Posts

Burnout

 Firstly I'd like to say, it's incredible reading my previous posts here. I had so many beautiful ideas and expressed them clearly. 19 and 20 year old me was smart. A lot of time has passed since my previous posts. I went to officer school, spent time in a new campaign, then started my role as team leader. Then after about 2 months, 7.10 came along and I spent a year as the head of my team in a war.  I should write about 7.10 at some point. For now: I woke up to phone calls at 3 am. Hopped over to the base at 4~, got back home at 5~. Woke up to missiles again at ~6. Then insanity ensued. https://www.mako.co.il/news-military/2024_q2/Article-aa99ed3cb3c1091027.htm?utm_source=AndroidNews12&utm_medium=Share At this point I basically made a decision. I'm going full throttle until the gas tank empties. Then I'm gone. And I followed through with that idea. The most interesting thing I realized is I absolutely hate doing this because I have to, and I have an extreme amount ...
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Control

Oct 22  I got a tattoo. It symbolizes a lot for me. Roll the dice. Some things we cannot control. We can only control how we interpret and react. I have mixed feelings about my tattoo. I went forward with an irreversible action, and immediately after I felt regret. It isn't perfect. It doesn't feel how I wanted it to feel. It's too exposed. It looks childish.  And yet sometimes, when I look at it, it feels right. It isn't trying to be real. It's a drawing. An interpretation of the idea. And it's right there, at the palm of my hand, ready to roll the dice. On some level, the fact that I need to let go and stop trying to control my feelings about the tattoo, is liberating. I feel like it's an important lesson in of itself.  But sometimes I feel like I need that control back. I need to get it removed. I don't want anyone to see it. I'm afraid. 
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Happiness

 I had an interesting thought today. Over my past few relationships, I generally felt like they weren't right for me. I felt this strange flip-flopping between attraction and lack thereof, both appearance-wise and personality-wise. When I was in the relationship, I felt like I needed out. When I was out, I felt like I wanted them more than ever. I always attributed this to the general notion that you want what you can't have. This might be true, but today I had another idea. Maybe I'm just unhappy, and projecting my unhappiness onto the relationship. When I'm in it, I'm unhappy and I believe I need out. When I was out, I was unhappy and suddenly started feeling like I was missing out on previous happiness. I don't think this means I need to go back to relationships I previously deemed not fitting for me. But I think I need to learn to manage my unhappiness. It seems like it would be key to not ruining my next relationship. 
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Value

"A person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life." So little time in life is devoted to choosing values. You would think something so important would be given more thought. An interesting thought I came across was that we have two sets of values. Our theoretical ones - those we wish we adhered to and pursued at all times - and our practical ones - those we truly live our lives by. To live a truly virtuous life would be to have these two sets of values overlap entirely.  I'm going to try to outline my ideal values at the age of 20.  Self discipline. Empathy.  Excellence. Freedom/Independence. I think those are my top four. 
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Self Discipline

"The ability to control one's feelings and overcome one's weaknesses; the ability to pursue what one thinks is right despite temptations to abandon it." Self discipline is interesting to me. I have been consuming a lot of content based around the idea that some things are difficult to do. I find myself surprised some times at the idea of people being lazy, not working towards goals. I find it easy to do things I value, because I truly value them. I don't value comfort as much as others do. I value achieving my goals. I get addicted to the gym because I want to be fit. I want to be attractive, strong, athletic. Somehow this makes the lifting itself very pleasurable as well.  I like working. I find myself wanting to stay later. Not because I want other people to think I'm working. But because I want to make progress. I want to be productive. I want to move forwards and finish things. I value my work.  Some of this is simply because I don't have so many tempt...
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Pride

 It's difficult for me to be proud of myself professionally. I enjoy what I do, I think it's important - but I don't feel worthy when I think about M' and the Kernel savvy folks I get to work around. I've never felt drawn to the subject. I don't particularly enjoy low level programming of any sort, reversing, exploiting, etc. I enjoy networks and Python, Clean Code, webdev, all that. Even though these are valuable skills, I still feel like they just aren't as appreciated. Why is that?  Are research and low-level inherently more difficult than development and Opera? Or is it a question of accessibility - those that break the barrier get the glory?  I think I need to decide that I am worthy, I do things that are important and no one else could do. But I can't convince myself that is true. The reason for this is the quantification issue. When someone has a certain skill that is rare, it is inherently more impressive. - because it's difficult to quantify...
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Truth

 Certain things are factual. They exist.  We tend to represent things that exist in different ways. Our representations tend not to be true.  This isn't always the case - some representations can be tied in certain ways to the absolute truth. Here are some examples of things that are tightly dependent on the truth, and some that aren't. Let's start with code. Code is, by definition, the truth - what is written will happen. Sometimes code can be misleading though. Dirty, convoluted code can mislead us as to what is happening. We might interpret it in untruthful ways - there might be side effects we didn't notice, etc. This is why it's important to write clear, expressive code. Next up, we have documentation in code. Comments, docstrings, etc. These can be truthful - but certainly aren't the truth. There's a difference - and having a false piece of documentation can throw us off of our goal of quickly learning the truth when we are reading code. This can happe...
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