Update for 7/8/2018

Posted on July 12, 2018 by Andy

Welcome to your Thursday edition of Sunday’s update. I’m going to try to come up with a way to write these quicker.

Life maintenance

😐

I looked at two apartments. One was a little disappointing, and the other was good but a little more expensive than I wanted. On Saturday my plan was to maybe look at another one if it’s available. Possibly I wouldn’t end up moving, especially since I waited kind of late to get started. In that case I’d try again next year and plan things better.

Movies

🤔

Sunday I watched Incredibles 2. I’d heard it was a great movie, and I agree. But half the reason I went was to see the short at the beginning, Bao. Debates like this one about people’s possibly culture-related confusion over it had made me curious how I’d react. It turns out I loved it, and I cried. I also felt that politicizing the story would kind of ruin it. But I probably will read about the cultural issues eventually, because I care about wrapping my mind around that stuff.

Cognitive science

😎

I finished Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. It was a very helpful overview of important ideas in evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind, with lots of references for further research. I used to think evolutionary psychology was way too speculative to be useful, but now I think it’s at least a helpful way to think about designing an AI: When you have to start from scratch, how might you develop an intelligent agent step by step? One difference, though, is that we can make our agent less klugey. In fact, Kluge by Gary Marcus will probably be my next cogsci book.

One issue I’d like to pursue as a branch off of Pinker’s book is the structure of human motivation apart from any evolutionary roots. Pinker stresses the point that even though our genes’ “motivation” is to replicate themselves in our offspring, that’s not the motivation of the minds our genes produce. The genes create a mind that, for example, loves its family members for their own sake and not because they carry similar genes. But most of the book was about tracing human activity back to its evolutionary benefits. I’d like to look at mental computation in terms of the mind’s own motivations.

Video games

😎

A few years ago Nintendo released an emulated version of the original NES system called NES Classic. It sold out really fast, which made everyone mad. Well now they’ve re-released it, and when I got the notification, in a mild panic I jumped on the order button. My order arrived last week, so now I can relive my imaginary childhood in which I had the original console. Like I did with the SNES Classic, I’ve added the included games to my game backlog.

Spirituality

🤔

My online friend Matt recommended I listen to NT Wright’s Simply Christian before Surprised by Hope. It was short, so I did. I thought it was a very good overview of basic Christian thought and practice. Some reviewers have docked it points because it can’t settle on an audience, but I didn’t worry about that because I selfishly only care about what I can get from it. And I found it very thought provoking.

The main ideas I gleaned from it were a set of organizing principles for navigating the Christian life. The main one was to live as points of intersection between heaven and earth. This was the idea behind the Temple and the Incarnation, and now it happens in the church. A second was the image that believers are meant to be penciling sketches for the masterpiece of God’s new creation. This expresses the already-not yet status of God’s kingdom. The last was that all of this is meant to be understood by means of love, rather than mere clinical analysis.

I’m listening to these two Wright books back-to-back, so now I’m on Surprised by Hope.

Music

😎

I’ve continued my YouTube explorations of music theory and composition. One of the highlights was this documentary on Allen Forte, whose book on tonal harmony opened my eyes to the world of serious music theory.

My YouTube wanderings are following my typical pattern where I get interested in something, explore it, feel lost in the swirl of details, and then start mapping the territory. With music I’m nearing the mapping stage. This is good, because enthusiasm and random wandering don’t necessarily amount to learning.

On Monday I foolishly passed up the chance to go to a Jacob Collier concert right here in my area. It started at 6:30, and I found out about it at about 2:30 that day. Somehow there were still tickets available. But I rarely (1) go to concerts, (2) make last minute plans, or (3) impulsively spend $25-$50, and at the time I didn’t know if I cared enough about his music. So I skipped it. I regretted it the very next day seeing photos from the event on Twitter. But he was here last year too, so maybe he’ll be around again.

I set up my LMMS installation so I can easily record my noodling at the keyboard. There’s still a little latency I want to reduce, but even with that I can use this setup to study my musical experiments and improve my performance skills.

