Melbourne I see a lot of cleaning websites that use stock photos of people that don't racially reflect the cleaners working for the agency. I want to flip that upside down and have encouraged my cleaner to put a photo of himself on the flyer (he's Sri Lankan). I think this will show any potential customers that he stands out from other cleaners and is proud of his work and who he is.
Last week there was a guy in social housing who killed himself after similar, and since then my social housing manager has been in touch to look at doing something - sad that it takes a death before someone investigates.
On the weekends I now wake up at 5:30 and drive to remote places to take photos during sunrise. I spend a lot of spare time researching lenses and watching videos with tips on things like composition.
I was never a morning person before.
For now I completed one course on Coursera and am planning on finishing the specialization with 6-7 courses. Also trying to learn some statistics going through ISLR on the side.
I considered grad school as well but I don't have much of a shot. So I've been applying to software roles at biotech companies to break in that way. I'll make my own grad school with free online resources:)
I'm scratching an itch, hoping to get a chip made to implement the biggest waste of transistors ever, per George Gilder's call. (A cartesian grid of LUTs, clocked as to avoid race conditions, a Turing complete system) It might be a way to make a cheap PetaFlop computer.
I got a bachelor's degree in geophysical engineering about 10 years ago and never really used it besides programming, GIS, and data visualization.
Ham radio lets me do a lot of the things I loved about geophysics. Wave propagation, being outside, electronics, talking to satellites, remote sensing. Driving around being cool with a radio lol.
I'm just getting started but I'm really glad I got licensed. Especially in case of emergencies. I hope to practice and get to a point where I can help with public events or during emergency situations.
- https://airsequel.com - SQLite hosting platform
- https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteDAV - WebDAV server for SQLite databases
- https://github.com/Airsequel/SQLiteGPT - Call ChatGPT directly in SQL queries
I'm a big fan of Logseq for keeping track of useful information and tasks and stuff, but the file-based (or Git-based) syncing has sharp edges, and the actual Logseq Sync feature has a proprietary backend, so I've been enjoying figuring out how the protocol works and building an OSS implementation.
Actually, my machine WILL NOT run unmodified unix, nor do I plan on porting it, I want to write my own, single-user system for it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mi-Cocina-Recipes-Rapture-Cookbook/dp...
Also moon phases (?)
I would never actually trade or anything like that. It's just fun to scrape data. Historical option chain data isn't really publicly free/available so I wrote a scraper + analytics on top of it.
But there is quite a lot still to be done. I would like to turn some of the art of making Tabla into the science of making Tabla.
Originally I was interested as a concept for a story, but as an atheist who was a very devout Christian for a long time I really wondered if there is some modern twist on the structure of organised religion and replacing a traditional meta-physical source of knowledge for a real world one (or group of them).
It has essentially turned into a framework of ritualism based around core concepts of various religious structure...with the ability to 'hot swap' your 'god' or 'AI' or 'book' or whatever source of wisdom you seek to lead your decisions.
It is much more complicated than I thought, but it is super interesting to me and while I have nothing that yet really helps me any better than normal reason based skepticism...I do like the ability to engage in tribal style ritualism in a modern context.
I've been trying to name it but so far all I have come up with is Algoruspicy (Haurspicy using algorithms) or Nexialism (Connection based philosophy)
And biotech/biohacking! (not the supplements flavor that calls itself those things but actually isn't at all)
Just started playing pick up futsal at the local YMCA. I’m pretty unfit right now but really enjoying it. I’d played football (soccer) as a youth and wanted to get back into it. Found the futsal pick ups and jumped in. A lot of fun and really good work out. I’d never heard of futsal until now. Similar to indoor 5 a side. Would recommend it to anyone wanting to play some competitive sports.
This summer I finally bought a GoPro to capture our motorcycle tour with my girlfriend – have been thinking about getting one for years but never did. Well, since then we have been on three city trips and I enjoyed recording those. Since then I edited and finished one of them, and it is such a joy.
Edit: by random chance if anyone wants to help with a title card graphic/logo, that’s the one gap I have in capability for this toy.
- Breathing: fuel yourself with fresh energy out of thin air. The Wim Hof Method (WHM) really just changed my entire life. I found finally a method to stabilise my bio-rythm aka constant up-and-downs.
