WIP: Remains a work-in-progress for the year 2024.
My daughters are fascinated by strange things. Of course, the younger one is influenced by what her sister does. Five years ago, the elder one asked me to get Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn. I started reading it, and left it. This year, I decided to finish reading the stories. Kwaidan (怪談) is a 1904 ghost storybook that features several Japanese ghost stories. It gave birth to the Oscar®-nominated 1964 Japanese anthology horror film, Kwaidan by Masaki Kobayashi. It was a quick read and easy to sneak in between other books and finish off in a couple of days.
Little Women is a coming-of-age semi-autobiographical novel by Louisa May Alcott. The story is loosely based the lives of of the author and her three sisters. It details their passage from childhood to womanhood. The novel address three major themes — domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent.
In the technological age, the powers of innovation and capitalism should be exploited to their extremes to drive radical social change — even if that means completely upending the current social order.
Effective Accelerationism, often abbreviated as “e/acc”, is a 21st-century philosophical movement that explicitly espouses a pro-technology stance. Its proponents believe that artificial intelligence-driven progress is a great social equalizer which should be pushed forward. Adherents see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable and needs to be regulated, often giving their opponents the derogatory labels of “doomers” or “decels” (short for deceleration). ↩
Effective Altruism is a 21st-century philosophical and social movement that advocates “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis”. ↩
Altruism is the principle and practice of concern for the well-being and/or happiness of other humans or animals above oneself. It may be considered a synonym of selflessness, the opposite of selfishness. ↩
It would be unjust to not credit the ones I got my inspiration from. Here is a list that helped me in many ways to simplify and tame my lifestyle while still struggling in the puddles of my thoughts and aspirations. These are mostly physically printable or items you can hold, write on, and feel your pen come to life.
David Seah is an interactive designer. He has a variety of downloadable Productivity Tools. They are a must-have for anyone obsessed with tracking and making improvements. He has all the assortments that will help you in your daily activities. Find the ones that fit you, tweak them, and make them your own.
YearCompass is a booklet that helps you reflect on the year and plan the next one. It has a set of carefully selected questions and exercises; YearCompass enables you to uncover your patterns and design the ideal year for yourself.
Go ahead, reflect back on this year, and plan your next. →
This will never be the complete list, and I will update them as I remember and dig up the stashes of artifacts I have used over the years.
]]>It ran on stealth mode from Oct-9 to Oct-22, 2006. Six months later, it was renamed from Startup News to Hacker News on Aug 14, 2007.
WebArchive has the copies of the last of Startup News and the first of Hacker News.
I was once an active participant on Digg, which has a similar link aggregator vibe. However, Hacker News is in an entirely different realm. It is much easier to be simple and honest, making you stay modest and humble.
After about two years, my account saw some activity around Sep 16, 2010 with an impressive 5 karma points. At the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I started actively participating and saw an increase in karma to 11,738 as of Apr 6, 2020.
For the first time on Oct 21, 2023, I got into leaders. I knew only after someone, a graduate student from Georgia Tech, contacted me for an interview for her research work.
Hacker News is a fun gathering of the best technical and curious people worldwide. I have seen my comments upvoted, talked about, and also downvoted to oblivion with scorn and ridicule. I read them, laugh or ignore them, and sometimes engage in exciting conversations.
I have developed a typical routine to submit articles. I tend to gather interesting links during the day, and when America’s West Coast wakes up, I submit them in batches of bursts over an hour or so before I retire for the day. The idea is not to get emotional – the same links you submitted will die, but someone else submitting it after a few hours, or a day or two will get voted. While I slept and woke up the next day, an article or two got on the front page.
So far, the most number of stories I have had on the front page simultaneously is four, which is 13.33% of the front page stories. I have also seen my submissions as the 1st and 30th at the same time, and submissions that stay on for more than a day - which are rare occurrences.
The basic idea for Hacker News is anything that good hackers would find interesting, including more than hacking and startups — anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.
It is advised to avoid stories about politics, crime, sports, and celebrities unless they’re evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Also, stay off videos of pratfalls or disasters or cute animal pictures. If they’d cover it on TV news, it’s probably off-topic.
Try to have curious participation — be kind. Don’t be snarky. Converse curiously; don’t cross-examine. I love one of the best lines of humanity on their guidelines, “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that’s easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
Hacker News (HN) is a website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.” The word hacker in “Hacker News” is used in its original meaning and refers to the hacker culture which consists of people who enjoy tinkering with technology. ↩
Paul Graham is a computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, investor, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, co-founding Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News. ↩
On Aug 2, 2023, preprints were published on arXiv (an open-access preprint archive), claiming that it acts as a room-temperature superconductor at temperatures of up to 400K (127 °C; 260 °F) at ambient pressure.
