plumsempy

> Slow down to go faster yes! I had a similar problem with bigger projects. I used to start coding too early before understanding the problem completely.

I have decided to write an essay since, about everything I am about to do. This slows me down and makes me look at every detail that might be crucial in the project execution.

These docs then become some sort of a data lake about the process of building this project, from which later I can derive documentation or slides for presentations from or send people there when they ask me why I did something the way I did.

On a meta level, order alone and no chaos means no order at all. You need some chaos to compare order against.

More particularly, let's continue your thought experiment. There is sexual desire in men still right? so they made sex robots. Let's assume all sex robots are equally good. In other words all are mediocre. Then one person adds a feature to this robot to make it exponentially better. Now billions of men on this planet line up to have sex with this new robot. Then those at the back of the line will start getting angry and call it unfair. And truly, it is unfair. This is chaos again.

So see what happened, one person added more order and it immediately caused more chaos. And they seem to be a natural byproduct of life: to live means to strive for the better and that means exercising your will and that means exacting some order here and spreading some chaos there. Also, you cannot create chaos without order, because the act of willing something is of order, even if that will is chaos.

I do feel obliged to tell you about something nuanced here. It is true that chaos is feminine, but this doesn't mean women are chaotic. Women are humans just like men, they "have" femininity, which is, on average, higher than men. Meaning they are more emotionally flexible, they are more forgiving, it is the mother who will forgive your transgressions. While masculinity is more rigid, less forgiving, it is the father that will punish you. These are all averages. As Jung says, averages take the sample and strip off everything unique about the individuals and present something that does NOT exist. So I am sure masculinity and femininity are variable in both men and women.

If you want to explore your idea more you can journal about it; write a make believe journal entry every night of your day in this planet. But also analyze the effects of your actions there carefully.

In summary, you cannot get rid of chaos without annihilating life itself and feminine does not mean women.

I don't know but sounds likr assassin's creed.

Yes! I have just discovered this recently myself as well: whenever I wander off I context switch to something else I want to do instead of reforcing focus: multiple books, work, anki, side projects. Good so far.

Write and Journal.

Whenever I feel unmotivated and cannot move forward, if I am not tired or burnt, then it is because I don't see a path forward. That is because my thoughts and information are disorganized and they pollute my sight.

Writing is a very good tool for organizing one's thoughts. For whatever reason thinking with one's short term memory, at least for me, is inferior to writing or even speaking(rubber ducky?) As Jon Haidt says, we are not a logic processing machine but a story processing one(or something like that).

If you have requirements for your work, sit down and write about it. If you don't know how to start then write about how you acquired those information; write about what they mean, what you want to do and anything that peaks your fancy. Over time you will develop your favorite style.

As an aside, journal your days too; looking back on your day you can put your personal story in order and then see if something went poorly, or well. If something doesn't make sense.

Again, over time, you can use your work or personal journal to derive other artifacts. Think of it as a data lake. Want some slides? documentation? forgot a command? forgot why you did something? open up your work journal and copy paste some lines, images or code snippets.

In summary I highly recommend writing. It is a valuable tool that for some reason is not emphasized enough.

One more thing, if you are expressing something, telling a story and such, you may type for speed. If you are thinking and exploring, its best to hand write, it will slow your brain down; plus, there is something about writing letters, a meandering doodling hand an rhythm that helps think.

I had a similar problem with StitchFix way back when; after finding out about my profession they truly pigeonholed me into a generic software engineer's fashion, almost caricature-esque.

I switched to Bombfell and I had been very happy until my cancellation.(canceled cause I wanted to explore fashion myself)

Tangential.

Games with good stories and gameplay are the same to me as novels, if not better. In that they allow me to experience things otherwise not possible. Like running for dear life when Dhaka is chasing you in Prince of Persia; or decimating a whole village in Skyrim and having that dark big hole in your chest for what you did carry on until you load the game again.

But the most recent learning from myself has been from Divinity 2 Original Sin. Great game. There you have a main avatar and 3 other players, equally qualified in every sense, and you control all 4. The only difference between the avatar and the rest is one's identity tied to the avatar.

At some point I realized my ranger and melee are pretty strong while wearing nothing but tattered loin clothes; while my avatar, a jack of everything cool and carrier of all the gear he could not even wear sucked. This was an epiphany for me in team spirit. I was hoarding everything cool for my avatar. This had 2 effects. Firstly, it starved the rest of the team from getting good, relevant gear. Secondly, the rest remained laser focused on a couple of skill trees while my avatar, or "I", was hoarding all the cool skills wanting to become a god of all the things or something. So I gave away some epic gear to my ranger and melee units and they got buffed a lot. And I also trimmed the avatar into a single well defined role (pyro summoner) and now I have a pretty strong team.

I am pretty sure this pattern would have had a longer lasting effect on my personal and professional development as well, had I not felt it on my skin like that. Everyone knows you're supposed to share or not to be greedy but I wonder for how many that has been a matter of "life and death".

it has become such a preference for me: silence, dimmed lights, some synthwave music, surrounded by all my machines and a lot of fun.

