2024-04-24 Someone Stole What I Stole

I have a severe love of order. This post defies that order, since I’ve been blasting through things recently and wanted to post about it. I told myself I’d do it twice a month. But, it’s my blog, and nobody says I can’t be sporadic, so here we go.

What I Did

Working through more piles of ish, but I’ve made tremendous strides. Now that I’ve made everything bite-sized, it’s much easier to crush it. 1-100 elements is like opening a bag of random screws from a yard sale, but 1-10 elements is like getting through a randomly selected chip/pretzel bag from those variety packs that curators of small children seem to like getting.

I rebuilt the system a bit to conform to my established numbering schema from before. I’ve had to use WordPress ID numbers on the back-end to keep my pages organized.

Further, I was able to parse the last of my copy-pasted Sivers book summaries. Beautiful ideas contained in them, but they’re literally big piles of Goes-Lots-Of-Places Items, so it’s a type of accomplishment.

What I Learned

I have been flattered recently: my goal-setting page has been plagiarized by Todoist! They took the curated information I made, added a few other components based on what I wrote, and rewrote it as their article.

Now, “plagiarized” may be a strong word here. Ideas have a way of existing as a transcendent domain beyond people, and we summon certain universals that always represent themselves. We do maintain a very effective illusion that we are the masters of those ideas, especially when we create. To that end, all things that weren’t inspired by nature itself are technically intellectual property theft.

So, I stole from others to create what I made, but I have the illusion of “mine-ness” contained in it. These ideas that feel like they’re mine are, in fact, just using me as their vehicle. I would be impeding the path of progress for the information to not send itself beyond me!

But, since information is free, I was able to borrow a system or two from them, so that was legit.

What I’m Doing Now

My Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission is on track, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:

• It consists of 7,457 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
• As I go, each condensation or output 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. Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (0->a-d).
2. Send grouped inbox items into their appropriate categories (000-001->100-86170).
3. Update the old content I’ve already written (100-750).
5. Finish out a few easy pages (800).
6. Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
7. Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (8580).
8. Finish the Management pages (8590).
9. Finish the Math pages (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, traced along a pseudo-path through the route of standard formalized education:
     • Basic arithmetic
     • Algebra
     • Geometry/trigonometry
     • Statistics
     • Calculus
     • 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.
10. Bounce around Trendless Tech for a while (86013-86170).