Matt Roll

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.

→ 4:57 AM, Dec 12

Listening on repeat: www.youtube.com/watch

→ 9:49 PM, Dec 4

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

→ 6:14 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.

→ 2:42 AM, Oct 17

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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→ 12:09 AM, Oct 6

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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→ 12:47 AM, Sep 29

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.”

→ 1:46 AM, Sep 22

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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→ 1:06 AM, Sep 22

I feel like someday I’ll meet someone who also associates an important part of their younger years with a love for Kevin Smith movies, and we’ll be friends forever.

Snootchie Bootchies

→ 1:10 AM, Sep 19

The way one tries to measure inequality is never neutral.

— Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

→ 12:59 AM, Sep 16

Learned from the FT 9.14.2020

I have a Financial Times subscription for the next year, and I want to make the most of it. So I’m starting a new series of blog posts where I record things I learn reading the paper. The paper comes weekdays Mon-Fri, and a weekend addition on Sunday. Throughout the week I’ll read the paper and write down things I learn. On Monday I’ll publish. The format of each entry will be short sections beginning with a description of what I learned.
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→ 9:58 PM, Sep 14

Still smoky over Palo Alto. Haven’t seen the sky in four days.

→ 1:51 PM, Sep 13

Panoramas from a week of hikes during staycation :)

→ 12:49 AM, Sep 4

On the Craft of Typing Code Into the Computer

For how much time people spend typing code into an editor, there’s not a lot written about how to do it well. And school doesn’t teach you, either. I spent five years in a good CS program and not one lecture was devoted to the proper use of your editor. Somehow the craft of typing code into a computer is not something people study. I don’t know why that is.
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→ 2:36 PM, Aug 29

Building emacs native-comp is really difficult right now. Running into problems even w/ the help of build-emacs-for-macos. Can’t wait until I get it working, either w/ this repo or when feature/native-comp gets merged.

→ 12:06 AM, Aug 27

Vachristcationmas

#staycation vachriscationmas (noun) - A vacation where you also receive presents. (It counts if you bought the presents for yourself.)

→ 1:28 AM, Aug 23

Life is short; I didn’t write back.

– Rebecca Solnit

→ 3:45 AM, Aug 16

New blog post up at blog.staqjs.com about how to set up subscription billing with Stripe’s new Customer Portal and Firebase functions.

Posting here is basically just announcing something to myself, but you know, something something backlinks yada yada …

→ 4:58 PM, Aug 15

Today I launched blog.staqjs.com.

Not that anyone reads this blog and will see this post and go there and find out about this new project I’m really excited about. I just figured I should post about it here in principal.

→ 3:06 AM, Aug 10

Coding became like tweeting in more ways than one.

— Nadia Eghbal, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

→ 4:29 PM, Aug 8

Writing Javascript in Emacs Circa 2020

After quite some time, I finally have a configuration that does what I need for writing Javascript in Emacs. Things I have working: Understands JSX Realtime in-buffer linting with ESLint Reformat on save with Prettier Autocompletion with lsp-mode and a Javascript language server Boilerplate generation with YASnippet This configuration works today in Doom Emacs. I’m not making any guarantees about how long that will last. Software dependencies: Javascript Language Server Prettier ESLint Doom Setup In your init.
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→ 2:26 AM, Aug 5

Just started reading Children of the Mind, almost 10 years after finishing Xenocide. Felt necessary to post this comic.

There was a distinct feeling that I got from reading Ender’s Game, and the same feeling but even more so from Speaker for the Dead. A feeling I only get from the very best science fiction. And so Xenocide caught me off guard; it was just off. A swing and a miss. Or maybe that part of the story just wasn’t as interesting and still needed to be told. I don’t know.

And so it was pretty incredible to find this comic, because it meant someone else had that same combination of feelings about those same books.

Credit to Randall Munroe at xkcd.com

→ 1:04 AM, Aug 3

Access GCP Secrets from Firebase Function

The documentation for Google Cloud’s Secret Manager leaves out a key piece of information, which is what permissions do you need to set in order to run this code in a Firebase function? The error you’ll run into before setting up the permissions is: Permission 'secretmanager.versions.access' denied for resource <resource-name (or it may not exist) And the way to fix it is by adding the role Secret Manager Secret Accessor to the service account of the name <project-id>@appspot.
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→ 4:30 PM, Jul 31

Found out an amazing thing today. Sometimes your projectile cache will get polluted with files that don’t exist anymore. This has been annoying me for weeks! But luckily a little digging turned up a solution. Clear the cache with projectile-invalidate-cache, which probably has a convenient binding if you’re using a package like Doom or Spacemacs.

→ 10:22 PM, Jul 30

I often have the urge to hack on something when I’m away from my laptop. And so I’ve been trying to come up with an interface that would enable a great software development experience for mobile phones.

But I just realized the solution isn’t to fit a dev environment into a tiny screen. The solution is to figure out how to bring your big screen everywhere. And so I find myself, all of a sudden, extremely excited for proper augmented reality technology. Can’t wait for a lightweight pair of glasses powered by the processor in my phone that I can use to access a cloud hosted dev environment.

That will be magic.

→ 9:38 PM, Jul 27

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