AcademicalNerd @academicalnerd@social.cleverlibre.org
People are more important than wires.
Joined Jan 2021
### 2021-02-11, 08:21, Thursday
Today there will be 5 classes, 1.5 hours each. Most of them will be quite challenging, to say the least, but it's fine. I managed to get some exercise in this morning and do some work, it should be enough.
Random thought that I dug up from old notes: different languages have different traits, and knowing multiple languages creates multiple aspects of your personality. They manifest themselves depending on the language and the way you learned it.
I have two languages in my arsenal: Russian and English. Russian is lengthy, lazy and philosophical, prone to reflection, poetical mood swings and ridiculously long sentences.
English is short and sharp. It is good for practical applications, such as planning and analysis. I use it in all my personal notes, planners and public writing for this reason.
Also, lifehack: if you are spiraling into anxiety attack, rationalizing yourself out of it is way easier if you use different language in your head. I have no idea why, it just works better for me.
2021-02-10, 20:35, Wednesday
A few random quotes from today.
> Deus Ex Coffemachina
-- Max Frei, "Coffee Book"
> I like my mornings nice and slow; it's a foreplay before life gives me a rough time
-- A paraphrasing of some random tiktok I stumbled upon
#quotes
2021-02-10, 07:00, Wednesday
So my schedule this semester is very weird. Wednesday is reserved for elective courses and military cources none of which I attend, and saturday is reserved for scientific research which I basically do every day in my spare time. Sunday is obviously devoid of classes as well.
This presents me with unique opportunity to actually choose a couple days to focus on different things. This is what I came up with so far.
Wednesday: no studying at all. No homework, no revision, just working on lab projects or my own stuff.
Saturday: shabbes, or rather a variation of it. No studying, no lab work, mostly creative writing and things related to my personal projects. A day to spend mostly with my family or friends. It is not a religious ritual, it makes sense so I adopt it.
Sunday: anything but a day off. I'll use it to finish whatever assignments I have left from the week.
Hopefully this makes sense. 'Till next morning~
@FailForward
I would extend this even further: there are a lot of things that get between the reader and the message of the writing. It is author's job to remove as many of these obstacles as possible while keeping the text enjoyable and colorful, fresh and juicy.
These things include, in my humble opinion, but are not limited by:
- *adverbs* (see S. King's "On Writing");
- brackets;
- excessive passive voice;
- complex sentences, as well as too lengthy ones;
- placing the subject too far from a predicate.
2021-02-09, 08:10, Tuesday
Mised things up with my morning routine. Now it's wake up at 6 am, brush teeth, work till 7 am, quick warm-up/wirkout and shower. Then breakfast, coffee and usual stuff. Feels good, we'll see results later on.
I was supposed to have 4 classes today, by this morning 1 left, other teachers cancelled their classes or straight up ignored every email. Neat, huh? At least I have enough time to work on the article.
A question for readers, both occasional and regular: do any of you use gemini? Are you interested in seeing content on that protocol?
#lifestyle #morningroutine #morning #gemini #student #uni
2021-02-08, 20:07, Monday
I guess I'll have to leave the translation work for tomorrow. Otherwise I might burn out, and it's the last thing to do in the beginning of the semester. Really, at any given point burnout is unpleasant. I know that I am extremely prone to it as I love both my major in university and my laboratory work and multiple time has reached the point where it's physically difficult to do pretty much anything other than staring at an empty screen.
And now I'm smarter than this, so here goes a cup of hot chocolate (no cinnamon today, duh; too cold to go shopping) and chill background music. I might even play some tunes on my Jackson if the mood strikes.
@alex
Semantically (correct me if I'm wrong here) self-confidence assumes some credibility underlying the judgement or action, whereas arrogance doesn't.
But the only person who knows if you actually have this underlying knowledge is yourself, right? Could be said in other way: are you called arrogant because you don't know what you were doing or because someone doesn't like your self-confidence. That said, good point.
2021-02-08, 09:28, Monday
Let's make things clear, I am arrogant as hell. Which doesn't mean that I'm not good at things I claim to be good at. Sometimes being humble is harmful, because you can't be a professional unless you consider yourself one. Know when you are good enough at someething to step up and say "I know what I'm doing and here is the right way to make things work".
Be arrogant, be blunt; you might screw up and lose other's trust, but these are the stakes here. They aren't the reason to not do things, they are to be taken into account when making a decision.
This paraphrases "Dr. House", of course. A good thing to consider nonetheless, especially if you are insecure as a person.
2021-02-08, 07:00, Monday
The semester starts today, hooray. Except, two classes are cancelled so I'm left with only two English classes, one of which is supposed to teach me "technical translation". Ironically, I'll be translating an article about the last project for publication during the class itself.
And yes, for now we are studying remotely, I hope is stays this way.
Yesterday we celebrated my colleague's birthday in a restaurant with surprisingly good sushi. Everyone else was freshmen there and I'm in my third year. I remember being way more insecure than they are in my first year and it's been a long and tough ride to who I am now, maybe more tough and longer than I remember. Courtesy of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and, to some extent, J.B. Peterson.
