Coconut Report 19

status

Utah, US

The Economist this week has excellent writings. The two articles about Amazon gave critical and reasonable opinions, sharp as usual. Highly recommend.

  • The genius of Amazon
  • Amazon: And on the second day…

I started collecting classic posts on hacking, OS, and file system, such as, the Linux documentary, Unix story, GNU, etc. I realized that there is still so much to learn. As a result, I went back to study Computer Science on Youtube. More importantly, I learned to be patient with my baby steps practicing.

I wrote more code this week, practice in Python and Rust, and I expect to write another bot tool for rib sourcing – to build the hacker mind by doing real stuff.

This week, my partner and I began to take videos while we were cooking. We have 3 draft videos so far, and we had fun!

Emotions, like the stocks market, go up and down often. Short-term movements in stocks are a sign of market sentiment, as emotions express our concerns. Following the long-term value is easy said than done. We human beings are easily distracted by things in front of us.

Built

  • Notes on Linux and command line
  • Drew coconut & cocobutt
  • Took 3 cooking videos
  • Coo English
    • Notes of Edison (4)
    • Amazon story from The Economist
  • Another draft post for the rib

Things learned

Readings

Memory is far more important than people tend to think: It plays a role in nearly every part of cognition, including problem-solving, creative work, and meta-cognition. The flip side is that memory systems themselves want to grow into other types of tools – tools for reading, tools for problem-solving, tools for creating, tools for attention management. That said, we don’t yet know what memory systems want to be. To reiterate: memory systems are in their infancy.

Develop a mental model of how it works.

Pick a small feature to change or add.

Make, test, debug, and document your change.

Now, ask yourself: do I understand this entire program?

Note: you should specifically not try to read the entire program. You will just exhaust and frustrate yourself if you do that. Instead, use the module structure of the code to zero in on just the part you need to understand.

Along the way, you will learn things about how the whole program fits together.

To train yourself, start small. If possible, first do the incremental-hacking cycle as an exercise on very small programs or scripts, 10-50 lines. When you master that level, go to the order of magnitude, 1000-5000 lines.

Once your design sense (your equivalent of musical ear) is activated, you’ll often find that you start refactoring each program you work on as rapidly as the third or fourth time around the incremental-hacking cycle.

Fun