The second edition of the weekly recap.

Theme of the week

History, Hardcore History!
Even if you had never enjoyed history, trust me, you will love it the way it is presented by Dan Carlin.

I’ve been binge listening the Hardcore History podcast every free minute I had this past week.

Random Thoughts

Most of the thoughts are based on what I’ve listened to and what fascinated me.

A glance at past pandemics through literature and podcasts

• Hardcore History 13 – Bubonic Nukes

  • One of the earliest Hardcore History episodes addresses the 2 major pandemics in the recorded history – The Bubonic plague in the early 14th Century that killed more than 100 Million people and the Spanish Flu in 1918.
  • It is hard to imagine what it was like to live through the black plague in the early 14th Century. Unlike today, people had absolutely no clue of what this "thing" was. How it came to be, how to deal with it, and what it was caused by.
  • The human’s imagination, under such sever psychological conditions, went loose. The lack of understanding led to one thing – blame others. Blame the sick of being sick and slaughter them, blame the Jewish people for poisoning the wells and slaughter them. Blame, blame, blame…

• The Plague – Alert Camus

  • The book, although written in 1950s, represent the situation we’ve been living through for the past almost a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Regardless of the incredible technological development, our society and its reaction to such disastrous events have not improved much. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, and slow reaction are ever more present.
  • The picture which Albert Camus draws into my imagination is chilling. I could almost smell the stench of rotting flesh, feel the sorrow and the fear of death.
  • Couple of scenes literally stunned me.
    • The tramways full with death bodies
    • The big wholes in the grounds where they threw the bodies and buried them
    • The fact that people took menthol gums thinking that this will help them avoid getting sick
    • The misinformation by the city counsel trying to prevent panic
    • The media riding the panic and the fears of the people to sell their publications
    • The described suffering of a sick child which ended with painful death
      • This reminded me about the book A guide to the good life – where a mother who just lost her child needs to find relief in the fact that such experience is unavoidable and irreversible. Just by reading the scene I doubt that Living through this painful emotion (by only reading about it) made me think that such a stoic act is completely impossible (for me at least)

Cool things I discovered

• At a time when there are fewer reasons to go outside and more ways to avoid each other, let’s not forget that self-reliance is an illusion. – Excerpt from the https://www.densediscovery.com weekly newsletter. I have no idea how I stumbled upon it a while ago, bit I love it.
• Part-time, but fully committed! What a nice way to describe the relationship of Indie hackers with their projects. Often, indie hackers are working full-time jobs and still manage to build and grow side projects and businesses. The story shared by Carl Poppa is inspiring.

i started learning to code properly because i was pissed off.

y'all know i used to run a restaurant, right?

In a good month, my restaurant used to do about $12k in delivery revenue alone (after the platforms' 35%+ cut).

This means ~$6k/m went to the platforms.

— Carl Poppa 🛸 (@poppacalypse) April 19, 2021

• A very handy tutorial to get over the basics of regex – https://regexone.com

  • This week I had to go over a seriously big list of potential key phrases that needed to be evaluated for future blog posts for Night Eye. Although you can bulk analyze keywords, preparing them for that analysis requires a lot of manual editing. I’m not sure why I’m discovering regex (short for Regular Expression) just now but it was a game-changer for me. It literally saved me hours.

• Your level is your age, your health bar is your lifestyle, your mana is your mental and spiritual health, and your talents and hobbies are your stats. reddit.

  • Wouldn’t be great to have a virtual armory showcasing all of your current stats for public view and/or for private use. For example
    • The health bar will be linked to your smartwatch. The "armory" software will receive the raw data, interpret it and adjust your health bar accordingly. I would be happy to see a detailed log how the health bar has been affected recently.
    • Mana will be sourcing data from your favorite meditation app
    • Talents – your talents would be linked to your LinkedIn profile. They will be affected by new skills acquired in the specific field, certification, completed projects and etc.
    • Hobbies – As I can’t figure out more general source of data to be linked here, I guess you will need to log everything manually. Not sure how the armory will interpret the data to adjust the hobbies stats accordingly.