Posted in Apartment, Cognitive science, Life maintenance, Movies, Music, Music composition, Music theory, Spirituality, Video games, Weeknotes | 5 Comments

Update for 7/1/2018

Posted on July 5, 2018 by Andy

(Edited to add remarks on the music videos. And to add the Life Model to the list of spiritual streams.)

Death

😕

The week received a surreal and troubling start when I learned on Sunday that one of the first video game YouTubers I watched had died in his sleep the night before. He was 22. His real name was Michael, but online he was known as Random Toon because of his main game, ToonTown Rewritten. The cause of death is unknown.

I’m noticing how death changes your definition of the person who died. Instead of “the guy whose future streams and videos I can take for granted,” Random Toon is now “the guy who will never stream or make another video again.” Instead of “the fun-loving guy with a thriving community of fans,” he’s “the guy who was tragically and mysteriously ripped from life way too early.” But he’s still the guy whose past we can remember fondly. And luckily his videos are still around to help us do that.

One episode that sticks in my mind was a livestream in which he edited one of his upcoming videos. When I’m creating content, I tend to work on my own and consider all the pieces very carefully. Michael threw together random elements, took suggestions from viewers, and molded it all into something that worked. Watching creators who are different from me expands my understanding of the creative process.

Life maintenance

😐

I’m still apartment hunting. Last week I finished the budget, found some apartments, and made Jeremy take me around in his air conditioned car to look at them. But I didn’t go on any tours to look inside. That’s this week’s task.

Spirituality

🤔

In last week’s update I touched on researching my current audiobook categories, and my ideas on the spirituality category were still developing, so I put off talking about them till this week. As I said then, my difficulty is that there isn’t much religious thought I feel able to take seriously. But it turns out there are some streams I do feel are worth following, even if I don’t like everything about them.

One is the spiritual disciplines tradition. These are the ideas and practices that were brought into evangelical awareness by Dallas Willard. They treat spiritual progress as a matter of gradual, persistent, holistic training. A lot of writers have followed in his wake, so there’s plenty more material in this category.

A second is NT Wright. I don’t really want to tie these categories to specific people, but at the moment I don’t know what else to call this category. I think of his theology as revolving around the spiritual exile of Israel and the redemption of the physical universe. I’ll need to explore this stream more to refine my summary of it.

A third is what I’m calling Inkling Christianity. I’d characterize it as an approach to Christian spiritual and intellectual ideas filtered through the British, liturgical, literary, classical lens of CS Lewis and his writer friends. This is where I’d put the Wingfeather Saga, which is the series that got me thinking about these streams.

A third is the Christian Hedonism of John Piper. I have to qualify this one, because I have plenty of reservations about Piper and the neo-Reformed movement. I only care about the ideas around Christian Hedonism, the notion that God is the fulfillment of human life and that joy is therefore part of our duty toward him.

A fourth is the Life Model, a paradigm of spiritual formation based on neuroscience. It’s associated with the Immanuel Prayer ministry I used to be involved with. It largely explores the role of relational connection in coping and growth.

A fifth is Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t know that I’d ever become Orthodox, but I want to mine it for ideas. I have a few print books on it. I haven’t found much in audio.

The last is stream is a genre–biographies. If I can’t deal with lectures on the way God must be, I can at least benefit from the stories of people who tried to devote themselves to him. If they’re authors I’d read, it also gives me a backdrop for understanding their writings.

After finishing How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker for the cognitive science category, my next audiobook will be NT Wright’s Surprised by Hope.

Music

😎

I’ve been watching more music instruction and other related videos, and it’s making life feel strangely magical. Here are some highlights from last week.

Posted in Apartment, Coping, Death, Life maintenance, Music theory, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 6/24/2018

Posted on June 25, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

🙂

I’m around 60% done sorting out the papers I need to finish the last 5% of my budget. It always takes a surprising amount of time to file papers when I have a big pile of them. And the latest folders in my filing cabinet are from 2015, so uh, I guess the piles have been accumulating for a while.

Part of the problem has been that I put off making a new set of folders when the new year rolls around, so the papers have nowhere to go. Well this time I took advantage of my filing state of mind and made folders for 2019, so I’ll be ready when the time comes. I find life is easier when I have refills on hand so when my current container or batch runs out, it’s not an emergency.

