From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind:
- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.
- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.
- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.
- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.
@Web Do some research on https://somecompany.com and write up a detailed overview of what the company does. What might their database schema look like?
I need you to build a mock database for them in duckdb for a demo
Then:
Create a uv project and write a python script to add demo data. Use Faker.
@Web research how many customers they have. Make the database to appropriate scale.
Only takes a few minutes in Cursor, should work just as well in Claude Code. It works really well for the companies core business, but I still need to create one to populate 3rd party sources (e.g. Stripe, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc.).
Looks cool, but as I have been on this knowledge management / productivity journey like everybody. Here are my findings:
If you are reasonably comfortable with computers / Unix.
- You need to first rely on a directory structures, filenames, plaintext, lists and maybe markdown. Stick with a "File over app", Unix approach.
- Try to sort things with universal concepts: locations, things, people, events, metrics, howtos. A bit like the 5Ws approach.
- Leverage good Unix tools: unix commands, make/justfiles, (rip)grep, git, fzf, etc.
- Do not try to solve the problem through the Web. Because you will end up trying to solve web problems instead of basic knowledge management and productivity issues.
- The smartphone/touchscreen is a major problem, but as with the Web do not try to solve it. Use your file manager or even fzf in termux can be adapted to be reasonably usable on a touchscreen.
Something I have been wondering about is the "backlink" feature. It would be cool to link items/notes together through references.
What I would be looking for is a Unix tools that can scan my text files for references to other files in the hierarchy.
I think the issue is that while the advice is literally true, most people aren't in life for "true happiness". Most people, if observed closely, are in it for the status.
The people who are in it for happiness tend to be ascetics.
Sure, tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago nobody was working with metals at all. And the centrifugal fan he uses is a modern invention; the oldest mention of them in the literature is less than 500 years old, in De Re Metallica.
It's really interesting to think about the "could have done this but didn't" stuff!
Silver chloride is one of the less sensitive silver halides you can use in photography, but it works; it dates to about 2500 years ago when someone (the Lydians?) figured out you could separate silver from gold by firing it with salt. So you could have done photography 2500 years ago instead of 200 years ago.
There's lots of stuff in optics that only requires a Fizeau interferometer (made of a candle flame and a razor blade, Bronze Age stuff), abrasives (Paleolithic), reflective metal (Bronze Age again; Newton's mirrors were just a high-tin bronze), abrasives, and an unreasonable amount of patience. Imhotep could have made a Dobsonian telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter 4700 years ago if he'd known that was a worthwhile thing to do.
Speaking of metrology, I've heard conflicting stories about surface plates: one story that the Babylonians knew about grinding three surfaces alternately against one another to make them all flat, and another that Maudslay originated the technique only about 220 years ago. (Or, sometimes, Maudslay's apprentice Whitworth.) This is clearly a technique you could have employed in the Neolithic.
Sorption pumps for fine vacuum (usually 1e-2 mbar) require a high-surface-area sorbent (zeolite or maybe even kieselguhr or ball-milled non-zeolite clay: Neolithic), probably glassblowing (Roman Republic era in Syria), sealed joints (apparently Victorians used sealing wax successfully up to HV though not UHV, and sealing wax is pine resin and beeswax: probably Paleolithic), and some way to heat up the sorbent (fire: Paleolithic). Fine vacuum is enough for thermos bottles (dewars) and CVD, among other things.
Conceivably you could have just luted together an opaque vacuum apparatus from glazed earthenware (which dates from probably 3500 years ago), using sealing wax to seal the joints. But debugging the thing or manipulating anything inside of it would have been an invincible challenge.
Sorption pumping works better if you can also cool the sorbent down, too; dry ice is today made by explosive decompression of carbon dioxide, similar to how puffed corn and rice can be made with a grain-puffing cannon, and regularly is by Chinese street vendors. Pure carbon dioxide is available by calcining limestone (thus the name: Neolithic) in a metal vessel (Bronze Age) that bubbles the result into water into a "gasometer", a bucket floating upside down. Compressing the carbon dioxide sufficiently probably requires the accurately cylindrical bores produced for the first time for things like the Dardanelles Gun (15th century). But possibly not; the firepiston in Madagascar is at least 1500 years old, dating back to the time of the Western Roman Empire, and I think it can achieve sufficiently high compression.
Mercury has been known all over the world since antiquity, though usually as a precious metal rather than a demonic pollutant. Mercury plus glassblowing (Roman Republic, again) is enough for a Sprengel pump, which can achieve 1 mPa, high vacuum, 1000 times higher vacuum than an ordinary sorption pump (though some sorption pumps are even better than the Sprengel pump). High vacuum is sufficient to make vacuum tubes.
The Pidgeon process to refine magnesium requires dolomite, ferrosilicon, and a reducing atmosphere or vacuum. You get ferrosilicon by firing iron, coke, and silica in acid refractory (such as silica). Magnesium is especially demanding of reducing atmospheres; in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide are not good enough, so you need something like hydrogen (or, again, vacuum) to distill the magnesium out of the reaction vessel. As a structural metal magnesium isn't very useful unless you also have aluminum or zinc or manganese or silicon, which the ancients didn't; but it's a first-rate incendiary weapon and thermite reducer, permitting both the easy achievement of very high temperatures and the thermite reduction of nearly all other metals.
Copper and iron with any random kind of electrolyte makes a (rather poor) battery; this permits you to electroplate. The Baghdad Battery surely isn't such a battery, but it demonstrates that the materials available to build one were available starting in the Iron Age. Electroplating is potentially useful for corrosion resistance, but to electroplate copper onto iron you apparently need an intermediate metal like nickel or chromium to get an adherent coating, and to electroplate gold or silver you probably need cyanide or more exotic materials. Alternate possible uses for low-voltage expensive electricity include molten-salt electrolysis and the production of hydrogen from water.
