Bragging Thread, July 2014

I used ideas I learned here to resolve a problem that I've failed at for over 10 years.

I was in an volatile arguement. My base rate of regreting arguements with this person is >90% over my entire adult life. I was really confident, perhaps even arrogant in hindsight. Then I remembered to think of our disagreement as travelers comparing independatly composed maps against a common territory. I proceded to draw a causailty DAG representing my own thinking. He added some nodes and edges I hadn't considered, but made sense after listening to him.

I felt the confidence of my position slipping away in my mind as the murkiness of uncertainty appeared. We could both easily be right, but the deciding information was out of reach for the time being. Our emotional arousal deflated. He felt good, reminded of his career as an engineer using fishbone diagrams.

It was the most pleasant ending I can remember compared to how our intense disagreements of utterly trival matters usually end: anger, bitterness, despondency, regret. I used a thinking tool, and changed minds, including my own, in a way I didn't anticipate. It felt strange, but good.

Not awesome by most cultural standards, but I think this is the only place where a simple story of changing my mind might be worth sharing.

I recently started my career as an effective altruist earning to give by making my first big splash with a $1000 USD unrestricted donation to Givewell last month.

Usually I brag about the great things. This time, I'll brag about the small daily things.

I've spent time every day remembering how cool and nice is the place where I'm living, observing the view, the neighbours and of course, the Spa. I've send thank you notes to two of the world's foremost primatologists. I've made a girl laugh uninterruptedly for the entire extension of a game in which Brazil lost to Holland. And she made me. I hauled a couch for a friend into his apartment. I sponsored the caffeine industry a lot. Told three people how beautiful their hair was. Entertained a young couple passing by SF for an afternoon for no particular reason, only to discover they were high, and would have been equally entertained by a goose or a mosquito for that matter.

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but:

• I asked for a payrise at work!

Finally overcame the mental excuse reel. Manager seemed supportive, but we have yet to see what will come of it.

Edit: formatting

• Became director of a library.

I finally finished a computer program I'm writing for my Master's project. Granted, it's the bare minimum for what I'll call complete, but it's good enough for me to leave it until I finish the paperwork, and just finish if I have time left.

The program is designed to draw differential geometry from the inside. I modified it for raytracing, and produced these two videos:

The camera moves through a wormhole while spinning around

The camera moves in an infinite loop between two wormholes

Man! Last month I posted that I had learned some HTML/CSS/JS and made a really basic website. This month, I learned that I made an A in my CS101 class, am currently making an A in my CS102 class, and picked up a part time internship doing web/mobile (phonegap) development for a startup in my town. I've also started designing a website I want to make, and have built a dev VM with Ruby on Rails built in and configured.

I've got all my financial stuff together to start going back to school full time in the spring, and I'll graduate with my BS Computer Science in Spring 2016.

I've used Pomodoro time management to balance my two partners, full time job, school, internship, and powerlifting.

I also realized that I really should go to a psychiatrist about potentially having bipolar II, as this is a pretty classic hypomanic phase immediately following a depressive phase.

Today I received the prize payment for an alternate-history novel I wrote last year.

I usually take the minutes of the German Pirate Party assemblies. It is non-trivial to transcribe two days of speach alone (and I don't know steno). A better solution is a collaborative editor and multiple people typing while listening to the audio with increasing delay, i.e. one person gets life audio, the next one 20 seconds delay, etc... There is EtherPad, but the web client cannot really handle the 250kB files a full day transcript needs, also two of the persons interested in taking minutes (me included) strongly prefer VIm over a glorified textfield.

Hence: On the 23rd of June I downloaded the VIm source and started implementing collaborative editing. On the 28th and 29th three people used it for hours without major problems (except I initially started the server in a gdb to get a backtrace in case of a crash and the gdb unhelpfully stopped it on the first SIGPIPE - but that was not the fault of my software).

To give you an idea of the complexity of collaborative editing, let me quote Joseph Gentle from http://sharejs.org: "I am an ex Google Wave engineer. Wave took 2 years to write and if we rewrote it today, it would take almost as long to write a second time." It took me 5 days (and I had a full-day meeting on one of them) to deliver >80% of the goodness. Alone.

• Got a gym membership and actually started going, if less often than I'd like(about 1x/week, which is at least not shameful)

• Managed to sit through a week of really annoying training for work without saying anything that'd be likely to land me in trouble with the company. Trust me, this is an accomplishment.

Worked out how the hell to use a fast limiter. Now my home musical productions can be as brick-wall limited and ear-bashing as the stuff I'm trying to imitate!

(Seriously, this is a major advance in getting my stuff usable by others. In technoish dance music, LOUDNESS WARS really aren't optional. This is unfortunate but unavoidable.)

Also discovered the loved one can sing in shouty German very well indeed - and is, after having put up with years of me noodling at this stuff, actually excited by the prospect of singing on top of it. The shouty German version of "Planet Rock" should be an absolute corker. DAC top ten here we come! [citation needed]

I made a heavy metal cover of the final boss' theme from the arcade version of Strider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQBy4X9Jr7g

I've submitted it to the OCRemix webpage so hopefully it will get accepted sometime this... year?

I was also noodling around with Java and made a Bayes Theorem ex jar with neat little slidy-bars.

I've also started a Master's program in Compsci.

I've alrady mentioned this in the open thread, but I would still like to brag a little more about it. If you upvoted me there, don't do it again here.

This is the outline of a conversation that took part no fewer than 14 times on the first Friday of this month, between me and a number of close friends.

"Life is like an RPG. Often, a wise, kind, and and deeply important character (hand gesture to myself) gives a quest item to a lowly, unsuspecting, otherwise plain character (hand gesture to friend). As a result of this, this young character goes on to be a great hero in an important quest.

Now, here with me today, I have a quest item.

For you.

But I can only give it to you if you shake on the following oath; that, once you have finished with this item, when you have taken what you require from it, that then, you too shall find someone for whom this will be of great utility, and pass it along. They must also shake on this oath."

"I will."

Handshake occurs.

"Here is your physical copy of the first 16 and a half chapters of 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality'."

Created a Sound-Cloud account and shared some music I made with my reversible spectrogram program on it. Got feedback from budding musician work colleagues and checked out their music. So I encouraged them and they encouraged me. And I have experience publishing on one of those social network publishing sites. And when I die, something of me will be available for others to see.

I got into Higher School Of Economics (top Russian University) for double degree programme with University of London/London School of Economics.

I got into Higher School Of Economics (top Russian university).

The funny thing is, I feel bad about it, because it feels like it's not something I've done, but my genes and parents having enough money to afford it. #firstworldproblems