wanderingmindthoughts

[wanderingmindthoughts]

the "you guys can't do anything" joke is really starting to grate on me.

I do struggle with emails. writing a polite email takes more effort out of me than spitting out code for my lab. you don't get to decide that writing emails is categorically a bottom-of-the-barrel easy task, and therefore struggling with that means that you're useless and skill-less.

like, do I have to point out the ableism of the thing? I feel like a lot of people who are normally mindful about ableism have happily jumped onto this joke to shit on ai generators, but regardless of how justified criticism of generators is, the butt of that joke are still the people who need machines to do stuff for them. the joke only works if you accept that struggling with tasks that abled people consider easy is a pathetic state, a weakness deserving of mockery.

this doesn't meant that generators are fundamental for us (I'm personally doing ok with email templates), but writing superfluous emails is probably the most logical use case for text generators, and if someone notices they struggle with that task, it's neither weird nor pathetic to use them for that.

the better argument would be to point out that things like email templates and automatic replies have existed for decades, are just as good as the emails that generators write, and don't come with nearly the same environmental cost

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I have been reading research on learning to prepare a workshop and it's not only a genuinely fascinating topic to read about, it's also that the more I read the more I realise how inadequate the school system is. the way normative school systems work sometimes comes in direct opposition to how human brains learn, and when it doesn't it is still very inefficient.

you only have to make a quick read on the literature to realise that we (humans, academics) have been aware of how learning works for decades, but schools are doing nothing about it. and I find it extremely telling that people who study to be teachers also aren't taught about any of this. like, there exist "educational research", which is the field that attempts to observe schools, how they work and what is more conducive to better learning, and from the looks of it, all of that research is done as if cognitive science has not spent the last hundred years studying how humans learn.

[wanderingmindthoughts]

Chef’s kiss

[wanderingmindthoughts]

just had the realisation that my boss is nicer to me when I mess up than my mother was during my day-to-day tasks as a teenager. like... none of my bosses has ever yelled at me

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I'm preparing a workshop about how to study to learn better and I fear that I won't be able to properly explain it without getting tangled into the hurdles that the educational system will put in their way

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I understand that rss is not popular because it's kind of techy, requires more active curation than a normal social networking site, and the best uis for a reader that I've seen can at best be described as "clunky".

but I think that a lot of people actually want a rss reader.

"I just want a website that shows the content of the creators that I choose to follow" -> that's an rss reader

"I don't want the website to mess with my timeline. just show me all posts in chronological order" -> rss readers do that. in fact you can choose to see posts in normal chronological order, reverse chronological order, pick to see only unread posts and you can even save interesting posts to read them later

"I don't want to see posts from people I don't follow" -> as far as the reader is concerned, the only creators that exist are those you follow

"I saw a post that looked interesting but then the site updated and now I've lost it!" -> never will happen on a rss reader. it'll keep all the posts on its queue as long as it has space on it left (afterwards it will start discarding the older posts to make room for the new ones)

just give rss readers a go. they're often ugly and require you to be active about managing the creators you follow, but isn't that a good thing after all?

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I have spent so much time, effort and money along my 20s to liberate my self-perception from the logic of mandatory school, but most people still think like that. whenever I mention my highschool experience is like a switch flips and suddenly we're not talking about a person, but about a student, a highschooler. did you get good grades? were teachers happy with you? were you bullied?

despite all of my work and deconstruction, my poor teenage self gets shoved into the logic of mandatory school by the people around me. I left highschool 12 years ago and it still haunts them

highschool years and adolescence are portrayed as this era of your life were you explore who you are, and figure some things out, and meet people, and start thinking about what you want in life because you're looking forwards to the future. and I just can't relate to that experience at all. during my teenage years I was forced into an environment designed to hinder the development of any sort of self-identity that wasn't based on highschool. it was made very clear to me that school came first of all, and that everything I had was conditional on school.

immediately after starting uni I got into a really bad depression that I only climbed out of by dismantling, examining and rebuilding every belief about myself that school enforced into me. so it is only now that I've left all of that behind that I have the time, money and freedom to... have a social life? try things out? do things for fun? I have never felt as much as a teenager than now that I'm pushing 30.

