What I Did
More tedium, more misery.
However, I can say that I’ve successfully wiped out the most terrifying portion of my project: the Unknown-I-Don’t-Know-What-I’ll-Do-With-This pile.
Most notably, I ran across this particular vast repository of information. Parsing it has been a stress test of my current system, and has yielded me quite a bit of learning.
So, I’ll divulge that learning, even if I run the risk of sounding egotistical. I’ll write it in the good faith that you won’t take it that way.
What I Learned
I have a strange obsession with things that are true. For me, parsing information in a way that can be most cogently understood is one of my personal favorite things to do.
However, at the same time, that’s not how our minds fundamentally work. We process information, but have no clear indication about whether something is “right” or “wrong” beyond how we feel about it. While our feelings may have some degree of accuracy, they need constant recalibration through well-articulated beliefs, which come directly from what we understand.
I’ve never been comfortable with that fact, and have therefore made it my priority to state things that are true, but also resonate with feelings.
This hobby has consumed most of my life, but I now believe I have a “box” around everything there is to articulate.
Now, that doesn’t mean I’m actually done with anything, and I technically would never be if I had abided by the standards of over a decade and three months ago when I started into this project.
The trouble with reality is that we have no direct relationship with it. Even if we use extremely intentional and specific language, we simply made an imperfect copy of the information we interpreted. It may be good enough to do things with it, but there’s a tragic philosophical divide between a mind being able to interpret an “automobile” as it really is, versus “automobile” as an interpreted copy. The mind’s copy fades and distorts, while the ideal would be to actually possess the thing itself inside our mind (a bit like computer information, where it won’t break down).
So, the only true value of any information we encode into our minds is through its use, or “utility”.
In other words, I have found peace that I can come to the end of this ceaseless obsession with many aspects of my projects.
At one time, when I started, I had an image of what the end of the project would look like:
- Assemble all my essays that describe how to live, how life works, etc.
- After each essay was done, I’d be able to make quick edits if any new information arose for that essay.
- Eventually, I’d be done with the essays, and the rest would be a little bit of maintenance once in a while until the essays were effectively complete-as-they-could-be.
This entire approach was a hubristic perfectionist theory, grounded in ignorance. A few well-worded questions to Past Me would have shut it down:
- What do you plan to do when you’re just about anywhere and run across a good idea? Is it socially appropriate to edit it on your phone right there in the middle of a conversation?
- Will you have time to edit something on your phone?
- What will you do if one of the many seasons of life incapacitates you for a few months, but your email inbox piles up?
- Can anything truly be “done”? As an example, would you truly be able to capture all the domains of specific survival situations that could exist?
- Have you considered the incremental labor requirements imposed for every single essay added to the collection of what you’ve done? Will you be able to do all of it?
- What’s your scaling plan? You have a high standard of writing, so you can’t outsource it. How would anyone be able to help you?
- You obviously hate advertising, and most people won’t care enough about this to pay you, so do you plan to constantly do this for the rest of your life?
- When will you reach a “stopping” point? Will you ever find happiness in this project?
I was operating under a duty-bound burden of obsession. I may not even have listened to Time Traveler Me if he had come by. I probably would have wondered if my beard would look that cool, then would speculate on the technology involved for bending time enough to travel in it.
So, this is my new, trouble-resistant model, which will (hopefully) work better once I’ve paid down my technical debt:
- Assemble all my essays that describe how to live, how life works, etc. (which are mostly finished and mostly need editing).
- Keep a parallel file system corresponding to those essays.
- When anything comes up, save a note/link/whatever to the parallel system.
- When the parallel file system reaches critical mass (i.e., >10 articles/notes or larger-scale content like a book), drop everything and update that one essay or essay group.
- Drop the content if it’s too severe for what I’d use (like a big book of stuff I already wrote on) or tedious (like deep concepts beyond what I’d ever care to do with for the rest of my life).
All of this is essentially a decompressing from a prior obsession. I desired to parse the truth, and I can happily say I’ve done that for the most part. Now, I have to figure out what to do after I did that.
And, truth be told, I didn’t expect I’d succeed at these projects, so it’s a bit of an existentially confusing problem.
What I’m Doing Now
WHAT I MUST DO:
- Working in an insurance office right now.
- Figuring out life with a beautiful woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix, which currently involves shopping for an RV.
- Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.
MY HOBBY:
Marching through my Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission, loosely guided by a Johnny.Decimal-like system:
- It consists of 12,697 files, each one containing between 1 and 10 elements.
- As I go, each condensation or output will make fewer files, but each re-categorization will likely 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:
- My essays will be updated, most notably NotaGenius and Trendless Tech.
- My toolbox, if it’s potentially useful.
- The primitives and templates for future projects.
