This. Right here. Look at it.

It’s a graph showing the performance of children after they’ve been praised for their intelligence (“you must be smart”) versus their effort (“you must have put a lot of effort into that”), and then given a series of hard problems to try to solve. The kids who are taught that effort is important increase in the number of problems they can solve. Those who are told that they’re smart show a frightening decrease.

This morning I pottered around the kitchen. I made toast and coffee, I washed the dishes, I sorted my groceries. I also read a lengthy article on AIDS in China at the same time. In fact, I’ve been reading more than ever now that I’ve given up on actually reading.

I don’t hide the fact that I want to learn everything. I have flashcards that I practice every day, I’m enrolled in more coursera courses than I can poke a stick at, and my most favourite thing in the world is to find someone with specialised knowledge and enthusiasm and talk to them about it in depth. Consequently, I do a lot of thinking about how to learn efficiently.

I’m incredibly lazy. My preferred way of making backups is to plug in an external drive, and have my laptop automatically do the rest.

In order to facilitate this laziness, I’m going to be using two tools: btrfs (an amazing filesystem with snapshot support), and udev (which can detect when a device has been inserted or removed). I’m also going to send notifcations directly to my Pebble watch, because I can.

Too many entities want to know too much about you, and one of the sneakiest ways they do this is to get website author to add third-party tracking information to their own site. The value to the website operator is often a service, feature, or even revenue, but that doesn’t change the fact that having third parties track your information sure feels skeezy to me.

A few years ago, the server on which I hosted my personal website suffered a hardware failure and died. It had been running for over a decade and the design had not changed once during that time.

I’m very glad to say that I’ve now resurrected the site, along with the over ten years worth of writing I had there. However what I’m really excited about is the technology and philosophy of how the new site is constructed.