Bragging Thread, June 2014

I have translated the whole Sequences ebook to Slovak language. Started in December 2013, finished this week.

Not sure how useful it will be, but at this moment I am happy that I succeeded to not give up during the process, when it felt like it will never be ready. It's over 2000 pages!

(The full version is not available for download yet; the first half is here. The rest is translated in Word, but I still need to convert it to ebook formats. If someone would be horribly impatient, I can send them the Word documents now by e-mail.)

I finished my thesis!

I quit my job for one that I'm much less comfortable with, but with more room for long-term improvement.

In your face, risk aversion!

I met an awesome girl who was single that I really liked, and followed the classic steps (1- be attractive; 2- don't be unattractive) correctly, and she liked me too!

I realize this sounds kind of trivial (especially since I've dated several attractive people in the past), but the reason it seems like an accomplishment worth bragging about was that I have never previously had a self-conception as an attractive person. I could always explain why others chose to date/sleep with me without needing to believe that I was actually attractive. But I have worked for several years on increasing my attractiveness (gym, social confidence, body language, posture, conversation skills, haircuts) and I am now starting to believe it, a little bit. Also I'm older, that probably helps too.

I am about to start a well-paying internship in the industry I am passionate about (space), which I am told will turn into a full-time job offer after I graduate (assuming all goes well).

This is exciting for me not just because it's exactly what I wanted to be doing this summer, but because it feels like all the long-term goals and shorter-term course corrections I have made in college have finally culminated and paid off, and I was able to "do it all" without sacrificing much. I came into college wanting to improve my social skills, and ended up leading a fraternity. I wanted to make friends, and have a few core groups that I would trust with anything. I wanted to succeed academically, and will (likely - still have one more year but am well on track) be graduating with honors. I wanted to grow my engineering skills, and have taken leadership in a design team that builds racecars. I wanted to have a career at the end of it all, and now it looks like I'll get it. It feels like I'm winning, and not just on paper but in real life.

On one hand, I don't fully feel comfortable parading this around since I can't take credit for what oftentimes feels like sheer luck and sometimes unfair innate advantages -- my status as an intelligent white cis American male, for example, means I don't have a lot of baggage to carry. On the other hand, this is the bragging thread, so screw it - I'm awesome, and I fully intend to use this to springboard myself to even more levels of awesomeness.

I lost 10 pounds in the last 30 days, and I would like to credit part of that to the LW community for introducing me to Beeminder.

I finished a Machine Learning Course by Andrew Ng!

WOOOH ME! AND COURSERA!!

Edit: I changed my mind. My awesomest achievement of the month is endless conversations and a kiss from a poly connection who thinks deeply and plays DDR and mini-golf and reads fascinating books and makes art. I'm high on hedons right now.

I turned in the first draft of my debut novel to my publisher. Now I get to relax for a few weeks before the real work starts.

I have an anxiety disorder, and I managed to get through a very stressful few weeks (work deadline, family difficulties, a minor injury, a moth infestation and a difficult accountancy exam), without my anxiety causing too much trouble. A couple of weeks ago I felt paralysed with anxiety, and I forced myself to have a rest and to do some mindfulness exercises. I did the same the next day and I started to feel less anxious gradually. I completed the work deadlines and I'm pretty sure I passed the exam as well.

EDIT: This is particularly significant, since my anxiety has certainly improved a lot over the last couple of years. However, I was worried that it would become severe again in a stressful situation. I'm glad that it hasn't!

I learned enough HTML/CSS/JS to make a basic website and a few interactive apps, and also found a ton of cool resources on learning more CS stuff.

My second article was accepted to a major journal. (Impact factor in the 1.7-2.0 range).

I squatted 400 lbs at a bodyweight of 154 lbs!

I've been doing squats for around 7 months now, and been lifting seriously for slightly over a year total.

In Dec of 2012 I was overweight and out of shape due largely to a job which required spending most of the day sitting in front of a desk and not moving. At New Years I resolved to start running and get to 30 miles a week.

After almost a year and a half of work on the first week of June, I ran 35 miles including running to and from work for 4 days of the week and running 13 miles in one long run over the weekend

This isn't strictly speaking "this month", but more "since the last time this thread was around", perhaps three or four months. (ETA: actually, the last such I took part in was October '13.)

Built a 3D printer from a kit. Learnt enough G-Code and OpenScad to be dangerous. Designed a few parts of my own, including some that replaced original parts.

