Notes

I don’t take new year goals, probably because they induce anxiety if I don’t stick to them. Instead, I think in terms of themes, a list I can look back throughout the year. So, here’s such a list for 2023: I’ve already collected a a lot of good content that I haven’t consumed. (This includes books, music and side-project ideas.) I’d like to stop collecting more and chug through what I already have. Staying healthy will obviously be high priority. I’d also like to go out in nature more. I want to stay away from new tools (in terms of software or services) and continue using those I already know to achieve my real goals. Less passive content consumption - for e.g., Hacker News, Reddit, news headlines, etc. But I do want to understand more deeply some topics from the world around me. For that, I am thinking Economist, YouTube and gradually curating a list of blogs etc. Research papers are a good idea. Writing blogs can be another good way to go deep into sone topics.

The projects here seem to be short, well-defined and decent way to familiarize with internals of a few technologies (such as Redis, Docker etc.) https://app.codecrafters.io/tracks This repo also seems to be good: https://github.com/codecrafters-io/build-your-own-x. For e.g., write and OS in Rust - complicated and likely not useful for me. https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom#documentation - uses Ruby though.

Some open-source tools that allow de-DRM-ing Audible books: https://github.com/rmcrackan/Libation - seems to allow signing into your Audible account so that you can automate the process to some extent. https://audible-converter.ml

I recently read couple of posts on Hacker News and Reddit where people claimed that Amazon banned their account when they issued a chargeback through their credit card. Consequently, they lost access to all their Kindle and possibly Audible books. That got me thinking that it’d be a good idea if I took un-DRMed backups of my content on these services, lest something similar happens to me for any reason. ...

It’d be a cool side-project to implement a programming language. Lua is a good candidate as it seems to be small and comes with a test suite that I can reuse to verify the validity of my code. I could make it more challenging, a lot more challenging actually, if I tried to do that in a language that’s new to me, such as Rust.

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I was looking for games that will run well on my M1 MacBook. I already bought Disco Elysium and I found 2 more that I can try in future: Factorio. Baldur’s Gate 3. (Its hardware requirements could be high though.)

This tool looks nice: https://www.lunarvim.org/ Has sane/opinionated defaults for using NeoVim as an IDE for some programming languages. So, can be a good alternative to paid IDEs like Jetbrains'.

Overall Pros: Tax-wise, annuity works out better than holding the same assets in an individual brokerage account. (See below.) Annuity will come out ahead by 0.62% in the best case scenario but, in reality, the number will be lower. So, question is whether this number is big enough to justify the additional complexity in my portfolio. Cons: The annuity gains, whenever withdrawn in future, are taxed as income, not capital gains, tax. And, at least today, income tax > capital gains tax. This may be similar to how a 401k works but, in that case, you are putting pre-tax dollars, so you are saving tax. Therefore, not a justified comparison. There is no step-up in cost basis when these assets are passed on to heirs. If we don’t use the money before we die and all of it goes to our kid(s), they’ll have to pay income tax on that. That’s a major concern because chances are high we’ll hit this scenario. Only money that I am sure I’ll withdraw during retirement should go into this. (If I withdraw earlier, the penalty will bite.) I don’t know how much money I want to spend between today and retirement, so I’d be taking a major risk by locking up money in such a vehicle. Cost calculation Assumptions: ...

I can’t estimate how many times I’ve seen this scene on YouTube. And it has given me goosebumps every single time, without fail. Cooper’s expressions were extraordinary: how quickly he spurs into action after the blast (without sulking or getting depressed about what actually happened) and how adamant he is that he needs to dock even though it’s almost impossible. Earlier, I also used to be amazed by thinking that Mann couldn’t dock when he was so close to the ship and Cooper did it after the ship was blown and rotating like crazy. It was only yesterday I realized that Cooper’s contribution was more about his attitude. The actual execution - rotating Endurance at the right speed and docking after that - was handled by the robots, TARS and CASE. Even the robots went from “this is not possible” to “this is no time for caution” pretty quickly! Hans’ soundtrack was equally crucial, maybe more, to make the scene work. Such anxiety-inducing. I want to say that this scene is the best I’ve seen in any movie but that’ll probably be recency bias. But is it amongst top 5, absolutely.