Weekly Review, 2021-01-31

Welcome to another weekly review!

This week, I share how I want to change my internet persona, a peak at some ideas I've had about our relationships with work, a couple of twitter theads about scale free networks, and some bike trouble.

Hope you enjoy!

To Niche or not to Niche

[[Nat Eliason]] wrote [[Be Yourself, Not a Niche]] this week, which was timely. I've felt compelled to pick an online persona, hence my current twitter bio. I thought I wanted to be a software guy on the internet. However, I've found that my writing is better, and I enjoy it more, when I allow my interests to freely flow from subject to subject.

So, I'm not going to pick a niche. This site will continue to be home to a continually expanding set of subjects and ideas.

Rethinking My Twitter

My twitter bio is the result of thinking I needed a niche. [[Salman Ansari]] connected me with [[Paul Lecrone]] on twitter this week because we are both big fans of [[Huxley]]. Paul's first message mentioned that he is not familiar with python, hinting that my bio was a bit of an obstacle to overcome to get to our shared interests. It's not that dramatic, but my current bio is narrow. In the next week, I want to add more interests in my twitter bio to help find connections with more people who may come across my profile.

Rethinking Work

I've shared great conversations with [[Salman Ansari]] this week through voice recordings. They were mainly about our relationship to work. Salman ponders the same topics in this video.

It's a nebulous topic. One that leads to many hard pauses and "ugh" moments. The voice format for these is great because you can really wander in the dark hoping to bump into bright ideas about how we can improve.

Salman had a great insight. To make any progress in this realm, we first need to just accept there is a problem. We need to take the time to become aware of the nagging feeling in the back of our minds that something is off. It's more persistent now than ever because the regular movements of our lives have been dampened by the pandemic for so long.

Our attitudes about work are [[Brave New World]]-eque. We are all working too much to talk about how we are working too much. There must be different structures and systems we could at least consider to improve our relationships with work - and our lives in general.

Scale Free Networks

If you follow me on twitter, you'd have seen I got pretty active with scale free networks last week.

Twitter Thead

First, I explained how [[scale-free networks]] make [[personal monopoly]]s possible.

Code

Next, I wrote put some code on github inspired by [[Alex Lamb]]. For anyone that has python installed on their computer, you can run the simulations with this notebook.

In the future, I plan to come back to this to make some useful visualizations and maybe even a web app that makes the experience more interactive.

For more background on these ideas, [[Why The World Has Gone Crazy]] was the original inspiration. I tweeted at [[Alex Lamb]] after I re-wrote his code in python and he sent me links to this article and this video which expand further into his ideas on how information propagates through networks. I definitely recommend them if any of this has piqued your interest.

[[MTB]] Mishaps

Last December, I bought a second hand mountain bike off [[pinkbike.com]]. It's a 2018 Kona Honzo DL. I've ridden it relentlessly for the last two months. On Saturday, I snapped my derailleur... When I got to my local bike shop, they found that my chain is bent, and my cassette and chainring are so worn that a new chain would not fit, so everything needs to be replaced.

On the bright side, a blizzard hit this week so I can't ride anyway. So this is an opportunity to do some research and decide if I wanna switch up my current setup since or get exact replacements for what I have.

My current rig is a Full SRAM GX Eagle group, 12-speed. It's pretty great. The 50 tooth twelfth gear is great when you wanna go real slow on fat climbs. However, the extra gear also makes the derailleur a bit more fragile, and it's more expensive than the 11-speed counterparts. I need to scour a few more reddit threads before I decide what to replace them all with.

Final Thoughts

I have built a habit of running into a mini burnout once every other month. I slowly build up to a week of continuous input. I spend the week constantly drawn to social media, constantly listening to podcasts, and pretty much can't get away from screens. By the weekend, I crash and burn. It's followed up by a slow week with low motivation. I get away from all the inputs and slowly restart.

It's almost a comforting pattern of slowly winding up, then releasing, before to starting over again. I'm not sure I want to change it, but the weeks following my wind down are rough. That's how I'm feeling right now. But I did still get around to writing the review, which counts for something.



My Linked Notes

One last thing

If you liked these notes, hit me on Twitter!