Lost about 6 kilos from my max weight. Anecdotally, what seems to have worked in my case was eating lots more vegs, liberal amounts of meat, and about half my previous quantity of carbs. Also increased exercise a fair bit, incorporating a lot more walking (to or near the oft recommended 10K steps a day) in addition to a weekly run (typically 10K). One of my major objectives was to not feel like I'd gone on a diet, but instead to rewire my preferences so that eating whatever I enjoyed would lead to weight loss. I worked quite a bit on identifying and removing the trivial inconveniences that were keeping me from enjoying vegs and salad more often.

Switched banks. Sounds easy when you write it like this but it's an insane amount of hassle.

I quit my job almost a year ago, spent most of the time on low-stress skill development and relaxation, and will shortly be starting a much-better-paying, much-lower-stress job.

I met up with a friend I hadn't seen since high school. I learned on Facebook that she likes to go to karaoke night at a local bar, and I arranged to meet her (and her husband) there and we sang a few songs. (As is my custom, I didn't drink any alcohol.) The music was extremely loud so it was hard to have conversations.

I had a pretty good time and it was a nice change from wasting time on the Internet every day.

I've systematized enough of my business, and trained people to run those systems, that I can now dedicate the first half of my day to learning about cognitive science, psychology, rationality and other related topics. Just started studying this week!

I successfully brewed not just technically-drinkable but actually nice mead ("show mead" - just honey and yeast) in a couple of months, all by myself. And another one by myself and the loved one (rose mead). I've also been blogging on the loved one's mead blog.

I spent the last two months in the valley away from my team and close ones. Pitched my startup to several investors big and small. I had to learn the game and the local culture on the fly. I went through insane ups and downs while keeping it together (mostly).

In the end I returned with signed a term sheet with one of the biggest funds in the valley for about 2.5x the amount I was looking for. This quadruples the value of our shares from our last round in September. Assuming term sheet converts to money in the bank, me and my team will be moving to the bay in the next 6 months with enough backing to take a proper shot at building a huge company. And now, to actually get some work done :)

At work, I launched the project that I've been working on for the last two years, which deleted over 100,000 lines of unmaintained legacy code and I got promoted for doing so.

I publish my first app on google play today. It's a meditation app. It measures how long before you become distracted in your meditation practice. It's free. [ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.minoritygames.tapmeditation ]

I learned some Ruby on Rails, enough to create a website for me and my family. This gave me a good excuse to finally start writing a blog.

On the blog, I've written up some research I've done recently on fatty acids, and also some thoughts on morality. Let me know what you think!

I received negative 111 (-111) karma in my first 5 hours of posting on lesswrong. it looks like i've set myself up to learn a lot here.

> this is a quoted text.

This is a [hyperlink](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink).

I have been able to communicate with the people whose decisions control my life for 5 years in a non agonistic, functional, subtle, mediated manner, despite in the past being very rough with similar institutions.

I've met so many freaking awesome people that I am having to allocate time for new friendships in the future, since I can't fit them in now, with all the dating and world-scale projects, and dancing that are taking most of my time.

I think by now I have succeded in causing people to call me "giego" instead of diego, which took a lot of effort.

I have recreated the Tuesday Dinner tradition I used to have for ten years in Brazil.

I think I have helped fewer people in fewer occasions last month than I normally do, which is a bad thing, but I have accepted that that has only happened because moving 11 thousand miles is really freaking hard and I had underestimated how many different things could go wrong, so I'm not feeling bad about it.

Finally dedicated several back-to-back evenings to set up tools and other preliminaries that were keeping me from getting started on a project. (Sorry, no details on the project yet...)

Also spent significant chunks of time on trying to solve some repeatedly-pushed-back problems (e.g. an intermittently failing hard drive).

Result: Lots of progress and a much better sense of what to do next (aka, what to do this week)

I moved to a prettier neighborhood with a roommate who is much nicer than the jerk I lived the past 14 months with.

Finally decided to enter a Kaggle contest. Apparently my bits and pieces of self-taught stats paired with good intuition is enough for (currently) position 14 out of 81 participants.

I have completed and published the 10th scene of my web serial, Watchmirror. I completed a poster for my room in a new style, and did some art for that same web serial.

I lost 10 pounds in the last 30 days, and I'd like to thank LW for introducing me to Beeminder.