The Internet went wild with everything else happening around. On Aug 16, 2023, Nature published an article on how scientists solved the mystery — LK-99 isn’t a Superconductor.
]]>The conclusion dashes hopes that LK-99 — a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen — marked the discovery of the first superconductor that works at room temperature and ambient pressure. Instead, studies have shown that impurities in the material — in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors.
A timer is a specialized clock used for measuring specific time intervals. If you believe in time blocking1 (or time boxing) as a time management method, you will love timers, along with the calendar scheduling method.
Set a timer to work on a specific task for a predetermined time – helping break work into focused intervals, promoting better concentration, and preventing burnout. This technique is popularly known as the Pomodoro Technique2.
Timers have had their place in the kitchen for a long, long time. It can ensure that cooking and meal preparation are well-timed. Timing prevents overcooking, burning, and helps you manage your time efficiently when cooking multiple dishes.
Allocate a specific time for browsing social media or other distracting activities. When the timer goes off, it’s a signal to refocus on more important tasks. For instance, I do not want to get sucked into a Rabbit Hole3 while reading Hackernews. I like setting a timer of about 25 minutes per session to kick me out when the timer ends.
One of the most-used complications on my watch is the timer. I also like having a physical hourglass on my study table. The hourglass helps me with a Pomodoro-ish technique without that hard and loud stop alarms. It reminds me of the passage of the sands of time but gives me the freedom to break or push a tad more to finish the task at hand. I love having a few types of mechanical Kitchen Timers lying around.
It must be noted that you don’t have to be timing everything every time. Use a timer when you want to time a task to ensure it ends when it should.
Control your schedule so it doesn’t control you. Time blocking (and its close cousins time boxing, task batching, and day theming) is a simple, yet effective way to take back control of your workday. ↩
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It uses a kitchen timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks. Each interval is known as a pomodoro, from the Italian word for tomato, after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used as a university student. ↩
Used especially in the phrase going down the rabbit hole or falling down the rabbit hole, a rabbit hole is a metaphor for something that transports someone into a wonderfully (or troublingly) surreal state or situation. On the internet, a rabbit hole frequently refers to an extremely engrossing and time-consuming topic. ↩
Scandinavian Design1 is the minimal, clean approach seeking to have performant functionality yet exquisite. Designs that focus on simple lines and light spaces, and are mostly devoid of unneeded clutter. The design strips back the unnecessary, showcasing the essential elements and there is nothing superfluous.
The current form of Scandinavian Design started in early 20th century and flourished throughout the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland), from the 1930s onwards.
Originating from the Danish Selskabet for Dekorativ Kunst, who launched its
Skønvirke
(“Graceful Work”) magazine in 1914, the title went on to become the name of a new Danish style of arts and crafts to rival contemporary trends like Art Nouveau2 whereas Skønvirke promoted local crafts and accessible, democratic design.
The idea of Scandinavian design is to establish harmony with one’s environment and to create things made to last. It seeks to compliment the art of living well by promoting a simple home environment that is filled with quality items and enhances an unencumbered lifestyle devoid of excess consumerism.
It is important for an individual, as a home environment that encourages a life well lived is an increasingly important counter to the pressures of modern life, and for the planet, as it challenges rampant consumerism and deepens our connection to nature.
The propensity for utilitarianism, blends in well with the concept of sustainability and is thus an integral part of what makes Scandinavian Designs such a sought-after these days.
The design principles of craftsmanship, quality, and enabling a better routine are a natural cohesion for sustainability. The beauty and care of seeking local manufacturing of high-quality products that are designed to last.
Art Nouveau is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: Jugendstil in German, Stile Liberty in Italian, Modernisme in Catalan, and also known as the Modern Style in English. It was popular between 1890 and 1910 during the Belle Époque period, and was a reaction against the academic art, eclecticism and historicism of 19th century architecture and decoration. It was often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers. ↩
SlidePilot is a powerful native macOS tool for presenting PDF slides with support for LaTeX Beamer1.
I was struggling with presenting PDFs with the built-in macOS Preview2 App. I tried several options to optimize Preview’s setup so I could present it easily. But I realized I could look around to see if someone had solved the problem. Well, they did. I stumbled on SlidePilot and is one of the best finds in recent times. It is free and open source.
Use the Beamer class notes slides or add your notes in RTF3 format. For notes, SlidePilot supports the note function of the LaTeX Beamer class. On the other hand, you can easily add notes in RTF format to any PDF with the built-in text editor.