After the budget, hopefully this week, I’ll decide on some apartments to look at.

Conceptual modeling

🙂

At long last, I’ve posted version 0.1.0 of my conceptual modeling method. Really I just renamed my existing “Analysis” article and made a few other changes to match the new name.

For the version numbers I’m adapting the semantic versioning approach used in tagging software releases. So this isn’t the real first version. It’s just the first official pre-release version on the road to the first truly usable one. It’s mainly there to record the clumsy method I was already using.

Fiction

🤔

I finished the last Wingfeather book, The Warden and the Wolf King. 5/5. I have mixed feelings about the conclusion, but mostly it was satisfying. My experience with this series has grown my awareness of the power of stories. Despite my somewhat jaded outlook on life lately, somehow these books were in tune with my personal issues and managed to carry me along, pushing and pulling my emotions along the way. Even a significant poem late in this book caught my attention so that I skipped back to catch every line, when normally I would describe my relationship to poetry as barely tolerant.

This series isn’t done working on me, so expect to see it in future updates.

Cognitive science

🙂

After finishing Wingfeather on Saturday, I had another audiobook crisis. I’d decided that since I’m cycling through three categories of book (professional development, spirituality, and fiction), it’d be a good idea to assemble lists of them so I don’t have to think much about the next book in the queue.

It was time for another professional development book, which meant something in the realm of cognitive science, rationality, or futurism. But by now my criteria have become a little stringent. Since I’m still learning the basics in these fields, I want the book to be something fairly standard and well-respected, not too specialized, available in audio, and listenable without excessive concentration. I spent several hours gathering likely candidates and reading reviews. I wanted to reduce my chances of wasting my time on books that were by fringe authors or that were poorly written.

I did come up with a few, and for the next book I settled on Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. It’s a long one, and he hits the ground running, but so far I’ve found it listenable. It helps that we’re in the same theoretical camp. I don’t need to agree with the people I read, because you can learn from both agreement and disagreement, but it’s nice to find a companion like Pinker who can walk me further along a path I was already on.

To extend the reading list past these few, I’ll need to map the territory I’m covering and come up with a list of prominent authors.

Spirituality

🤔

I already have plenty of fiction lined up, but the spirituality category will also need some research. My difficulty here is that there isn’t much Bible interpretation or theology I feel able to take seriously, so lining up books of Bible exposition feels like a setup for frustration and disappointment. That’s not always a bad thing, but I’d rather limit it at the moment.

Having said that, beginning this search has shown me I do have a few avenues to pursue. However, I’m going to wait to share them till next week’s update when I’ve defined them a bit more.

Music

🙂

Now that my liturgical church hunt is basically done, I’ve been back to my home church on a regular basis, and I’ve taken a renewed interest in listening to the improvising techniques of my fellow pianists. Unfortunately I have a bad memory for music, so I can only remember the vague gist of what they did, and that doesn’t help too much when I’m at the keyboard. And recording them from my seat in the congregation only helps when the rest of the band isn’t covering up their sound.

But in the past I’ve run across tutorial videos on YouTube about piano and keyboard improvisation, some of them specifically for worship music. So I’m starting to search for them more systematically to see what new skills I can pick up, without taking too much time away from my other projects. One good channel I’ve found is OurWorshipSound. I also have a couple of books on improvising.

Posted in Books, Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Life maintenance, Music, Spirituality, Weeknotes, Worship performing | Leave a comment

Update for 6/17/2018

Posted on June 19, 2018 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😐

Well, I meant to post some minor updates last week, but they turned out to be trickier than I expected, and then my week was taken up by finances and catch-up naps. So maybe this week. But I’m thinking this project will go slower over the next month because I’ll be getting ready to move.

Life maintenance

😐

My budget is 95% done. The last little bit requires collecting some receipts and bills, so I’m organizing my boxes of papers to find them. That’s putting me in the mood to sort through my other stuff and hopefully end up with fewer boxes to move.

