It feels great to be back typing in my blog! After a March hiatus, due to me and my baby passing sicknesses back and forth, family visits, and being really, really busy (in a fun way) at work, I'm trying to carve back out time to write. It's turning out to be more difficult than I expected. All of the things that have happened in the past month seem to reinforce the consumption habit, leaving my 'productive muscles' atrophied.

I stopped writing while I was midway through a post on my latest progress in learning Emacs. I'm still using it more than ever at work, with every Org mode feature I adopt making Emacs a more essential tool in my workflows. I haven't coded in what feels like months (and probably is, I'm afraid to look), so my next goals are to finish that post, then to find a hobby project to start coding with.

Here's a shortlist of interesting things that I've come across, in these weeks where my focus has shifted so fully over to consumption:

• Re-discovering and elaborating my "moral framework", which has me thinking more about how my squishy brain works and why I should care, inspired by:
  • An incredible Ezra Klein show podcast episode on how "our kids are the least flourishing generation we know of", with social scientist Jonathan Haidt, who writes about the decline of "play-based childhoods" and the compelling topic of moral and amoral social frameworks and how our social media-addicted society has tilted towards the latter, pulling incredible quotes like "it is just bad for teenage girls to be endlessly posting pictures of themselves on the internet for other people to rate" ... "this is a huge failure in parenting culture, this inability to say we have views on what is good and bad, and they don't require 16 years of randomized controlled trials, they're just actually our views on virtue",
  • Sacha Chua's post on conscientiousness and the tools and habits she uses to support her brain (which seems to be quite similar to mine) and grow while being a busy parent,
  • A post on "the average college student today", a cohort who seem to struggle with basic attentive tasks such as reading and writing and attending a full hour-long lecture, and thinking about my college days and how dramatically different they would be if I had LLM's and social media to poison my studies,
• Reminiscing about the great Dotcom Bubble Burst, trying to remember how it looked and felt from my adolescent perspective, and musing on what it might look like for the current tech bubble to burst and how that would impact me. I'm feeling bullish about such a prospect, as I specialize in enterprise digitalization (to boil what I do completely down to its essence), and as long as there are companies that need to mature their critical processes and systems from ad hoc Excel to digital products, I assume my skills will be in high demand.
• Reading Matz - creator of the Ruby language - presenting how Emacs changed his life and informed his mindset when writing the first versions of Ruby, and loving how studying history teaches you that so many things in life turn out to be intersectional (and inspired by context even as seemingly trivial as choice of code editor),
• Speaking of history, reading Ken Shirriff's post on Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos and piecing together the chorded keyset, a piece of hardware that has loomed large in my imagination since I first watched this seminal demo many years ago - oh, the things I imagine I could do with such a peripheral, and with Emacs! 🤤
• And even more history, reading Lars Wirzenius's story about the early days of Linux, and thinking about how many great technologies we owe to the creativity, impetuousness and industriousness of youth.

Reviewing these, it's fun to see a pattern in the content I find interesting enough to log and revisit - history, technology, and society, the exact title of my Bachelor's major!