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2020-05-31 Weekly Review

"Nature vs Nurture"

World events this week made me think about crisis and how people respond to them. That might come across in the review this week.

WHAT I'M THINKING ABOUT

  • Nature vs Nurture
    • Articles
    • Quotes

      Since the early 1960s biologists have realized that genes are neither blueprints nor dictators; instead, as I will explain in a moment, genes are better seen as providers of opportunity.

    • Notes
      • Genes are not destiny. Rather, they are probability and predisposition. This article makes the point that genes are more like a series of “if statements” than a rigid blue print. Genes express very different traits depending on what environmental factor they are triggered by. For the “nature vs nurture” debate, the research would argue that this is a false dichotomy - like a snake eating its tail, the two feed into each other.
  • The Sum of Parts
    • Articles
    • Quotes

      It is not the computer, working alone, that produces a solution. It is the combination of people, augmented by computers.

    • Notes
      • A repeating motif in many of my favourite science fiction novels is the "whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts". The right combination of elements can produce fantastic results - some examples that come to mind are jam and jelly, the baseball team featured in moneyball, and the avengers. I think there is vast potential for creating these sums between people and the tools that we use and that we've only scratched the surface of it.
  • Character in Crisis
    • Quotes

      Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them - Andy Grove

    • Notes
      • Some people believe crisis builds character, others believe that crisis reveals character. Whatever the case, these are times where we are learning the characters of a great number of people (starting with ourselves).

WHAT I'M OPTIMIZING

  • Wrote a vscode extension to convert require style imports to import
    • Notes
      • Do all my js development in typescript and most modules only have examples showing require. Gave me an excuse to play with vscode extensions
// before
const foo = require("foo");
// after
import foo from "foo";
  • Sync keyboard shortcuts and settings for vscode
    • Notes
      • Use multiple versions of vscode (one for code, the other for notes). Started using hard links and mackup to sync shortcuts and settings between them