After talking with few interesting people and trying out various different processes myself I have come to the conclusion that some of the strategies mentioned below can help in persistance of motivation in a long term personal project without any unnatural self-enforced adherence. I call it serendipity-based outlook because the diversion[[…‘I bounce between projects to maintain my interest. (In Kurzban’s theory, willpower seems to reflect opportunity cost and a built-in aversion to overcomitting to a task which hasn’t delivered any large rewards yet, and switching regularly helps prevent burnout.) Since many of my pages are incremental, there’s always little things to be done’…
—Email Exchange with Gwern::lsn]]. from the singular focus towards the main project seems to be allowing for some kind unexpected results and epiphanies as byproducts.
Working Strategies:
**One thing that I have been observing is multiyear projects with smaller-side projects can help incorporate the Hybrid Routine Easily.*
Baumeister & Tierney. (2011). [[Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue::https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/magazine/do-you-suffer-from-decision-fatigue.html?pagewanted=all]]
…‘Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there,’ Baumeister says. ‘It’s a state that fluctuates.’ His studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions….’Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,’ Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach. ‘The best decision makers,’ Baumeister says, ‘are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.’…
Conversation with [[Gwern Branwen::https://twitter.com/gwern]]. (2019-Dec-19). Email Exchange
…‘I bounce between projects to maintain my interest. (In Kurzban’s theory, willpower seems to reflect opportunity cost and a built-in aversion to overcomitting to a task which hasn’t delivered any large rewards yet, and switching regularly helps prevent burnout.) Since many of my pages are incremental, there’s always little things to be done’…
Conversation with [[Prathyush Pramod::https://twitter.com/prathyvsh]]. (2019-Nov-15th). Twitter Exchange
…‘Having no set goal in mind means you are not worried about completing anything. Also lately, I’m finding things are more interconnected than they seem. So whatever I learn contributes to a the whole than narrowing down to a slice of it’…
Taleb, Nicholas Nassim. (2015). Antifragile
Taleb, Nicholas Nassim. (2018). [[Twitter thread on routine::https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1029812693660848129]]
Routine is effortless. Most humans, alas, prefer to expend physical, never intellectual energy. Creating requires much, much more effort.
Graham, Paul. (2013). [[Do Things That Don’t Scale::https://paulgraham.com/ds.html]]
My Journal Entry, Jan 6th 2019
]]>Clearly, my brain has learned to ignore the Google calendar notifications. Initially, scheduling and completely the event/task used to feel rewarding, so I built up on that and kept adding trivial items in my calendar like gym, writing, journaling, etc. Although it worked for a couple of days, somehow there was a behavioral shift in how I was responding to the notifications, now it was not only the trivial ones that I was ignoring, the important ones too got side-tracked as a result of decision fatigue.
Although the extremely important ones had this aging process of incremental prioritization owing to [[Parkinson’s Law::https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law]].
Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
An example would be this:
“Witness here how salaried physicists are dismissing @stephen_wolfram Wolfram’s automata BEFORE even hearing him Just as Freeman Dyson publicly dismissed_A New Kind of Science_ c. 2002; it turned out that he did not read the book. & pple who refused to read it referred to Dyson!”
—Tweet by Nassim Taleb
That said, it should be noted that switching books based on interest is not wrong, caution must be applied while talking about topics that you yourself have not completely gone through.
[[I’m convinced a lot of leprechauns or ‘citogenesis’ comes from people who don’t read past the title or abstract but decide to cite it anyway as proof
—Email Exchange with Gwern::lsn]]Gwern describes this better than I ever can by comparing such second-hand partial information mongers to people who use leprechauns or ‘citogenesis’ based on reading the title/abstract of a paper. (See Below)
Note: Remember any resource that you pick up is someone’s sweat and blood. If you do not wish to read it, always make sure not to form opinions on it, or at least not to promulgate any partial information on it. Always try to put yourself in such a situation and see how you’d have taken it — The Silver Rule.
“Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you.”
Most of the time our inability to read to completion has to do with association of the act of reading instead of the book that we are read, context-switching can really here. Also Reading with fractalized mental pattern can be extremely useful in such situations.
