Mateusz

BOOKSTORES: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content

Living in the “golden age of content” has many benefits. You can basically watch anything, anywhere, anytime. Servers do not sleep, phones are slim and the extension of your arms and companies want to have the most diverse content catalogue. Information is all around us, yet I’d argue that sadly we are slipping into medieval fairy tails and folklore rather than grounded knowledge and scientifically proven facts. For once I don’t blame us, we are at the receiving end of the information barrel. Misinformation, trolls, cheap attention grabbers and many more ways the todays internet overwhelms you are bullets coming out of this barrel, and they are heading straight for your attention. Pioneers of any field are idealists. Michael Faraday did not indent to use electricity to build electric chairs. Albert Einstein did not indent to use the general theory of relativity to build atomic bombs. Tim Berners-Lee did not indent to use the internet to build Facebook. Reading the original vision of the internet written by Tim Berners-Lee himself we can see that he wanted to aim the information barrel at the walls that were limiting us. For this we have to go back to books.

Books! I got so carried away by the internet - as always - that I forgot about the meditative medium. The medium where you and the book are alone and never pressured into anything. Given the experience of reading Harry Potter or infinite scrolling for 2 hours everybody would say that the book was more enjoyable. I know because that is what I say each time I sit down with a book and allocate a chunk of time for reading instead of mindlessly wasting my time. Quoting Louis C.K. “And yet they still do it!”. It’s hard to pick up a book and just start to read it. Many factors are at play but most common ones are motivation and forgetting about it. And don’t fool yourself, you’re not going to “Do it in 30 minutes”. As with everything it’s going to be reallocated to the magical “tomorrow”. BUT YOU COULD HAVE SO MUCH FUN! To get the best motivation booster and all the tips you need to start reading the documentary by Max Joseph is your place to go. The best part is that all of this stuff is just the side dish to an extraordinary document that - oh irony - is posted in a place where you could easily waste the runtime of this documentary not getting anything in return.

the cryptopals crypto challenges

Cryptography is the backbone of todays internet secure communication, the magical blockchain and a big rear pain in all the governments trying to create a back-door in it. This field of mathematics is either going to dominate computer science or disappear completely - thanks quantum computers - so I’d say its worth to see what’s what. As with learning anything the best way to learn was described in once sentence by Richard Feynman “What I cannot create I do not understand”. I just want to add that this is probably the best quote to put inside a repository that aggregates links about how to program things from scratch. Take the challenge, learn by creating and open the black box that so many of us are using.

First images from James Webb

James Web Space Telescope (JWST) has be giggling like a little girl about pictures of hydrogen balls. The sheer scale of this operation, the level of engineering that went into making this launch more than perfect is beyond me. Testing and retesting for hours on end just to have days, weeks, months, years of your work be tested one last time where everything has to be perfect is an unimaginable feeling. People that made all of this possible from the bottom of my monkeys brain curiosity receptors, thank you. They tried to capture the most boring image that they could and yet still produced something that is maxing out my “this is so cool-o-meters”. I get giddy thinking about all the possibilities. My could nine is the fact that for the next 20 years this telescope is going to produce images about our universe. Even if this all leads to disappointment at least it means that it leads to truth.

Antoni

The five balls

Imagine your life is a game of keeping 5 balls in the air. One of them is a rubber ball while the others are made of fragile glass.

The five balls are : work, family, health, friends, soul.

I think it is a modern world privilege that we are getting so concerned about our carriers. Just take a step back and think about it, people are able to be workaholics. Their environment is so supportive that they are able to focus entirely on doing what they like. Or is it so?

Isn’t it that so much people do something only because they are getting paid for it? Aren’t their relatives hurt by theirs attention shortage? Aren’t they forgetting about they physical wellbeing? Do they even meet people besides family and colleagues? Do they have time to stop and wonder?

Why a sign on a paper and monthly paycheck motivates so many people to do such things? How is our society constructed so that such behaviors are considered normal? When we stopped working to live and started living to work?

Some questions really bother me for long time and this one truly is, bothering. And unfortunately I cannot find an answer for it. Not yet.

But the thing I do know is - I don’t want to live like this.

What the climate?

Want to give few words about current climatic situation. I am not gonna lie, I stopped following the news about it. I have been hearing many dark predictions and read many conversations. This topic is indeed polarizing.

What really bothers me is the fact that the narrative is getting more and more serious. Events are getting worse, wildfires, floods, hurricanes. And at the same time the problem has disappeared from public radar since the outbreak of pandemic and lately war.

The consequences are really hard to grasp. Living right now, at this very moment, life has not been better for me. Weather in Poland is also not very hostile. So I am so much in a comfort zone, riding a tram and suddenly open my phone to see such news.

I definitely felt worried, but at the same time, what really struck me, I was not surprised. There is no much negative information that really, when thinking about the climate my thought process is that we are all doomed. Should it be this way?

Am I able to make a positive change with such an attitude?