Weeknotes 2024W50

Just two more weeks to go in 2024. This week, I watched Wicked in theaters. It was visually beautiful and I appreciated the themes and representation in the movie. I just don’t think musicals are my thing, though. While the plot was interesting, the singing scenes (you know, the thing you watch a musical for) weren’t particularly entertaining for me.

One thing I’ve enjoyed since being back in the US is (re)defining my personal clothing style. AM and I went shopping and I found a fantastic chore coat that I’ve been wearing for three days straight. Chore coats were originally rich blue French workwear (bleu de travail). It has a typical breast pocket and two big, vertical pockets towards the bottom that can hold anything and everything. So good.

I had a night to myself while AM went out. I put on my headphones and wrote, learned some Racket, drank beer, played online poker, and read. I’ve been sitting on a blog post for a while about my journaling process and I finally dusted it off to get re-inspired both to write and to journal more. It got posted that night. Someone found it and thought it was interesting enough to post to Hacker News which was kind of wild to me. It didn’t hit the front page of course but still got some traffic.

I’ve been learning Racket for the past few weeks and my mind keeps getting blown. I’m currently going through the tutorials from Beautiful Racket by Matthew Butterick. Butterick writes very well and it’s clear that he really knows his stuff. With his help, I created new programming languages. How cool is that‽ It’s been challenging (in a good way) trying to switch my brain from imperative, object-oriented to functional, expressive programming. Next challenge is to think of and implement my own language.

I also took some time to consult a friend on setting up a custom email address. I recommended Proton as an email provider because I love it and have been using it for a long time. I also recommended iCloud because this friend is a fan of the Apple ecosystem. He was also already paying for it. We walked through the DNS configuration and email alias strategy. For this, I recommended using three email addresses: one for trusted humans, one for important accounts, and one for newsletters or other email lists. Personally, I keep the first highly protected and use Proton’s automatically generated aliases for the last one.

I finished reading The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin. Incredible writing style, prose, character development, and world-building. I so badly wanted to know more about the aliens and how they think and communicate but maybe the wonder is part of the experience. I’ll definitely be thinking more about this book and the themes and questions it left me with.

After that, I wanted more Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness was on my list but AM has been looking for a fantasy series to start. Luckily, Le Guin wrote the Earthsea series that we started reading together. I’m excited to see how her prose and world-building translate to a fantasy world instead of a sci-fi one.

Links

• ice/breakers. A beautiful way to get a random ice breaker questions.
• The Computational Web by Jason Velazquez. The next era of the internet is going to be (already is?) defined by the computational power and infrastructure only provided by the big tech companies that have the money to spend on it.
• Bicameral, Not Homoiconic by Shriram Krishnamurthi. A bit over my head but “Lisp-y” programming languages split up the parsing pipeline into a reader and a parser. The reader makes sure that the code looks good, rejecting basic mistakes. The parser then looks for deeper flaws. This is analogous to bicameral legislature.
• For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website by Gita Jackson. Once again, make your own website so that Big Platforms can’t take it down when they feel like it or put it into an AI training set. Own your stuff.
• Domain Sins of My Youth by Jim Nielsen. Use subdomains on your own domain instead of buying yet another new domain for a project that may or may not last (e.g. example.wwinks.com instead of example.com).
• Every Hex Codes. Every possible hex color code combination. That’s 16,777,216 different colors.
• test by Department of Defense. There are humans behind these websites after all.
• How to Be Thankful for Your Life with One Simple Reset by Lawrence Yeo. Imagine what your life would be like without all your experiences, friends, and other things that give your life texture and meaning.
• Serving in the Peace Corps 20 years later: The same or different? by Jeff A. Fun story of a Peace Corps Volunteer comparing his experience in Morocco (!) 16 years ago to his current experience in Nepal. Thank you, Jeff!

  Being a guest in a new country fashions all Volunteers as vulnerable, but that vulnerability also opens us to the diversity of experiences—both wow and woah—before us.

• Should Programming Languages be Safe or Powerful? by Ashton Wiersdorf. Another one a bit over my head but interesting nonetheless. Since I’ve been learning Racket, macros have been really fun to think about.

Created: 2024-12-15

Last modified: 2024-12-15