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Cool Firefox addons

Little-known

Making YouTube less painful (aside from uBlock Origin for the ads, but everyone does that)

While doing research

For Emacs people

What links here

  • 2021-05-05
Created (2 years ago)

Moloch

Long poetic blog post that sparked this line of thought: www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

The basic thrust: many of the systems and institutions that are absolutely necessary for human society to function are currently absent. It is unsurprising when society doesn't seem capable to do things that are good for it – that's what we would expect, if we were an alien visitor hearing of how humans have structured their society, taking human psychology into account. You could say it's "broken", but that word implies there was once an initial state when it did work – there never was. It's hard for a collection of humans to bootstrap a functional society, it'll get stuck in all sorts of traps, "local maxima", but at least we can start identifying these traps.

Book: Inadequate Equilibria goes more in depth.

What links here

Created (2 years ago)

About

Hello. On this homepage, I publish some of my notes.

Notes of what?

What not? They can include:

  • study notes, taken while I learn
  • guides / tips
  • cheatsheets
  • observations
  • movie lists and other attempts to systematize
  • open questions / confusions
  • …

Centrally, it's not a blog. Blogs (and social media) tend to peg each post to a point in time, so that they age like milk and not like wine. That's the "stream" in The Garden and the Stream. I always saw more sense in the "garden" a.k.a. evergreen/long content, where you continually reuse, refine and extend your pages.

If there's any guiding principle, it's the notion of a slipbox as described by Book: How to Take Smart Notes, though as of [2023-11-23 Thu] I think future-me wouldn't call this a good slipbox just yet.

It may make sense to realize the notes existed before the website, they're not written for it. I write them anyway, entirely offline, and then decide that some pages can be public.

Why write that much?

  1. Writing enables more complex thoughts. Ever heard the expression "I don't know what I think until I write it down"?
  2. It answers how to always have interesting conversations. I've often felt stumped on contributing to a conversation because it's hard to explain my thinking in real time without having first explored the topic by writing.

But why publish everything?

My original motivation was rooted in #ADHD. When talking to therapists, I wanted to give them a way to pick through my brain for a more complete picture.

Anyway, a better question than why is why not? Glory in the useless web!

Side-effects

I've found some other benefits of publishing:

  1. My writing is improving. When something is public, you put an extra critical eye to it.
    • At the same time, my opinion of what's currently posted is steadily degrading, but that's part of the process!
  2. I've become more rigorous as well as humble. As you re-explain your beliefs on a web page, you realize that you've held some beliefs far too tightly, that they were even vaguer than you feared (unread library effect), and as you cut that stuff, you change on the inside.

How'd you make this website?

What you're seeing is a SvelteKit app in a Docker image hosted on Google Cloud Run. Source code: github.com/meedstrom/svelte-frontend

The notes themselves, I write as plaintext files-on-disk according to the conventions of org-roam.

When it's time to update the website, I follow these steps:

  1. In Emacs, run M-x org-publish to turn my org-roam files into HTML files.
  2. Run a small Node.js script that packs the resulting collection of HTML files into a posts.json and moves it into the frontend's assets folder, along with a couple of other generated files needed by the app.
    • Contains secrets, so not posted here.
  3. Rebuild and push a Docker image to Google Cloud Run with the commands gcloud builds submit && gcloud run deploy.

What links here

Created (2 years ago)
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