Conversation with Gwern Branwen. (19-Dec-2019). Email Exchange
…I generally read everything through if I goes past the abstract at all. I feel you can’t really have an opinion if you haven’t read the whole thing; if you don’t read the whole thing, and you say anything about it, you are all too often perpetuating lies or half-truths. I’m convinced a lot of leprechauns or ‘citogenesis’ comes from people who don’t read past the title or abstract but decide to cite it anyway as proof….
Nicholas, Nassim Taleb. (2020). Tweet
]]>“Witness here how salaried physicists are dismissing @stephen_wolfram Wolfram’s automata BEFORE even hearing him Just as Freeman Dyson publicly dismissed_A New Kind of Science_ c. 2002; it turned out that he did not read the book. & pple who refused to read it referred to Dyson!”
“Be bored with a book, not with the act of reading”
> —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
Taleb, Nicholas Nassim. (2015). Antifragile.
]]>Even a side-project in github that you consider to be trivial has an effect that only such kind of projects can provide, of having done everything yourself and without anyone putting constraints on what you can and what you can’t. It allows you to experiment outside of what would be acceptable within a project you are doing with others. Something like what if I just re-wrote this entire engine on top of openGL would never (or almost never) make sense in a collaborative project, but it would make perfect sense if it is just you.
The other obvious advantage is it makes you much more light-hearted because you know that if this doesn’t work out the way I like it or good for me, then I can just go. When you are working on a personal project out of your own free will, it has a certain kind of air that a collaborative project won’t. It is purely voluntary, and you can just up and leave at any time. That adds something to the mix. The responsibility of joy or stress that comes out of it suddenly becomes more tolerable as well as enjoyable. Note that I am not advocating that you drop everything that you don’t like, it is just that having certain things in your life that you can control can help handle that which you can’t.
Related: [[Creativity is a quality without a name]]
Andreas Kling. (2019). [[Commute Talk: How to improve as a programmer::https://youtu.be/DY3Islql6xs]]
]]>Most of the issue of not understanding the fragility of one’s epistemic confidence arises due to comparision, but more often than not Comparison based on accomplishment does not have a baseline.
Taleb, Nicholas Nassim. (2015). Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder
]]>See Related: [[Humility is the knowing of the epistemic gap]]
Raghuveer S. (2018). Journal Entry
]]>Even people with mild eye issues[[Jason Harrison, UBC - People with astigmatism (approximately 50% of the population) find it harder to read white text on black than black text on white.::lsn]] seem to benefit from light theme than dark theme in most cases. And to top it all, even the researches that focus on the legibility[[Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual display units through contrast reversal.
See Below for more.::rsn]] and aesthetics claim that dark on light is almost always better than dark on light. Every article I have read and referenced below vouch for dark on light, which I find to be true too at least in most occasions.
How can what is relatively bad for legibility in most ocassions, bad in terms of expressibility of authorial aesthetics be a wide-spread preference? My hypothesis is this is primarily due to cognitive exhaustion like sleep deprivation, burn-out, stress etc (Extrapolating from n=1), which due to implicity conformity and [[preference falsification::https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification]] has become a normative social element. My experience has been that when I have had a bad last night sleep or stress due to office, I invariably am looking for less polarity, otherwise the dark on white seems more appealing to me both aesthetics wise and legibility wise. An extension of these could be that cognitive stress elevate the ocular stress like accomodative/refractive/convergence stress leading up to this, but I contest dark mode being the wide-spread personal/subjective preference.
Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual display units through contrast reversal. (From: [[UX Stackexchange on theme and eye strain::https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53264/dark-or-white-color-theme-is-better-for-the-eyes]])
“…However, most studies have shown that dark characters on a light background are superior to light characters on a dark background (when the refresh rate is fairly high). For example, Bauer and Cavonius (1980) found that participants were 26% more accurate in reading text when they read it with dark characters on a light background…”
Pabini Gabriel-Petit. (2007). [[Applying color theory to digital displays::https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2007/01/applying-color-theory-to-digital-displays.php]]
“…While white text on a black background provides very high value contrast, it is less readable and causes greater eye fatigue than black text on a white background…”
Jason Harrison – Post Doctoral Fellow, Imager Lab Manager – Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group, University of British Columbia
People with astigmatism (approximately 50% of the population) find it harder to read white text on black than black text on white. Part of this has to do with light levels: with a bright display (white background) the iris closes a bit more, decreasing the effect of the “deformed” lens; with a dark display (black background) the iris opens to receive more light and the deformation of the lens creates a much fuzzier focus at the eye.
