2022 TIL
Today I Learned...
May 23
Bikeshedding is spending a disproportionate amount of time on something trivial or low impact. Can happen on a PR, in a meeting, etc. If you are the owner of the meeting or the domain, just make a decision. If you are not, appeal to the owner to do so so we don't waste valuable time.
April 17
- Digital Ocean: What is High Availability? Also floating IPs, HAProxy (High Availability Proxy), load balancers, load balancer clusters, redundancy
March 9
No Idea: Glue work https://noidea.dog/#/glue/
February 18
- Organic Search
- Hydration in context of data
February 11
January 26
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
- From "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan (Dune by Frank Herbert)
January 24
I am not a country music fan so much as I am a huge fan of storytelling and craft. Pop music, R&B and hip-hop are all about the producer. Country music, Americana and folk music are about the songwriter. I like that. What I don't like is how the genre has been divorced from its multiethnic roots to become what it mostly is today: a cultural playground for white identity politics dressed up as innocuous middlebrow culture. But a new wave of Black artists, queer artists, Native American artists and Hispanic artists are challenging country's music's latent politics in a big way.
- Tressie McMillan Cottom, We're all experts now. And that's not a good thing.
- Line Goes Up -- The Problem with NFTs
- Blockchain and cryptocurrency rose in popularity in 2012 as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. Deep distrust in central banking. But decentralization --- or really, centralizing power to machines without any real backdoor contingencies other than "kill switches" owned by a select few tech bros --- isn't a better solution.
- NFTs are a means of increasing the pool of players in cryptocurrency
- Cryptocurrency favors early adopters and those with the means to amass great computing power, thereby increasing inequity rather than fixing it. "It's a battle between the top 5% and the top 1%." Unfortunately middle class folks are also getting sucked into it. It acts as a scam, arguably a pyramid scheme.
- There is a cult-like, in-group/out-group culture with language to signal where you fit. A lot of the folks ingrained with the online culture are racist, misogynist, etc.
January 14
January 10
January 9
January 7
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Are we ambivalent about being free? We say we want freedom but then we don't have any "gravity."
We can only focus for 90 minutes at most at a time.
Focusing has tradeoffs of being blind to the rest of the world.
Ultimately, where do we want our attention to go?