Weeknote for 8/8/2021

Finances

πŸ€”

I’m planning my investments with the Bogleheads’ Retiree Portfolio Model. My impression is it contains most of the formulas I was going to have to research or guess at, so it should save a lot of time. I might use it for actual retirement planning later, but for now I’m adapting it for my medium-term investing goals. Or at least I will when I come back to this project.

Productivity

πŸ™‚

I’m spending a week on my productivity system update. It’s disheartening to leave a project incomplete for a month or more when I switch to another one, so I’m shortening the minimum wait to a week to see how that goes. This week I’ll collect my current productivity system goals, make a plan, and see how far I can get by next week.

Programming

😎

I’m learning Haskell. Domain Modeling Made Functional reignited my curiosity about functional programming, and I’ve reconfirmed that Haskell will be my best starting point for trying again to learn it. It’s both intensely functional and widely used. I’m reading Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!, and I’m finding it much easier to get into than Haskell Programming from First Principles, though I’ll still try to read that one later.

AI

😐

A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins gave me a bite-size treatment of the author’s theory. Hawkins caught my attention with his interview on Lex Fridman, but the book was less engrossing and satisfying than I hoped it would be. There’s only so much enthusiasm I can muster for basic points I’ve heard many times before (deep learning won’t get us to general AI, etc.), and the parts that were newer didn’t give me much detail to sink my teeth into.

Having said that, his framework for understanding the neocortex is an interesting one, and at some point I’d like to look into it further and play around with simulations. He also has an intriguing idea for a stellar-scale monument to human civilization, and I’m curious what he’d think of the proposals of Isaac Arthur and friends on overpopulation, climate change, spreading the human presence off Earth, and other concerns the book raises.

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