Spider-Man Neurons, Hearing Fractals, and Fulfilment
I can’t believe we’re approaching a time of year when I can wait until after dinner to turn on my desk light. In the almost two months since my last newsletter, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, having 1:1s with some pretty rad people, learning Rust, and of course surviving school. Surviving, in this case, is a questionable word choice.
3 things I’ve found interesting
- Multimodal Neurons in Neural Networks. First off, Spider-Man neuron. This paper is an interesting exploration on how neural networks can appear to have an understanding of abstract higher-level concepts that are composable. A lot of really interesting potential here.
- Sounds of the Mandelbrot Set. Is mayonaisse an instrument? Yes, and fractals are too. A really cool look into doing an auditory visualization of things we wouldn’t normally associate with sound.
- Jazz Messages. Send notes to your friends in style with j a z z.
2 things I’ve been wondering about
- What does it mean to find fulfilment in what you do? I’ve found myself involved with an overabundance of projects in the past year and only a select handful have truly been fulfilling to work on. I’m doing a bit of introspection in hopes of maybe figuring out why I love doing the things I love and maybe an answer to
$whoami
. - What’s not in the frame. In which Hank talks about the metaphorical ‘frame’, or the context in which people present themselves. People choose to present themselves a certain way in front of others and in doing so, leave a lot of what’s actually going on outside the frame. If all we ever see are other people’s frames, how do we remind ourselves of what’s going on outside of it and normalize being ‘out-of-frame’?
1 thing I’ve done
Pretty slow month in terms of personal projects/pieces, mostly either working on patching up older projects (finally got around to updating ctrl-v and Docker Explained). I did end up finishing Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal and found some really interesting ideas that I wanted to explore and flesh out a bit. I had a few convos with a friend on Twitter and ended up writing a piece on why Open Source should be funded.
Stay tuned for next month(s) and don’t forget to be awesome :)