Matt Roll

The House on the Road

Once upon a time there was a house. This house wasn’t an ordinary house, like one you would expect to see on your way home from work. No, this house was what you would call an extraordinary house. It had windows, but it was impossible to tell how many. It had doors, but — well, same story. The house was red. That was one thing you could be sure of, because when you looked at it it was just obviously red.
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→ 10:48 PM, Sep 13

Wanting to Live Multiple Lives

It’s really a bummer that you can only live one life. At least as far as I know you can only live one life. I assume if reincarnation were a thing then I wouldn’t be the first instance of the my being. My experience is that I have no past lives, and so I don’t expect to have future lives. I mean maybe there could be reincarnation if it worked in a way that when you are living a life you don’t remember your past lives, and like when you die in one life maybe there is like an intermediate period where you return to your full, complete self in the void and you remember all of the lives that you’ve lived until that moment, and then you go into another life.
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→ 1:29 PM, May 22

Review: How to Start a New Country

A review of How to Start a New Country by @balajis I. The thesis behind Balaji’s How to Start a New Country seems to be something like this (paraphrasing) The ways people have tried to start a new country up until now have been bad, either because they are too difficult to make work (elections, micronations, seasteading, space) or they are violent (revolution, war). In the last five years or so technology has advanced to a point that gives us another option for starting a new country, and we should start doing that.
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→ 3:05 PM, Apr 11

Mazirian's Garden

This exerpt from The Dying Earth struck me as a beautiful piece of language. …Such was Mazirian’s garden – three terraces growing with strange and wonderful vegetations. Certain plants swam with changing iridescences; others held up blooms pulsing like sea-anemones, purple, green, lilac, pink, yellow. Here grew trees like feather parasols, trees with transparent trunks threaded with red and yellow veins, trees with foliage like metal foil, each leaf a different metal – copper, silver, blue tantalum, bronze, green iridium.
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→ 5:22 PM, Apr 4

Homemade Pizza

I’ve been making this recipe twice a week, Friday and Saturday, almost every week since the pandemic started. Must have started sometime April 2020 but I can’t be sure. It’s really yummy and has provided a comforting weekend routine I’ve used to stay sane through this whole thing. Here it is. Ingredients 1 bag of premade dough from Trader Joes ½ jar of marinara sauce ¼ bag of shredded parmesan cheese ¼ bag of shredded mozzarella cheese ½ green pepper 1/8 yellow onion 1 jalapeno pepper Recipe Spread a handful of flour on your countertop.
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→ 12:44 AM, Apr 3

Weekend Bitcoin Project Recap

I dream of a future where everyone is their own bank, money is internet native, and the world is a true decentralized meritocracy. Such things are promised by crypto and its advocates. Wouldn’t that be great. Maybe that will happen, maybe it won’t. (I hope it does.) Regardless, bitcoin is super interesting and each passing day it looks less and less like it’s going away, and more and more like it will stick around as a legitimate financial tool in our world.
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→ 12:33 AM, Apr 2

How to Run a Bitcoin Node on AWS For Free

This past weekend I went down something of a bitcoin programming rabbit hole while exploring an idea for sending crypto to people over Twitter. I ultimately decided not to pursue the idea any further than the the proof of concept phase, but I ended up spending a decent chunk of time playing around with self-hosting my own bitcoin node in the cloud. I wrote up my learnings into this guide, which will hopefully be useful to someone as an intro into bitcoin hacking 🙂
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→ 12:13 AM, Apr 2

Starting a Software Business is Getting Easier

It used to be that starting a software company was hard. It was hard because you had to do everything yourself, and doing a lot of those things was expensive. Over the past 25 years, since the birth of what we would call the first modern software companies – Google, Yahoo, Viaweb – the trend has been that starting a software company involves doing fewer things yourself, and the things that you end up having to do cost less money.
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→ 11:21 AM, Mar 30

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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→ 10:35 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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→ 12:22 AM, Feb 28

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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→ 4:00 AM, Jan 23

Aaaaaaaand we’re back astralcodexten.substack.com 📖

→ 8:09 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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→ 7:10 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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→ 4:32 PM, Jan 17

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

→ 3:14 AM, Jan 17

htop while compiling emacs feature/native-comp

→ 7:40 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.

→ 2:52 AM, Jan 13

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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→ 11:28 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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→ 12:11 AM, Jan 6

Omg. Money Stuff is back! 😃💵

→ 1:06 PM, 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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→ 5:06 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

→ 5:22 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.

→ 12:34 AM, Dec 20

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

(disclaimer: I watch a fair amount of tv)

→ 1:33 AM, Dec 18

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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→ 11:14 PM, Dec 12

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