By some happy accident, or inevitability (jury's still out on that one), you've reached the small part of the internet rented by Prakhar Nagpal.
I just moved into my own place in London!
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I work at a startup that's trying to do some good for the world, most of the time - we're not perfect.
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Love cooking, reading, learning things (more specifically - the rush that comes with learning something new and really understanding it), playing sports, hiking, meditating and I jusy picked up a ukulele.
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I thoroughly dislike most things that the tech industry, or any industry for that matter, represents - especially but not limited to Silicon Valley.
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Any socio-economic system that forces incredibly smart, talented people to focus on creating value for an ever increasingly smaller share of the population instead of tools to fix real problems for real people everywhere is one that should not make sense to anyone with a conscience.
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Having said that, I have not been able to come up with a good alternative and so I think reversing the rising inequality that has exploded since the early 1980's is a good place to start for now.
Everything. I like reading and learning everything.
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Right now, I'm focusing on Economics, History and Philosophy. Computer Science is sort of a constant lurker in the background. I'm reading Rob Fie thesis in which he lays out the principles for the REST (not the REST we know, I highly recommend reading it) protocol.
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This is in order to come up with a good answer for, "Is this current condition of the species inevitable or is there something we can do it to make it better in the long run?"
A different kind of browser that addresses the fundamental problems of information storage and retrieval. It might not work (in fact, it probably won't), but we'll learn some interesting things along the way.
The fundamental problem that tools need to be designed to solve is allowing us to translate our thought processes most effectively.
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Most tools today suck at doing this. most tools throughout human history have sucked at doing this, but it is quite sad the interfaces we use to interact with the technology we have access to are still so primitive
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Most programming languages don't allow you to efectively translate your intent into code without doing some mental gymnastics around the semantics baked into the language itself
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Odin does a good job of addressing some of these problems. I have only been using it for a while so I'm definitely not someone who can claim to be an expert but I've really enjoyed it so far.
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Rust is an interesting one, but fundamentally forces you to work around the safe memory semantics that it enforces. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. it's just not as flexible as a language needs to be to really allow a marked increase in engineering productivity.
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Most productivity tools require you to work around their implicit assumptions.
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Obsidian and Roam research force you to really lean into linked notes and backlinks to get the maximum utility out of them.
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Notion... is a nonstarter for me. If you use Notion and genuinly think it makes you more productive I'd recommend performing some timed experiments to see where your time is really spent in the app.
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Notion cont'd; The fact that all your information is stored in a place that you have no control over should scare the living shit out of you. If the last 2000 years have shown us anything it is that people who have money/resources do not give a shit what they have to do in order to hold onto those things. Our access to information will always be the first casualty in any mass struggle.
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Muse app by Ink and Switch is a frighteningly good attempt at a productivity app that works, but unfortunately the constant context switching between browsers and files and deciding what to import and clipping things is more troublesome than I'd like. Fantastic effort and you should absolutely follow the Ink and Switch teams research, I think they're one of the few companies really taking the time to think about what problems we need to solve.
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The problem is, this isn't how we learn. This isn't how we think and most importantly, in order to really make the most of these tools end up focusing less on the active process of learning something new, focusing instead on curating the so called second brain - a term I hate. Brains are notoriously bad at cataloguing, recalling and resurfacing information well so it's a really terrible marketing term for a piece of software whose primary purpose is carrying out said actions.