Blogs

Jan 17: Agency, William Gibson 🥈 Jan 30: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani 🥈 Jan 31: Absolute Carnage, Cates and Stegman Feb ??: Cosmic Ghost Rider, Cates and Burnett Feb 07: Mister Miracle, King & Gerads 🥇 Feb 23: This is Tai Chi: 50 Essential Questions and Answers, Paul Read 👂 Mar 03: How to Become a Straight-A Student, Cal Newport Mar 27: Mind Gym—An Athlete’s Guide to Inner Excellence, Gary Mack with David Cassteven Apr 24: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport ➰ 🥇 Jun 07: The Widower’s Two-Step, Rick Riordan Jun 29: The Immortal Hulk (vol 1), Ewing and Bennett Jun 30: The Immortal Hulk (vol 2), Ewing and Bennett Jul 02: Conan—The Jewels of Gwahkur and other stories, P. Craig Russell (adapted from Robert E. Howard) 🥇 Jul 04: Talking to Humans, Giff Constable Jul 06: Conan—The Death (vol 14), Brian Wood, et al. Jul 14: Stumptown (vol 1), Rucka et al Jul 18: Conan—The Nightmare of the Shallows (vol 15) Jul 23: The Four Agreements—A Toltec Wisdom Book, Don Miguel Ruiz 🥈 Aug 11: The Sheriff of Baghdad, King & Gerads 🥈 Aug 25: The Immortal Hulk (vol 3), Ewing and Bennett Sept 16: The Immortal Hulk (vol 4), Ewing and Bennett Sept 23: The Immortal Hulk (vol 5), Ewing and Bennett Oct ??: The Immortal Hulk (vol 6), Ewing and Bennett Oct ??: The Immortal Hulk (vol 7), Ewing and Bennett Oct 20: Willpower Doesn’t Work, Benjamin Hardy 👂 Nov 13: Zero History, William Gibson ➰ 🥈 Nov 15: The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, M. Mitchell Waldrop 🥇 Dec 21: Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart 🥇 Some parting thoughts for this year’s list of books finished: lots more comics this year. Marvel monthlies were straight-up popcorn (tasting more and more stale), the Conan works were much more sophisticated than I expected, and King & Gerads slay. Two audiobooks 👂 and two re-reads ➰. I didn’t track the dozens of board books I’ve read to our now-toddler, but I could recite most of them from memory. ...

Jan. 1, Rampage Jan. 1, Fast and Furious 7† Jan. 3, Blood Simple† Jan. 8, Alita Battle Angel Jan. 9, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance Jan. 10, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back† Jan. 15, Baby Driver† Jan. 16, Birds of Prey and the Emancipation of Harley Quinn Jan. 22, Hobbs and Shaw† Jan. 31, Time Bandits Feb. 3, Pacific Rim Uprising† Feb. 14, The Gentlemen Feb. 21, Captain Marvel† Mar. 6, Too Late† Mar. 14, The Princess Bride Mar. 19, X-Men: Dark Phoenix† Mar. 27, Judas and the Black Messiah Mar. 28, Get Hard Mar. X, Captain America: The First Avenger† Mar. X, The Transporter† Apr. 8, Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) Apr. 11, John Wick 2† Apr. 18, John Wick 3† Apr. 24, Central Intelligence Apr. 25, Mortal Kombat (2021) May 1, Eastern Promises† May 2, Joker May 7, eXistenZ† May 8, Wrath of Man May 15, Galaxy Quest May 16, Tenet May 26, The Take May 26, Army of the Dead May 28, Deadpool† May 28, Thief† May 29, Eurovision Jun. 1, Spy Jun. 4, The Trial of the Chicago 7 Jun. 6, Snyder Cut of Justice League Jun. 7, The Hitman’s Bodyguard Jun. 16, Conan the Barbarian† Jun. 25, Angel Has Fallen Jul. 3, Ava Jul. 10, The Clash of the Titans (1981) Jul. 11, F9 Jul. 24, Under Siege† Jul. 30, Jack Reacher† Jul. 31, Black Widow Aug. 8, Gunpowder Milkshake Aug. 15, The Last Boy Scout Aug. 29, Predator (1987)† Aug. 31, SAS: Rise of the Black Swan Sept. 5, Wrath of Man† Sept. ?, Congo† Sept. 9, Clear and Present Danger† Sept. 17, Chain Reaction† Sept. 22, The Suicide Squad (2021) Oct. 2, The Net Oct. 9, A History of Violence† Oct. 15, Altered Carbon: Resleeved Oct. 30, Get Out† Nov. 6, Blazing Saddles† Nov. 7, Desperado† Nov. 14, Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings Nov. 19, Jungle Cruise (2021) Nov. 22, Dune (2021) Nov. 23, Ready Player One Nov. 25, Casino Royale (2006)† Nov. 26, Quantum of Solace† Nov. 28, Good Time Dec. 1, Skyfall† Dec. ?, Red Notice Dec. 10, Kate Dec. 14, Blade Runner 2049† Dec. 17, Spectre† Dec. 18, The Little Things Dec. 20, Deep Cover Dec. 27, Matrix Resurrections Dec. 28, No Time To Die Dec. 29, Hudson Hawk Dec. 30, Don’t Look Up Dec. 31, Snatch† † denotes a re-watch ...

