After #exercisenotesfollow everything's awake and a good kind of sore.
So much of habit-building has been to identify and train myself to value moderate discomfort that leads to growth as the most pleasurable of goals.
Consistent spiritual efforts, healthy food and in proper amounts, minimum sleep quota, regular exercise a few times a weekโall of these involve discomfort and force of will, but all of them enable growth and fulfillment.
I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing 130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later. #educationnotesfollow#programmingnotesfollow
I was talking about this with some alumni students, specifically their experience learning python with us a few years earlier (these are college students who are not really using python any more). What it seems to boil down to is that with python you have the feeling that there is this huge forest of solutions to any problem you are having -- but you will never know the whole forest. BASIC feels like you "know" it after a day or two of playing around, evidently.
I forgot that I was at work and did my big sneeze, not the work sneeze. The one where a startled deer looks straight into the camera, which then zooms out to a flock of pigeons taking off, and a crow makes a warning noise.
Someone dropped something in the adjacent lab. I hope it wasn't my fault.
I laughed at this. I'm all for people crafting their own tools, but it really feels like everyone's reinventing the same handful of wheels for agentic development.
i recently finished hemingways "the old man and the sea". very highly recommend for anybody that wants something short and memorable. left me feeling something between inspired and nihilistic
This strangely reminded me of golden days of Twitter. There was a point I absolutely love Twitter. This is also a reminder for me to pick up a book instead of reading a load of random stuff online.
Thank you!