Share the ideas you've currently wresting with. February 9, 2023

Will

What ideas are you wrestling with this week?

I had a DropBox fiasco this week. For some reason, all my zettelkaten files, on my office mac suddenly have a 3 Feb 2023 timestamp, both the modified and the created. The files on my shop laptop remain unchanged. But I'm worried and have temporarily turned off DropBox syncing. I've started a super-top-secret coding project that uses these file parameters and am worried my file's timestamps will get mucked with.

Oh well.

I spent a ton of time this week learning about manipulating python dictionaries. In the coming week, I'll be looking at html and css tools.

I'm really happy that my zettels are non-zettelkasting and life-focused.

My 7 Day Zettel Production

Will

@rl911 What ideas are you currently wrestling with concerning your ZK? Have you read any good books lately?

rl911

@Will said:
@rl911 What ideas are you currently wrestling with concerning your ZK? Have you read any good books lately?

1) I am in the process of linking my photo collection and the collection of logbook entries via the date.
The aim is to embed individual photos in the respective logbook entry if required.
Whereby "photos" can also be photographed map sections with drawn hiking routes or entrance tickets.

For this purpose, I made some Python scripts (with the help of ChatGTP3) that read the "EXIF date created" from the photo file and put it in front of the file name of the photos.

2) in October 2022, I found a visit to the tower of Michele Montaigne in France very impressive. Now I am reading "Montaigne's Cat" by Nils Minkmar.
Places, travel photos, French history and historical persons now combine in the note box.

I am thrilled at how a puzzle of experiences, places and history develops.

Will

Could you stop your torment? Another book added to my 'Reading Candidates' is unavailable in my only impoverished reading language, English. The reviewgives the book an enticing flavor.

Please report back what you thought of Minkmar's book. I've read a different book on Montaigne that you might be interested in.

Read in 2017

32. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell, (Kindle) (Kindle) March 15, 2017 — A biography about a historical figure I had not known about. He lived a dignified life at the end of the 1500s. Famous for starting the writing style of the personal essay. He was notable for following the paths of the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. The author narrates the biography excellently and seems to place Montaigne in the proper perspective. I’ve read many biographies lately, and this one was the most ‘biographical.’ Lots of notes.

I, too, use OpenAI's ChatGPT in conjunction with my python programming. My IDE is VS Code, and the GitHub Copilot plugin has been almost indispensable. I'm now using ChatGPT as a tutor. I don't have access to any other programming tutors. We are currently working through the finer points of dictionary manipulation. It's funny how I've ascribed "we" to ChatGPT, but I think this might be how it lulls us into compliance. There I go again, and I've given it human-like qualities.

ZettelDistraction

What ideas are your respondents wresting from those grasping and therefore undeserving others, whoever they are, this week? Perhaps the question concerns twisting the ideas of others. Either way, I have had further progress on the code for the REYAX RYLR998 LoRa® module. I am attempting to wrest from a certain semiconductor manufacturer confirmation whether a certain configuration command causes the module to stop receiving until another, unrelated non-configuration command is issued. I'm trying to be discreet. Perhaps this doesn't count as an idea, much less one to be wrested from others.

I did ask for chatGPT's assistance with this project, but it wasn't that helpful. I'm tempted to read the original paper on transformers...though I would be one blood tick among the hoarde. Which reminds me of my fragmentary reading of Matthew B. Crawford's "The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction." The book might be beyond my head even after three years of CPAP therapy. I subscribed to Mr Crawford's Substack Archedelia, in the hope that some of his insight might penetrate a mind shrouded in tenebrous vapors. Regarding certain developments in AI, beware:

Certain developments in the realm of ideas provide the tacit picture of the human being that guides our institutions. One feature that the currently ascendant schools share in common is a low regard for human beings, whether on the premise of their fragility, their cognitive limitations, their latent tendency to “hate,” or their imminent obsolescence with the arrival of imagined technological possibilities. Each of these premises carries an important but partial truth, and each provides the master supposition for some project of social control. Each tends inexorably toward a further concentration of wealth and power, and the further erosion of the concept of the citizen: the wide-awake, imperfect but responsible human being on whom the ideal of self-government rests.
-- Matthew Crawford. Automation, anti-humanism, the politics of emergency, the battle of the sexes, the possibility of Christian manliness...

Whether our AI masters succeed in wresting from us our last vestige of humanity, I leave you with this cartoon of Dr John von Neumann.

TinkerToy

It's been a little while since I've commented anywhere here, but at the time the zettelkästen method hadn't 'clicked' for me yet. I'm very pleased to report that the click came, and I've been writing like mad ever since! I'm averaging 1.5 cards per day, spread somewhat evenly among my interests. Right now I'm primarily studying 1970s drug smuggling and filmmaking for a nonfiction project but I'm also throwing in some gender studies, engineering, and writing disciplines for good measure.

rl911

@Will said:

I, too, use OpenAI's ChatGPT in conjunction with my python programming. My IDE is VS Code, and the GitHub Copilot plugin has been almost indispensable. I'm now using ChatGPT as a tutor. I don't have access to any other programming tutors.

ChatGTP is my very patient Python teacher.
But sometimes he makes small mistakes in the scripts or misunderstands my somewhat too uncleanly formulated questions. It's part of the learning process :-)

Revising old stocks of photos and notes with the help of Python scripts initially speeds up the tidying up.
But two consequences put the time saved into perspective:

1) just as it used to be when rearranging bookshelves: by chance, a long-forgotten part of the collection is found in a new context and the time spent rereading it disappears.

2) Powerful scripts also make powerful mistakes. The checks for plausibility of proposed changes are often far more time-consuming than the changes themselves.

Educational effect:

When creating up-to-date notes, slips of paper and photos, a routine for sustainable addition with metadata sets in because the benefit has become more perceptible.

rl911

@Will said:

Please report back what you thought of Minkmar's book. I've read a different book on Montaigne that you might be interested in.

Read in 2017

32. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell, (Kindle) (Kindle) March 15, 2017 — A biography about a historical figure I had not known about. He lived a dignified life at the end of the 1500s. Famous for starting the writing style of the personal essay. He was notable for following the paths of the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. The author narrates the biography excellently and seems to place Montaigne in the proper perspective. I’ve read many biographies lately, and this one was the most ‘biographical.’ Lots of notes.

Thanks for the book tip,
In this case I'm luckier with the language. [[Sarah Blackwell]] is available in German translation. It's now on the [[Montaigne reading list]].

The historical and literary figure of Montaigne has become a historical (16th century) and national (France) point of reference or starting point for me.
Both subjects were occupied until now only with isolated ruins of memory from school education. (Paris, revolutions, Napoleon, French sector Berlin ... :-) )

Besides, the figure is surprisingly up-to-date as a model of a mediator between self-absorbed fanatics.

I have been too impatient for Montaigne's texts, his essays. Various attempts ended with the usual quotations. But with a little more background, perhaps the next attempt will succeed.

ZettelDistraction

I've been hellbanned.

Will

@ZettelDistraction said:

I've been hellbanned.

NO! Say it's not true.

ctietze

2023-02-15

We've moved apartments and are now settling in. All boxes are unboxed, but not all things have yet found their optimal place

The Archive-wise, a small roof began burning the other week:

With Dropbox finally biting the bullet and adhering to Apple's instructions to not hack the OS that much, the popular sync service changes how it operates. This seems to affect people trying to delete files, just like GDrive already did (which was on the new macOS API to provide file sync for a while).

I was about to finalize a first beta with plugin support, but that's going to wait a week or three more.