To know thyself, is the beginning of wisdom
Socrates

On tangibility of the past

All of us create content, every moment, tuned to varying extents of influence and permanence.

It’s intent that separates us all into different leagues of producers.
Let me explain via a hierarchical build up of selected formats of content with varying intensity.
Note that the list isn’t exhaustive by any means and I’ve deliberately excluded works of larger scale (movies, video games : they have the potential to be the most influential kind of content out there).

Nootropics are cognitive enhancers, boosting brainpower and mental abilities, while ergogenic variants focus on elevating physical performance, creating a powerful combo for unleashing your potential.

I’ve got my core habits dialed down now (sleep, exercise, nutrition) and have some good routines in place to actually start converging upon a diet that suits my goal of clocking in stable, moderately high levels of physical and mental performance throughout the day.

I’m in a phase now where minor tweaks and changes won’t be held back by poor staple habits.

The Premise

I was initially reluctant on using generative AI for my writing process.

That being said, I was quite aware of the potential of large language models (generically addressed as LLMs in here henceforth) - especially true in the case of content creators and/or eccentrically curious individuals.

I, therefore, decided to clarify how I’ll be using generative AI for my ideation process.

The Promise

Before we get onto that, as promised by the title, distilling the over-arching skills needed to extract good insights from a conversation with an LLM (an el-el-em; please don’t read it as large, please..).

So, I’ve been reading a book on prompt engineering and decided to practice a little…

Here’s a conversation I had with chatGPT regarding a small essay I wrote recently and fortunately, there’s room to improve.

Here’s how it went…

Criticize my writing …

Raj: You are my writing critic for this session; do not make any intellectual changes in any text I paste; do not heavily influence my style; only analyze what I say and generate pointers as to how I can become a better writer.

Do note that this is an old post (from my last archived blog) that I’m refactoring : more on that here

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[2022-04-17 Sun 17:09] - 8021

3 hours ago, I encountered a semantic crisis. It all started with the thought that I’m not really prepared for a lot of things in life. Now, that in itself is a toxic thought - one can never be prepared for it all but I definitely have time to figure out several things with minimal extra effort. This would definitely result in a lot of uncertainty being cared for. I’ve encountered the nihilistic philosophy before: if complete certainty cannot be achieved, why try clearing away any of the uncertainty you have around you.

Do note that this is an old post (from my last archived blog) that I’m refactoring : more on that here

The Unaltered Entry

[2022-02-23 Wed 18:11] - 7968

A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, “having learned much”; Latin: homo universalis, “universal human”) is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.

For the past 2 years, I’ve begun exploring several domains simultaneously, maintaining a generic enthusiasm and curiosity for most of them. Here are some thoughts on what I feel now, actively pursuing polymathy.

Do note that this is an old post (from my last archived blog) that I’m refactoring : more on that here

The Unaltered Entry

[2022-02-01 Tue 10:11] - 7946

I, hitherto, have been reading books as a single unit of intellectual conveyance. However, that strategy doesn’t work for all the works. Some authors have their writings crisply intertwined with their other writings.

Approaching a single book as a part of a larger intellectual conveyance is more efficient in the longer term if one intends to read all the work of a particular author. Consequently, grouping these reads together has also been somewhat interesting lately.

I’d managed to produce some fairly original essays on my last blog and I’ll soon be incorporating them into posts here. I had a habit of writing in streams in the main blog itself and there is a lot of insight stored in the chronology of some such logs.

The old blog is archived in the repository here and I could benefit from repurposing old works into the present setup.

I’ll mainly be focusing on editing the fluff out, finding what good stylistic knacks I’ve accumulated over the years, and rejecting the questionable habits that don’t serve me so well.

Books play a pivotal role in the life of any aspiring and existing intellectual. I began reading diversely and seriously when I was 19 and immediately regretted not starting sooner.

Reading sets you up for an involved existence. If you read vastly, you’ll be a force to be reckoned with.

Over the span of 3 years (2019 - 2022), I read around a 100 books ranging from the classics, biographies, auto-biographies, physics, computer science, anthropology, data science, etymology, theology, game theory, mathematics, history, how-to-books, nutrition, physiology , fitness, health, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, business (okay, don’t judge - we all do this), economics, writing, self help (guilty as charged), spirituality, humor (guides to being funny and similar stuff), young adult (only 1 - please don’t chastise me - I could not handle the cringe), philosophy (a lot - please don’t chastise me) and meta books (speed reading, how to consume books, taking notes, etc).

I took this up when I had to setup a bunch of NLP pipelines for work and this does stand true to its name - it is a quick and practical index into approaches, introductory theory and useful libraries for the same.

I don’t like reading text books at a stretch due to several reasons:- “cross a bridge, when you get to it” is something that has stood the test of time for me when it comes to reading practical books. I don’t find it useful to read stuff without the doing if that is what the book is intended for.

What makes lisp so unique is the way its code is structured - you definitely can’t miss all those parentheses. In this section of the series, I discuss the cause for such a representation and how that makes lisp unique in terms of how it views its code as data as code (aka homo-iconicity).

Further reading

• Python disassembler
• Homoiconity
• Byte Code
• S-expressions
• Common Operator Notation
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• The Blub Paradox

Call to collaborate

If you’re someone who shares the dream of making lisp popular and mainstream so that we can use it for our jobs and don’t have to switch to blubs to make a living (without denting its charm of course) , consider contributing to the notes and hit me up via mail or any of the other media I’m present on.

This is an auxilliary post collating resources for the recent video I posted …

The Pipeline

1. All the ideas, resources that I want to process, any miscellaneous questions I have, are fed into the input-queue in the buffer
2. All the manipulation takes place in these buffers - they’re org-files and I use org-roam to maintain the connections
3. whenever a node set ripens and is worth sharing, I write a post or publish a video.
4. It can go both ways : I can force a set into maturity if I wish to publish something specific or I may chance upon a concept when observing connections.

Observations

I use org-roam-ui to visualize the buffer and check for linkages that might result in something useful. I also want to publish this graph (demonstrated in video) but there’s no explicit solution for that yet and I’m planning to build one myself with rust and webassembly as a compilation target.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that follow the educational common lisp series on my youtube channel as an auxilliary.

I’ll be summarizing the videos in these blogs and be using these to point to references and additional resources that further elaborate the matter.

In memory of the author of vim, arguably the most influential programming utility ever…

Here is a paper : “ Seven habits of effective text editing ” by him that I hope continues to inspire programmers, as it did me when I was a novice.

[As of 0x213B : 2023-08-17 Thu]

I use emacs for a lot of my daily tasks and spend majority of my time in it. This is a review of some significant components of my init.el

;keyboard all the way
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(scroll-bar-mode -1)

;I don't like distractions
(setq byte-compile-warnings '(cl-functions))
(setq ring-bell-function 'ignore)
(setq visible-bell t)

I chose the most recently engineered package-management solution when I began with emacs, haven’t switched since and don’t think I’ll need to. Migrating from vim, I preferred a configuration file rather than installations via melpa interface. Also, freezing and thawing is cool : exact reproducibility is guaranteed.

Given I’ve passed through SICP once, quickly grasping common lisp to build stuff and explore the traditional and industrial aspects of lisp (I know clojure exists but traditional…) was my next objective: with decent speed and only solving the somewhat involved exercises, it took me two weeks to complete this book.

The exercises aren’t meant to be a challenge but to adapt to the environment and the topics introduced. The book does not explore concepts with depth (CLOS, macros, etc…) but that shouldn’t be the objective of an introduction anyway.