Notes

2022-10-08

gmail set up:

2022-04-03 Centralization vs Decentralization

2021-08-02 Social gestures

2021-03-19 Google is plenty innovative

Why resisting temptation is probably easier than you think

2020-08-31

Resisting temptations supposed to be difficult. I think it’s often much easier than we are used to believe. 3 reasons:

  1. our preferences are very, very dumb and desires tend to fall off extremely quickly.
  2. also we often literally forget about the temptation even if we do something else for like 1 minute
  3. also brain interprets any amount of waiting as a credible signal that we’re prepared to wait and decreases temptation’s strength

Pet Peeves

2020-08-09

Listening to music in 2020

One way in which 2020 did not disappoint is in listening to music. I open a “My Mix” randomly generated playlist on Youtube and start listening to an almost perfect mix of my favorite+new songs. Love this.

How long does it take to write a post/essay?

Many of my posts start as a bunch of bullets that are accumulating in some text file, before reaching the critical mass and making me realize that I should finally write the post. Many of them are me just being hit by an idea (usually upon reading something on the internet) and starting to write immediately.

I also have many unpublished drafts which took anywhere from 1 minute to over 30 hours.

So, you want to write something…

2019-07-31

Almost all the writing I’m most proud of was started early in the afternoon and finished at whatever the natural stopping point was, generally between 6 PM and 2 AM.

Patrick Mckenzie (perma)

I have more than 100 text files in my “drafts” folder. Some of them consist only of a few lines; some are hundreds and thousands of words long. How many of them will I finish? 10 would be an optimistic prediction.

Behind every draft is an idea and all of them were created when that idea was burning in my mind. I had to take it out and put it into writing. However, a month, a week, a day later, the idea is no longer burning. Its home is now a text file that will live on my hard drive but to which I will probably never return. Perhaps I will open it, take a look at whatever I wrote and think “man, I should’ve just written it up then”.

If you have an idea burning in your mind – write now; everything else can wait.

(if something seems like to could start burning at some point but right now it’s too vague or uncertain, feel free to dump notes in the text file. But never start writing a coherent text and abandon it halfway through.)


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