- Cold Showers: In combination with WHM it's one of my biggest physical improvements. I was always the guy who complains a cold climate. Now it just doesn't matter anymore, I don't get sick as easy and my body feels great!
- mindfulness: value the moment, keep it clean from other topics that doesn'tfit in right now. Matches perfectly with breathing/yoga exercises.
- build up my second career as life- and social counselor to help others getting their life sorted: https://gedankenfrei.at
Just hit me if you want to talk, I love people and social interaction!
If you've never heard of it X4 is a space sandbox game with an emphasis on trade. I can't remember the last time I was this captivated by a game. It combines a lot of things I love - simulation, automation, optimization, statistics, space combat, slow but quantifiable progression.
That and cellular communication. The g-protein coupled receptor[0] is basically an all-purpose biological switch. Combined with other messaging pathways it is used to build complex logic into cell message/response networks.
[0] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/gpcr-14047471/
Finding and listening to good music while working on my own first EP.
Writing about video games and whatever comes to mind on my website, as well as playing old classics, indies, and AAA giganto-games.
Writing to friends regularly.
- Learning to use Emacs better
- Common Lisp
- Clojure
- Getting better at chess
- Rubiks cubes and solving them faster
- Indie gaming and fighting games at the moment
But I’m super happy with the result and have a bunch of geeks with recording nodes setup a long distance apart. Localizing large explosions show that it’s possible to localize to a carpets even when some of the nodes are almost 5 away.
For those interested, here is the project:
When ChatGPT/LLMs became accessible, I started playing around with OpenAI's API with the goal of "encoding" some of my expertise into the AI so it does the work for me (specifically how to write founder stories for my customers).
The result is https://storypitch.ai and it's already generating revenue.
But I have to say it's both worrying and fascinating to see AI do my work for me.
Go is a surprisingly pleasant language for building websites, especially for indie hackers, yet the tooling is not quite there. I'm trying to get the developer productivity for building websites in Go to be on par with building web applications in Node.
With ESBuild and Goja maturing, we're pretty close. Go is still just missing a few important connections needed to the frontend ecosystems (e.g. React, Tailwind, etc.)
Let me know if you're also interested in this space!
Besides for the absolute mayhem, the planning, driving, and engineering that goes into these competitions are insane.
Some fights to give you an idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORDg67i70IU
I'm trying to document the process of setting one up in such a way that I can do a teach in for my friends at my local hackerspace.
In the process I've determined I would like to write my own k8s enabled application (likely a daemonset for checking for a specific hardware device and configuration on each bare metal node, and storing that data in a way for k8s to use and reference later).
I've been working on this any free time I get, since September, each weekend sees a flurry of activity then I spend the week daydreaming about it.
Modifying and calibrating my 3d printer(s), chasing speed while maintaining print quality.
Using CAD more seriously, trying to challenge myself with more complex projects and models. Current project is to make a CoreXY Plotter from an old 3d printer I just disassembled.
Wanting to get/make a CNC Mill/Router to finally have the ability to work on some bigger "cooler" projects. ex. I have a custom PC case model that I've been working on, and can't wait to build for the upcoming rig upgrade.
In particular the open source Visual Pinball engine and the amazing content made for it and community around it. https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. Also vintage pre-Windows computers and retro video gaming. Home computers in the 80s and early 90s were so unique, diverse and interesting. Each had strong opinions about what the future of personal computing could be, expressed in their own hardware, software library and community of enthusiasts.
Plus, there's an awesome community around the game and the arcade so it's been nice to meet new people that way.
That, also combined with other hobbies such as VR (Eleven VR), 3d printing (printing/designing table-tennis adapters for the VR controllers).
I've started with the Vangoa EWI-100, which is an affordable, silent, and good enough MIDI EWI (electronic wind instrument) device. I have also been learning some of the technical details of MIDI. I sometimes use it alone, and sometimes with a Cocos Reaper with free VSTs. I have only been doing this for 4 days, but I am already enjoying it a lot.
If I continue to play it, most probably I will upgrade to a better EWI.
Which country will achieve the first crewed lunar landing of this millennium?
Which country will set up the first permanent moonbase?
Which country will achieve the first crewed martian landing?
Which county will set up the first permanent base on Mars?
etc.
