Fast Learning Book: Badass: Making Users Awesome

Experts are not what they know but what they do.
Repeatedly.–page 81

OK then, I want to learn Laravel the O’Reilly “Head First” way. Kathy Sierra came up with the idea when she started writing books on Java around 2003: Kathy says: you don’t focus on the tool, you focus on making the user of the tool awesome.

So how does one make the user awesome? One breaks the subject matter down into small lessons, and repeats them alot, to achieve a fast learning flow.

Also using whole-body techniques– Splash! Wake me up with a tiger to get my attention.

How to Avoid Adding Passwords to Git

I was working on figuring out how to log ftp scripts, and discovered how to use a remote file: .netrc to store usernames and passwords. So I’m going to have to apply that to a number of scripts in the DigitalSignage program I’m working on. Hmmm, which makes me realize I’m doing the same for the main RETS library I’m accessing!

Then I randomly clicked on a YouTube “Tech Code” channel and watched a guy describing how he accidentally hard-coded a password into his program, and saved it to git–thereby uploading it to anyone who has access to the source code. Yikes!

The solution to hard-coding usernames and passwords into programs that get moved about is to use an environmental file: .env (for python or laravel for instance) that stores the either local or remote (test / production) settings. Of course!

 

I’d like a Check for A Million Dollars…


A friend wrote me saying he was coming up from the city this weekend and was there anything I’d like. I was thinking along the lines of “A check for a million dollars would be nice.”

Later in the day I was listening to a podcast on the way to town, and I heard:

Those who speak of faith (even without “radical self-understanding”) are involved with the Principle of Divine Communion, because they somehow “know” that the “twenty watts” of their ordinary life contain practically nothing of the Vast Power of Existence. Faith is the presumption of the Vast Power, the “Unlimited Wattage” of the One Divine Reality. The “Narcissistic” hope for the goods of life–“God, I want you to give me a million dollars”–is not faith. Faith is leaving behind the limited principle of the body-mind-“self” and the “world”, and presuming the Greater Principle of the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant Divine Reality.

from MY “BRIGHT” SIGHT, by His Divine Presence, Avatar Adi Da Samraj, from the talk, “Guru, Faith, and Divine Communion”, page 9.

The Train Has Not Left the Bitcoin Station

This is a short excerpt from Venture Capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya on CNBC, Dec 12, 2017.

I wrote an article about bitcoin in 2013. There is so much asymmetric upside here. This is a thing that goes to roughly the value of gold. There’s very little downside.

Take 1% of your money and put it into schmuck insurance. This is now a confidence game, this is a hedge against autocratic regimes and banking structures that are corrosive to how the world needs to work properly. You cannot have central banks infinitely printing currency, you cannot have guys with misdirected and misguided fiscal policy…

So we’ve seen the first few chapters of this and now we have to see the great unwind. [Referring to QT: quantitative tightening]

All I’m saying is its a hedge against the infrastructure that made those decisions without our input is a smart thing.

I think 1 bitcoin will be worth $100,000 in 3 to 4 years, and in the next 20 years, a million dollars a coin.

Former Facebook Exec Chamath Palihapitiya On Social Media, Bitcoin, And Elon Musk (Full) | on CNBC.

Here’s the link: 10:20 in,  Let’s Talk Bitcoin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zyRpq2ODrE&t=620s