Blogs

Library Note Pattern

Every once in a while I need to write a comment in one place and then refer to that comment from other places.

Turns out there is now a language-independent tool that helps to use this pattern - tagref!

Transcribing talks

I wanted to get an LLM summary for XOXO Festival. Lisa Hanawalt, BoJack Horseman - XOXO Festival (2015) which turns out to be a perfect opportunity to test out transcribing audio using Whisper!

Here is what I did to get a human readable transcript:

Learning geometry through formal proofs

Every once in a while I try to understand something in detail, and often understanding something in detail requires understanding a bunch of math. I then go and try to understand the relevant math, but that depends on yet more math I don’t understand and so I give up.

The most recent iteration of this attempt at understanding something, started in December 2022, is my attempt at understanding “How Archimedes showed that π is approximately equal to 22/7” ¹ .

It’s 8 months later, I’m not even close, but I haven’t given up yet!

Reading, notes, spaced repetition

Over the last year, I’ve stumbled on a series of texts that together changed how I approach learning.

“How to take smart notes” ¹ introduced me to the idea that reading a text is insufficient to understand the ideas in the text. The suggested solution is, in short: write about what you read. Slightly more specifically: create a densely connected network of notes based on what you read.

“Why books don’t work” ² re-iterates the “reading is insufficient” point, but also suggests that one needs more than to write, one must also remember. This text suggests using Spaced Repetition as a learning mechanism: you read, you write cards, you memorize cards using Spaced Repetition Software.

“How to write good Spaced Repetition prompts” ³ describes the practical aspects of learning using Spaced Repetition. “good” Spaced Repetition prompts need to be factored into a, surprise-surprise, dense network!

Notes on How to Take Smart Notes

Originally published on substack.

For a while now I have been trying to write book reviews for all the books I read, that has not been going well(I couldn’t muster the willpower to write them). This time I’m posting my notes on a book as is.

The way I was taking notes changed closer to the end of the book, initially I was writing idea snippets and later I was trying to write developed ideas. Some of the idea snippets I was able to expand into developed ideas, other snippets I dropped, since they either didn’t make sense or I realised I didn’t care to keep them, and the rest I kept as is, they make sense to me (for now), but I don’t care enough to expand them into developed ideas.

What follows are my notes from a note taking program. Text in double square braces(like [[common knowledge]]) and text prefixed by a hashtag(like #ontology) link to other notes I have, you don’t get to see them, sorry. Otherwise the format is a nested list, each level of initial indentation followed by a dash represents a new level of nesting, hopefully that’s somewhat readable.

The Accidental Superpower, a review

Originally published on substack.

“The Accidental Superpower” by Peter Zeihan is in essence an apocalyptic prophecy: due to a confluence of reasons USA is going to withdraw from acting as the world police, leaving the world in a pre world war 2 state of constant struggle for security and supremacy.

Let’s break this down into smaller claims.

Where Does the Meter Come From

Originally published on substack.

A while ago I’ve read “Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and I found the argument laid out in it overall compelling, but there was one passage that felt wrong to me:

… few realize that naturally born weights have a logic to them: we use feet, miles, pounds, inches, furlongs, stones (in Britain) because these are remarkably intuitive and we can use them with a minimal expenditure of cognitive effort—and all cultures seem to have similar measurements with some physical correspondence to the everyday. A meter does not match anything; a foot does.

Setting aside the overall argument for “metrology bad”, “A meter does not match anything” is simply not true (or mostly not true).

The Tyranny of Metrics, a review

Originally published on substack.

“The Tyranny of Metrics” by Jerry Z. Muller, sets out to investigate how metrics became ever present in private and public organisations, and how introduction of metrics can lead to unintended consequences.

I’ve picked up the tyranny of metrics as a counter-balance to “How to Measure Anything” by Douglas W. Hubbard, a book that has convinced me to join the “measure everything!” club. Tyranny of metrics did not convince me to leave that club.

So Good They Can't Ignore You, a review

Originally published on substack.

“So Good They Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport, follows an attempt by the author to figure out what makes a career satisfying.

Core argument, around which everything else builds, is that one should not follow one’s passion (since having spontaneous passion is rare), but should instead acquire “career capital”, that is “git gud”. From that career capital all the good things will follow: satisfaction through mastery, control through being valuable, and mission through extreme specialisation.