Learning is a marvelous thing.

With just a connection to the internet, any old laptop and enough free time you can learn just about any skill.

Can’t find a job?

bam!

Wanna learn a language??

pow!!

Wanna play an instrument????

KACHOW!!!

But how does one learn on their own? As kids we’re taught in such a way where every step is laid neatly after the other but self-study is different.

Learning resources are scattered, incomplete or even hidden on the second page of google.

When all you’ve only ever done is what you’re told, choices like these become paralyzing.

Making Sense of it all

The first thing you should probably do is join the community of the thing you want to learn.

This doesn’t have to mean active participation but you should have a general undertanding of what other people in the community think is a good resource to learn from.

This help you wades through at least some of the weeds of bad resources (which you will certainly find).

Find somebody that you trust to be competent in what you’re learning and ask what they reccomend.

Avoid those with financial incentive to skew their answer, they usually don't have your best interest in mind.

Then really all you gotta do is put one front the other and get to work.

But how do I Learn?

I have a confession to make.

I used to be that guy who would watch every motivational videos on YouTube, researching “how to learn” without ever actually opening up a book.

Do better.

From all I’ve found, the “most efficient” way to learn is almost always:

literally just do the thing lmao

The answer to “how do I learn to play the guitar” will always be “play the guitar” but we love to pretend like there’s an easier way.

You will fail and adjust until you no longer seem to fail anymore.

This process does not have to be painful and boring but can be difficult and exciting.

Difficult != Boring

Another misconception I see all the time is that “learning is boring”.

Nah.

Learning is one of the most fun and engaging activities that you can participate in but you need to actively embrace engagement.

Ask questions, follow up on things that you don’t understand, fall down rabit holes.

When you’re actively trying to remain engaged with content I promise you will find it’s one of the most enjoyable experiences of your life.

• Find something about the topic that engages you
• Comparison is the thief of joy
• Try and stay within the goldilocks zone of learning

Learning doesn’t have to be this ardous proccess that you dread but even something you look forward to.

So How do I Reeally Learn

I mean that’s really it.

1. Find a learning medium that doesn’t make you sick
2. Actually follow through
3. Do the thing
4. Profits

Maybe there’s some skill out there that this doesn’t work on but it’s worked on all the things I’ve tried.

Cool Learning Resources I’ve found

If you share any of my passions, these are some learning resources that I’ve found very useful.

Also checkout my linkhut or email me for more.

Computer Science

• linkhut - literally just links
• build-your-own-x - learn programming by reinventing the wheel
• tldp - lots of free documentation on Linux stuff
• cs50 - comprehensive introduction to programming
• cpu.land - one of the coolest introductions to cpu’s I’ve ever seen
• lyah - learn you a haskell for great good (yea)

Learning Japanese

• learnjapanese.moe - guides to the immersion approach for language learning
• yomitan - popup dictionar
• anki - the goat
• livakivi - love this guy

Studying Music

• youtube - literally just play to some music brah
• reaper - cheap enterprise-level daw
• imlp - like every public domain composition for download

It is my current belief that American culture places too much reliance on the concept of fault. Decades of propaganda have led us to believe that you should “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and that only you can be blamed for your misfortunes.

Thus we work hard to believe that the only thing separating us from the “American dream” is effort. That with enough effort you too can enjoy yachts on a monday evening, surrounded by sunshine and glasses of champagne.

While I’d like to offer statistics as to why this is unlikely and that billionaries are only ever born into wealth, I cannot do that as the results are skewed [1][2][3] and I don’t have the authority to tell you which to believe.

What I can tell you is that I personally come from a rather poor family, one not so poor I was afraid I’d lose the roof over my head yet poor enough to live off of food stamps and “peanut butter toast” for the majority of my life.

There is certainly likelihood where I could become wealthy (eww) but I want it to be made clear that it would take me a dissproportionate amount more effort then someone gifted six million for graduating high school.

This is not said with the intent of garnering pity or to offer excuses about why my Pen Island startup failed but as an attempt to help others see another perspective.

South Tucson

Last year I chose to enroll in a class about the anthropology of disabled people. Not because I had any particular interest in the subject but because I needed an online-only class that would fulfill the writing requirements I needed for my degree.

Thus like most of my non-major courses I began by paying as little attention as possible. However this time there was one story in particular that caught my interest.

Back in the 1932, a man by the name of Howard Hughes founded the “Hughes Aircraft Company”. Starting as a passion project, the company’s success rapidly ended up accelerated via the looming threat of war reaching the U.S. over seas. Eventually, Hughes had amassed enough success where facilities began to be built in El Segundo, Hawthorne, Fullerton, San Diego, and most importantly, Tucson Arizona.

In consequence of this success, it didn’t take Hughes long to realize that he had a waste problem. And what do you do with large amounts of toxic chemicals in need of disposal you ask? Why you dump it in the nearest body of water of course.