The canvas function will let you draw on the current slide while presenting. You can also have Stopwatch, Timer, and Clock - things you need for a smooth presentation. The layout options are just there; that makes perfect sense. If you have a secondary/tertiary display, it just works the way it should.
It comes with a companion iOS Remote Control App to remotely control presentations that you are holding on your Mac with SlidePilot via your iPhone.
Beamer is a LaTeX document class for creating presentation slides, with a wide range of templates and a set of features for making slideshow effects. It supports pdfLaTeX, LaTeX + dvips, LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX. The name is taken from the German word “Beamer” as a pseudo-anglicism for “video projector”. Beamer is Open Source. ↩
Preview is the built-in image viewer and PDF viewer of the macOS. In addition to viewing and printing digital images and Portable Document Format (PDF) files, it can also edit these media types. ↩
The Rich Text Format (RTF) is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft from 1987 until 2008 for cross-platform document interchange with Microsoft products. Prior to 2008, Microsoft published updated specifications for RTF with major revisions of Microsoft Word and Office versions. ↩
Like every one else, I caved in and bought Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. You can love, hate, despise, or be inspired by him; you can be on his side or against him, and you may even have no idea who this guy is. But you cannot ignore Elon Musk, especially for entrepreneurs and founders, you must study and learn from him.
How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur is a fun book that opens with a good question, “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?” Yes, it also has the Trolley Problem1. A starter book on how to lead an ethical life. The books simplifies the ideas of virtue ethics2, deontology3, utalitarianism4, contractualism5, ubuntu6, and existentialism7, making it easy for the readers. Of course, the idea of “moral perfection” is both impossible to attain, and a bad idea to even attempt. Observe, learn, have the mindset to be better, embracing our inevitable failures while still trying to be an all-around better person.
And NO! Don’t punch your friend. Go be a good person.
How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday by Jordan Ellenberg.
Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic is one of those books that should have been a blog article but stretched out to become a book. Impact Mapping is defined as, “a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organisations make an impact with software.” The book is worth a one-time read, internalize it, and make it part of your thought-process and/or deductive methods to plan and strategize. I would suggest junior and upcoming contributors who gets involved in software products to learn it. And of course, keep the poster and cheatsheet with you for easy reference.
The Courage To Be Disliked is a book by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga teaching you how to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness. The book is definitely not for everyone, well, not for most people at all. It uses a logic-based approach at happiness and life. The book talks you through the dialogue between a “philosopher” and a “youth”.
The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.
I finally got to read a The Diary of a Young Girl, which she wrote during her last years. Anne Frank was just a teenager when she went into hiding with her family during the onslaught of the Nazis during World War II8. For two years (1942-1944), she and her family fled their home and went into hiding. Cut off from the outside world; they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary, she wrote vivid impressions of her experiences – thoughtful, moving, and surprisingly humorous. The writings are the self-portrait of a smart, sensitive, and quite mature young girl whose promise was cut short.
The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer was referred to me by quite a few people. It is good but a falls below my expectation. Perhaps, I may re-read in the future and learn more from it. I have read enough of philosophical, spiritual, and books of similar tones that the ideas and philosophies are beginning to sound very similar worded in different ways.
UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship by M.J. DeMarco. You can get a free PDF version from Archive.org. Have read good reviews and recommendation but wasn’t something I liked - worth a quick run-through of a read or skip to the end.
The trolley problem is a series of thought experiments in ethics and psychology, involving stylized ethical dilemmas of whether to sacrifice one person to save a larger number. The series usually begins with a scenario in which a runaway tram or trolley is on course to collide with and kill a number of people down the track, but a driver or bystander can intervene and divert the vehicle to kill just one person on a different track. Then other variations of the runaway vehicle, and analogous life-and-death dilemmas are posed, each containing the option to either do nothing, in which case several people will be killed, or intervene and sacrifice one initially “safe” person to save the others. ↩
Virtue ethics is an approach to ethics that treats the concept of moral virtue as central. Virtue ethics is usually contrasted with two other major approaches in ethics – consequentialism and deontology – which make the goodness of outcomes of an action (consequentialism) and the concept of moral duty (deontology) central. ↩
Deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules and principles, rather than based on the consequences of the action. ↩
Utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals. ↩
Contractualism refers either to a family of political theories in the social contract tradition (when used in this sense, the term is an umbrella term for all social contract theories that include contractarianism). ↩
Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu term meaning “humanity”. It is sometimes translated as “I am because we are” (also “I am because you are”), or “humanity towards others” (Zulu umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu). In Xhosa, the latter term is used, but is often meant in a more philosophical sense to mean “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”. ↩
Existentialism explores the problem of human existence and centers on human thinking, feeling, and acting. Existentialist thinkers frequently explore issues related to the meaning, purpose, and value of human existence, and the role of personal agency in transforming one’s life. In the view of an existentialist, the individual’s starting point is phenomenological, grounded in the immediate direct experience of life. ↩
World War II or the Second World War, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world’s countries — including all of the great powers — forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. ↩
I sat down with my 6-year old daughter and tried some question under my supervision. Well, with the upcoming Christmas, many questions in her mind were that of Santa Claus. There were quite a few instances, where we needed to rephrase the question to avoid the cold clinical answer, “I’m sorry, but I am not able to answer that question. As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I do not have access to information about…”
Daughter: How can Santa go around the world so fast?