it's hard to talk about the feelings that this realisation is bringing. if my pet dies I have a social reference of how to talk about it, how to bring it up in a conversation. but I don't know how to explain that, even though selling your workforce makes for a shitty and miserable life, working fulltime is the easiest time I've had since I was 12. I don't know what to do when I'm explaining the harm school did to me and everybody stops listening the moment they learn that I wasn't bullied and that my grades were great.

this year I've taken up oil painting. my mother loves my pieces, but every time she praises one of them I can only think about is that I have been yearning to do this for 15 years. I *could* have been doing these lovely paintings for 15 years, but *she* wouldn't allow it because highschool was too important to risk distractions. how I am supposed to talk about THAT?

[wanderingmindthoughts]

highschool years and adolescence are portrayed as this era of your life were you explore who you are, and figure some things out, and meet people, and start thinking about what you want in life because you're looking forwards to the future. and I just can't relate to that experience at all. during my teenage years I was forced into an environment designed to hinder the development of any sort of self-identity that wasn't based on highschool. it was made very clear to me that school came first of all, and that everything I had was conditional on school.

immediately after starting uni I got into a really bad depression that I only climbed out of by dismantling, examining and rebuilding every belief about myself that school enforced into me. so it is only now that I've left all of that behind that I have the time, money and freedom to... have a social life? try things out? do things for fun? I have never felt as much as a teenager than now that I'm pushing 30.

it's hard to talk about the feelings that this realisation is bringing. if my pet dies I have a social reference of how to talk about it, how to bring it up in a conversation. but I don't know how to explain that, even though selling your workforce makes for a shitty and miserable life, working fulltime is the easiest time I've had since I was 12. I don't know what to do when I'm explaining the harm school did to me and everybody stops listening the moment they learn that I wasn't bullied and that my grades were great.

this year I've taken up oil painting. my mother loves my pieces, but every time she praises one of them I can only think about is that I have been yearning to do this for 15 years. I *could* have been doing these lovely paintings for 15 years, but *she* wouldn't allow it because highschool was too important to risk distractions. how I am supposed to talk about THAT?

[wanderingmindthoughts]

now I have a feed rss button on my blog! it's only accesible from the desktop version I'm afraid, but if you want to add my blog to a rss reader all you have to do is right-click on the rss button:

right-click and select the "copy link" option. then you can just paste that link into your preferred rss reader, and it should work! if you do a left-click on the button it'll show you the rss file, so you can also download it if you want.

you can do this with any tumblr blog just by adding "/rss" at the end of their url, tho. I just decided to put that link on a button to remark this functionality and make it explicit to any user

[wanderingmindthoughts]

THEY DO and you can also get rss feeds from just the posts with a particular tag!! I'm gonna slap an rss button on my blogs as soon as I sleep, get to work and then leave work tomorrow

I just added a tumblr blog to my rss reader? so tumblr blogs have an rss feed by default, hidden somewhere??

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I just added a tumblr blog to my rss reader? so tumblr blogs have an rss feed by default, hidden somewhere??

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I think I've finished reorganising my work files! and just in time for my boss to ask me for all my published articles in pdf lol.

there are still some kinks to work out, but that's for next week. organisation systems are living, ongoing projects -like cleaning your house or decorating a room, I'm never going to be "done" organising.

if there's something I must credit tiago forte's book with, is that it's made me think about my life in terms of information flows. I have information sources (email clients, twitter, books, AO3, podcasts, etc) and information "sinks" -not in the sense of information being destroyed, but in the sense that I have discovered that I have "places" where I consume information. the places that I have discovered thus far are:

my RSS reader (I use feedly. please, somebody make a better reader than feedly)

my kindle

the "reader" function in the firefox browser

my logseq

my chosen filesystem

I think that it's obvious why I see an RSS reader and a kindle as information sinks, but it's a little bit less obvious why a notetaking program like logseq or a filesystem "consume" information. it's because I often have little bits of information (tweets, pictures, screenshots of a conversation, a book that I may want to read but can't yet) that I want to keep. like, I don't know if there are people who simply let all of their files live in the downloads folder, but personally, I need to "process" the files in some way in order to do anything useful with them.

usually this simply involves moving them from "downloads" to a different directory, but sometimes I also need to take notes on them (if they are a book, or a fanfic, or an academic paper), or maybe I want to add the new snippet to the existing collection of snippets about a topic, and I may have to string all of them together in some coherent order. so that's why I think my notetaking program and my filesystem are information sinks.

