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Ask HN: What are you learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#71
Going through the Western cannon. Specifically the Syntopicon and a rejiggering of it.

I've always thought the work was an absolute masterpiece, but utterly inaccessible and the holotype for the word jargon. So, I'm trying to write vignettes of the work, with characters that personify the 'great ideas' in the Syntopicon. Something like Godel, Escher, Bach. Hopefully, this personification will be more accessible and readable than a gigantic listing of page numbers and linking information.

Thus far, yeah, just wrapping my head about the linking documents is tough, but there is a lot of 'meat' on the bones and turning ideas into people is surprisingly fun.

I doubt I'll ever finish the project, but it's a great deep dive into the Western Cannon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#78
World-building.

After reading about storytelling, I realized that I'm as fascinated to a well-crafted world as good plots and characters.

There's not much to read about, as a fiction world can contain as much detail as the real world. I'm spending time looking at the fiction worlds that I like and taking them apart.

As an exercise, imagining places and races is also interesting. You'll be amazed by the amount of details required to fill the gaps in order to "see" something in your head.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#80
Prolog. I think that genetic logic can largely be expressed in Prolog to enable doing some crazy stuff that hasn’t been explored yet. It’s crazy to me that synthetic biology hasn’t really used logical programming yet for gene design.
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