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25 Feb, 10 tweets, 3 min read
✨books read in 2021: a thread✨

Without a commute I've been reading much less, but I'm still getting a couple books done here and there
1. The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott (suggested by @iwsfutcmd)
This is a book that focuses on cultures that have historically resisted statecraft (and are, in a large part, defined by their resistance to statecraft)
In particular it focuses on the various minoritized upland cultures in Southeast Asia that have done this, including the Hmong, Mien, Karen, and Lahu.
It was a really great read, giving insight into the origins of statecraft, and how it has historically operated. It also gives a lot of insight into what a stateless culture might look like.
It also reminded me a lot about the mushroom book, which in part talks about how a large part of the matsutake picking community (which is also somewhat at the fringes of the state) in the PNW is from these minoritized southeast asian cultures

Overall a great read, though somewhat dense. Took me a while to get through because the pandemic made it hard for me to get a consistent schedule
2. (Reread) Ra by qntm

I read this last year, and suggested it as the topic of a book club amongst friends this year. Worked out pretty well, and I really love the story!

3. Fine Structure by qntm

I mentioned that I had just read Ra to @kourge and we both remarked that we hadn't read Fine Structure, so we book-clubbed it.

Very similar vibes as Ra as having a very interesting and complex "magic" system, with a really good story
It isn't told chronologically and gets a bit confusing, but it does all make sense in the end. The premise is fascinating.
4. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

A really gripping novel (part 1 of a trilogy). Takes place in a heavily colonized universe.

The primary language used is ungendered (rendered in English as all female pronouns), which is an interesting quirk

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More from @ManishEarth

Manish Profile picture
7 Mar
A thing I've come to appreciate about self-driven learning processes is that it's completely devoid of a particular kind of frustration where you're learning something you don't see the point of, or don't really *want* to
This mostly only works if your goal is learning for fun and not "learning to use it for something" but I think this is something super important that folks don't realize as much.
I'm almost completely an autodidact in programming. There is not an aspect of the field I have learned that I hated learning. Usually there's always a topic that an individual will go "yeah I HATED learning that" but I don't have those.
Read 18 tweets
Manish Profile picture
2 Mar
a recent conversation amongst friends reminded me of my thoughts on expertise, magic, and mental models, and while this probably should be a blog post I'm lazy so I might as well thread it
the context of this was advanced borrow checking in rust, but most of the thoughts are more general and apply to a lot of learning paths, at least in programming
for example, with lifetime elision / explicit lifetimes in rust, i've heard the learning process described as:

1. Beginners: Rely on the "magic" (elision), and use it exclusively. They're lost the moment they need to step out of it, until they learn the underlying workings.
Read 22 tweets
Manish Profile picture
1 Mar
a thing i've said a couple times now is that the marginal benefit of someone getting their vaccine a bit earlier is nothing compared to the huge benefit of us reaching herd immunity
yes, you getting the vaccine now may make someone you feel "deserves it more" get it a little later. that's fine, overall everyone rushing to use up available vaccines as fast as possible moves us significantly closer to herd immunity.
Folks have the same attitudes around vaccines as they did around masks a year ago

masks are not usually a scarce resource, they were temporarily scarce, and that remedied itself

Read 5 tweets
Manish Profile picture
28 Feb
Trying to figure something out about some words in Mandarin

Mandarin speakers: mind saying 这么, 什么, 怎么样 in a natural way (fit it in a sentence?) to yourself, and then answering the questions in the next tweets? Don't look at the questions before saying the words
Was there an "n" sound between the characters in 这么?
(feel free to reply with specifics)
Was there an "n" between the characters in 什么? How would you transcribe it?
Read 6 tweets
Manish Profile picture
21 Jan
Sometimes you set up a process just before you need it and look back and feel so grateful someone had that idea

@ca_covid has a way to report errors with the data, since sometimes we don't get all the info, sometimes vaccines run out, etc
until a few days ago, we just had a feed into a discord channel of these, and folks could triage and fix them

then we added the "oh no ping", a special ping to various people that would happen whenever an entry had 2+ unhandled errors
most of the errors are minor, but if you get two for a site it's definitely something that should be prioritized, even if the actual error is not a big deal

today we started getting many more of these, and because of this ping we were able to triage and fix them quickly
Read 4 tweets
Manish Profile picture
20 Jan
The second point here played out in a really cool way

We learned from one pharmacy that they hadn't been in the county system and got themselves loaded because we had called the previous day
this made folks wonder: "hey surely that's not the only place with this problem? maybe we can tell them to make sure they're in the system!"

we then could just call a bunch of pharmacies of the same chain in the same county (we have a list!) and tell them to do this. It worked!
a cool thing we could have done, but didn't in this case, would have been to go a step further and retarget our phone banking efforts to that county, with a broadcasted change to the script. We have that tooling.
Read 4 tweets

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