PoC - #1 - Thinkering
Ideas and Experiments of this week
Welcome to Pursuit of Curiosity - #1, I intend this to be a weekly bite sized newsletter to share some of my curations on topics that I found exciting. These could be tweets that sparked ideas in my head, conversations I have had this week that have left me thinking, articles I am currently working on and things I am tinkering with.
This week I talk about an article I have written, an idea that sparked in a twitter conversation, a book that I am currently reading and my struggles with getting my website off the ground.
My new website and article
I recently took my website off the ground and published my first article: In God I trust , others quantify. It talks about why I obsess about data and metrics as much as I do. The journey up to this point has been longer than expected. Hopefully now that inertia is conquered , momentum makes it easier. I have a pipeline of articles in various stages of completion and will muster the discipline to complete and publish. Would love to get some feedback on the website, article and this newsletter.
Historical Facts in a Repo
So much of the online shit-storm is about people debating opinions. There are no winners in that game. And it is so hard to keep track of historical facts. History as we know changes by those that write it. So this tweet proposed putting all data ( in this case archaeological) in a github-like repository and then build a narrative using Open AIs GPT-3. ( On a tangent do read this lovely take on what GPT-3 can and can not do by Jonathan Hills ) . This is quite powerful when you think about it. While history by itself is quite interesting, how history itself changes is more interesting. To be able to view historical facts as branches in a repository that have been merged with the m̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ main branch might be fascinating. Just to view the pull requests and discussions of proposed changes alone might make for some amazing reading. Does something like this already exist ? If not, someone should build it.
Book I am currently reading
I am currently reading The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishmi and Fumitake Koga. I am halfway through the book and have been blown by the power of explaining the underlying message as a conversation between a young man and a philosopher. The flow of thought is linear and ideas compound slowly over time. The book talks about the ideas of Alfred Adler, a psychologist who was contemporary of Freud and Jung with very different ideas. He saw purpose and process as fundamental drivers in behaviour. He also proposed that the past doesn't matter and the future is determined only by the present. Fascinating book so far, more about this book and learnings as I finish it over the next couple of weeks.
My thinkering struggles with my website
A pursuit of curiosities is a good summary of my struggles to get my website off the ground. I was trying to do something very specific with Wordpress, I wrangled with it for a while and then started looking at alternatives in frustration. Squarespace felt similar to Wordpress, Webflow felt like an overkill, and was tempted to go down a basic HTML route when I discovered the world of Static Site Generators, Headless CMSs , JAMStack. Then I found Gatsby. A few hours down the line, I was convinced this was the rabbit hole I wanted to go down. Weeks later when I reflect
Was this the best use of my time ? No, I hadn't completed a single article and I was learning something orthogonal
Was this skill that might be useful elsewhere ? Debatable. Really don't see how yet
Did I have fun learning ? You bet ..I did !!
Do I feel proud of what I created ? You bet.. I did !!
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FootNotes & Credits:
Github Image : https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/branching.png
Image in Header : Unsplash