Text-to-speech

😎

Last week I met a new friend. It’s called Voice Dream Reader, and it reads documents to me from my phone. This is a solution I’ve been looking for since before I even had a smartphone. It’s way better than any other text-to-speech app I’ve tried, including the iOS VoiceOver feature. The only problem is that Voice Dream doesn’t read anything with DRM, so my Kindle books are out. But I found out the Kindle app for PC will read them using the Windows screen reading feature. The voice options are limited, and having to fumble with my Surface will be awkward, but I guess it’ll do for now.

Futurism

🤔

Our the topic this month at the futurism meetup was corporations. Apparently corporations started out existing for the public good, and then the Industrial Revolution happened and they became legal persons. Then in the 1970s their goal became to maximize profits for their shareholders. In my semi-informed opinion, the clearest way to rein them in is to reduce their influence over politicians.

Cognitive science

🤔

I finished The Language Instinct. Pinker touched on a lot of topics I can make use of. One of them was Donald Brown’s work on human universals. I suspect some of these universals will make it into my framework for developing conceptual models. I think one of the main reasons Gary Marcus recommends this book is Pinker’s idea of mental modules for processing different kinds of information. It fits the idea of innate machinery for AI that Marcus advocates. I’ve added Pinker’s How the Mind Works to my reading list.

Spirituality

🤔

Someone on Christian radio who I listened to back in my youth (Chuck Swindoll?) said he alternated between reading different categories of books. It might’ve been fiction and non-fiction. I’ve always thought that was a good idea, but it wasn’t until this year that I’ve managed to adopt that kind of rhythm. At the moment I’m cycling through cognitive science/rationality/futurism, spirituality, and fiction. Update: It was my old pastor growing up, and his categories were the same as mine: professional development, spiritual growth, and fun (H/T my dad).

So after Pinker, I listened to Union with Christ by Rankin Wilbourne. Sometimes when I step back and look at the big picture of spirituality, I wonder what its central concept is, what idea leads to all the others and ties them all together so they’re easier to remember and practice. Many moons ago I brought this up with my coworker Matt, and he replied, “Union with Christ.” I’d heard this before, and it seemed like a fair possibility, so I filed it away to investigate. Wilbourne’s book came up for $2 in Amazon’s ebook sale for this month, so I picked it up.

The book is short, and I checked out the audiobook and finished it in about a day. I’d say it’s a good first look at the topic. 4/5. Especially helpful was the chapter on history. I’m always looking for references to explore. Also a couple of practices from the book have stuck with me. One is imagining Jesus as someone who surrounds me, like a character costume at Disney World. The other is mentally reframing my plans and experience in terms of things I’m doing or experiencing with Jesus.

Now, the book was full of Christianese and felt just like listening to a Christian radio show, but I can excuse it because the book was clearly aimed at a typical churchgoing audience and not people like me. When I encounter this kind of language, to get much out of it I have to translate it in my head from metaphor and abstraction into the terms of literal experience. It always takes effort.

The fact that the topic is so central for spirituality and the language is so conventionally evangelical actually makes the book a good candidate for study in my beliefs report. I’ve been looking for a catalog of the principles of Christian living to interact with so I can easily collect my thoughts on the subject. Maybe this is it.

Fiction

🙂

The next audiobook in my new pattern is the last book in the Wingfeather Saga, The Warden and the Wolf King.

Posted in Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Fiction, Futurism, Life maintenance, Spirituality, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 6/10/2018

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Andy

Conceptual modeling

😎

I consider this my main project right now, defining a method for conceptual modeling. But I tend to waste a lot of time on things like social media, so I wasn’t spending as much time on it as I wanted. But the past couple of weeks I’ve been learning to redirect myself from mindless scrolling to productive work, and I’m making much better progress. It helps a lot that I can work on this project from my phone and that I don’t mind doing so. It lets me make use of a lot of random spare moments.

Here’s my plan: I’ll update a few key details of my essay this week and call it version 0.1 of the method. In about three weeks I’m hoping to have version 0.2 ready to post. For that I need to finish the book I’m examining now and put my earlier notes in order, then assemble it all into something comprehensible.

The book I’m studying is Demystifying Dissertation Writing by Peg Boyle Single. It’s just what I needed at this point, and I recommend it to anyone who has a big writing project to tackle, even if they’re not getting a doctorate. It’s both helping me get through this project and shaping the method the project is developing.