2021-02-07, 08:27, Sunday
Not a standart devblog because the project is almost done, now it's necessary to finish an article and submit it. And I don't really feel like telling about work , so here goes something.
So I visited a stand-up event yesterday. It happened in a small but cozy basement bar where comedians, apparently, test their jokes before telling them to a bigger crowd. Which I never thought existed, but makes a lot of sense. One could call it "a debugging of humor"; here the equivalent of console prompt is a small bar with five tables full and three empty and two barmens sitting on chairs at the counter, cracking at jokes.
Once I approached the bar counter, barmen (26 yo woman, as I found out later) stated:
- Now, tell me.
I resisted the urge to tell her a "long time ago in a galaxy far away", but that would be cliche even by my standards. I haven't tried beer before and in this place they serve exclusively beer and cider. I asked for "something bitter" and wasn't dissapointed. The label is below, the thing even feels "heavy" to drink and almost as smoothingly bitter as coffee. Turns out a nerd likes beer, who knew.
#beer #story #life #student
2021-02-06, 09:00, Saturday
It is very satisfying to see a huge, long-time-in-the-making project come to an end. All the problems are solved, the code compiles and runs perfectly and displays validated output. Feels almost like defeating the strongest boss in a videogame, but without the bitter feeling of "ending", because there is no ending, at least not in my lifetime. Science is too vast to have one.
#stem #programming #life #coffeenotes
2021-02-05, 07:18, Friday
I realised today rhar I need to make a website this weekend if I want to have it up at all. Because studying starts on Monday and there will be no time.
Also, I seem to have overworked myself with the last project. I'll finish the last tasks today and send everything to my advisor, hopefully there will be no follow-ups and I'll be able to focus on making a website. Or a gemini capsule, I'm not quite sure yet.
2021-02-04, 07:04, Thursday
Hab to buy a new bag of coffee. The one I opened recently was a gift and the roast is very dark. Too dark, I should say, there wass nothing but bitterness in my cup.
Anyhow, I rewrote the script yesterday.
###Developer note: separating writing and editing works in programming as well as in creative writing.
I tend to launch or at least build my code very often to see if I broke anything. This at some point starts taking a lot of time, because I have to write small chunks and make them compatible with the rest of the system.
Yesterday I was working from my laptop. Wrote 2 hours worth of matlab code from vim and then debugged it from console (opengl gui breaks on xmonad for some reason).Seems like I tend to be too paranoid when programming.
@FailForward Maybe you'll find "Games People Play" by Eric Berne interesting. It describes disfunctional interactions (usually between two people) as "games" where the roles are chosen or, more often, forced upon one of the participants. It also gives a useful framework, as well as this triangle concept.
@FailForward
A quick question about thew scrapbook: do you keep zettelkasten-type system alongside or is it just a collection of notes now? Personally I couldn't really stick to traditional ztk the last time I tried it. Seemed like a lot of trouble to go through for a set of notes.
@FailForward
Thank you for you advice! It has already proven to be helpful: this morning I had to rewrite the code I referred to in my last post pretty much entirely. Changed variable names and sorted some spaghettiness that accumulated, now it's easier to debug.
2021-02-03, 07:37, Wednesday
So I happen to be a morning person. Which means I usually habe to grind my coffee the day before, because the grinder is loud and wakes up the entire family. This is why I have to resort to tea for today, sadly.
It is very important to differentiate solving a problem from creating a product, or a framework, if you will. When there is a single problem (or a set of similar problems) that require a one-time solution, one can get by using spaghetty code and non-optinal solutions without getting into much trouble.
If the code is to be maintained and expanded, then you are writing a product. Now you shouldn't do spaghetti code or omit documenting. This is not about just you anymore, so minimize your succesors' suffering by putting extra effort into cleaning your code.
This seems obvious but is important to keep in mind. I found myself overoptimizing a peice of code required for one-time use.
@zpartacoos
I am actually reasonably satisfied with this one. It does the job and I don't need that much from it anyway. Maybe I'll make it transparent, but that's pretty much it. I also have dmenu for launching stuff and it's all I need.
Oh well, I finally managed to finish my xmonad config. It is now fully usable. Turns out, it's possible to control sound from haskell without any additional tricks. Neat.
Tiling WMs are my sinful love < 3
I will, of course, spend some time ricing it properly, but this will work for most things. Also, yes, this is xmonad config on pop os instead of the usual arch. Because I'm too lazy to reinstall linux on laptop - there is a plethora of apps and packages and I don't want to deal with this now.
2021-02-02, 06:45, Tuesday
I am slowly getting back to my normal schedule, since uni starts on the 8th in February and it seems like we'll have offline classes. Which sucks, because I'll have to commute up to two hours daily in underground during rush hour. The number of new cases is still quite high in Moscow, so it's concerning. Also, social media in Russia now have to delete everything that contains swearing and a list of things including "encouraging unlawful behaviour" and "irrespecting the government", yes, it is the citation.
#earlymorning #thoughts #Russia
