Notes from 4/3–10/3/19

Now this was one heck of a long week! Slow news week too, doesn’t seem to have much happening… other than the ongoing Trump investigations.

Stop asking ‘how are you?’ Harvard researchers say this is what successful people do when making small talk

Open your eyes before you open your mouth. Find something to focus on in your surroundings, like the piece of art on the wall, a quirky gadget or family picture on their desk, a race car helmet, scattered coins from various countries and so on.

Be aware

If the conversation is already flowing, it will be easier than you think and ask follow-up questions. Your boss could be the one to make the first step, “So, tell me what’s going on with [X].” Thanks to the small talk, you’ll already be in sync. You can then pivot to a more meaningful discussion that showcases your knowledge, contribution and confidence.

But this seems to be the real goal. Not sure if it’s wise to weaponise small talk. Personally I’m just curious at how people’s lives are going. I don’t think one’s life can be considered small (afterall it’s their entire world to them) and if we happen to have similar interests, the conversation would move.

Blockchain-Ethereum

The Timeline to Ethereum

I think… this is an attempt at historicity and how Ethereum is the natural succesor to the internet/digital movement. Bold stance to take

ConsenSys Monthly Report — February 2019

It’s pretty insane how Consensys essentially dominates the entire Ethereum platform.

Data Science

OpenAI GPT-2: Understanding Language Generation through Visualization

BERT was pre-trained using masked language modeling, which is more of a fill-in-the-blanks exercise: guessing missing (“masked”) words given the words that came before and after. This bidirectional architecture enabled BERT to learn richer representations and ultimately perform better across NLP benchmarks.

I think I’m more interested in this now than GPT-2, typical Singaporean results-orientedness kicking in

But anyway, the article provides a clear way to demonstrate what the model focuses on, namely the earlier words in the prompt, in order to generate the rest of the sentence.

Governance

Why The Public Sector Will Never Support Bug Bounties

Disappointing to here but.. tickles the brain on how bug bounties might be used elsewhere! What if we had some sort of bug reporting program as as student engagement initiative here? You’d be encouraged to fix them/ provide some sort of solution and we could work togethe ron some near misses.

Life Optimisation

How to Streamline every Area of your Life

• Go grocery shopping once a week and plan the entire week’s meals at one go
• Batch process tasks
• PLAN AHEAD
• Have a set of short tasks you can use to fill up spare pockets of time

Weekend ‘catch-up sleep’ is a lie

“When you’re talking about something as complex as metabolism, it’s very much about balance and equilibrium, and when you’re chasing numbers of hours and you’re trying to make them all add up, that’s not about balance,” Grandner said.

Guess I’ll just lie down and die now

Change Your Life by Changing Your Environment

If we break down bad behaviors, we find that they’re guided by certain negative influences.

So the whole goal of this article is to help you identify these influences and negate them. Do this through making it convenient for you to avoid them automatically to form habits.

The Suicide Wave

“Need and struggle,” James wrote, “are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void.” We are never so strong as when we are actively striving — it is actually the arrival and completion of an aim that seem to deplete our psyche and invite ennui. James’ solution? Continual struggle toward worthy ends: “The history of our own race is one long commentary on the cheerfulness that comes with fighting ills.” Don’t read that in an overly narrow way: Your definition of “fighting ills” may be intimate, such as going through addiction recovery or a personal philosophical experiment. Or it may be public, such as engaging in activism, military or civic service, or starting a constructive business.

The determination is yours, but the message is clear: Fighting evil, however you define it, is vivifying. “Life is worth living,” James wrote, “no matter what it brings, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one’s heel set on the tyrant’s throat.” Working to conquer a problem or ill is the most vital part of living.

Ah thank you.

You could, James counseled, take your own life at any time — and that realization itself provides a sense of self-determination: You are not at the mercy of unknowable forces, but you are their final arbiter.

A nod to Absurdism.

A friend of mine was recently depressed when a book he wrote failed to live up to sales expectations. Rather than search for some vaguely Eastern form of “nonattachment” or opt for an amorphous search for inner meaning — which can be especially difficult for Westerners (something I consider in my upcoming book, The Miracle Club) — why not throw yourself anew into effort and striving? Does that sound like a corrupted ethic for forever racing on the gerbil wheel of receding achievement? It is not. I specifically question the hallowed expression “no one on his deathbed wishes he had spent more time at the office.” Actually, I believe some people find a deep-seated sense of purpose not only at the office, depending on their work, but also the studio, stage, martial arts mat, writer’s desk, and so on.

If you fail at something. Try something else.

The absence of respect and appreciation — and the private toll taken at work and at home by bullies, smart-mouths, gossips, and passive-aggressive creeps — can drive you toward desperation. Indeed, the agonies inflicted by cruel or manipulative people represent an unacknowledged psychosocial crisis; I am convinced this is a factor in despair and suicide.

My heartfelt advice: Cut cruel people out of your life, and burn your bridges behind you. Even if you cannot immediately get away from a destructive personality, begin by doing so as an inner principle.

A reminder to myself to be kind. And be careful with my words.

This is your D-Day — deploy all your resources, and command them like a general. “Be not afraid of life,” James concluded in his 1895 essay. “Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

Yes and that’s why the one photo I keep from the London Museum was Montgomery’s handwritten plan for D-Day.

The determination is yours, but the message is clear: Fighting evil, however you define it, is vivifying. “Life is worth living,” James wrote, “no matter what it brings, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one’s heel set on the tyrant’s throat.” Working to conquer a problem or ill is the most vital part of living.