Matt Roll

What I Really Want

[This post is inspired directly by some notes Michael Nielsen posted about fundamental limits of matter, and indirectly by ideas I have about what is possible if humans can live on universal timespans and control matter at the subatomic level.] When I think about what I want my life to look like in ten, twenty, thirty years, there’s an unspoken constraint that guides the space of answers. The question I’m really answering is something like “What do I want my life to look like given current levels of technology and what technology will reasonably be available in ten/twenty/thirty years?
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→ 6:35 PM, Feb 28

Some Thoughts On Tool Building

Emacs vs. Vim might be the most famous flame war in programmer culture, but there are plenty of other dimensions along which coding identity splits. There is static vs. dynamic typing, functional vs. imperative programming, frontend vs. backend, probably more. My favorite is “tool builder” vs. “tool user.” The tool builder in this scenario is the kind of programmer who is rarely satisfied with how their tools work out of the box, and spends hours and hours configuring and hacking their computing environment to work exactly how they imagine it should.
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→ 8:22 PM, Feb 27

The Missing Piece to helm-projectile

Obviously you should be able to start a search by choosing a directory in the current project and then doing a recursive grep from there. But for some reason that’s not built into helm-projectile or helm-rg, my preferred search interface. So after like several months of living with this hole in my life, I took an hour and wrote it. I didn’t know it would only take an hour, of course, otherwise I probably would have done it sooner.
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→ 12:00 AM, Jan 23

Aaaaaaaand we’re back astralcodexten.substack.com 📖

→ 4:09 PM, Jan 21

How to Override evil-collection Keybindings

Having spent at least an hour over the past couple days figuring out how to do this, I thought it would be worth putting up a clear explanation for future googlers of said question. It’s currently possible to find out how to do this via google, but the answer is at the bottom of a thread on a GitHub issue and I feel like it would be nice for the top result to just straight up ask and answer the question.
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→ 3:10 PM, Jan 18

How to compile Emacs feature/native-comp on macos

I was finally successful in compiling and running the feature/native-comp build of Emacs! This was my second try, after having failed the first time several months ago. This new build promises huge performance improvements which I’m very much looking forward to enjoying in my day-to-day use of the best editor on the planet :) Since it took me two tries and several hours of hacking to get this working, I figured it would be useful to write down the winning recipe for others so they might have an easier time of it.
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→ 12:32 PM, Jan 17

I started a Links page where I’m collecting things I found online that have shaped who I am.

→ 11:14 PM, Jan 16

htop while compiling emacs feature/native-comp

→ 3:40 PM, Jan 16

Everything else will fade but I’ll remember that 2020 was the year the New York Times killed Slate Star Codex and it will still be the worst year on record.

→ 10:52 PM, Jan 12

Emacs Status Update

tl;dr: I decided to exit pre-built Emacs configuration packages and build my own config from scratch. See the whole thing at the bottom of this post. Last time I wrote about Emacs it was about how to set up JavaScript editing tools in Doom Emacs. I had switched to Doom Emacs because I was having significant performance problems with Spacemacs, and Doom advertised a bunch of performance optimizations. It turns out I was just doing something stupid with Spacemacs, probably like not restarting it for months or letting some configuration bloat build up.
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→ 7:28 PM, Jan 11

A Healthy News Diet II

In the previous post I described what I thought a healthy news diet might look like. I wanted to lay out a framework that would allow me to stay informed in ways I care about, but would also keep me from using news as a way to pass time and indulge in an addiction to the feed. I came up with the following criteria for a healthy news diet:
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→ 8:11 PM, Jan 5

Omg. Money Stuff is back! 😃💵

→ 9:06 AM, Jan 5

A Healthy News Diet

[Note: This post is a reaction to my drastic increase in Twitter consumption this year. All uses of the second person “you” and “your” in this post are in fact me talking to myself.] If you aren’t careful, you’ll spend too much of your life scrolling a feed. Might be Twitter, HN, Reddit, NYT, etc. Could be some app that doesn’t exist yet. Doesn’t matter. The result is the same.
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→ 1:06 PM, Dec 31

“Now, we live in a new world, a world in which currency is a choice, and not just a choice in terms of use… Any of us can now create a currency using a simple web form.”

— Andreas Antonopoulos, The Internet of Money

→ 1:22 PM, Dec 27

Heist movie you might not have heard of: Den of Thieves. On Netflix atm.

Gerard Butler plays a morally ambiguous cop, and Nicky Sobotka from The Wire plays the head of an ex-military bank job crew. The plot plays out back and forth between both sides of the law. I’m only a third of the way through right now, but it’s pretty good so far.

→ 8:34 PM, Dec 19

Getting into a good book makes me wonder what anyone ever watches tv for.

(disclaimer: I watch a fair amount of tv)

→ 9:33 PM, Dec 17

Why I'm Not Super Interested in Money Management

There’s obviously a lot of money in finance. In making decisions about where to put people’s money. Wall Street bankers are infamous for making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year in bonuses and/or commissions on deals. At first glance it seems like money management is a great place to look for opportunities to get rich. But there’s a catch. A good manager can only expect to return like 5-8% on average[1].
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→ 7:14 PM, Dec 12

I have a feeling that Anathem is really good, it just takes a couple hundred pages to get there. That’s why, more than ten years after first reading Cryptonomicon, it’s the only Stephenson book I haven’t read. I’m 120 pages in and determined to finish it this time, however.

→ 12:57 AM, Dec 12

Listening on repeat: www.youtube.com/watch

→ 5:49 PM, Dec 4

Honestly the most interesting thing about the second half of the Ender Quartet is the plot arc around the descoladores.

→ 2:14 PM, Dec 4

Reading Hobbes’ Leviathan and this line just came out of the book and smacked me in the face.

“And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind)…”

It’s like he knew what was coming. I get the feeling he was so sure of the eventual progression of this thing (science) that he could tell was just starting in his lifetime, with the concentration of Natural Philosophers around London and the formation of the Royal Society.

→ 10:42 PM, Oct 16

Learned from the FT 10.05.2020

Things global reserve currency is used for Foreign Exchange (FX) reserves Cross-border exposures International debt Swift payments A global reserve currency is one that no one minds owning or transacting with. So when doing transactions between parties in different countries, it makes sense a global reserve currency is the medium of exchange. Moreover, on many metrics, the dollar faces few rivals. Whether in terms of its use in cross-border payments or its share of foreign exchange reserves held by global central banks, the dollar’s dominance is sweeping…
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→ 8:09 PM, Oct 5

Learned from the FT 9.28.2020

Why are silver and gold a hedge against inflation? This question came up reading a story on recent silver prices in Monday’s paper. Here’s the quote: Precious metals are often seen as a protection against inflation. After some googling, here’s what I came up with. Precious metals have intrinsic value because of their scarcity and real world use cases. It doesn’t seem like there’s a financial mechanics reason why the price of gold goes up to outpace inflation.
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→ 8:47 PM, Sep 28

Best euphemism for the French Revolution goes to Thomas Piketty, who in chapter 10 of Capital in the Twenty-First Century describes it as a time when “…the fiscal privileges of the nobility were abolished.”

→ 9:46 PM, Sep 21

Learned from the FT 9.21.2020

Just a couple tidbits this week. Supply side control as monopoly defense By controlling supply, and therefore price, a company that dominates production of some good can hold onto its monopoly by bankrupting competitors who get too big. This works especially when in a field where entry and operational costs are high. The company with a monopoly can flood the market to drive down the price, which in turn drives down the competitions revenue.
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→ 9:06 PM, Sep 21

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