2024-04-08 Absolute Lunacy

Happy lunar eclipse day! Please send me a message for anything I missed about the failed prophecies for the end of the world. Imagine if the lunar eclipse happened precisely 7 months from now!

What I Did

FRONT-END:

Nothing new to report in that domain. You’ll just have to be happy with what I’ve already made, and the rest of the internet. I hope you’ll find something on there.

BACK-END

I’ve now officially deduplicated my piles. It took longer than I expected, but I think everything else will create more tangible results from here.

I’ve also had to redesign my system. It was worth the deduplication and additional link generation, but I now have to rebuild the system to predominantly serve my essays, with the toolbox coming as a secondary experience following it.

What I (Re)Learned

We need motivation to keep going. This typically manifests in how we observe our results. To the degree it isn’t creating results, we must spackle over that uncertainty with some form of “faith“.

The quickest and easiest form of faith is in ourselves: trust that we can do things. However, that trust is highly limited, and is easily subject to self-deception from our tendencies to overstate our aptitude.

Though it’s not the easiest to configure, the most reliable form of faith is in something unchanging. It may be a reflection on God, an understanding of what’s guaranteed to happen, or simply peace that you’ve done your best.

Either way, I’ve had to rediscover this because my faith in sifting through big piles of things has somewhat waned in the past few years. Not using it loses it, as the saying goes.

What I’m Doing

WHAT I MUST DO:

• Working in an insurance office right now.
• Keeping a home together with a beautiful 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 is getting merged into a single domain, loosely inspired by Johnny.Decimal:

• It consists of 3,842 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 project will eventually send everything to 3 possible places:

1. My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
2. My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
3. The primitives and templates for future projects.

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

1. Items I must re-sort into their corresponding domains.
2. Downloaded content I feel compelled to do something about (e.g., my notes for the essay, photos, PDFs).
3. Links to proper guides on the subject.
4. Commentary on the subject.

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

1. Send grouped inbox items into my clearly marked categories (000-001).
2. Update the old content I’ve already written (021-027).
3. Finish out a few easy pages (100)
4. Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (a->b-d).
5. Add ready-to-go content updates (b).
6. Finalize Trendless Tech easy pages (101-104).
7. Finalize Trendless Tech pages I can visualize (105-119)
8. Finalize Trendless Tech pages that are hard for me to conceive the final product over (125-145)
9. Finalize Trendless Tech pages that are either monstrous hairballs of many things or I have very limited knowledge (150-165)
10. Finish up the Entrepreneurship pages (170)
11. Finish up the Management pages (175)
12. Get the Math pages completed (180)
    • I’m aiming for breadth, not depth. I don’t need to perform combinatorics in my head, but I do need to explain in plain English what the heck each math “thing” is.
    • The trek is along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education.
      1. Basic arithmetic
      2. Algebra
      3. Geometry/trigonometry
      4. Statistics
      5. Calculus
      6. Number theory, with a likely divergence into applied maths and game theory. Along the way, I’ll keep a jargon-resistant dictionary of the big math words.