Cancelling Netflix and Chill (T-Mobile offer)
I'm cancelling my Netflix subscription and shouting out to some YouTube viewers that make streaming fun. I'm also evaluating what I should do today using three daily metaphors, considering moving back to NYC, and discussing the benefits of being anti-fragile. I'm advocating for the use of Linux, Python, Vim, and Git (LPvg) as a practical alternative to Web Development. LPvg is a great way to become a programmer without needing to learn a whole new language.
Cancelling Netflix and Shouting Out YouTube Viewers: Evaluating My Options and Exploring LPvg as a Practical Alternative to Web Development
By Michael Levin
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Some YouTube Viewers I’m Shouting Out To
- Bob O
- ComputerChronicles
- Celtic Orthodox Prayer
- OttoVon Bismarck
Thanks you folks, you make streaming fun and give me hope to blow up. To that end, I will stream whenever I can, especially on topics that are part of the public zeitgeist.
So Brain, what do you want to do today? To decide, look through my daily metaphors:
Daily metaphors
- What’s most broken. Weakest link in the chain evaluation.
- Where do you get the biggest bang for the buck? 80/20-rule evaluation.
- What plates need spinning? How deep does the rabbit hole go? Caution!
Let’s take them in order:
- Money, money, money… I’ll be out of it real soon.
- I must move back to NYC where expenses are double.
- And I’m already stretched thing.
And so, Bye bye stuff I buy like Netflix, price-raised? Not this guy. I love Umbrella Academy and look forward to season 3. But not that much.
How To Be Anti-Fragile
Life is full of Charlie Brown landing on his back moments. You’re not trying to go from fragile to durable. Durable implies static. You want to remain a dynamic personality. Don’t get set in your ways except for the muscle memory of timeless tools. Those should be static. But your world-view, belief in things, etc. should be open to revision. This is an open mind, and the main attribute of a dynamic individual. This means that the knocks that knock Charlie Brown to his back are not only endurable, but in fact, necessary to being dynamic, and what is recently being revealed as anti-fragile.
You gotta be brave. Bewarb, but not too bewarb.
Yankee Doodle Dandies vs. Mystic Celtic Druids
Celtic magic… farmers… and their highland brethren. US, we did the atomic bomb… no secrets there, because boom! Brits broke the German enigma code and no one knew the details for 40+years (Alan Turning, the imitation machine)
I know I’m a bit weird. It’s because I’m not whitewashed by media.
Think for yourself.
Original thoughts come of as weird to folks who follow the flock.
Following the flock comes form consuming mainstream media.
Cancel Netflix.
Powertoys Give Me Powertools Heebie Jeebies
I try to avoid customization. You can’t fully avoid it. But reliance on things like powertoys is right where I get nervous.
When knowledge is OS-specific, you want to avoid 3rd-party dependencies that don’t exist on those other OSes. I know Powertoys isn’t really 3rd-party, but even extra stuff to install has to be strongly justified in my mind. Microsoft Terminal makes the cut. Powertoys, maybe not so much.
A Word on Living in vim & Hard Line Returns
Live with editing text files using hard returns (which are line-breaks at a given point, usually 80-characters by convention). Most word processors don’t wrap lines with hard breaks. Hard linebreaks are usually reserved for paragraph breaks.
I don’t put down NIH syndrome. I project that I put down NIH syndrome because I am so very guilty of it. Why? You understand things better (and believe they’re superior) when you invent them yourself. NIH syndrome. It’s bad. But it’s good. Have some. Write some.
All Linuxes are the same (either Debian or Redhat)
Unless they’re Arch or Gentoo. Those are different.
I will guess Otto von Bismarck is not a fan of systemd. I am wrong. Otto von Bismarck is very much a fan of systemd and enumerated the reasons. I was also wrong about Arch being one of the last remaining holdouts against systemd. It seems they are on the bandwagon as well now too.
And Now a Word About systemd and Linux Services
I personally can’t get enough of systemd. So what’s still different about Arch?
- Arch doesn’t use the apt-get or rpm. It uses pacman.
- Arch doesn’t generally use a graphical desktop.
- Arch is badass and cool. Pacman agrees.
- Arch moved from init.d to systemd (yay!)
systemd is monolithic, introduces hacking surface-area, oversteps its bounds (userspace vs. systemspace), was inspired by Apple.
But in all other regards, is awesome and provides a practical alternative to Web Development.
So what is systemd. Why do I advocate it so much.
- Linux system services
- System services are a practical alternative to Web Development (webdev)
- System services automatically run at startup
- System services re-run (re-spawn) on fails / exit
- Scheduling (run script at time every day)
- Without crontab
- Python’s standard library sched
- Pip install schedule (scheduling for humans)
People think Tech is like this:
You think tech is like Star Trek and people want to do things like change to better tech when it’s available.
Too often, Tech is like this:
Tech is just as much like nervous little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike… don’t change anything or else all the water comes flooding through. Paralyzed into inaction for fear of the machines breaking and heads rolling.
So, what to do? Adopt LPvg:
- Linux
- Python
- vim
- git
…So that you don’t have as much new stuff to learn. Learn Linux, Python, vim and git and you can stop learning and become a static personality? Does this limited tool-set that I’m advocating mean that I actually am a static person? Am I actually even a dynamic personality like I claim and strive to be?
Static Personality vs. Dynamic Personality
Yes, because each of those tools has a lifetime of sub-learning.
Plus, even so I took up JupyterLab because sometimes the exception is more important than the rule. The overriding main rule does not have to be held onto blindly regardless of other facts.
Stop and look around. Give new things a try. Julia might be your next programming language, because under the Linux tool, any other tool that can be invoked on the Linux command-line is really under the Linux umbrella.
Bash scripts and piping from program to program can make you a programmer without even being a programmer.
How Deep Does That Rabbit Hole Go?
Of LPvg, the “L” is the broadest. I’m not advocating learning low-level Linux kernel stuff. Here more than ever, you’ve just got to use good sense and bring to it the amount of flexibility that you need, and which will avoid falling too deep down the wrong rabbit holes.
Linux is full of rabbit holes of both the good and the bad variety.
Knowing which is which ain’t easy.