I think that finding my information sources and information sinks in my life can really help me write more and be more creative in general, because a thing I've noticed is that when the information travels fast and smoothly from my sources to my sink, the faster I read it and the easiest it is for me to actually work on it and use this new information in my life.

(and also, I know I'm using very abstract terms, saying things like "processing information" that maybe put the picture of a maganer pleased with how the lines in their graph are all going up. but please, have in mind that the use case that made me realise the importance of having my data sources and sinks well connected was me wanting to leave a nice comment on all the fanfics I read. my "line going up" is "I can post around a dozen nice comments per week now!")

[wanderingmindthoughts]

I don't understand goodreads... the website is okay I guess? but I mostly use the app, and it's abysmal. the ui is terrible and worse, I can barely share anything at all from it. why wouldn't it make it easy to share your own reviews with people from outside the app? I'm starting to think we are lucky to be able to share the books at all.

on the other hand, I've just discovered that in the web version you can get an rss feed for all reviews and status udpates of an user??? that's amazing. I love it, but why is it so hidden, and why is it only on the web version?

[wanderingmindthoughts]

me, a fool: maybe I shouldn't worry so much about keeping each small little file and coping it everywhere. what are the chances I ever look at this anyway?

me, finding two important files in an unassuming directory inside a flashdrive after wasting hour looking for them: lol. lmao.

well guess who's decided to reorganise their research files and can't find the data for a project they worked on less than 6 months ago

[wanderingmindthoughts]

this spree of data wrangling has arrived inspired by that book by tiago forte that I was reading.

Disclaimer: it's been a few months since I touched the book and kindle says that I've only read the first 36% of it. I don't know if I'll continue it, because I think that it has an ungodly amount of foddler that I just can't be bothered to power through, and anyways, it is a self-help book so I have no remorse about taking what I find useful and leave it unfinished. I'm just making it clear that I'm just using a concept that's a small (I hope) part of the book.

the thing is that I've found its PARA organization method very useful for my personal files, and I'm sick of constantly losing or not being able to find all the files related to a paper or project in particular. it's making me think not just about how I organise my files, but how I organise my information in general.

currently, my research files look something like this:

in "Resources" all I'm currently storing are papers that I've cited somewhere, papers that I may use at some point, and papers that I don't yet if they'll be useful because I haven't read them yet

"Studies" is where I put the "working files" for my research -things like spreasheets, logs and result of programs

"Paperwork" is stuff related to my workplace's administration

"Papers" are the papers that I'm writing, or that I've already written

and "jupyter code" is self-explanatory

this structure has worked... kinda poorly for me. the files related to a single paper are spread all over, and I'm not particularly consistent naming files nor directories, so when I want to find a file in particular it can be a fucking pain. in fact I'm dealing with how hard that is right fucking now, as I'm rearranging my filesystem to look more like this:

this filesystem follows the PARA organising method, which stands for Projects, Areas, Resources and Archive. to achieve this, one of the tasks I have to do is move my finished projects from the old "Studies" directory, gather all the text files, code and output files related to each of them, compress them in zip files and then put then into the new "Archive" directory. this way I can declutter my working directory and have only my active projects in there, and at the same time I gain a single place to look into when I need to consult my past projects in the future.

I'm already having trouble finding all related files to a project. I have most of them already zipped, but there's one that's causing me particular trouble. which honestly only proves that I really needed to change my filesystem to something more functional

well guess who's decided to reorganise their research files and can't find the data for a project they worked on less than 6 months ago

[wanderingmindthoughts]

well guess who's decided to reorganise their research files and can't find the data for a project they worked on less than 6 months ago

[wanderingmindthoughts]

"when did we stop considering knowledge as something that enhances your life and started to think of it as just a means to an end" from your first day in mandatory school lol