20220126

2022 01 26

A friend took me to an Asian Supermarket today, which was an incredible experience - in part because I was very hungry when I went! Got a few goodies there on my friend’s recommendation - he’s from China so his he knows whats up. Being there really reminded me that I need to learn how to cook more Asian meals - there’s so many good things that you can make (I truly mean Asian in full generality - many countries with many diverse regions and many with great food).

Still working on my documenting while working - I did ok today putting some of my thoughts and actions into a keynote slide, but I can do much to improve. A good thing I did was to have a thought about wondering if some behviour I was observing in a test would change under different circumstances, and I just tested it instead of leaving it as a thought! Very small and simple, but its part of the greater change in my mental thinking that I want to have as “put up or shut up”.

“Put up or shut up” is a reference to this story from the history of the smalltalk programming language (ctrl-f “put up” to find the primary source) in which Alan Kay claims that he could describe an object oriented programming language on a page in a similar manner that John McCarthy did with Lisp. In response to his claim, others at Xerox PARC said “put up or shut up” - i.e. do as you say. Remarkably he was able to do a version in a few weeks, which snowballed into fellow researcher Dan Ingalls programming an implementation in a few days. These events then led to smalltalk and very influential existence. I think this idea of “put up or shut up” is generically so important to internalize as it will greatly direct your thoughts to be reflected in your actions, which should help you think more critically and clearly (since if you can’t put up, you won’t be saying anything!). So, minor victory today with a put up - got to encourage that behavior to have bigger wins in the future.

Daily Listening Listened to three great House mixes from the YouTuber Slav, which is probably one of the best collections of House music on YouTube. [one, two, three]

Daily Reading The Lathe of Heaven is starting to really advance its philosophical point, although I’m not quite finished with it yet. Mildly curious about the conclusion, but mainly I’m looking forward to getting back to the Mysterious Island. I think I’m just not in the right headspace to appreciate this book fully at the moment. I don’t think it is bad, I just am not vibing with it in the way I was with Jules Verne, and I think its important to seek out those things that you really vibe with as you’ll get more out of them because you care more for them.