nishparadox

Every year, I come back to "On The Shortness of Life" by Seneca to ground myself to the fact that life keeps on happening and I have to remind myself that life is long enough if I think about it...

I have a custom repo which my .config folder will have symlinks to. It gets synced to remote git (~GITHUB). For new devices, I use stow[0] to create symlinks...

[0] - http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/

This made me nostalgic. Back in the school days, I used to write all sorts of QBASIC programs: creating quizzes, basic animation, solving math equations, etc...

Few years back I was a co-founder and director of tech and research. We were not doing well. I was personally struggling financially not just at startup level but also at my person/family level. For 8 months nobody (co-founders) took any salaries. Because of personal financial struggles, I was drowning in a mild debt (asking money from friends) to even sustain everyday life. After a year, due to some internal politics (which I absolutely hate on any organization and given my more "nice guy" personality, I couldn't bare), I decided to quit. I quit without any second thoughts. I remember giving resignation without anyone anticipating it. I didn't have any plans. After quitting, I asked for some compensations which lasted me for only 2 months. It was hard for me and my family (you know how Asian parents are). Out of nowhere, I decided to pursue grad school. So started GRE+TOEFL. Gave it. That was 2 years back. I am still in "going to grad school" phase for my Master's. Let's see how it goes in next 2 months.

However, out of nowhere during the end of 2019 I was approached by a startup here which works in Document AI space. I am the only senior. I am juggling through research + engineering ML. But in some ways, I didn't anticipate that I would be enjoying so much here. But still, imposter syndrome hits hard often.

If I hadn't quit my initial startup plan, I don't know what might have happened to my research and career. I might have been more miserable.

:) ---

This resonates with me. I also learnt the hard way to simply close all the tabs and then re-assess history if I really want to access the tab. On that note: sometimes I also just use OneTab [0] if my tabs are important but are hogging the system's performance.

[0] - https://www.one-tab.com/

The title hits home, strongly... I have rarely used emojis (let alone I don't have any social media profile, plus only conversate through mails with few people). One thing I realized is the use of emojis from the other side evokes a sense of "I don't want to see emojis...". I don't know why, but I just feel that emojis kinda make me feel that the conversation isn't "deep"; it doesn't convey the actual emotions... In hindsight, I also feel a few-word replies are often disengaging. Probably it's just me. But it's been years I haven't used emojis. I don't even have the urge to use it or see it.

On the contrary, I do believe that using emojis in certain contexts are better. For instance, when you are euphoric and someone sends you a "happy-like" emoji, it makes you feel more "connected".

I guess, it's just me...

It has its own hiccups. If this addon fails, I simply close the site and try to find alternative sources.

I've been using this for the past few months: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

It's working fine on FT.

I exactly had the same thought few weeks back on Twitter. Since I have ditched the whole 'social media bubble' for my mental health, it seems sometimes I wish there was some sort of HN-like aggregator for Tweets from my favorite topics and people.

This is neat. Over Docsumo [0] we have a combination of ML plus NLP+Computer Vision algorithms to detect the tables:

[0] - https://docsumo.com/free-tools/extract-tables-from-pdf-image...

I've been using delta: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

It can be easily set up...

One of my favorite custom bash function is to use up() function to abstract away all the cd ../../../ command.

Up 3 will put me 3 directories behind the current one.

I recently bought a new dynamic mic. And it has absolutely changed the way I do WFH. No more crappy noises. No more background sounds. In fact, I believe that having a good microphone is a good initiative to seriously start a better workflow for WFH.

As someone who tends to walk a lot (often, alone), most of the ideas I get (and solutions for problems) come up while walking. That's why I like to say "walking is thinking".

Exactly. I started one newsletter a year back...I felt quite relieved writing in public [0], especially when I quit all other social media. So, I just write for my own knowledge reinforcement. There will be times when I had to force myself to write. Eventually, I took a break (and still on a long hiatus).

---

[0] - https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public/

Grant has been one of the inspirations since my early BE days (that was years ago). I got so much inspired from manim that I tried to make my own animation tool, panim [0] where I implemented mathematical concepts I understood. Nowadays, whenever I am in a rut, I jump back to panim and try to jot down my ideas into code.

