Jacob Gravelle

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on the atlas · 16

highlights · 36

To take this approach means your notes will not be neat and ordered, like a Dewey Decimal system for the mind. They will be dominated by the contrarian, by paradoxes, by the inexplicable. Which is exactly the point. Contrarianism is the fastest method for discovering the paradox at the heart of every inexplicable phenomenon.
Productivity for Precious Snowflakes: a Mood-First Approach to Knowledge Work - Forte Labs
WIP limits aren’t for everyone. I shudder to imagine Visakan Veerasamy, for example, one of my favorite internet writers, implementing WIP limits like these. His whole style, I think, benefits from a kind of mood-first productivity.
Making Knowledge Work Visible - Forte Labs
These categories follow Aristotle’s three kinds of friends, a choice that is partially playful – books are a kind of friend, no? – but also practical for me.
Making Knowledge Work Visible - Forte Labs
visualizing the work is just the first step of successful kanban usage. The next step is to install work-in-progress (WIP) limits.
Making Knowledge Work Visible - Forte Labs
I found a solution in two key insights from just-in-time productivity: making work visible, and implementing work-in-progress (WIP) limits.
Making Knowledge Work Visible - Forte Labs
In the same way as with reading, I discovered that writing multiple essays at the same time made it easier to increase the overall quantity and quality of my writing.
Making Knowledge Work Visible - Forte Labs
Reading in parallel dramatically increased the number of books I was able to read in a given time period.
Making Knowledge Work Visible - Forte Labs
Symbolization of a skill - reducing it to a series of discrete symbols that you can practice individually and then combine in application - allows you to become extremely good at a constrained subset of that skill.
Learning to walk through walls - by David R. MacIver
Systematizing something like the grip fight takes a continuous, physical, game and turns into a discrete, symbolic, one, by transforming it into something that you can talk about in words.
Learning to walk through walls - by David R. MacIver
“make sure you’re playing the real game, not some more complicated game you’ve made up for yourself.”
Learning to walk through walls - by David R. MacIver
Pedro’s father (James Pedro) could gain an advantage that others lacked. It is a Cohen the Barbarian style refusal to do what is done, and ask instead what he could do.
Learning to walk through walls - by David R. MacIver
If you hold one mental image of Wiles, he wants it to be this: not the triumphant scholar with the medal around his neck, but the child learning to glory in the state of being stuck.
The State of Being Stuck – Math with Bad Drawings
Of course, immunity to fear isn’t enough. You need a positive incentive, something to strive for.
The State of Being Stuck – Math with Bad Drawings
Wiles knows that the mathematician’s battle is emotional as much as intellectual. You need to quiet your fear, harness your joy, and cope effectively with the doubt we all feel when stuck on a problem.
The State of Being Stuck – Math with Bad Drawings
Few problems worth your attention will yield under the standard attacks. “So,” he said, “you get stuck.”
The State of Being Stuck – Math with Bad Drawings
The essence of Wiles’ answer can be boiled down to just six words: “Accepting the state of being stuck.”
The State of Being Stuck – Math with Bad Drawings
Coming up with an idea for the sake of coming up with an idea is hard and pointless, because ideas don’t do anything on their own. Instead, you come up with ideas by starting with something that needs an idea.
How do you nurture your imagination? | David R. MacIver
Where do ideas come from? They come from the adjacent possible.
How do you nurture your imagination? | David R. MacIver
And this, ultimately, is the main point of ideas: Ideas enable you to do the work.
How do you nurture your imagination? | David R. MacIver
Your goal here is explicitly to do things that you find interesting, so it’s OK if they don’t work out as long as you’ve learned something in the process.
How do you nurture your imagination? | David R. MacIver
Developing the skill of having ideas that you find interesting.
How do you nurture your imagination? | David R. MacIver
Meanwhile folks using languages built from the ground up without Option swear by how great it is to use! This is because one language has a more coherent and holistic design, while the other has a more jumbled and stapled together one.
Destroy All Values: Designing Deinitialization in Programming Languages
Even if your language has no notion of things being initialized or uninitialized, it’s still happening on some semantic level, and it’s happening constantly. So all programming languages generally develop some tools to help programmers describe and think about those situations.
Destroy All Values: Designing Deinitialization in Programming Languages
But now you’ve reached that dreaded point: you have to implement some kind of heap allocation. Well that part’s fine. The real nasty part is deallocation.
Destroy All Values: Designing Deinitialization in Programming Languages
If my language is too "religious" for you, feel free to transpose it all into the key of psychology. Speak of archetypes and semi-independent complexes. Feel free to hypothesize that I've merely learned how to enter some non-ordinary mental states that change my body language, disable a few mental censors, and have me putting out signals that other people interpret in terms of certain material in their own unconscious minds. Fine. You've explained it. Correctly, even. But you can't do it!
Dancing With The Gods
We’ve witnessed a mass de-risking across the board in media - sequel after sequel, re-launch after re-launch, formulaic productions, an infinite supply of garbage just entertaining enough to keep us entranced and complacent.
The Dream Machine - by Silicon Jungle
For example, I believe that Ultros, the octopus villain who really does have no purpose in the game beyond being a generic (but amusing) evil, was placed in the game to contrast with Kefka and encourage players to think more deeply on the implications of Kefka as a villain precisely because there’s more to him than Ultros.
Final Fantasy VI and Kefka – the most nuanced and interesting villain in classical JRPGs – Digitally Downloaded
Then, in trying to derive meaning from this, Kefka comes to the belief that the real meaning of existence is in non-existence. “I will destroy everything… I will create a monument to non-existence!” he proclaims.
Final Fantasy VI and Kefka – the most nuanced and interesting villain in classical JRPGs – Digitally Downloaded
Prior to this, madness was seen as a form of wisdom, and the “insane” would provide insights that “normal” people could not
Final Fantasy VI and Kefka – the most nuanced and interesting villain in classical JRPGs – Digitally Downloaded
He operates off a completely different moral core, but he’s incredibly rational. And that’s what makes him so fascinating.
Final Fantasy VI and Kefka – the most nuanced and interesting villain in classical JRPGs – Digitally Downloaded
The philosopher, Michel Foucault, never played Final Fantasy VI, but a lot of his writings hold great relevance to the character of Kefka
Final Fantasy VI and Kefka – the most nuanced and interesting villain in classical JRPGs – Digitally Downloaded
Meditation is about training the mind to be able to notice these more subtle events and then instructions for noticing certain things about the causal relationship between these subtle events and how good your moment to moment experience really is.
Neurotic Gradient Descent: (mis)Translating the Buddha
if the path you are on seems like it will only cause you to increase in resentment in the world STOP and turn back
similar to pirsig's gumption trap: if the path you are on seems like...
a unique problem arises when a specific desire is NEEDED above all the other desires and the individual's ability to question is very good
a unique problem arises when a specific desire is NEEDED above all the...
Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magi…
The Metaprogrammers Dilemma : ProgrammingLanguages
he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on
Curius / Onboarding