Life maintenance

😐

My budget is about 60% done. I should be able to finish this week, if I can pull myself away from modeling.

Church

🙂

A friend of mine at church is moving out of the area with his family to live closer to work, so we had a going-away reception for them Sunday afternoon. It reminded me that our church knows how to conduct meaningful events. (The smile’s for that, not because my friend is leaving.) The good thing is they’re only moving about a half-hour away, so I can still see them from time to time.

Movies

🤔

Tim and I saw Solo: A Star Wars Story on Sunday. 4/5. The movie hasn’t done well, but I liked it fine. Despite not being directly about the Skywalkers and the Force (though the Empire made a strong appearance), it still felt like Star Wars to me. I concluded it’s because I think of Star Wars more as a setting than a plot. There are a lot of different stories to tell within it. The only thing that bothered me was that a certain character’s stated philosophy of life was directly contradicted by his earlier behavior, and he had no explanation.

Fiction

😎

Wingfeather Saga, Book 3: The Monster in the Hollows. 5/5. The author read this one and the next. He’s not as good as the British guy who read the first two, but his voices still drew me in and made me forget I was listening to a single reader. I enjoyed the story, as usual. Peterson is good at putting his characters in impossible situations. Even though I know there must be some escape, I still feel the tension. And he succeeded at moving along the series arc when I was sure he would run out of time. He’s good at surprises.

Cognitive science

🙂

My current audiobook is The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker. It was a recommendation from a Gary Marcus talk, and Marcus is one of my favorite people right now because of our shared minority stance on AI. The book is very interesting and overlaps with Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain, which makes me believe everything Pinker’s book says. Okay, I do wonder about the idea of universal grammar based on these criticisms, but even so I think Pinker’s overall point stands–that the brain’s learning mechanisms aren’t completely general but are born prepared for language.

TV

😐

Well, after many years of procrastinating, I’ve started watching Breaking Bad, very slowly. I’m sure the show is meant to be about the main character’s descent into depravity and everything, but for me the two episodes I’ve seen are a tribute to knowledge. Walter White is a chemistry expert, he’s intent on doing things right, and ignoring him hurts. But yeah, maybe he could’ve picked a better line of work. He wasted no time trapping himself in a very difficult dilemma. I imagine this will happen a lot. Though moral dilemmas feel easier if you stamp out your conscience, just FYI.

Posted in Books, Church, Cognitive science, Conceptual modeling, Life maintenance, Movies, TV, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 6/3/2018

Posted on June 3, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

Last week:

  • Budget – Progressed about an inch.

This week:

  • Budget
  • Apartment research

GDPR

😐

Last week:

  • Terms of service, privacy policy, privacy tools, consent checkbox
  • Backup research

This week:

  • Backup setup

My backups have been spotty in the past. One good thing I can say for GDPR is that it’s given me a kick in the pants to automate them.

The more I read about GDPR, the more it sounds like a good case study for issues in conceptual modeling and other areas I care about. I might make a project someday out of studying it in detail.

Thinking

😎

I finished Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. 5/5. I’m wary when I run across books on consciousness. I assume they’ll make a lot of breathless leaps of logic and claim way too much. I was pleasantly surprised at how careful Dehaene’s reasoning was.

A few takeaways:

I was pleased at some of our agreements, such as that self-awareness isn’t necessary for consciousness and that randomness isn’t the kind of free will we really want.

I learned that the subconscious is even busier than I knew, which makes me more aware that the strangers I see around me who seem kind of blank on the surface have brains that are teeming with concealed activity at every moment.

I somewhat disagreed with his belief that learning enough about the brain will explain the existence of subjective experience. I want to stay open to that possibility, but for now I compare it to the idea of doing more math to find out what font the math is being printed in. Subjective experience and brain activity seem to belong to two different arenas of inquiry.

The conscious and subconscious interact in ways that are relevant to my approach to conceptual modeling. I’ll be coming back to this book sooner rather than later.

Fiction

🙂

Now I’m on The Monster in the Hollows, book three of the Wingfeather Saga. My interest in this series was flagging, but last week a semi-related ebook crossed my desk at work and reminded me not to let it die.