This is very nice! I feel some kinship with you and I also feel a need for some shameless plug:

https://plumsempy.com/2018/09/17/tetris-on-google-sheets/

dibs on biyomon

I think a person who overthinks does it regardless of the stakes. Focus is very closely related to not getting interrupted by your own thoughts. I agree with you that you need to have the skill to be able to perform well, but I'm suggesting that even in a low-stake one, one who can't focus won't focus, be it overthinking or distractions.

I learned this from this brain exercise game, Peak. I started leveling up like crazy when I stopped thinking and speaking to myself and let my brain do what it does best, which learning.

I know you pronounce it ES-KYU-EL because you used "an"

I'm not sure I entirely agree: curiosity and discovery can be very enjoyable; which means it is more about openness -- personally I over analyze when I am contracted and anxious, which figures.

I agree with you and I will add my own tint to it: I do this to push myself to grow and move forward and then lie back and do what's comfortable and familiar. Rinse and repeat.

my fav:

The bartender says: we don't serve race conditions here A thread walks into a bar

Depends what you mean by bad; it hurts trust. For instance the Appengine to Appengine 2 transition is a particularly painful one for a consumer who built an entire business on it and I was part of a migration to address this.

I had heard Google is unreliable in this aspect before but after this particular experience I will unlikely use or suggest Google for anything serious.

I am Iranian, and I have to admit, taarof has been an interesting subject in my social interactions.

With other Iranians, I have no problem reading and sending social cues; with non-Iranians taarof makes me come off as super nice and kind. But what happened, when people repeatedly took me on on my taarofs, I grew silently very spiteful and distanced myself from them. If a guest is staying late we never ask them to leave, we ask them to stay for dinner and that is a cue that I am about to inconvenience myself and you have to leave, but more often than not, in situations like this, I ended up having a guest over for hours and then overnight lol.

It took me a while to rewire my brain to set the boundaries explicitly, and I have to admit it is still excruciatingly painful for me to reject someone; makes me feel very rude. Nonetheless this approach works great, I dare say a more straightforward culture allows for a better mental state by allowing explicit and clear boundaries for oneself.

and then there are those who don't have a close button and make me open up the console, delete that DOM element and restore the scroll. Had to once so it on a website that was teaching javascript, which was ironic.

I use it to have a visual anchor of what the place looks like. While driving sometimes its not appropriate to slow down and read the building number, but a big visual like building color or shape will help. Especially if I want to enter the building where missing it means missing the destination.

Another use case of mine, is when I have to go through an intersection of streets or freeways with a lot of merging and diverging routes, I use street view to know which lanes do I have to be on to not miss my exits, or what signs would I read if I am on the correct route.

So in summary, large visual hints.

haven't read the article and just here for the comments as one does, but I recommend Conscious by Annaka Harris. The Sun, while not necessarily alive, might be conscious. No woowoo.

thank you, at first glance I couldn't see its reduction to this case but I will sit with it more. But if you can show me how it applies here I will appreciate that as well.

yeah~ its clicking a bit more now, thank you. I am comfortable with the fact that the remainder is a coprime of a and b; but that corprimes have a definitive path to 1 is strange. Why now 0 or -1? or -2? it is not clear to me why it must always converge to 1.

Thank you very much for the proof. I can understand the proof in my analytical thoughts, but what I have a problem with is an intuition for it.

Of course it can be that I need to sit with it more, work with it more, connect more basic subjects to my intuition first to make it work. It can also be that if everyone waited for things to make intuitive sense we will fall back in science. Math is a great tool where it can take you places even when you don't possess the correct intuition if you just follow the rules.

But I have decided to try the intuition way nonetheless. My main problem is that, it was not immediately obvious to me that subtracting coprimes successively will always result in 1. It is still so strange to me. In comparison the fundamental theory of arithmetic is also strange but there is a good intuition behind it: any non prime number is a product of primes, because if it wasn't it would be prime itself!

This is interesting. Thank you.

It is definitely not necessary. Because the gcd of 2 and 4 is 2, thus we have 2(1) and 2(2). 2 and 1 are coprime and thus will reduce down to 1, the common part left out is 2 and the uncommon part is 1, as always 1.

Thanks about the Buchberger intro I didn't know about that.

oops! thanks for noticing. Will correct it soon.

How about something in research?

I use Google Sheets a lot and I love it. From the common uses like task management to using it as mvp for a web app or a database for an mvp.

What's interesting about Sheets is that the tables can be thought of as a database with columns and records, or a CSS grid and you can put buttons and everything on it.

Currently I made a task queue for myself in sheets. There are a lot of things I want to do and I find out about these interesting stuff while in the middle of something else; so I just put the mew thing on the queue and forget about it. Works great. I also tag these tags in case I want to analyze them later.

Finally, for fun, and also shameless plug, I made a Tetris using it. It even has animation when the tiles disappear. See it here: https://plumsempy.com/2018/09/17/tetris-on-google-sheets/

It is a very powerful tool.