Matt's Roof Garden

December 19th, 2021

Been thinking a lot about causality and the roadblocks we put in our own way. Also watching Video/Movie/Tenet has made my brain kind of fuzzy

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I knew someone on here would relate, wild that you're thinking through some of the same things 😆

I'm becoming more aware of just how much of life takes practice. Not just mechanical or concrete things (running, performing) but the intangibles practicing how to be a good sibling, how to be kind to yourself, how to unlearn a bad habit, how to make the right friends. So many more parts of ourselves to flex and stretch and strengthen than those we’re taught in anatomy lessons

I actually agree with you about being intentional and conscious about the shaping of our identity. If we're not then we're shaped by whatever is presented to us (physically & digitally) and that passivity can be a breeding ground for unhappiness.

I think what I'm saying is more about working to remove value judgment from my actions. I had inadvertently created a cycle of shame around a positive action. (I am and want to be a person who cooks. If I do not cook I am not a person who cook. That makes me not who I want to be.). If being hard on myself was a good tactic it would have worked already and I'd be the most perfect version of myself

Even the things that felt second nature in the Before Times, like commuting or working in an office, could stir up some discomfort after an entire year without practice. ... It’s important to make sure any goals we set for ourselves takes this into account, and that we treat them as aspirational rather than prescriptive.

no one tells you how much of life takes practice. not just writing, painting, running, singing, etc, but practicing how to make friends. how to make the right ones. getting practiced at how to be a good friend, a good sibling, a good person. practice identifying when people haven’t earned that. learning to recognize your right to rage and, eventually, how to offer mercy. so much of life is muscle memory, and i’ve begun to realize there are so many more parts of ourselves to flex and stretch and strengthen than those we’re taught in anatomy lessons

Twitter thread by Mikael Brockman: so I have this e-ink display connected to a Raspberry Pi and I'm bottom-up building a Lisp system that draws on it... and I'm getting the sense that what it really yearns to become is a computer interface that's thoroughly steeped in typography and typesetting 🧵

it's like you have a Kindle already and it's just a straight-up isomorphism of print books but with more awful typography because of economic rationality e-ink with a general-purpose computer should mean you make the computer feel like a dynamic print medium *

look at this page from the 1981 Knuth and Plass paper on how TeX does paragraph layout

Donald Knuth was in the process of writing the most revered and incredible computer science book series of all time when he noticed that computer typesetting didn't really exist so he took a 10 year sabbatical to invent TeX which is still the lingua franca for academic publishing

so yes of course he has done a detailed study of the typographic traditions and inventions of polyglot bibles in early modernity, that's just what a computer science professor does, right? and people gush about Steve Jobs taking a college course in calligraphy

Have you seen his Things a computer scientist rarely talks about? *

December 19th, 2021