June Monthly Bragging Thread

elharo

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to comment on this thread explaining the most awesome thing you've done this month. You may be as blatantly proud of yourself as you feel. You may unabashedly consider yourself the coolest freaking person ever because of that awesome thing you're dying to tell everyone about. This is the place to do just that.

Remember, however, that this isn't any kind of progress thread. Nor is it any kind of proposal thread. This thread is solely for people to talk about the awesome things they have done. Not "will do". Not "are working on". Have already done. This is to cultivate an environment of object level productivity rather than meta-productivity methods.

So, what's the coolest thing you've done this month?

Oy, it's only halfway through the month! I still have two weeks to reimplement the proofs of correctness for the Damas-Milner type system and its inference algorithm W. I already got through almost all of Benjamin Pierce's Software Foundations, getting through almost the whole bunch of lambda-calculus and type-theory chapters just last week.

Well, anyway, in the past month I published a nine-page decision theory article here on LW and more-or-less organized MIRIx Tel-Aviv (I just have to attach my PayPal to my bank account). At one point, this involved causing the LW-TA mailing list to erupt into debates that rather reminded JoshuaFox of the Extropian Mailing List in the '90s: I consider this slightly shameful, but also actually an accomplishment.

Actually, the productivity technique used for that was multifold: 1) sheer chutzpah of applying, 2) solicit people for information on when and where they can do things, 3) close down discussions that diverge. You'd be surprised how far this gets you, provided anyone actually responds to anything ever.

I've been getting coursework done on-time and with really good marks, but that's not real productivity for a graduate student.

Overall, things are just going very smoothly, time is getting managed well, and I'm finding myself with lots of time to invest in my long-term goals.

reminded JoshuaFox of the Extropian Mailing List

Just reminded me of them, but they weren't all that similar; we've learned a lot in the last 20 years. In fact, the discussions of metaethics etc were on a pretty high level and I am glad we had them. But, as Eli hints, I think that for MIRIx purposes, a math focus without discussion of philosophical underpinnings is best.

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June Monthly Bragging Thread

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June Monthly Bragging Thread

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