Posted in Books, GDPR, Life maintenance, Thinking, Thought | Leave a comment

Update for 5/27/2018

Posted on May 30, 2018 by Andy

Church

😎

I forgot to mention my latest liturgical excursion a few weeks ago. I visited the Methodist church my friends attend. It’d been a long time since we’d seen each other, so we had a nice time catching up over lunch.

One of them is the music minister at the church, and she invited me back to see their upcoming concert. So that was my Sunday morning last week, and it was very worth the visit. They performed Robert Ray’s Gospel Mass (YouTube playlist–same work, different performers, conducted by the composer!), an adaptation of the music of the Mass to African-American styles. I knew nothing about it going in, but I love genre crossovers, so I was fascinated and felt inspired to write my own liturgical music. But not yet.

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

  • GDPR – Barely started.

This week’s tasks:

  • GDPR
  • Budget

GDPR

🙄

Still working on some degree of compliance.

I was going to start an article on the wiki for a running list of stories about GDPR’s unintended consequences, but someone on Reddit has created r/GDPRegret and done my work for me.

Whenever privacy issues come up, I always think of this science fiction story by Tim Pratt, “Observer Effects” (audio). Sometimes universal surveillance sounds like a good idea! Too bad human nature always has to complicate things.

Thinking

😎

I finished listening to Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. 5/5. I plan to study it in depth when I get to my rationality project. It appeals to my sense that life is much more unknown than people like to think. I was also intrigued by his many references to classic literature and thinkers. He especially likes the French. I tend to ignore the past, but Taleb makes me feel like wading in.

Cognitive science

😎

Now I’m on Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain. A member of the futurism meetup recommended it to me a couple of times, but I’ve been procrastinating on it. It’s turning out to be very good. Surprisingly it even applies to my conceptual modeling project. It intersects with my model of how introspection works in modeling.

Beliefs report

🙂

I also forgot to mention last week that my friend Linda made me this nice owl.

Posted in Beliefs report, Church, Cognitive science, GDPR, Life maintenance, Music, Thinking, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Update for 5/20/2018

Posted on May 25, 2018 by Andy

Brace yourselves. This one’s kind of a doozy.

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

  • Discarding old medical equipment – Done.
  • Budget – No progress. I blame the EU. See my diatribe below.

This week’s tasks:

  • GDPR
  • Budget, if I have time left over

Thinking

🤔

Conceptual modeling is trundling along. Not quickly but pretty steadily. A blog post by Ron Jeffries got me thinking again about how agile software development could apply to my other projects. Jeffries recommends very short iterations for delivering usable versions of your software–a week or a day. Could I post a substantial revision of my modeling project every week? It’s a goal I’d like to work toward. I think it’d mean mechanizing my writing process somewhat, the way programming is fairly mechanized with a lot of regular idioms.

GDPR

🙄

Last week I was listening to Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan and wondering what unexpected event might throw off my project planning. Life delivered in a jiffy! The Black Swan of the General Data Protection Regulation.

I wish GDPR were a type of ASMR, but no. GDPR is an EU regulation (nicely formatted here) that lets European users exercise more control over data that organizations have about them. It lets them request the information an organization has about them, export it, have it deleted, and know it’s only being used with their consent and for its stated purpose. The regulation was created two years ago but goes into effect this Friday. It’s a great idea, in principle. Businesses have been sloppy and self-serving in the ways they handle their customers’ data, and it’s resulted in a lot of data breaches and creepy tracking of user activity.

But protecting that data GDPR-style means organizations have to do a lot more record keeping. Also possibly rewriting software, buying new software, hiring more data protection experts and lawyers, rewriting contracts with their data-handling vendors, and replacing vendors that don’t comply with the regulation. The exact requirements aren’t clear, however. To hear some tell it, the regulation is 88 pages of ambiguity, and opinions differ on who has to do what. Some articles offer 5 easy steps to GDPR compliance. But on a stricter interpretation, the burden can be monstrous, especially for a small enterprise with small resources.

And then there are the fines–up to €20 million or 4% of your annual revenue. But each case will (allegedly) begin with warnings, and the fines will (allegedly) be proportional to the circumstances.