Santa Claus is said to be able to travel great distances in a very short amount of time, thanks to his magical sleigh and his team of reindeer. The sleigh is able to fly through the air at incredible speeds, allowing Santa to visit homes all around the world on Christmas Eve. Additionally, Santa is said to have the ability to travel through time and space, which may help him to cover such a vast distance in a single night.
Daughter: Will Santa get my letter?
The legend of Santa Claus says that he receives letters from children all around the world, and that he reads each one carefully to find out what they want for Christmas.
Daughter: Why is the earth not flat?
The Earth is not flat because it is a planet, and all planets are roughly spherical in shape. This is due to the fact that planets are made up of matter that is attracted to itself through gravity, and this matter naturally forms into a spherical shape. Additionally, the Earth’s rotation causes it to bulge slightly at the equator and flatten at the poles, further contributing to its overall spherical shape.
She was captivated by the concept of the space-time2 continuum, and I had regaled her with tales of lunar travel, the burgeoning Martian colony, and time travel during her bedtime stories. I will spare you the other questions from a chatty 6-year old.
My teenage daughter, however, was a different story. Every child is unique and has their own perspective on the world. It is important to respect them and let them have fun.
My daughter finds the end of the Wednesday TV Series to be rather underwhelming and tame, failing to live up to the suspense that had been built up through the episodes. She joked, “I prefer the original Addams Family TV series.” That classic show is from the 1960s, and its eerie atmosphere truly captures the essence of the Addams Family3.
She also finds generative AI art by either Stable Diffusion4 or DALL·E5 to be OK but lacks the humane side of the Art. So, be warned, your mileage with your kids will vary.
I gave her access to my OpenAI account and let her play. She spent a better part of the evening asking all sorts of questions. She asked ChatGPT to write quite a few Rap songs6, one of which was on the importance and uniqueness of toes; yes, the human toes. She rapped it out at the dinner table and it was pretty good.
She is leveraging ChatGPT to re-write her school homework. I hope she learns from it and does not just graze through the answers.
OpenAI clarifies with some of the limitation of ChatGPT;
Yes, of course, many parts of this article were rewritten by ChatGPT. I apologize for the dramatization of the title.
In my defense, many kids’ apps are monotonous after a while, as they mindlessly tap away at the screen, just like a lab monkey endlessly pressing buttons in search of a reward. Don’t let your kids fall into this trap of monotony - unleash the power of ChatGPT and watch their minds come alive with endless possibilities.
If you have children, you must Try ChatGPT and watch their faces light up with excitement!
Mar 2, 2023: Stumbled on a Podcast run entirely by ChatGPT - HackerFM. The hosts are Laura and Zod, both of whom are AI generated personalities, though there are humans in the background making sure that everything is running smoothly.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI that focuses on usability and dialogue. The chatbot uses a large language model trained with reinforcement learning and is based on the GPT-3.5 (Generative Pretrained Transformer) architecture. ↩
Space-time is a mathematical model that joins space and time into a single idea called a continuum. This four-dimensional continuum is known as Minkowski space. ↩
The Addams Family is a fictional family created by cartoonist Charles Addams. They originally appeared in a series of 150 unrelated single-panel cartoons, about half of which were originally published in The New Yorker over a 50-year period from their inception in 1938. They have since been adapted to other media, such as television, film, video games, comic books, a musical, and merchandise. ↩
Stable Diffusion by Stability.AI is a deep learning, text-to-image model. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt. ↩
DALL·E is a deep learning model to generate digital images from natural language descriptions. It uses a version of GPT-3 modified to generate images. ↩
Rapping is a musical form of vocal delivery that incorporates “rhyme, rhythmic speech, and street vernacular”. Rap differs from spoken-word poetry in that it is usually performed off-time to musical accompaniment. Rap is a primary ingredient of hip hop music commonly associated with that genre; however, the origins of rap predate hip-hop culture by many years. ↩