interests, circa 2021

some current areas of interest:

• running
  • barefoot shoes
    • how can i improve my gait?
    • what is the ideal way to work up to running long distances barefoot?
    • how do i walk barefoot?
    • some books i am thinking of reading on this topic:
      • Fixing Your Feet by John Vonhof
      • Born To Run by Christopher McDougall
  • toe-strike running in non-minimalist shoes
• user interfaces
  • see comments about 'post-web'
    • why are we still using smartphones?
    • revisiting native desktop applications
      • i've been messin about with tkinter lately
      • GUIs to wrap useful local applications
• technical areas
  • operating systems
    • how do i write a device driver?
    • how do i write a kernel module?
    • how does the kernel work on different operating systems?
      • linux
      • mac OS
      • windows
      • beOS/haiku
      • plan 9
      • BSD
  • AI/ML
    • what low-power/low-fidelity/low-tech methods are there for doing machine learning?
    • can you train/evaluate a artificial neural network using analog components?
  • post-cloud
    • i do not want google/amazon/microsoft to do things for me
      • music
        • mpd
      • email
        • protonmail
        • self-hosted mail?
      • file hosting/backups
      • photo management
    • one possibility is to migrate from larger catch-all services back to using specific companies to do things, e.g. neocities (which is what i'm using right now!)
  • post-web (synchronicity? someone just wrote about this. 23/08/2020)
    • there are too many web standards and they are too complex
      • as a result, it is almost impossible to create a new web browser
      • it looks like we will eventually only have one web browser that is used by most people (google chrome)
      • i do not think that google should be able to dictate what the web looks like
      • does this mean that we should abandon the web?
    • in a lot of cases, the web no longer works like a web
      • http is designed to access hyperlinked documents
      • but a lot of what we do happens on web apps, which may or may not behave like documents
  • post-free software
    • permissive software licences have failed to protect the rights of developers and the users of software
      • free/open source software is used everywhere behind the scenes, which has arguably made software development cheaper and easier for a lot of people (companies)
      • but most of what most people do on computers nowadays makes use of software platforms (e.g. web apps) that definitely do not grant them freedom
• philosophy of science + engineering
  • just read 'making social science matter' by flyvbjerg
  • what is the difference between hard science and soft science?
    • hard science is more about discovering rules and facts about how a system works
    • soft science is about systematically improving our judgement, its discoveries are context-dependent and oriented towards action
  • is software engineering more like hard science or soft science?
    • i think it's more like soft science
    • it does have some basis in hard science/episteme (maths, CS, EE) and contains a lot of techne (applied knowledge) but there is a form of competence that cannot be expressed in these terms
      • the remaining third kind of knowledge (phronesis) can be recorded in thick case studies
  • it's also interesting to consider the relationship between software engineering and "real" engineering (such as electrical engineering, civil engineering, etc. there is this idea that software engineering is not "real" engineering because it relies less heavily on episteme and techne.
    • i am curious... to what extent do fields in "real" engineering actually live up their own standards? to what extent do they use intuition and experience when making decisions over rigid rules and formalised knowledge? if we use the dreyfus model of skill acquisition (as flyvbjerg does when talking about social science) then "real" engineering at the proficient/expert level is also highly phronetic and probably not that different to software engineering.
    • perhaps a reason for the prevalance of the "software engineering is not real engineering" meme is that the arguments for it mostly concern the kinds of knowledge that people at lower levels of ability focus on, but those distinctions disappear at higher levels!
    • at the top of every discipline, above the clouds... there is just wisdom
• my local environment
  • where should i spend my time?
    • the park
    • cafes
    • pub
    • the climbing gym
    • online?
    • at home
  • how do i meet new people in public?
    • outside, probably
    • friends of friends
• food
  • finding it
    • what is food is produced locally?
      • community-supported agriculture
  • growing
    • vegetables
      • foreign vegetables
      • rare cultivars
      • anything that cannot be found in supermarkets or grocery stores
    • herbs
      • basil (on the windowsill/desk)
        • pesto
    • guerrilla gardening
  • cooking
    • bread
    • omelettes
    • pasta
      • ravioli
      • trofie
      • anything that can be shaped by hand/rolling pin
    • coffee
      • moka pot
      • filter coffee
      • turkish coffee
• memory
  • spaced repetition
    • how do i make better flashcards?