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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from 2024 Year End Review

2021 Year-end review

31 Dec 2021 - 19 Nov 2024
Open in Logseq
    • I have a whole year's worth of Roam/Logseq notes, that's a first. So an experiment, go through my daily logs and pull out some highlights.
    • Took me until Feb 13th, 2022 to get through the whole year. Not really a pleasant task and it's kind of arbitrary what made it in here, lots of things didn't get logged are were too trivial to include.

    • Shows and Films

      • Got a nice new big TV because I figure it's going to be a long time before I get back in a movie theater.
      • Counterpart was excellent, and very few people seem to know about it, so it is my go-to thing to tell people about.
      • Rewatched Twin Peaks and The Wire, not for the first time. Trick to watching Twin Peaks is to skip most of the second half of the second season.
      • Doom Patrol (dumb guilty pleasure), Succession (good even if everybody in it is hateful)
      • Dune (only movie seen in theater this year)
      • White Lotus (eh)
      • Midnight Mass (also eh)
      • Rewatched Barton Fink, Blood Simple, and various other Coen brothers movies
      • Rewatched. The Pianist, The Parallax View, 2001, Sunset Boulevard., Godfather I and II
      • Grand Budapest Hotel (rewatch)
        • Wes Anderson at his most extreme, but it works, and the subtext of advanced civilization falling prey to fascism and brutality gives it a resonance.
      • Jojo Rabbit (I kinda liked it)
      • Fantastic Fungi (great doc with Paul Stamets)
      • The S From Hell (short film about a generation traumatized by a corporate logo)

    • Writing

      • What you see before you. I started this just before the last new year, polished it off in the first few months, and have been adding and tweaking it since. Haven't got the response I hoped for, but then I'm not pushing it very hard and it isn't clear what it's for.. I had thought it might spur some dialog with Rationalism but that didn't happen and it's not clear it would be interesting in any case. I might call it a failure if it had any actual goals.
        • Very little feedback but her is one: [What are the best blogs that is "opposed" to LW? : SneerClub]
        • Also got some appreciation from the guys on the Weird Studies Discord.
      • Not sure where this agency stuff is going; it's too much like philosophy and a particularly boring corner of philosophy (free will vs determinism).
      • I had an opportunity to write something for an audience of academic Freudians on agency that I more or less passed on, but took the opportunity to read a bunch of psychoanalytic stuff.
      • I spent some time arguing with right-wing cranks under an alias. This is a very embarrassing habit but I can't give it up apparently.
      • To find an audience for my flames at Rationalism I did some posting at SneerClub. Not proud of this.

    • Hacking

      • Built out Goddinpotty (renamed from the boring "Static-roam") and this website. Got mistreated by Roam so switched to logseq, which took a lot more energy than I thought it would. Somebody expressed an interest in using it to set up a pretty neat academic anthropology journal site, but that fell through. Lots of little formatting tweaks and adjustments, in particular I hid the hairball diagrams in the left-hand column under an expander, because they were very distracting (and stupid in other ways – if you want to spatialize your knowledge palace, you have to do it in a navigable and stable way).
      • Going through the new book from Hanson and Susman, Software Design for Flexibility.
      • A tool to generate dependency graphs of Clojure code and systems. Not yet packaged for the public, here's a sample:

    • Learning

      • computational vitalism
      • psychoanalysis

    • Ideas

      • Roam linking is a portal gun technology
      • Wrestling with nihilism
      • tulpas
      • Best meme
      • Compositional interfaces
        • That is – we have UI semantics for things like taking an action, or selecting an item from a list, or providing some text for a prompt – this is the standard vocabulary of GUIs. The web has made its own extensions and variants of that. All well and good, but a bit limiting in the scope of things it supports. What if Scratch-like itnerfaces become standard enough that the idea of composing has a standard UI representation?
          • This is I suppose just a slightly different way to think about end-user programming.