When I read about GDPR a few months ago in headlines about Facebook, I knew nothing about it and assumed it had nothing to do with me. Big companies are always facing legal confrontations. But then a couple of recent tweets related to freelancing made me wonder if I should make some adjustments myself, and toward the end of last week the topic had engulfed my attention. The research kept me up late wringing my hands.

At first this reaction was only sympathetic. I was appalled that the EU would place such onerous requirements on even small businesses. It pushed my buttons. But while I do some freelancing, my clients aren’t European, so GDPR didn’t really seem to apply to me.

But I do run my own website, and it collects the IP addresses of visitors like all websites do, and I let people post comments, which requires them to enter an email address. Gradually I realized this might mean I fall under this draconian legislation. But maybe not? See-sawing on that question has been painful.

Everything I’ve just said about GDPR took me a lot of time to figure out. Hence the hand wringing. It’s less the fines I worry about than simply having the legal system’s attention at all. It just seems like trouble. So does complying. A rock and a hard place.

Fortunately, this is just a low-traffic blog, and it’s not likely any regulator will notice it anytime soon. But over the next few days you might notice some changes around here as I try to follow GDPR’s clearer and more relevant requirements. Some of the site’s features might eventually go away. I’m planning to follow a stairstep plan where I degrade the site in major ways only as each becomes necessary. I’ll also have an eye out for ways GDPR degrades the web in general.

I’ve drawn a few personal conclusions from this little adventure:

  • User data is radioactive waste. Try to avoid it.
  • Never start a business. GDPR isn’t the only regulation to deal with, and there will only be more in the future. I come up with business ideas from time to time, but now they’ll be discarded. Too much trouble.
  • Never run an online hobby project. The days of treating the web as a developer playground are basically over. This is the saddest part for me. I’ve had ideas to try, but now that would be a mistake. At least it shortens my project list.
  • Maybe don’t even sell over online marketplaces like Amazon. Your customers might not be Europeans, but how long before the US passes a similar law? At least now I can stop procrastinating on selling my books. Amazon felt like it’d be a pain anyway. Half Price Books is a less lucrative but much simpler option.
  • If I ever create an AGI, one of its first roles will be to deal with the law for me. I sometimes joke that I have an army of minionbots that do my bidding whenever I want to make mischief for my friends. I have spybots, attackbots, and whatever else I make up. The lawyerbots might become a reality.

Having said all that, GDPR does have some upsides for me:

  • It’s gotten me interested in learning about the EU (and euroscepticism). It’s fun to have new topics to research and follow.
  • It’s actually a nice example of conceptual modeling. Yeah, it could be clearer, but it’s laid out more or less the way I would. It could be worth studying for that project.
  • It might get me to learn about data security. I’ve read that the reaction to GDPR from data security professionals is one of relief and triumph–finally, everyone has to follow their advice! It’s just that it’s more pleasant to learn about these things when a dragon’s not breathing down your neck.

Work

🙂

In the middle of my GDPR angst, our workplace held a company-wide minigolf event. It was to celebrate the completion of the department moves and recarpeting that’s been happening over the past few months. Each area of the building created its own hole, and we split into teams by department and played through them. We ended with a pizza lunch for National Pizza Party Day.

Participating in all this was optional. It was the kind of thing I could easily see myself skipping, but I decided to sign up to play, and I’m glad I did. It was fun, and it got me to be a little more social than I usually am at work. (I have it in mind to change that, by the way, but it’s a project that’ll have to wait its turn in line.) And my score wasn’t too bad, pretty much in the middle of our team’s scores, which is where I often end up when I play games. I’m mostly satisfied with that position.

Also the minigolf took my mind off GDPR for a while, which was nice.

Math relearning

🤔

I spent basically all Saturday continuing my GDPR obsession. But I took some time out of my unproductive day to waste time on general social media. A post on Reddit caught my eye. It was about learning by programming, which is the approach I want to take to relearn math. The poster wanted to use it to learn some biology, but they asked for resources on learning that way in general, so I replied.