(Say, "panim" name might be a gimmick?)

--- [0] - https://github.com/NISH1001/panim

One of the best things about fraidycat is the video essay. brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI

This is neat. Over Docsumo, I've had fun to build one of the pipelines [0] to extract tables from any kinds of documents. Our older pipelines use image-processing-based approaches. However, they had too much assumptions in them (for instance, header texts, column types, etc).

Now, we've moved onto to ML-based approach to train generic models that can be applied to variety of documents for table structure recognition.

[0] - https://docsumo.com/free-tools/extract-tables-from-pdf-image...

This same exact thought has been bugging me for a long time. Over our startup (~30ish people), we've experimented on writing on confluence, didn't work. We've tried setting up the knowledge repo [0], it didn't scale much (probably because of our infrastructure). Currently we're dumping everything to tara.ai.

What I have found is, it just hasn't worked so far in terms of discoverability and search. So far, GitLab wikis have been seamless. Archival is fine with them, but search and knowledge re-assessment has been not so easy. My ideal solution (of course, haven't done so far in our company) is to have Knowledge management system similar to Roam/Obsidian/Logseq/Athens/TiddlyWiki. But we haven't figured out any mechanisms to host Obsidian. I've been personally putting the knowledge to Roam/Obsidian graphs. Even if we figured out to host, probably team collaboration would be pain in the ass.

So far, we're dumping everything to tara.ai and GitLab wikis, hoping that someday we might be able to index these data and then combine everything for search.

This also has been a topic with few of my friends for a long time now. Knowledge management at startup/corporate level is fragmented it seems. If we had tools to self-host networked-thoughts, it'd be great.

[0] - https://github.com/airbnb/knowledge-repo

Having tried running the whole stack on my local a few times in the past -- which didn't work well at that time -- I'm excited to use it now.

One question I have is: how much compatible will it be eventually with other tools like Roam/Obsidian/Logseq (when we want to import the graphs)?

This post resonated me so well...

It's been more than a year since I quit Twitter and the likes. I can't stress enough how good it feels to not have constant stream of mental hazard. I decided to rely on my whim to collect information using my own filter bubble (something I like to term as "information mindfulness"). I feel: as digital platforms are growing and evolving, with everyone inside the echo chambers [0], it's better to practice this "information mindfulness".

I am sure it depends on your own usecase for social media like Twitter; how you're going to sink in the platform. For me it didn't work. I hit my mental limit (finally after a long time).

[0] - At this stage, almost everything feels like an echo chamber.

This is the first thing in my config, whenever I try to setup in a new system. Now "kj" and ":w" has become more like a muscle memory, even when I am just staring at the abyss...

I see a reflection of myself in this story...

Hey, our startup recently moved to tara because we couldn't afford jira. Thanks for this tool. We've been using it for a month or two now and the task management seems to be doing fine. Not that we are that much managed, but still tara seems to be a good (and of course, free) alternative to get the things done.

Ditto.

This reminds me of write-up by Morgan Housel: long-term knowledge vs expiring knowledge[0]. To optimize that trade-off, I generally try to review, on a weekly basis, what I consume from the internet-verse. This has helped me in some ways. Not sure if it's gonna work or not for other people... Plus, moving the scale towards consuming long-forms is also helping me out. (I guess it depends on what type of bubble you are wrapping yourself into. For instance, only visiting specific sub-reddit and LW topics intentionally has been advantageous to me...)...

[0] - https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowle...

I use getpocket for saving and reading later. And roam for knoweldge management.

Glad to see vimium been mentioned. I've been a fan of vimium for a long time as it fits perfectly with my setup of i3 + vim.

Hey. I've been using the commenter for a month now. Thanks for such a handy extension. I use it on daily basis... Appreciate it.

This archive is gem. Thanks for sharing. I have been a long-time "walking" preferer. I'd say I walk to most of the place in the city I am living in...

Side Note on [2]: "slatestarcodex for now is deleted due to privacy issues with NYT and Scott...