I’ve been thinking a lot about the origins of psychosomatic pain. I’ve had minor brushes with it, just about enough to convince me to take it seriously. I understand that psychosomatic stuff can be insert adjective but I’m convinced there’s at least a grain of truth in it both 1) existing in more cases than people think and 2) being resolvable through emotional healing.
How I stopped the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career
I have accumulated a ton of links that generally fall into the agentic-offbeat-ambition domain.
Do I Need to Go to University?
Activities with (positive) asymmetric returns
A follow up on the previous thread
A nice perspective on meeting people
Asking what you would do if you didn’t have a constraint is clarifying because you often realize it isn’t a constraint. Money can limit your scale, but probably not keep you from the attempt.
If you were a billionaire willing to spend say, $500m, what would you spend it on?
This is a wildly underrated piece on the Japanese political system and how it has a functional one party system.
Building a Functional One-Party Democracy
Fun facts about Babylonian, apparently there are tons of tablets still untranslated.
How to Read “Gilgamesh” (2019), comment by handrous
How to Read “Gilgamesh” (2019), comment by retrac
An interesting story about watermelons, but one part stood out to me -
In 1924, a National Geographic Magazine writer chronicled his adventures in Sudan from 1916 to 1920, in which watermelons played a key role. He enjoyed watermelon tea the locals made—after punching the fruit open and squeezing the flesh to press the juice out—and, in brutal 110-120F heat, endured a six-week journey on which watermelons were his sole source of water. The writer, Major Edward Keith-Roach, complained about being unable to shave during that trip but couldn’t praise watermelons enough for saving his life and making the trek possible.
Marketing comes very unnaturally to me, been reading @visakanv’s marketing blog recently.
Gigantic doc on marketing for engineers
When is it best to post to Hackernews?
Hacking Hacker News for fun and profit
This guy built an ML trading system to make $200k from $5k. A little light on the details but interesting nonetheless.
Lessons learned building an ML trading system that turned $5k into $200k
Old article from Neville Medhora on crashing a party… should probably implement this at some point for fun.
Open problems in robotics plus commentary
Sometimes I want to start a new coding project, so when I get around to that I’ll probably pull from this list.
More challenging projects every programmer should try
This guy is selling a book on how to get a 4 day workweek. I haven’t read the book, but I find myself referencing his blog a lot to people who don’t realize you can just negotiate a shorter workweek.
You can negotiate a 3 day weekend
A great summary by Alex Danco about Rene Girard’s theories. Much easier than reading Girard directly, trust me.
Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard
I’ve been weighing buying a VR headset. These links have some thoughts + good games to try.
VR, perception, and brain reset
I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR, comment by mettamage
Good article on Aztec political thought which gives an insight to what the purpose of human sacrifice was.
This is a cool set of comments about soil usage and climate. It’s sad seeing people blame meat production for climate change, since it can absolutely be transformed to be beneficial to the planet. Also, modern factory farming is terrible for the soil in more ways than I realized.
I have an unhealthy desire for buying textbooks.
What is the SICP of your field?
Interesting progress in the field of tinnitus. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that knowledge in the field of medicine is poorly distributed. Hopefully this can help someone.
Clinical Evaluation of Tofisopam in the Treatment of Tinnitus
I liked this koan.
