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.

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.

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.

If you’re new to the concept of polymathy (I personally ventured into the idea when I read Da Vinci’s biography by Walter Isaacson), a lot of counter-intuitive traps await you when trying to build competence in multiple areas.

You don’t need to be a generalist at all times during your journey into polymathy. I mentally grasped this fairly recently that you don’t need to shun specializing for smaller durations. Something like a day is obvious as a candidate but, in the past, I would shy away from even periods of a month to actually focus on a singular thing. I’m fairly comfortable doing that for upto three months now but would recommend touching a large span of domains over the span of six months for you don’t want to start losing out on the humility that interdisciplinary pursuits enforce on you.

People have been responding to emacs and my beard.

For a while I thought I did not have a lot to say. Turns out a lot of other humans are quite interested in the much of the same things that I’m into: my hatred for the mouse, and the consequent love for efficient workflows being some of them.

I’ll give the people what they want: I get to enjoy esoteric tech and spread the word, growing a cult, while other humans have enlightened experiences (believe me I do talk like this in person) and continue propogating the techno-propaganda about enjoying computer science.

I haven’t been writing quite as much as I’d like to lately and have been considering how I approach the whole thing.

Instead of talking about what I’m thinking in the moment (pretty fleeting), I’m ……

This is exactly the point where I’ll go “I’m planning on …” : I do not wish like doing that anymore. Talking about my momentary plans for a while has been quite the distraction that I occasionally enjoy.

Checkout the previous polymathy musings

Context

I intend to formalize my plans of getting good at multiple domains not for the reputation that follows but for the generic insight about the world that you may harness as a result.

This is the second refactor of the way I approach this subject and this time around I will be pushing for practical indicators that allow me to gauge my progress over time.

Writing is an involved process. A rough overview is as follows:

• you think of an idea
• you build upon that idea with what you already know
• you structure out some initial drafts
• you run it under a careful eye to scrape out the loopholes
• you edit it, to the point of satisfaction

The problem with that process is the last bullet right there. It makes the worth of a word in the moment diminish than the act of etching something down in stone.

I find most sources of information these days (since several years) to be too noisy compared to the actual signals of wisdom you expect from a popular source.

Rarely, I’ll pull up the news application on my phone and consume a whole bunch of generic, and some domain specific news.

Other than state of the art research in a technical domain, which is based upon a corpora of established citations, most other “new” stuff is noise.

Speech and the word written, are potential expressions of a thought. Each one of us enjoys a different mix of how we best convey ourself.

Ever since I began blogging when I was 19, I’ve been prioritising descriptiveness over precision. I feel I’ve entered a mental state where I value the distilled value of the transmission more than the exhaustiveness of the message.

I also notice a rift between the way I speak and the way I write. Not to say that any one of them is superior than the other but I could use an exercise in convergence - projecting them both onto a common ground.

I’ve been formally delving into epistemology and relevant lateral root domains recently and have been re-encountering several ideas that I’d previously casually explored with intrinsic motivation.¹

This isn’t my first accidental implicit intersection of thoughts with core philosophical theories like constructivist epistemology and ontology.²

Given my natural inclinations towards personal interdisciplinary research, apart from my core specializations, I do deliberately maintain an extensive scaffolding around several domains that I plan to build foundations in soon. This allows me to generalize over multiple realizations of similar concepts in different epistemological clusters and identify some interesting patterns.³

I partition my days in phases of different mindsets that allow me to cater to my varying epistemological hungers. One of them is a daily ninety minute ideation hunt and feast that helps keep my skills sharp.

The laws of thermodynamics do form a formidable devil that really does mess up your ordered habits if you do not inject in the necessary energy from time to time.¹

As a way to sharpen the intellectual axe, I envision myself going on domain hunts to allot myself a new class of game to look forward to during minor breaks from my usual, comparatively conventional endeavors.

I’ve been building up my vimrc again because emacs’ tramp mode just wasn’t cutting it when it came to speed for my remote work environments.

I’ve been a vim user for around 4 years now and having read some books partially and sampling a lot of blogs and conference recordings over this span, I decided I should commit and formally invest into a definitive resource to get me upto speed and beyond.