I maintain something akin to google trends but for abstracts in economics papers. The word "novel" is growing rapidly, while "reproduce", "replicate", and "verify" have not changed much over the years: https://dubovik.eu/blog/repec?t=replicate&t=reproduce&t=veri...

- 4 pages at the back are reserved for index.

- Daily journal starts at the back.

- There is no obligation to have regular entries in the daily journal.

- ◦ denotes a past event; ◦ hh:mm denotes an upcoming or past event.

- → denotes a task.

- "circled" → denotes a completed task.

- strikeghrough denotes a cancelled or refiled task.

- ¿ optional task, not sure about something ?

- "-" is for all types of second-level bullets.

(As a side note, I mostly do task organization on the computer, but sometimes in a journal as well.)

- Topics start at the front.

- Topics are free-form.

- A new year starts a new journal. (I don't care for the new year resolutions though. At best, a list of side quests I'd like to do.)

"Set aside time—perhaps one small task per session—where you write code unassisted. Treat it like exercise."

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47578405

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Regarding the space management, there are many solutions straight out of the programming world, of course: utilize both sides of the notebook, reserve a minimum number of pages per topic, keep an index with free pages, etc. But there are some hardware ones as well, I'm trying Atoma notebooks (https://atoma.be) these days.

I imagine the problem is more economics and politics than technology. Say, personhood verification becomes available. Then it is also that much easier to mandate age verification, and that becomes a slippery slope.

That combination is hardly documented anywhere. And so I somewhat skeptical about my unorthodox security solution. Sharing on the off-chance a security expert would comment.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47348175

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298581

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If I am to name just one prompting trick that I discovered to be useful, that'll be hierarchical budgeting. I have a total word budget for the whole book and I ask Gemini to allocate that budget for chapters, and so on recursively. Fun part, the sum of parts does not always equal the total, but the difference was never bigger than 5%. That's some stochastic summing happening.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45632714

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Personally, I try to: - prioritize older, existing projects, - have an explicit daily schedule, - keep a handwritten journal (just as a commitment to be away from the computer).

Helps a little bit.

And in actually answering the question, one occasion where my focus was certainly higher than average is when I had an opportunity between jobs to travel for a few months to another country. I had a laptop with me but for security reasons there was hardly anything on it, just basic browsing. I didn't even have passwords for my Netflix account, etc. Quite quickly I could focus really well on just a few tasks, say learning a new language. Of course, such a solution is hardly applicable in most cases.

The rest of the pipeline was straightforward. I exported individual frames in a .ppm format, which was easiest to program, and then stitched them into an .apng animation using ffmpeg. Did quite a few tests initially to choose between .apng and .webp and back then .apng was least glitchy across the devices I have.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087391

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43079952

Points: 63

# Comments: 7

The original motivation was, can one make a game with relativistic spaceships, conceptually speaking? The issue is that if a player calls another player IRL it'll be like instantaneous communication... In flat spacetime, though contradictory to its postulates, one can choose a preferred frame of reference, say the planets, and allow instantaneous communication within that plane, not leading to any inconsistencies in a game, I think. Curved spacetime doesn't admit a notion of simultaneity, so that's completely out, no black holes in a game :( Never really got to the point of modelling multiple ships though, the life caught up. So it's just a single ship on the website for the moment.