Throughout the entire system, I maintain a schema that reflects the content I’m building:
ref# | location | 0 re-sort | a content | b guides | c commentary | d tools |
000 | miscellaneous sidequests | 6 | ||||
001 | someone else’s commonplacing | 132 | ||||
031 | miscellaneous piles | 71 | ||||
050 | my portfolio site edits | 8 | ||||
100 | AdequateLife edits | 193 | ||||
200 | Gained InSite edits | 353 | ||||
300 | TheoLogos edits | 1069 | ||||
400 | NotaGenius edits | 349 | ||||
430+530 | Math | 84 | 52 | 32 | 16 | |
460+610 | Entrepreneurship summarized, in general | 210 | 38 | 61 | 23 | |
460+610 | What it takes to plant a church or start a ministry | 10 | 6 | |||
460+610 | Specific entrepreneurship for the tech industry | 20 | 18 | 59 | 47 | |
470+620 | Management summarized, in general | 240 | 51 | 89 | 25 | |
470+620 | Specific management necessary for running a church | 124 | 23 | 25 | ||
470+620 | Specific management for the tech industry | 37 | 9 | 87 | 3 | |
50-400 | 19 small pages | 49 | ||||
500-600 | Trendless Tech edits | 399 | ||||
502 | Gleaned Axioms | 6 | 1 | |||
510 | Assembly Code | 7 | 5 | 2 | ||
514 | CPU | 11 | 25 | 36 | 10 | |
520 | Anecdotal Language Comparisons | 96 | 200 | 181 | 140 | |
522 | Programming Basics | 32 | 43 | 19 | 3 | |
523 | Programming Features | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | |
524 | Software Design | 9 | 59 | 26 | 41 | 50 |
525 | Software Redesign | 5 | 21 | 27 | 56 | |
526 | Version Control | 4 | 42 | 29 | 51 | |
527 | Software Maintenance | 2 | 2 | 6 | ||
528 | IDE | 3 | 18 | 17 | 30 | |
529 | Technical Documentation | 49 | 7 | 11 | 15 | 111 |
529 | Programming Habits | 16 | 19 | 60 | 4 | |
529 | Game Development | 50 | 16 | 42 | 104 | 88 |
529 | Graphics | 129 | 14 | 40 | 29 | 152 |
529 | AI | 30 | 11 | 98 | 3 | |
529 | Machine Learning | 98 | 60 | 71 | 134 | 394 |
529 | Making Programming Languages | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | |
529 | Compilers | 2 | 1 | 7 | 16 | |
542 | Algorithms | 34 | 81 | 39 | 33 | |
542 | Data Structures | 5 | 17 | 11 | 50 | |
543 | Databases | 37 | 41 | 52 | 55 | 72 |
544 | Data Visualizations (unmade) | 29 | 1 | 3 | 7 | 20 |
551 | Operating Systems | 90 | 15 | 16 | 19 | 41 |
552 | Booting | 3 | 3 | 5 | 5 | |
555 | CLI/Consoles | 24 | 46 | 17 | 52 | |
556 | Unix & Linux | 65 | 90 | 175 | 54 | |
556 | Apple (unmade) | 2 | 5 | 21 | 14 | |
556 | Windows vs. Unix | 5 | 3 | 6 | 4 | |
561 | Networks | 19 | 16 | 18 | 31 | 4 |
562 | Protocols | 18 | 16 | 28 | 112 | |
563 | Web Development | 103 | 7 | 53 | 50 | 260 |
564 | Browsers | 140 | 12 | 35 | 54 | 239 |
564 | Social Networks (ummade) | 25 | 6 | 20 | 72 | 268 |
565 | Blockchain | 17 | 26 | 46 | 38 | |
565 | P2P/Torrent | 92 | 25 | 9 | 13 | 14 |
566 | Distributed Systems | 42 | 14 | 46 | 72 | 48 |
567 | Virtualization | 15 | 54 | 50 | 54 | |
568 | Cloud Systems | 27 | 35 | 30 | 53 | |
572 | Screen | 5 | 19 | 15 | ||
573 | Speakers/Microphone | 2 | 11 | 15 | 89 | |
581 | Hacking | 15 | 3 | 20 | ||
581 | OSINT (unmade) | 15 | 6 | 22 | 4 | 274 |
582 | TL;DR Cybersecurity | 33 | 9 | 7 | 3 | |
583 | App/Host/Data Security | 42 | 16 | 45 | 46 | 86 |
584 | Malware | 2 | 5 | 4 | 11 | |
585 | Social Engineering | 11 | 17 | 21 | 7 | |
586 | PenTesting | 35 | 35 | 76 | 121 | 58 |
587 | Authentication | 6 | 18 | 33 | 63 | |
588 | Encryption | 10 | 36 | 22 | 46 | |
589 | Cybersecurity Compliance | 17 | 15 | 12 | 13 | |
605 | Job-Seeking: Technical Interviewing | 4 | 26 | 7 | 6 | |
700 | EntertainingSpace edits | 36 |
The flow of work represents itself through a unique semi-ordered flow of “phases”:
- Send grouped inbox items into their appropriate categories (001-049->050-700): 201 left.
- Separate out the guides, opinions, and tools for each section (0->a-d): 1,142 left.
- Rebuild my toolbox to conform to all the existing essays.
- Update the old content I’ve already written (050-700).
- Finish out a few easy pages (50-400).
- Add ready-to-go content updates (a).
- Finish the Entrepreneurship pages (460+610).
- Finish the Management pages (470+620).
- Finish the Math pages (430+530).
- Bounce around Trendless Tech for a while (500-605).