Naas Energy

Updated 26 September 2023, from a Panera Bread in Tempe, Arizona. It's starting to cool down! Only 95 in the middle of the day now!

Takin' a Sabbatical

I'm taking a Sabbatical from professional work, as I take stock of where I am in my life and where I want to head.

Resisting reading the news

This update became a blog post!

Renewing my "woofer" certification

Two years ago, my buddy and I, both being outdoorsy engineers, got trained and certified as WFRs, or Wilderness First Responders, at a 9-day course by NOLS in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was time for the bi-yearly refresher, so we headed out to North Carolina for a 3-day recertification course. We considered doing the whole 9-day course again, but we were still worn out from the first one so we'll try that the next time around.

Refining my PKM

In May, I accidentally got obsessed with Personal Knowledge Management systems, and Obsidian specifically. I've been organizing all my years-old notes and journals into it for tagging and linking elsewhere in my "digital brain", and slowly building a sort of "custom Wikipedia" for what I read about and learn. It's been super helpful getting all of my thoughts through the years finally migrated into one place, in one common form (plaintext markdown), and setting myself up with a system that will be able to adapt for the next 70 years of my digital notetaking career. Apps and programs with custom proprietary file formats come and go (e.g, a few years ago I was lucky to recover my single encrypted-in-something-weird 2010 journals from the random Mac journaling app on my first laptop), but plaintext lasts forever.

Reading Too Many Books Everything

Cycling through my reading nook slowly getting read are:

1. Building a Second Brain - Tiago Forte
2. Built To Move - Kelly Starrett and Juliet Starrett
3. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
4. Stop Reading The News - Rolf Dobelli
5. The Art of Thinking Clearly - Rolf Dobelli
6. What is ChatGPT Doing... And Why Does It Work? - Stephen Wolfram
7. Alexander Hamilton's Guide to Life - Jeff Wilser
8. Neuroscience For Dummies - Frank Amthor
9. The Brain - David Eagleman
10. Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson
11. Project Management Handbook - Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez
12. Disability Visibility - Edited by Alice Wong
13. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson
14. Who's Afraid of Classical Music? - Michael Walsh

And digitally:

1. ReModel - Joshua Spodek
2. American Nations - Colin Woodard
3. Mastering Emacs - Mickey Petersen
4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
5. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

And aurally:

1. Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
2. Brain Rules - John Medina
3. Hamlet - Folger Theatre
4. Hamlet (Version 3) - Librivox

And while I'm at the library:

1. The Information Diet - Clay Johnson
2. Becoming a Data Head - Alex J. Gutman, Jordan Goldmeier
3. Creative Selection - Ken Kocienda

And research papers I've printed and engaged with while reading:

1. LLaMA: Open & Efficient Foundation Language Models (Touvron et al., 2023a)
2. Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models (Touvron et al., 2023b)
3. Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017)
4. RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control (Brohan et al., 2023)
5. Building transformers from neurons and astrocytes (Kozachkov et al., 2023)
6. Art and the Science of Generative AI: A Deeper Dive (Epstein et al., 2023)
7. Man is to Computer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings (Bolukbasi et al., 2016)

(This is a now page, inspired by Derek Sivers.)