The November Report

While “The November Report” sounds like a government scandal in the 70’s, this blog post is a simple reflection on this past month. There are three main purposes in writing this post: first, to solidify concepts by putting them into writing; two, to organize ideas and goals; and three, for logging purposes (that last sentence sounded so utterly robotic that it wouldn’t be suprising if it turned into binary when pushed to GitHub).

Content Consumed

At the time of writing, below is the list of content that I found most informative this past month.

YouTube

• Liong Ma Maker Portfolio ~ lion mars
  • great motivation to actually do projects instead of think about them
• Answering Your Questions ~ Sebastian Lague
  • you should always strive for concisity and clearness if a good explination is the goal of a video
  • the speed of animations can be adjusted based on various function classes, so don’t just use a constant velocity for things like sliders
  • keep a detailed record of commits for recording purposes
• Coding Adventure: Simulating Fluids ~ Sebastian Lague
  • optimization with spatial maps
  • read papers to supplement code if you are incorperating real dynamics into a simulation
• Running a Mile an Hour ~ Beau Miles
  • humans can accomplish a lot in a day
  • wonderful to set weird, lofty expectations
• What The Key to Happiness Is ~ Veritasium
  • loneliness is harmful for longevity

Audio

• Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology ~ Robert Sapolsky
  • Behavioral Evolution
    • traits are heritable
    • some versions of traits can adapt more easily
    • small mutations can cause large changes
    • A chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg
      • individual selection, kin selection
    • pair bonding vs tournament species…humans in middle
  • Molecular Genetics
    • mutations can alter order from DNA
    • 95% instructions
    • clear up misconception that we share 50% of genes with sibling but 98% with chimp?! Same types of genes with chimp, same variation of type with sib.
    • DNA expression interesting because of environmental triggers/onset instead of specific protein.
    • fertilization about genetics, development about epigenetics
  • so many more awesome and weird details in the course!
• Econtalk: Sapolsky on Determinism, Free Will, and Responsibility
  • There is no free will…where’s the room for it?

ChatGPT Sessions

• Moon’s Orbit Explained
  • Tidal pull
  • Initial velocity from big bang
• Recipes
  • GPT’s new Sous Chef feature is pretty fun
• Strange Loops Logo Design
  • Generative art to design brand logo
• C++ Learning
  • :: operator
  • & vs && vs *
  • constructor, copy constructor, move constructor
  • namespace directives

Text

• The Three Body Problem ~ Liu Cixin
  • Humans live in a 3D context
• Morgan Housel’s Blog
• Sam Altman’s Blog
  • Looking at legitimate cryptocurrency can tell you more about the potential growth
  • Care about what people think over the long term, not short

Conversations

In addition to the content a person consumes from sources out in the ether(net), conversations with people are important in shaping views, learning new things, and developing connections with others through compassion, humor, and companionship. The stuff that I’ve gotten done this month was spurred by a synthesis of content consumed, conversations, and randomness.

Personal Projects: In Progress & Checked

Improvements to be made

• Today, I disabled GitHub copilot for C++ files. I hope to leave this disabled and refer to ChatGPT only for learning purposes in C++, not for code writing.
• Read more man and reference pages. Instead of learning about a function through a nice summarized explination on stack overflow or GPT, I’d like to get better at reading the language that manual pages use. Matthew, who has inspired me to start reading the docs (his blog is linked here) is great at interpreting this type of information. Documentation like cpp reference usually links to other pages (like wikipedia), and so reading this type of infromation can also lead to discoveries of functions or libraries that might be even more suitable for your goal.
• Start to think about projects that could help others, or be turned into products. While it has been interesting to think about forming a life database, and implementing some functionality for it (like pushing new gmails to a database and having the GPT api write a quick summary what it was about) with Google Cloud functions, moving forward, I’d like to focus efforts that could be helpful or profitable or both.

Goals for December

Beginnings are a wonderful thing, whether the first day of a new week, the first bite into a carrot, or the first day in a new place. As the first of December approaches, I’m excited to continue some projects (like Strange Loops), and begin new projects. I don’t yet have a definitive idea of what to explore, and want to think a bit more before I delve into the next project. In the meantime, I hope anybody who reads this, and the general public is drinking in some delicious last sips of November!