Journal

325 entries for 2024

Monday, February 12, 2024

How to be a -10x Engineer

Mock function calls until no original code runs.

Wow, do I need to change my approach!

Our current dominant political system used to impress people like old infomercials, but is increasingly understood as the phony sales pitch it has long been.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

People don’t like build systems but they love static-site generators.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

If money is all the machine understands, we can only be heard by putting money where our mouth is.

[RSS turns the web into tapas.]

Friday, February 9, 2024

Hugo Testing

Each branch of Joe’s hugo-testing git repository is a scratchpad where he has over 750 attempted ‘solutions’ to help different people on the Hugo forum. Seems like discovery requires starting at a specific topic (as opposed to searching for the problem or solution), but it’s quite organized the way it is. How might being this prolific in helping others impact one’s own skills?

Frugly vs. Freemium

the following games profit solely from aesthetic upgrades: Rocket League, Fortnite, CS:GO, Path of Exile, League of Legends. In these games, players purchase outfits for in-game avatars that do not impact the competitive balance.

I plaster the word “free” everywhere until consumers pay for a license. I’m not the first to do this, and I certainly won’t be the last.

Thursday, February 8, 2024

I’ve been to the Hackerspace Wiki before to find local places while travelling. I didn’t know they had hackerspace apps listing, software wishlists.

Their design patterns library includes The Community Pattern:

set up a mailing list, a wiki, and an IRC channel. You will need all three. Think about a platform for discussion, storage for documentation and real-time communication.

The Critical Mass Pattern:

[You need at least two people to start an idea and two more to get work done. It’s easy to recruit once you have four people, and best to get started with ten.]

The Infrastructure Pattern:

[Infrastructure first or projects first? By making everything infrastructure-driven, people will come up with contributions you would have never thought about.]

World map of 24x365 average temperature fingerprints

The temperature fingerprints cover every day of the year horizontally, and every hour of the day vertically

Every child on their own trampoline

Private affluence is individuals gaining things for themselves – possessions, nice homes and experiences, trampolines. Public affluence is money spent lavishly on things that are shared – libraries, parks, buses, playgrounds.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

In the physical world, we buy insurance to guard against adverse situations and contingencies.

In the digital world, we make backups or copies.

Djavan: a voz e o violão (1976)

Perfect fusing of the Brazilian language’s natural rhythm with samba’s flow: 4. Para-raio reminds me of the ‘perfect fit’ between words and percussion I hear in João Donato’s music; 9. Embola Bola (Cateretê) barely has words, almost pure voice percussion; 11. Magia feels like hip-hop; 12. Ventos do Norte like swing jazz.

Is there a better way to run a command N times in bash?

alfa=10
for bravo in $(seq $alfa); do
   echo "$bravo"
done

How do I get the Git commit count?

git rev-list --count master

How do you jump to the first commit in git?

git checkout `git rev-list --max-parents=0 HEAD | tail -n 1`

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

The magic of doing $10,000 per hour work

[Busywork is satisfying (swoosh) and easy (ding), so do it cautiously. Email can lack affordances for priority while allowing anyone to send you one, which can easily get you absorbed in what other people demand of your attention. If you can do it hungover, it’s less valuable.]

[Increase your anti-fragility by honing keystone skills: public speaking, writing, sales, technical sensibility, design, and negotiation.]

[$10,000 per hour work is invisible and may produce no results for years or decades.]

A simple habit to let luck find you

I’ve made one [Mutually Beneficial Introduction] per day for 10+ years.

[Once both people opt-in, take thirty seconds to write with details that can’t be found by searching online. Try this regularly.]

Writing, Riffs & Relationships

[Share what you wrote with a deliberately small group of maybe five people: your metric here is conversation and meaningful connection.]

[Write for one person to focus the text and also guarantee there’s at least one person you can share with via direct message.]

[Scan your list of decent drafts considering who you could write each for.]

Grapefruit (book)

Let people copy or photograph your paintings. Destroy the original.

Monday, February 5, 2024

Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub

GitHub Actions can run on a recurring schedule and manually by pushing a button.