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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Honestly, trying not to beat myself up too much is a big part of it. This sounds like a wishy washy answer, but for real, I improved a heckton when I started giving reasonably accurate updates.

    E.g Before: I have arranged to meet with a friend at 4pm. My travel time is 30 but can be variable due to traffic. It takes me 30 mins to get ready. 3:15 rolls round and I still haven’t started getting ready. If I hurried, I might make it in time. I do not do that. I cringe internally and end up indulging more deeply in whatever distraction caused me to overrun. 4pm rolls around and my friend messages to check in. Either I cancel, or I tell a lie and start getting ready, hating myself all the while. My friend is irked at me, and I don’t blame them.

    After: The same as before, but at 3:15, I message my friend to tell them I’ll be half an hour late (I round up to account for being bad at time). I end up being 5 or 10 minutes late nonetheless, but my friend isn’t annoyed, partly because I kept them in the loop about my progress. I still cringe at being late, but I find that over time, I get better at genuinely holding myself accountable, and at estimating time.


  • Sorry to reply to this so late, I procrastinated because unfortunately my answer is that I don’t know of any communities, perhaps because I’m a scientist who loves maths rather than a mathematician.

    However, I will use this opportunity to share some fun stuff from people I like.

    https://youtu.be/H0Ek86IH-3Y by Oliver Lugg on Youtube is great. His channel is very eclectic though, and there isn’t much pure maths. I love his shitposting tone though, and he has a discord community that were pretty mathsy when I was in it.

    A blog-type site that I enjoy is Tai-Danae Bradley’s https://www.math3ma.com/about, largely because I’ve discovered many other cool researchers through her site.

    I also really enjoy Eugenia Cheng’s books, especially as someone who is interested in understanding how to write good scientific communication that is accessible without “dumbing things down”. I recently finished “The Joy of Abstraction”.

    Apologies that this isn’t what you actually were looking for. I share your distaste at Reddit: I have used Reddit occasionally for those niche communities that aren’t available elsewhere (yet!), but the atmosphere is increasingly toxic. I fear that smaller communities that flee are congealing in harder to discover places, like Discord.



  • The thing I’m concerned about is how little non-programmers know. I think that much of the world went “oh, GenZ are digital natives, that means they’ll know their way around computers naturally” when if anything, being “digital natives” is part of the problem. But like my original comment said, I attribute a lot of blame to Microsoft’s impact on IT education.

    I can’t speak much on how much programmers tend to know, because I am a biochemist who started getting into programming when studying bioinformatics, and then I’ve continued dabbling as a hobbyist. I like to joke that I’m a better programmer than the vast majority of biochemists, and that’s concerning, because I’m a mediocre programmer (at best).



  • Reflecting on my IT education in school, it feels like it was mostly learning to use Microsoft Office. Reflecting on it makes me horrified, because I feel like we’re heading for a period where only a select few have tech skills and the skills gap we already see is going to get way worse. That’s what intense lobbying from Microsoft will get you


  • Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines had a patch for it that made it way more stable (and also added back in a bunch of cut content).

    Way back, my partner played Watchdogs at launch and the stuttering was awful, and it was basically unplayable. Some random person made a patch that fixed most of the problems and made the game look closer to what it did at E3.

    Random nerds on the internet are my favourite people









  • I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I’ve just imported get a tag of “new”, which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don’t do it at time of import).

    Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I’m wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I’d have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might’ve known which was which, but if there’s a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I’m quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I’ve been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I’m still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it’s easy to forget why I’m reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I’ve read also.

    Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn’t make it one of my books, ‘taking it home’ and putting it away on my ‘bookshelf’ makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn’t really work and that pruning little and often helps more.