I was surprised by how much progress in space China has made. They have a permanently inhabited space station. They are planning to achieve a crewed lunar landing by 2030. They are planning to complete a permanent moonbase by 2035.
I’ve launched many blogs over the years, but they were mostly a hobby and consistency was lacking. My goal is to change that now, by writing every day about some things that interest me while improving my skills in multiple languages.
It’s been roughly two months since I began and this is something that truly inspires me at the moment. Everyone can benefit from writing down and sharing one’s knowledge from time to time.
Has been over two months since I started to germinate spores on agar plates and am about ready to move to a fruiting chamber.
I'm writing a Go package to read them: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/dolmen-go/sqlar/sqlarfs
So, I joined Toastmasters. Went along for a few taster sessions and signed up. Quite apart from improving my speaking skills it's actually a lot of fun. I'd recommend it.
We always intended to do it, but life and Covid got in the way, now the restrictions are gone we are spending as much time as we can on the slopes, we are fortunate enough to live "near" a large indoor ski slope with actual snow on it and there's a real online and offline community vibe around the venue.
Love the speed, the acceleration, braking, leaning, the sound and the smell of it and getting over that second-guessed fear of death every time I get the bike out.
Also love the dynamics, physics, maths of it and the skill and absolute attention it takes to control.
Actually my job is just a means to support my motorcycle addiction now.
I’m recovering from a knee injury so I’ve had a rough time keeping my mind occupied without being online all of my waking hours. It’s been a ton of fun painting based off of famous impressionist works, pictures I’ve taken over the years, and from my imagination, and it’s definitely given me a fun new way of looking at the world!
I have recently started recording Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 2 using some DAW and orchestral instruments from my digital piano. It is not easy to make sound good, and a major undertaking since even the first part is 10 minutes long. But it is a fascinating process to me. I hope it turns out ok.
There are a few solutions which use tesseract type OCR and a few which are human assisted template based, but I figure with some linguistic clues it should be possible to automatically solve.
1. Improving my health / fitness.
2. Learning Korean.
3. Financial freedom through my business (currently growth has flattened...).
I'm digging deeper into the architecture of those open source tools—how they work under-the-hood—and not only at the superficial surface (deploying the stack and tune some parameters).
It's been great so far! It has a lot of complexity and physicality, which I enjoy.
Some of the sickest, gnarliest grind metal music ever. Super creative, relentless drums, awesome production. Just so nasty. Trying to learn the album Pollinator on guitar at the moment. Guitar player has tabs posted on his instagram
Also building "drones". I create a glider and slap some propellors on it, then race it once a month in a local club.
I'm still wondering if I can process this data into something useful.
At this moment, I am feeling passionate about seeing my wife.
After that it would be robotics, navigation, space, underwater exploration, random stuff, I'd be a tinkerer, have a ranch somewhere
I'd have totally forgotten to post again, even though I also considered doing it at some point.
Leave contact info to beta test and explain why you'd be a great initial user. Limit 20 people.
Building a modular synth from scratch.
- Health & Fitness (lose your health and you have nothing)
- Electric scooters (so fun!)
- Hiking
- Reading more books
- Playing more Chess
- Keyboard layouts
- Baking
- Penny whistle
earth.fm is now at 700+ recordings
Made this orrery a week ago: https://youtu.be/FGdjk5fY87s?si=t9nwZI8YXxy4Bi7D
And presently working on a world clock inspired by the xkcd 1335 commic.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0a0fsV9Ektf3GVnP0Nqqn-Trw https://share.icloud.com/photos/029ulUc8TnmvZwqfb2OI5xgIw https://share.icloud.com/photos/052VuJUFynystXHS-qHBO3dJg
TLDR: Rewind the disease movie to see the inverse pathology; then create a forward universe implementation of the reverse universe inverse pathology. If this takes a patient to some H’ with distance(H0, H’) strictly less than the limit of detection, they are cured.
(for example, continued taking pills is detectable, so you have to actually fix the underlying issues so patients don’t need pills or ongoing treatment)
Thus, I propose the definition of “cure” vs “treatment” is a matter of *functional purity*
learning to design and build mechanical joints and stuff.
will need to learn welding asap.
I like to keep things nice and declarative.
2. Chess
3. Programming
