I’m using monitors again and it’s like consuming caffeine after a long time (last recorded usage circa mid November 2024).

I guess I need to cycle my dosage so that I don’t end up being too dependent.

I’m enjoying it though.

EDIT: as of <2025-01-27 17:50:30 IST>, I’ve given up again

I have a somewhat indifferent approach towards achievements(mine and others’): with tendencies to gauge the personalities based on how their conversations flow and in terms of the quality of the questions and problems they are working on.

Recently, I’ve began to grasp why they actually might be a necessary construct:

• when leading larger societal initiatives, simply claiming ethical superiority doesn’t pan out well (and it shouldn’t) with the need to gain the trust of masses.
• you need displays of competence for people to will their incentives to align with yours somehow (necessary for collective progress).
• claiming dignity is simply not enough and that is a good thing.
• of course, this opens up a whole bunch of societal games and dynamics that are too complicated for me to completely break down right now.

If you do wish to make a change, you will someday have to take the helm of larger groups of humans. This is when being competent and having proofs for it becomes indispensible.

check out what an IKN0x means here

ICBM, in here, is an abbreviation for the “Intellectual Cluster Bootstrap Methodology”.

I’ve only recently began enjoying the joys of maintaining scaffolds in multiple intellectual domains.

Given you maintain good generic fundamentals of various root domains, you get to enjoy grasping new specific ones in an expedited manner.

These days when I have to assimilate a previously unseen domain, a weekend long pragmatic study marathon yields results comparable to what would’ve required at least a week, before I deliberately chose to set out on this path.

A while ago, I had the strong desire to partition some of my professional work logs into mutually exclusive git repositories: with Blacklists and Whitelists flipped.

I was aware that the .gitignore could ignore stuff; today I found out that I can also whitelist stuff via that.

checkout ¹ this stackoverflow question

So if the first .gitignore looks like

asdf-pattern 
more-asdf
some-absolute-asdf
dir-asdf/

the second one would look like:

# blacklist everything first
*

# unignore the directories to capture nested existences
!*/

# then your usual unignores
!asdf-pattern
!more-asdf
!some-absoluete-asdf
!dir-asdf/

What I wonder now is if git would allow for a branch-contextual .gitignore (named with certain protocols) so that I don’t have to maintain two different repositories altogether.

I’ve lately taken to watching Alan Kay talks during my lunches and dinners.

The idea of this being a campfire talk near the end caught me offguard and is something I would like to use in the future.

I recently have moved on from using monitors and am working (professional and writing endeavours) only via a 13 inch laptop. It is definitely a different workflow than what I’m used to.

It has been around 10 days I’ve been doing this and here are some observations:

• I’m able to focus better as I’m forced to enlarge my context maintaining capabilities; for I don’t have the luxury to look back and forth with just my eye movements.
• I can work from anywhere. I change places and posture every 1.5 hours, 5 times a day.
• Given I move between a couple of meets during the day, I don’t have to adjust to differing window management mannerisms as I only ever work on the same screen now.
• I work in at most two splits now compared to the 5+ previously: it is all simpler and the monitor has started to seem like a vanity rather than essential accessory.
• I don’t have to switch keyboards between my desk and meets: I don’t mess enough as much now.
• I can start looking down upon people that are bound to monitors, thinking that they’re spoiled or aren’t minimal enough.
• I’ve started preaching about the spartan-ish effects of working only via your laptop
• I spend more time on screen, on my bed: consequently I’m writing more.

I definitely do miss reading papers and books on a larger vertically oriented screen but I’m going to stick to this for a while.

As an aspiring polymath, you’ll soon run out of books and courses if you really wish to explore the intersection of multiple domains based on your current intellectual requirements.

That is a great problem to have and the solution is to transition into the mindset of chunking your learnings into projects rather than subjects.

I’ll recommend maintaining a sense of pragmatism (incentivize application of what you’re learning in the foreseeable future (with non-pedagogical intent)) and haste during your initial iterations. Perfection (The will to tend towards it, rather..) can follow once the prototype is principally sound.

One cannot rely on objective standardized tests to gauge how good one is at the act of being.

They’re good to indicate a specific aspect of where you wish to affirm your competence in, but have exhibit numerous fallacies when you’re trying to optimize a probabilistic, unstructured, instinct based behaviour over longer spans of durations, ranging from weeks to decades.

Such a gauge is probably only exhaustively captured in how the complexities of life unroll around you based on your behaviours.

I like studying and exploring new things in the spirit of science. The science that happens today in institutions is more than just science and involves a lot of ancillary efforts directed towards the formalized production of research.

I respect formalized scientific efforts but feel like humanity as whole is losing out on the idea of having personalized problem statements to work on without worrying about applications, citations or what the next big thing is going to be.

There’s this saying :

If you’re stuck on an island and have the opportunity to build all of the software landscape again, the programming language you should choose is C. But the first thing you should write is a lisp interpreter.

I’m going to do that with Go.

As for the saying, I’ve heavily paraphrased (aka butchered) that and don’t quite recall the source so do excuse me for that.