Raluca Budiu. (2020). [[Dark mode v Light Mode: Which is better::https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/]]
“…Their results showed that light mode won across all dimensions: irrespective of age, the positive contrast polarity was better for both visual-acuity tasks and for proofreading tasks. However, the difference between light mode and dark mode in the visual-acuity task was smaller for older adults than for younger adults — meaning that, although light mode was better for older adults, too, they did not benefit from it as much as younger adults, at least in the visual-acuity task.
When researchers looked at fatigue metrics, they concluded that there was no significant difference of contrast polarity on any of them (meaning that it wasn’t the case that dark mode made people more tired, or vice versa)…”
Lauren V. Scharff, Albert J Ahumada. (2005). [[Why is light text harder to read than dark text::https://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2132608]]
“…For paragraph readability and letter identification, responses to light text were slower and less accurate for a given contrast….”
Jim Sheedy, Kevin Larson. (2008). [[Blink: The stress of Reading::https://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/eye-strain]]
]]>Example: Apart from the quirky and chirpy attitude, what makes this this [[Application to New Yorker for a Job::https://fs.blog/2014/05/eudora-welty-to-the-new-yorker-the-best-job-application-ever/]] by Eudora Welty so memorable in my opinion is her use of common social artefacts like subtle mention of her background and its significance in how it relates to her being in this position right now;
…I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930– 31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A. (’ 29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up….
The witty use of what I like to call a socio-cultural confabulation in the form of a movie review and a relatable but madeup word that is also original in a sense.
…As to what I might do for you— I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works—quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards…
The mention of India print and subtle showcase of how she knows the struggles in the industry without any explicit mention.
…Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning— a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting…
And the final invocation of the extremely common social contruct i.e., the leprechaun throw.
There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay’s Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.
This may not have been the best application in a formal sense, but the reason people go to it is probably because what it reminds them of — the cultural nostalgia (the shared social artefact).
Another type of common artefact is sincere immitation of great works, the sincere admiration can help with the remembrance. Related: [[Sincere imitation is authentic]]
Incorporation of common artefacts might also help with remebering and understanding it easily when you read them years later. To put it succintly, it help you [[Write so your future self can remember]]
Orwell, George. (1930s). [[As I Please, The Tribune::https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/]]
Virginia Woolf. (1921). [[Monday and Tuesday::https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29220/29220-h/29220-h.htm]]
Welty, Eudora. [[Application to New Yorker for a Job::https://fs.blog/2014/05/eudora-welty-to-the-new-yorker-the-best-job-application-ever/]]
]]>“He wants to know what the best is so he can be superior to everything at once by seeing that the best isn’t perfect”.
One way to handle this would be to realize the fragility of the epistemic confidence acquired as a result of accomplishment based superiority. Socio-cultural structure like Humility can help with this a lot. It is to be noted that , and not the false pretension to decieve each other into playing the comparison and pseudo-superiority game, which would just defeat the purpose of seeing the uniqueness of circumstance.
Warren Buffet. (Unknown). [[The Inner Scorecard::https://fs.blog/2016/08/the-inner-scorecard/]]
]]>Meet jekyll-audit — an npm CLI that builds/serves your Jekyll site, crawls it, and runs a stack of audits (Lighthouse, Pa11y, Linkinator, HTML validator), then writes a consolidated summary.
I didn’t want another “sample demo.” I ate my own dogfood on a real site: my Jekyll project enjoyment-work (100+ GitHub ⭐), and used the findings to make concrete HTML and accessibility fixes.
Links:
JEKYLL_ENV=production).baseurl from _config.yml.sitemap.xml (or falls back to specified paths).reports/).summary.json and exits non-zero if thresholds fail.Requirements: Node 18+, Ruby/Jekyll.
