2024-03-01 Cogito Ergo Fatigatis

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I Did

FRONT-END:

I’ve almost cleared out the backlogged content edited a few months ago by my Wooby Goobers. This time, it’s about finding a job in the tech industry, which is an extension of my job-hunting series on AdequateLife:

  1. How to know your job sucks and when to quit.
  2. How to set goals for your tech career, a spinoff of the AdequateLife goal-setting page.
  3. Building a suitable image for tech, a spinoff of the AdequateLife image page.
  4. Hunting for jobs and how to train and research for roles, a spinoff of the self-marketing page.
  5. Non-technical human interviewing (which is technically the easy part), a spinoff of the interview page.
  6. Closing the deal and negotiating, directly borrowing from the deal-closing page.

BACK-END:

More yak shaving, more free online courses, so whee.

I have discovered, and nearly completed, a significant sidequest:

  1. Essentially, I’ll find articles referencing other links and tools, but they’re difficult to reference between them for grouping together. For example, this link about the Open Textbook Initative is almost not directly linked at all to this hyperlink barring a specific keyword or two.
  2. I need to add the hyperlinks under the existing lists, which basically means opening the discussion page, opening the link, then saving that.
  3. I will first finish this sidequest for all the more advanced sections (36 folders), then I’ll dovetaile the task into the existing 100-section domain I was working on (31 folders left).

What I Learned

I took a huge drink of online liberal arts courses lately. Most of the literature courses were boring to me, but the history and philosophy courses have been interesting. Most notably, I discovered and pieced together an answer to the historical pattern I saw within this western philosophy course.

I first have to give a condensed primer on the history of western philosophy as I understand it. It’s a partial evolution of my GainedInSite essay on the matter:

  1. Ancient philosophers preoccupied themselves with asking deep questions about stuff that exists. They presumed the mind itself was observing nature itself.
  2. Catholic philosophers took those ideas and added a heavy observation on how to perceive and understand God. They spent a good millennium doing that.
  3. Enlightenment philosophers started into asking what we really could understand (with the apex of the idea being from David Hume). The short version: we really can’t prove anything is or isn’t real, so we can only be between 0.000001-99.999999% certain of anything.
  4. Not to be content with answer, the post-modern philosophers dragged that uncertainty into how we ought to live, with the pinnacle coming from Nietzsche. In a sense, the only meaning we can gather is through the things that can be controlled, and it’s all driven by the pursuit of power.

Now, what I discovered is that Lewis had a counter-argument to Nietzsche’s domain. The Last Man/Over Man battle has another angle altogether, and it reflects closely with the concept of self-evidence. In short, there is a Tao that exists as a self-evident domain, and disregarding it is to dismiss the very nature of what makes us human.

Anyway, I’m tired, and I’m still baking on the idea, but it was an interesting exploration.

    What I’m Doing

    WHAT I MUST DO:

    • Working in an insurance office right now.
    • Keeping a home together with a woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix.
    • Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.

    MY HOBBY:

    My Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission now has 2 domains, loosely inspired by Johnny.Decimal:

    • It consists of 3,909 files, each one containing between 1 and 50 subjects.
    • As I go, each condensation will make fewer files, but each re-categorization may make more files.
    • The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

    The software-leaning side has 2,732 pages, and will (eventually) go to my toolbox:

    • 03X — an inbox of stuff that goes everywhere else, and where I dump any new content when it’s not explicitly obvious or convenient to file away (74 files)
    • 1XX — need to both sift for duplicates in the system and group the information (1,269 files)
    • 2XX — need to sift for duplicates in the system (363 files)
    • 3XX — need to group the information (913 files)
    • 4XX — has been sifted and grouped and ready for the toolbox, presuming I understand it (108 files)

    The writing-leaning side has 1,109 pages, and spans the output of my Trendless Tech essays and my remaining NotaGenius essays:

    • 02X — content to update my already-finalized essays (92 files)
    • 05X — needs regrouping into narrower classifications (252 files)
    • 1XX — written content (my notes or copy-pasted stuff) that must make its way to a new essay (676 files)
    • 2XX — hyperlinks-only lists of guides (45 files)
    • 3XX — hyperlinks-only opinions and expert wisdom (42 files)

    Throughout the entire system, I maintain a sub-schema that actually reflects the content I’m building:

    The flow of work represents itself through a unique flow of “phases”:

    1. Sift through the duplicates (somewhat alongside Phase 2)
      • S1->S3
    2. Precisely group content (somewhat alongside Phase 1)
      • S1->S2
    3. Sift through duplicates in grouped content (alongside Phase 5)
      • S2->S4
    4. Group/merge content into other categorizations (alongside Phase 4)
      • S3->S4
    5. Separate out the toolbox items, guides, and opinions
      • S4->TB
      • S4->W2
      • S4->W3
    6. Regroup the essays and update old content
      • S0->S1
      • S0->S2
      • S0->S3
      • S0->TT/NAG/TLS
    7. Add ready-to-go content updates, which will make all my essays officially “done”
      • S1->TT/NAG/TLS
    8. Make decisions on the guides
      • S2->Maybe/Later
      • S2->?
    9. Consume and update the last of TrendlessTech
      • S3->TT