Mon
My first day! Feeling a bit nervous but also excited. I really want RC to be a transformative experience and I’m ready to give it my all – I guess aside from that, I just trust the process and let go :meditation:
Tues
(This was a holiday for Election Day. A good break tbh.)
Weds
Omg hi hi uhh…today:
- welcome to the hub
- informal chatting
- pairing workshop (ft. @Jordan )
- creative coding show and tell
- getting stuff together on Zulip (#missing semester , #ARENA , #AI ML Paper Cuts )
Relevant quote from Ms. Bald in AP Chem:
You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.
Thurs
- Note taking: so much fun learning about other people’s note taking tools – thank you for organizing @Michael and thank you @Deb for sharing the anti-notetaking blog post
- AI Safety Intro + Forecasting AI Advancements: thank you for your enthusiasm!! @Changlin
- Presentations: so awesome to see @Cindy ‘s tfw site!
- was getting anxious to start writing code so I’m working on finishing our game of life from pair programming!! @Jordan
excited that the groups I’m helping organize are coming together omg
more on the anxiety about not writing much code yet: I think I’m struggling with a “temporal determinism” in which I predict my future by simply extrapolating my present state (at best, it’s a linear extrapolation with one constant slope defined at my present state; at worst, it’s zero slope, a flat line that says future me will be exactly where I am now). So the implicit thought is “I’m not writing code now. and if I’m not writing code now, that means I’ll never write code in the future.” This method (of predicting the future based on the present) is not bad necessarily, but it’s not fully informed. My certainty about my future reduces, flattens me into an automaton.
The meantime implies waiting, a less important area between two specified times. In the case of dread or, really, any overemphasis on some future point, the meantime also appears empty: With nothing but distance between you and your destination, it may as well have already taken place.
The truth is, I have agency through time, i.e. a non-zero derivative that I control infinitely many times (as many times as there are moments in time). My future is not predetermined by my present – the present is just the initial condition (omg diff eq’s…). I have time, and time brings me freedom. With writing code: there’s a lot of setup (imo, important setup, at least for me) that I wanna do first – I’m not tied to continue down this trajectory forever, it’s just what I’ve chosen to begin. I can’t actually say anything big about my future – beyond the little dt’s that I work with in the present, the future is “filled with possibilities” which is an optimistic way of saying “uncertain.”
“Many love certainty so much more than possibility that they choose despair, itself a form of certainty that the future is notable and known. It is neither.”
It makes me wonder if one meaning of “having time” is to halve time – to make a cut in chronos and hold the past and the future apart as much as hope will allow.
quotes pulled (out of context, lol) from Saving Time by Jenny Odell
Fri
- coffee chat with @Lucy
- pairing on game of life with @Jordan ty :pray:
- Building your Volitional Muscles getting myself together (good clear first projects: simple personal website, simple professional website, simple personal+professional blog)!
- ran into @Alexa omg it was meant to be (papers: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01103, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2205.09991, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.08587)
- coffee chat with @Luisa
- more working on my game of life TUI using ratatui, looking at hashlife algo
yippee