npm install
npm run build
node bin/jekyll-audit --help
node bin/jekyll-audit audit
npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit audit
npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit --baseUrl http://127.0.0.1:4000 audit
npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit audit –linksInternalOnly –linksConcurrency 200 –linksTimeout 15000
npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit audit –maxPages 20 –noSitemap
npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit audit –output full –includeDetails –includeScreenshots
Optional config file `jekyll-audit.config.js`:
```js
/** @type {import('./dist/config/schema.js').AuditConfig} */
export default {
jekyll: { buildDir: '_site', buildCommand: 'bundle exec jekyll build' },
crawl: { useSitemap: true, maxPages: 50, paths: ['/'] },
thresholds: {
lighthouse: { performance: 0.8, seo: 0.9, 'best-practices': 0.9 },
accessibility: { maxIssues: 0 },
links: { maxBroken: 0 },
html: { maxErrors: 0 },
},
reports: { formats: ['json'], outDir: 'reports' },
};
name: Jekyll Audit
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
audit:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Set up Ruby
if: hashFiles('**/Gemfile') != ''
uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
with:
ruby-version: '3.2'
bundler-cache: true
- name: Install Jekyll deps
if: hashFiles('**/Gemfile') != ''
run: |
bundle config set --local path 'vendor/bundle'
bundle install
- uses: actions/setup-node@v4
with:
node-version: '20'
cache: 'npm'
- run: npm ci
- run: npm run build
- name: Run jekyll-audit
run: node bin/jekyll-audit audit
- name: Upload reports
if: always()
uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
with:
name: jekyll-audit-reports
path: reports/
I ran the CLI against my real site and triaged the results. Representative run (summary):
Performance/SEO were great. The biggest wins were in markup correctness and link hygiene.
_pages/tags.md, _pages/categories.md, _pages/dates.mdid usage to class and keep single, meaningful IDs for headings.Before (from _pages/tags.md):
<ul id="tag-grid">
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">markdown</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">jekyll</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">theme</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">test</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">practical</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">purpose</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">inspiration</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">productivity</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">habits</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">planning</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">writing</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">goals</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">creativity</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">notekeeping</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">quantum mechanics</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">soc</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">plot</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">bash</a></li>
<li id="tag-content"><a href="#">hint</a></li>
</ul>
After:
<ul class="tag-grid">
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">markdown</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">jekyll</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">theme</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">test</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">practical</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">purpose</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">inspiration</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">productivity</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">habits</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">planning</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">writing</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">goals</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">creativity</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">notekeeping</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">quantum mechanics</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">soc</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">plot</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">bash</a></li>
<li class="tag-content"><a href="#">hint</a></li>
</ul>
<h3 id=""></h3>
Why this matters: duplicate IDs break document semantics and can confuse assistive tech. It also creates fragile CSS/JS selectors.
<br/> → HTML5 <br>_includes/backlinks.html, _includes/related.html, _includes/footer.html, _notes/*.md, _pages/*<br/> as non-standard; validators flag it.<br/> → <br> in all templates and markdown content.Examples:
_notes/reading-material.md_notes/serendipity-outlook.md_notes/dark-theme-adoption.md_notes/reading-fractailized.md_pages/tags.md, _pages/categories.md, _pages/dates.mdBefore:
> "... quoted text ..." <br/><cite>—Source</cite>
After:
> "... quoted text ..." <br><cite>—Source</cite>
<img> and <input>_includes/content.html, _posts/2020-04-01-Exploring-the-features-of-enjoyment-work.md/> on void elements is unnecessary in HTML5 and often flagged alongside other markup issues.Before:
<img src="/assets/img/feed.png" alt="Feed" width="80%" />
After:
<img src="/assets/img/feed.png" alt="Feed" width="80%">
Also corrected generated HTML strings in _includes/content.html where <img> and <input> were assembled with a /> and converted those to standard HTML5 tags.
_pages/tags.md<br> inside loops created awkward structure.<br> outside loops to avoid repeated, stray breaks and improve flow for screen readers.The link scan surfaced 33 broken links. Typical fixes include:
I keep link checks in summary mode for CI, then dive into a full detail pass locally when I’m ready to fix.
<br/>, duplicate IDs, void-element solidus) significantly clean the validator output and reduce noisy errors that hide the real problems.npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit audit
npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit audit --output full --includeDetails --includeScreenshots --a11yIncludeDetails --linksIncludeDetails --htmlIncludeDetails
npx @brennanbrown/jekyll-audit audit --linksInternalOnly --linksConcurrency 200 --linksTimeout 15000
If you ship with Jekyll and want a single CLI to answer “Is my site healthy?” across performance, accessibility, HTML, and link quality — give jekyll-audit a spin, and let me know what else you’d like it to check.