Hey, welcome back! Thanks for reading my average recollection and insights of the last month!
Books
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
I finally read it! I would embarrassingly admit that I was too prudent to read it. I felt this hyped book, I can’t read and saw a ton of people around me reading it. I am more than happy to admit I was wrong. It was worth the time. Mark does have important lessons to share. To quote a few
- Happiness comes from solving problems
- Happiness doesn’t come from no problems.
- Choose better problems
- If we are the hamster on the hedonic treadmill, let’s get our values right to which direction we want to face while running, what speed, tempo to choose. Things we can control.
- So the question, if the suffering is a part of life, what pain or suffering are you willing to go through?
- You can play with the simulation of the end result many times and day dream many times about being an artist – the stage, the audience cheering, but are you willing to live the life of the artist? Willing to be hungry for some nights, willing to crash on friends and families couches, willing to do gigs?
- How being average has become the new standard of failure, how people who are dissatisfied by just being average fall into the victimhood mentality, because then they become special by being the most miserable person in the room, by being at the other extreme end of the bell curve.
- Self-improvement is about choosing better values, better things to give your f*cks (attention) to.
- Beauty of poker is that luck is always involved, it doesn’t dictate the long term results. Not necessarily the people with best cards win, the people who choose to live with consequences of choices made.
- To be caught so much in our own victimhood that we forget to be happy for others.
- Why is travel good for self-development? Because it shows a community can thrive on an entirely different set of values than our own.
- Commitment makes decision making easier and the fear of missing out. If I committed to spend my time with someone, I don’t have to think out missing out on spending it with someone else. It was my choice. The freedom that comes with commitment.
- As alluring it is, entitlement isolates us.
These are just some of notes I highlighted on my Kindle to remember myself and here I am merely re-quoting. And more than 50% of the ideas I am myself on the victimey side, so I am trying to improve myself on those 😀
Programming
In Golang, if you subtract two timestamps and you are getting a negative value even if you subtracted smaller value from bigger value, it’s because they are both in different timezones. And why does it happen that you end up having two different timezones? It’s because time.Now() by default gives local time. You have to format them both in the same timezone. Again for future me, and I have to implement this tomorrow and keep everything in UTC. Also it’s cute how on the official Golang documentation page, the time 15:04 is called Kitchen time : )
I listened to Co-recursive podcast about Eliza, the AI therapy chatbot of 1980’s, was developed in a language called SLIP by Weizenbaum, who he wrote a paper in 1966. Although the LISP implementation of Eliza, also known as the Doctor, became popular. A similar version was implemented in Emacs, also known as doctor. I tried the “AI” Eliza of that era, it’s chatbotish with some context keeping but the sentences seemed to get cut short or are like that only. And they don’t waste character space by adding a question mark 😀
Also loved the SQLite episode podcast on the same show Corecursive with Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite. It has the history of why it was developed, military, the MCDC testing of that reduced the bugs reported to almost zero. Nokia and Blackberry consulting Richard and so did Google for Android. And Richard’s reaction to how Google was debugging Android in real time compared to Nokia’s 30 day production cycle for one update.
Philosophy
The Me vs Us and Us vs Them problem mentioned in one of the episodes of the Good place. When someone is in survival mode, they think about themselves and find it hard to do things for others if it doesn’t benefit them(the me here). This is the first problem humans face, if you don’t have a sense of belonging.
Songs
Another Time by Saco, Adrienne Florence
Take me Home by Saco, Sebastien
Future Books
I picked up 21 Lessons for 21st Century and am listening to When Breath Becomes Air and Michael Schur is on pause. I also resumed Attached for a few lessons coz I needed guidance with some personal problems. I am also planning to pick up one of Brené Brown’s maybe next month or sooner.
Thanks for reading so far!
Peace Out V
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