In the much-vaunted style of literate programming, here’s an emacs-lisp function I wrote recently. The motivation was to convert a shell alias I added this morning, which counts the number of Zettelkasten notes I’ve written that day. (“Jesus, him, too?” Yes, dear reader, I’m afraid that this is one trend I haven’t managed to dodge forever, but my adoption has been cautious and deliberate.) alias today_count="fd $(date -u +"%Y-%m-%d") ~/org/zd | wc -l" Using the lovely fd utility, I find all files in my Zetteldeft directory, which start with today’s date. Then, I pipe that output to wc -l to get the count. Easy peasy, chicken breezy; took me about two minutes to write. Turns out this doesn’t work as an alias; the date isn’t recalculated every time the alias is called. ...

Eventually working around high-productivity professionals like John Carmack made me realize that if you want to excel, then you have to work hard and focus the whole time. I remember Carmack talking about productivity measurement. While working he would play a CD, and if he was not being productive, he’d pause the CD player. This meant any time someone came into his office to ask him a question or he checked email he’d pause the CD player. He’d then measure his output for the day by how many times he played the CD (or something like that – maybe it was how far he got down into his CD stack). I distinctly remember him saying “So if I get up to go to the bathroom, I pause the player”. ...

Pittsburgh, Frank Santoro The Churn, James S. A. Corey Bttm Fdrs, Ezra Claytan Daniels & Ben Passmore Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O’Connell Space Riders, Fabian Rangel Jr. & Alexis Ziritt Zero to One, Peter Thiel with Blake Masters Sabrina, Nick Drnaso Kettlebell Simple & Sinister: Revised and Updated Edition, Pavel Tsatsouline The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row, Damien Echols Big Red Tequila, Rick Riordan Dept. H Omnibus, vol 1, Matt Kindt & Sharlene Kindt Effective TypeScript, Dan Vanderkam Atomic Habits, James Clear Pulp, Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips Power to the People!, Pavel Tsatsouline Foundation, Isaac Asimov Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis & Christos H. Papadimitriou & Alecos Papadatos & Annie Di Donna Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, Andy Hunt X-Force (2014) vol 1: Dirty/Tricks, Si Spurrier & Rock-He Kim & Jorge Molina COPRA, Round One, Michel Fiffe The War of Art, Steven Pressfield Hogfather, Terry Pratchett Some parting thoughts: Not as many books finished this year compared to the last. I didn’t read many graphic novels that I loved, and didn’t finish any books in the months of April and August. The pandemic shut down my monthly graphic novel book club, it was easier to de-stress in front of the TV, and — probably the biggest factor — my wife gave birth to our first child at the very end of 2019. Having a newborn isn’t great for reading (books for adults) or sleeping, but the rest of the experience makes up for it. This year, I want to focus on modeling good behaviors, so I’m going to make it a point to read more around the baby.

Recently, I had occasion to complete some coding exercises. Since there was some exposition involved, I wanted to take advantage of some of the affordances for literate programming provided by org-mode in Emacs. I won’t get too much into the definition and benefits of literate programming here. My intent is to create a reference of some of my favorite org-mode commands that, in practice, I don’t get to use that often; but, would like to have collected in one spot. ...

For the last six months or so, I’ve been working on building out the infrastructure for our machine-learning service at work. One thing that had me scratching my head last week was trying to compare two fitted pipelines, trained on what could be the same data. To ensure that I wasn’t re-uploading a duplicate fitted pipeline, I wanted to compare the MD5 hashes of the fitted pipelines. Joblib has a way to do this, but I spent way too long trying to find an example of getting it working. ...

The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa Garlandia, Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky Bingo Love, Tee Franklin and Joy San and Jenn St-Onge Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, Al Ramadan and Dave Peterson and Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future, Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Scott Anderson Crux, Ramez Naam The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide, Peter Fleming Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, Kim Scott Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher The Oven, Sophie Goldstein House of Women, Sophie Goldstein The Wild Storm, vol. 1, Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writings, Neal Stephenson Algeria Is Beautiful Like America, Olivia Burton and Mahi Grand Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik Zero K, Don DeLillo The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee The Russian Kettlebell Challenge: Xtreme Fitness for Hard Living Comrades, Pavel Tsatsouline Passing for Human, Liana Finck The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones, Alan Moore Dune, Frank Herbert All You Need is Kill, Takeshi Obata and Ryōsuke Takeuchi and Yoshitoshi Abe RASL, Jeff Smith Star Wars: Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, Charles Soule and others Tongues of Serpents, Naomi Novik By Chance or Providence, Becky Cloonan The Silence of Our Friends, Mark Long and Jim Demonakos and Nate Powell November, vol. 1, Matt Fraction and Elsa Charretier Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World, Pénélope Bagieu Mastering the 21 Immutable Principles of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Paulo Guillobel For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World, Sasha Sagan

After reading about the Mozilla Foundation and Coil’s announcement, I decided I wanted to try an experiment and add a Coil micropayment meta tag to my blog. I couldn’t find an obvious way to do this with Hugo or much information about it in their docs. I first tried just adding the key-value pair to my config.toml. # config.toml monetization = "$coil.xrptipbot.com/zP3gu5RkRVSdjBhe_fu3XA" The values didn’t end up in the <head> tag on my site, though. Then, after skimming through Hugo’s discussion forum, I hit upon the idea to check out the theme’s header.html partial. I added a check and a spot for the monetization meta parameter on my fork: ...

They say that code should read like well-written prose, and that code is written to be read by people—it’s only incidental that machines do something with whatever we create. To those ends, prefixing the names of variables of the boolean type with “is” or “has” or another interrogative word has the effect of leading the reader to expect an answer—“yes” or “no,” or in the parlance of the language, true or false. This communicates to the reader that the variable represents a boolean, and primes them for approaching the next part of the expression as something that may or may not happen. ...