# Tuesday, 11/08/2022

## 23:20 Usual day

Godel's completeness theorem this morning, followed by some waffling and
some wandering and some email clearing and some unrelated work. Glad the
wiki is mostly shaping up; occasionally performing some BFS "groom" of
the system is already paying dividends. Learning a lot about my writing,
how to keep it terse and focused and cut and cut and cut until I get to
what really matters.

Still believe that computing and education is one of the biggest
problems to be solved today, but not as big as the energy crisis. What
else is there that can be solved outside of governance?

Not sure where I stand on "cool". Cool is a great way to understand what
people find culturally interesting, and it's this pyramid of obsession
with cool that peaks with characters who make meaningful creative
contributions, but is really held together by those who act as "glue",
showing up to every party and knowing everyone interesting and
connecting them to one another and to people who are ostensibly "less
cool". Chasing cool seems silly for my role, but incidental cool seems
incredibly useful.

Noticing that I usually have a great decision making ability after a few
minutes of insight; my first impression is usually not correct, but
continuing to waffle wastes a ton of time for me without producing any
reasonable insight. The boots I buy really don't matter that much, but I
think I've made the right decision for something sustainable and
repairable going forward that'll fit my look (a bit academic, a bit
Rick, a bit retro; as if I stepped out of Apple's R&D in the 80s but
someone threw Ricks on my feet). Leveraging traditional "educational"
looks with interesting sillhouettes. Still waffling about making
clothing down this path. No graphics though. Or very few. Just make
impulse purchases, rotate them through, and drop them when they don't
fit the wardrobe. Gym will come through soon enough.

Still dreaming about compact function stores and lisp methods of
computing. I'll build these. Window manager as papertian metaphor still
interesting, but definitely have to use browser DOM and run some JS to
render these things. My compromise will be not using React and building
my own thing. Maybe I'll come up with some novel notion of state but
I'll probably reimplement reactive programming somewhere down the line.

In same vein as cool - maybe optimizing for cash is good. Short term
it's great to have more flexibility and choice in life. Long term it
gives you more options, choices and agency. Cost is that you
"compromise" by optimising for arbitrage that makes money without
providing value; fear is that you are capturing far more value than you
are creating for others without working towards some global goal. Lots
of very smart people spend their whole lives working on very noble
projects that don't matter, though - maybe these contributions to the
literature are okay, and who's to say who knows what's worth betting
on - not me.

## 23:44 teaching is social problem

so much of teaching computers is social. most of the teachers i know
when faced with teaching computing are going to ask the people they know
and their friends, and the acquaintance who works at intel is going to
tell them that yeah, I use C, and my buddies all do machine learning
python things, and the teacher is going to take one look at smalltalk or
gtoolkit or "beginner student language" and say fuck, i'll read some
coding bootcamp medium articles and teach my kids how to program with
the C language. hard to express or understand that what is in vogue now
isn't necessarily the best for learning from first principles, and may
not be necessary for learning at all now or forever because tech changes
so so so so fast. can't sell another language or framework or technology
to teachers unless they're particularly inventive or agentic. this is a
social problem reliant on external perceptions of computing; because
people don't understand their computers beyond these programming
language things and hacking and terminals, then also use these complete
apps, they never develop agency for themselves and as such never really
understand what it is to control something they own, and never really
understand what it means to control another comptuer and use computing
with agency. it's vicious!