>it turns out that a blank list is a great filter for what is truly important and motivating. If it is important, you will remember it at some point during the day.

I started using GTD, but due to sprawling list overwhelm, evolved it into nanoGTD, where I start each day with a blank page and recreate my projects and next actions from memory/imagination.

This works best on paper. To make sure nothing fell through the cracks, I just turn to the previous page.

You've put into words beautifully one of my main argument against getting a job.

I have a better one though: a job leaves almost no time or energy for actual work.

For me, a stable job is key. The structure and accountability makes it hard to fail, and my (relative) lack of ambition ensures I don't over-commit or stress too much over work. It's everything else that I get lazy about! I have plenty of time, but it's too easy to do fun but unproductive activities.

If something doesn't trigger my "oh no, this will lead to more responsibility" alarms, I can be very productive. For example, I love to plan a trip, because it has a discrete start and end and is entirely within my control.

What's your alternative solution for paying rent / getting food?

Not having a job feels like a good option if you can select into it but the barrier is high for me

Can an already trained LLM be made (fine-tuned?) to forget a specific document, by running gradient descent in reverse?

It's for me, as far as I can tell! I like making PDFs.

My ideas start in Obsidian (Markdown) and then I use pandoc and add a bunch of cursed inline LaTeX hacks to the Markdown for the final product.

I guess cursed hacks are part of any workflow, but I am definitely going to check this out.

Is there some kind of thing that turns a web page into a text file? I know you can do it with beautiful soup (or like 4 lines of python stdlib), but I usually need it on my phone, where I don't know a good option.

My phone browser has a "reader view" popup but it only appears sometimes, and usually not on pages that need it!

Edit: Just installed w3m in Termux... the things we can do nowadays!

You want Zotero.

It's for bibliographies, but it also archives and stores web pages locally with a browser integration.

I frankly don't know how I'd collect any useful info without it.

I'm sure there are bookmark services that also allow notes, but the tagging, linking related things, etc, all in the app is awesome, plus the ability to export bib tex for writing a paper!

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I am going to cancel my internet subscription...

You should sign up for Nautilus. Monthly compact discs mailed to your door containing 650MB of assorted interactive multimedia. It was the original broadband (with very large packet size.)

(You might need a Time Machine first)

There was a guy at MIT who made a silent headset a few years ago. It didn't use brainwaves but rather measured electrical activity in the facial muscles. Apparently when you think in words, there's a slight activation of the same muscles you use to speak.

I heard that in Lisp every program becomes a DSL?

I wouldn't say that. It's just its trivial to make DSLs in languages like the various lisps (common lisp, racket, chez scheme...etc).

That's usually what people complain about (besides the parenthesis) in that it's easy to not be very disciplined.

Lisp is homoiconic, so there isn't really a distinction between programs and data. For example, a snippet of code like a for-loop iterating through a list is also a list that can be inspected and modified. Or something along those lines (there's an XKCD comic that captures the spirit where the person says "it's all CARs" as in lisp you can build everything from CAR, CDR, and CONS I think). You'll have to dig into that on your own. The terms are historically relevant, but seem antiquated now. I've never really understood macros (compile or runtime ones) all that well though, so hopefully someone else in the comics can clarify my mumbo jumbo.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/224:_Lisp

I had a similar feeling when I finished my freelance projects, that I would be difficult to replace, or that it would be easier to start from scratch than to try and decipher the system.

That's partly because I was being "too creative" — I love making things from scratch, but that's suboptimal from a business perspective fot several reasons. And partly because I didn't document the decisions very well (except in random comments).

So I had the feeling like most of the value was in my head, and a lot of work would have to be repeated with the next guy.

Aside from just inexperience and lack of professionalism on my part, there seems to be some tension here between what's good / enjoyable for me as a developer (making everything myself) vs what's good for the business (probably WordPress / PHP).