By the mid to late 1950’s the Hughes Aircraft Company proceeded to pour copious amounts of cancerous trichloroethylene (TCE) into South Tucson waters. By late 1984, the range of contaminated water had reached a width of 3,000-4,000 feet and a length of more than four miles. Fourty years later, many Tucson families still were experiencing sickness from drinking water that contained 200x the reccomended limit for ingestion of forever chemicals.

When the outraged South Tusconans cried out in justice they were told that their dispraportionately high cancer rates were a result of their poor lifestyle and eating habits (no I’m not joking). That if they had just tried a liiittle harder then maybe their son wouldn’t have been diagnosed with cancer before he had learned to walk.

“It’s supposed to be the other way around,” Alfonso said of his granddaughter’s premature death. “Our grandkids are supposed to bury us but we’re burying our grandkids.”

– tucson.com

Responsibility without Fault

Following my (very dilligent) reading of the course material me and five other students were instructed to have a conversation about the contents of the chapter.

One thing that really stuck out to me about that conversation was an overwhelming sense of doom that overarched each conversational point. Everybody knew that there was a problem but nobody had the initiative to discuss any sembelance of a solution.

While the obvious solution implies legal and societal change, what does this mean for the Tusconans right now suffering with ailments caused directly by misaligned governance? Shall they wait till they’ve been granted enough pity points with the supreme court to be granted the gracious permittance of safe drinking water?

Large-scale societal change may be the only reliable long-term path forward but I don’t believe that means we should give up on the individual of today.

It is perfectly reasonable to expect those who’ve wronged you to make it right it yet in today’s day and age theft is sanctioned and fraud steers the helm. The decision to believe that someone else will come save you is becoming an increasingly unreliable bet to make.

It is not fair that we must think about this but we cannot give up because of it.

In order to survive one must be willing to take responsibility for what is not their fault.

Only buy imported bottled water, move cities, states hell even countries. These are not in the slightest reasonable requests, nobody should have to uproot their entire family simply to provide their childeren a safe place to live.

But what’s the alternative?

Shall we tell those people it’s hopeless?

That they should smile as they bury their granddaughter?

Background

For a long time now I’ve wondered what it would be like to have my own personal website. One look at html’s syntax however put me in an odd state of discomfort thus preventing me from taking the plunge.

Very recently however, I finished all of the problem sets and lectures for Harvard’s CS50P Python course. For the first time in my life I’ve felt like I can actually kinda somewhat maybe program and CS50P’s final project requirement gives me a chance to prove that.

The final project within CS50P gives you very little guidlines on what the project must look like, the one caveat being that the project must:

entail more time and effort than is required by each of the course’s problem sets.

Some people create video games, scripts, hacking tools, etc etc.

For my project I decided that I wanted to automate the very common task in my life of downloading new manga for Japanese immersion

This project would entail a few things: 1. Periodically scrape relevant web sites for new manga releases 2. Create a cli interface to add to and update an rss.xml 3. Automatically download and format new manga 4. Transfer manga to my homelab

By the first step I felt I was already confused, there were all these new libraries (BeautifulSoup4, Selenium, Playwright, Scrapy) I didn’t really know which to pick and I had absolutely no idea what was happening in the html documents I was attempting to scrape.

While I’ve had interactions with html in the past, they were merely short flings of passion that immediately ended after I realized my mistake and opened the file I had actually intended to open.

This project was the first time that I kinda had to actually look at the thing and figure out what it was trying to say.

Thus, shortly after starting a project in Python, I had spent 16 hours learning how to write my own website.

Hugo

While I had originally started writing my website in pure HTML and CSS (I have no intentions of dirtying my hands in “they who shall not be named”) I quickly realized that I would have to manually copy and paste all changes that I wanted globally.

All I wanted was a header that stayed with me throughout my webpages and HTML and CSS couldn’t even offer me that.

While I knew there were probably solutions to my problem I also knew that they would lead me dangerously close to redirecting my career path towards that of a full stack web engineer.

At least until I found hugo.

What is hugo

While I can’t even pretend to understand how to use this thing (The tags page still doesn’t work for me and I don’t know why) my basic understanding outlines like this:

Hugo is a templating toolkit for quickly generating static web pages from markdown files

In me-terms, this meant that I could write the same header.html in one file and have that automatically show up at the top of every one of my web pages.

It also has many other convienences such as shortcodes that allow you to use some of your hugo templates from within your markdown files.

This was a huge win for me, as it meant that I could retain some sembelance of the sanity I would have lost copy pasting a header into a raw html file to write about how a cat looked at me weird on the street.

Conclusion

While I still have a lot to learn (my header is still off center) I’m excited to say that I finally have my own website where I can share my very important thoughts about how you should use emacs instead of vim.

Learning HTML, CSS and eventually Hugo has been a really fun endeavor for me and if this blog post has caught your interest in any way I highly reccomend you take the plunge as well.