Well, my reply got the attention of someone else who sent me a private message about collaborating on relearning math. I was expecting to put off that project till after I got somewhere on modeling. So now I need to decide whether this is a good time to return to it anyway (once I’m past GDPR). I’m always in danger of putting things off too long.

Posted in GDPR, Life maintenance, Math relearning, Thinking, Weeknotes, Work | Leave a comment

Update for 5/13/2018

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

  • Electronics recycling – Done, except for a few things I have to take to other drop-off sites.
  • Budget – In progress.
  • Sorting housekeeping tasks – Done.

Posting those on the blog last week actually got me to do them. So I guess this weekly update thing is somewhat accomplishing its purpose.

This week’s tasks:

  • Budget
  • Discarding old medical equipment

Beliefs report

🤔

I finished Eternal Living, a collection of people’s reflections on Dallas Willard’s life. It was good, but I got kind of tired of the fawning. It turned up the dial on my skepticism, especially since I already disagreed with some of his ideas. So I found an article by someone else who had Willard criticisms, and I felt better. As with many things I both like and dislike, I found myself wondering what it would look like to adapt Willard’s views into a version I liked more.

Thinking

🙂

After the Willard book, I had a little crisis in which I didn’t know what kind of book to listen to next. I had a few options, but most of them didn’t feel quite right. I settled on something that would help me be less unintelligent, The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

When I first heard about The Black Swan, I thought it was a survey of the effects on society that large, surprising developments can have. But it’s really a book on rationality. It’s about how bad we are at taking these unpredictable events into account and how we can be better at it. Right up my alley.

Movies

🙂

I saw Infinity War. I liked it. I’m a big fan of crossovers, so I was glad to see the various teams converge. I was also glad the villain was an actual character and not a prop like in Justice League. There were some gaping holes in Thanos’ strategy that it would’ve been nice to address in some kind of debate, but that’s not really compatible with an action movie. That’s okay. It just means the audience gets to do it.

Side note, this was the first time I’d really noticed that a theater’s sound system makes an action movie tactile. You can feel things crashing around you. This seems like it should be obvious, but I’m a little slow catching on sometimes. Or maybe this sound system was just better.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Life maintenance, Movies, Thinking, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Update for 5/6/2018

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Andy

Comics

😎

I spent a lot of last week getting ready for my annual comics purchases on Saturday, which was Free Comic Book Day. I like to buy things that day to support the stores so I’m not just taking advantage of them for free stuff. I made a couple of trips to the stores I’d be visiting, and I researched some cyberpunk comics to keep an eye out for. Here’s what I ended up with at the end of the day.

I also picked up the first volume of Blame! from the library. I learned about the series and its intriguing setting from the developer of the upcoming architectural puzzle game Manifold Garden. In a Twitch stream he told us that manga was a major inspiration for the game.

Thinking

😎

Peg Boyle Single’s Demystifying Dissertation Writing is giving me a new outlook on my conceptual modeling project. She divides up the process of research and writing in a way that feels much more manageable than what I was trying to do. I feel like I have a better handle on this project. And all my others, for that matter.

Life maintenance

😐

I’ve been too distracted by comics and conceptual modeling to do much of anything practical. Here are the main things I need to work on this week:

  • Electronics recycling
  • Budget
  • Sorting housekeeping tasks

Fiction

🙂

I finished Wingfeather Saga, book 2: North! or Be Eaten. 5/5. This series continues to be very interesting.

Beliefs report

🙂

I’ve started on Eternal Living, a book of people’s reflections on the impact Dallas Willard made on them. Some of it repeats what’s in the biography, but there’s enough new to give me food for thought.

TV

👍

After a break, I came back and finished The End of the F-ing World. It ended not quite how I expected, but more or less. I’ve read they’re looking at making a second season, which I might watch. I saw the graphic novel at the comic store. I only flipped through it, but it looked very different from the show.

Now I’m trying to finish Star Trek: Discovery.

Movies

😎

Tuesday I’m finally going with my geek meetup to see Infinity War. Somehow I’ve managed to avoid any real spoilers. Unfortunately, it’s the same day as the futurism meetup, so I’m missing that one this month.

Posted in Beliefs report, Books, Comics, Life maintenance, Movies, Thinking, TV, Weeknotes | 2 Comments