Copper rectifiers and photovoltaic panels pretty much just require heating up a sheet of copper, I think? Similarly copper wires for a generator only require wire drawing (Chalcolithic I think, at least 2nd Dynasty Egypt) and something like shellac (Mahabharata-age India, though rare in Europe until 500 years ago), though many 19th-century electrical machines were instead insulated with silk cloth.
Vapor-compression air conditioners probably need pretty advanced sealing and machining techniques, but desiccant-driven air conditioners can operate entirely at atmospheric pressure. The desiccants are pretty corrosive, but beeswax-painted metal or salt-glazed ceramic pipes are probably fine for magnesium chloride ("bitterns" from making sea salt, Japanese "nigari"), and you can pump it around with a geyser pump.
I think the geyser pump is still under patent, but it can be made of unglazed earthenware or carved out of bamboo (both Neolithic) and driven by either a bellows (Neolithic) or a trompe (Renaissance).
Some years ago I figured out a way to use textile thread (and, say, tree branches) to make logic gates; I posted that to kragen-tol. So you probably could have done digital logic with Neolithic materials science, though only at kHz clock rates. And of course you could have hand-filed clockwork gears out of sheet copper as early as the Chalcolithic, instead of waiting until the Hellenistic period.
Any idea that the CEO/business folk come up with should be implementable. You never want your tech limitations to be stopping you implementing a pricing scheme.
In that light, you want to be able to set any product to any price any time. You might want to let existing customers keep the old price. You want to be able to give existing customers one-off credits or charges, or discounts for a given number of months.
You want to be able to do the same for other features. For example, credit a customer a certain number of gb's or minutes. Or a group of customers.
You need to be able to do 'if then' pricing. eg. If you have more than 8 synced devices, you automatically get 99 more gb's.
You need to be able to do pricing depending on other customers. Eg. "if you refer 3 friends, and they all verify their account, you get a credit of $10, but it must be spent within 3 months"
You need to be able to 'undo' mistakes (ie. retract an invoice), but you also need to be able to re-issue a now-corrected invoice. The rebilling might need to use the pricing/discount structure present at the time of the original invoice, or it might need to use the current pricing structure.
There is no simple way to achieve all of this. You will end up with a mess. Just embrace it and move on.
FOMO is a sign of the vice of curiosity[0] and pride[1]. The rosier side of what you're doing is that you seem to have a means of at least managing the impulse. Still unfocused, still not perfect, but better than pointless chasing after information.
Perhaps a way to break the habit is a kind of fasting and interruption: when you come across the temptation to indulge a distraction or archive that link, cut yourself off and remind yourself that all you're doing is dissipating your energies and working against your own good and understanding. Instead of nourishing your mind through sustained commitment, you are choosing to wallow in the shallows of the shoreline. To enter the depths, you must let go the shore. That's the decision you face here, and decisions are always a sacrificial act. You give up one thing for another.
[0] Curiosity here refers to a kind of "information gluttony/lust", a kind of wandering eye. It's the same impulse that afflicts busybodies and gossips in that the desire to know has been unhinged from reason. You don't need to know most of that stuff and most of it is of little value to you.
[1] Pride because there's now way you can know everything, not in this life.
> Yet when the editor showed me their notes, I felt bad, I felt I was wrong. I felt that mentioning my briefs was wrong. It was as if I were being called out for a misdemeanor. The editing was so subtle and penetrating, it sent me on a tailspin. How can I explain? In my version, I was in my underpants, and that specific shame was inherent to the portrayal. That shame was existential yet not political. Putting my underwear on the page was a way to show vulnerability, but without making it too clear a predicament, a way of adding the warmth, the sleaze, the camaraderie, the confusion. In their edit, though, it became something altogether different: my making ironic fun of my naked wife was now unfair—even unjust—as it was now coming from a presumably fully-clad person. And without the hint of our drunken blackouts, we now had no shared sadness and exhaustion, and also no affection and complicity.
This paragraph really hits home for me with respect to what people refer to as a "chilling effect" on expression post 2015. This American editor almost feels like a metaphor.
When juxtaposed with our values, it's clear how things got this way. Social media lets us casually evoke, and even moralize, these judgements. When cast en masse with hash tags, threads, and replies it looks like a very unsafe world for us to be ourselves. Suddenly, things look less free than they used to be.
A man must be poking idle, unpleasant fun at his barely dressed wife. A parent must be bad if there's beer or cigarettes observed, but not when hidden - that's a different kind of ill, right? All these little cliches add up to a larger story, and that's what I'm reading. Our tendency for clear villains and heroes leaks into everything we do - even to how we shape our literature.
This is a false dichotomy. One can both take data into account and go with their gut after having evaluated such data. But data, by it's very nature, is rearward looking. It is really dangerous to become a solely data driven person/organization.
Perseverance and conditioning yourself to be comfortable with (or even excited/inspired by) long periods of unfinished-ness are core competencies in practically every demanding project I've embarked upon - not just software, literally anything that can't be started and finished over a weekend.
A WIP is often largely indistinguishable from a complete and utter broken disaster. When the project necessarily takes a long time, that work-in-progress state can start convincing you (and your peers/family/friends/onlookers) that it's not a work-in-progress but a total failure. The only difference between those two realities is abandoning it vs. finishing it.
Some (most?) people lack the grit to get through that trough of "unfinished-or-failed?" ambiguity.
That's a lot of text trying to describe what I've found is the real substance behind "real developers ship".
And somewhere in all this, you still have to have maintain enough perspective to know when to cut your losses.
As a developer, and builder of things in general, I have hella respect for anyone who does such projects.
- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.
- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.
- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.
- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.
- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.