Notes

This is not a thought

18 March 2018

Zen, isn’t it?

Recently, I have some encounters of this zen topics: on YouTube video, on a Geekcamp 2017 talk, and on a podcast.


Kurzgesagt: Emergence

The YouTube video that I encounter was a video by Kurzgesagt on the topic of emergence. It talks about when a living being is by itself, it is pretty stupid, but when it become collective, intelligence emerged.

  • There is no wet, but collectively, there is wetness.
  • There is no city, but collectively, there is a city.
  • There is no society, but collectively, there is a society.

Geekcamp: meta-circular programming language interpreter.

What if we make a programming language interpreter, using the programming language itself, and later use this interpreter to interpret it’s own source code. This is what is meant by meta-circular.

There is no program, the source code is representation of the program.

Similarly, there is no interpreter, the source code is representation of interpreter. Hence, if a source code of an interpreter of a language is written on the language itself, theoretically, it should be able to interpret itself, right?


Podcast. Radiotopia Showcase: Ways of Hearing.

The podcast series is about analog and digital recording.

Digital audio is for machine. Song recorded using analog recorder could have a faster beat around chorus. Digital made it even and regular, made the beats tied to a clock.

A record is a performance of the song at that time of recording. This means that there is no song, there is a representation of a song.


This is not a thought. This is a representation of a thought itself.

 

Code Practice

9 March 2018

Recently, at work, I have been participating in a big feature project; and halfway through, after the UIs were implemented, I swapped place with a colleague (i.e. his part become mine, and mine become his). Man, it was really hard to complete the rest of the code using his. It’s just that his style of code writing is so much different from mine. …

Radio

14 February 2018

I have an obsession with radio, especially BBC Radio 1.

I’ve started listening to BBC Radio 1 since 2011. I’m listening from UTC+7 and UTC+8 time zones. Because of that, I can only listen to daytime radio shows. Greg James is my favorite, as he has more similar music taste to me. Some other shows that are okay: Alice Levine. Danny Howard’s Dance Anthems were great too. This show plays song remixes only, and for first hour or two, it was usually good, but after a while, you kinda sick of remixes. …

Phone Notifications

tl;drAndroid notification settings is less controllable than that of Windows Phone


Back in 2014, I bought my first smartphone, a Nokia Lumia 1020, powered by Windows Phone 8 (if you didn’t count Nokia E72 with Symbian S60v3 as a smartphone). Windows Phone 8 have notification features, but it was just a toast and will be gone after a while. So, the way to check your phone real “notifications” is to go into each of the apps to check for updates (but it will be indicated at apps’ Live Tile). It was not long before my phone OS was upgraded into Windows Phone 8.1, where the toast notifications are collected at Notification Center until it was dismissed by the user.

But I was not a fan of notification.

21

It’s the time of year where I apply kaizen: To stop, reflect, and continuously improve.

I’m scared of the future. It seemed so uncertain and scary out there. Meanwhile, my days in university is numbered. I couldn’t start it with positivism and optimism like what I did in my 17th, where after reading it back, I laughed at myself 😃 Many things have changed but some things will not. I saw my wishes from my 18th birthday, I felt that I did fulfilled all of them already by this age: improved designing skill (check; hey, back then, my designing skill was really bad); improved public speaking (partial check; I think co-presented a presentation during international conference counts? hahaha); built personal website (check; it was a mini-resume now, with few side projects hosted on it). …