Quote from: MiningHabit on January 04, 2018, 05:14:55 PM

Quote from: TimMarsh on January 02, 2018, 03:44:19 AM

Quote from: MiningHabit on January 01, 2018, 10:38:51 PM

Quote from: TimMarsh on January 01, 2018, 05:28:22 AM

Quote from: MiningHabit on December 31, 2017, 08:49:42 PM

Same to the DNotes team and the entire community.

2018, for me, is going to be a year of personal transformation. First up, winning my bet at healthywage.com. I signed up to lose 20% of my body weight, and attached enough financial incentive to the goal that it will really hurt if I don't get there.

Here's to a great start to that and everyone else's 2018 goals for personal and professional betterment.

It always makes me happy to hear that someone I like hearing from is taking action to improve their odds of being on the planet longer and participating in it more. (I'm assuming that you have objective information that this is excess weight).

I really like it that you've found a way to gamify and enjoy the process. So I'm wishing you more than success with this venture, I'm hoping it brings lots of fun as well.

Yeah, I really liked the concept when I first heard of the site. Studies indicate upwards of a 40% increased chance in hitting goals when a financial incentive is there.

It will definitely be a lot of fun; I enjoy fitness. But every year the past 10 years since having kids, I seem to get just a little bit fatter. I've run 6 marathons the last 10 years, with my latest coming late last April. But my BMI technically puts me just a hair over obese. I lovvvvvve running, but it's not conducive to fat burning since that is best for exercise that is 110-120 heartbeats per minute. My trouble is that I motivate myself by saying "Im gonna running a marathon in 9 months." Then all my training focus is on that. And it's really only during the first few weeks of plodding along that I'm doing much fat burning. But I can't stay in that paradigm, since I have to start building towards the race.

So, I feel like the financial incentive/gamifying will take the place of the marathon as motivation...and allow me the mental freedom just do 60-90 minutes a day of walking on a treadmill, without the pressure of feeling like I need to get to the next level asap for an upcoming race.

Anyhow, this is going to be an amazing year.

What's everyone else's top self-improvement goals for the upcoming year? How about you TM?

Okay you've both inspired me to and made me think about it, so here goes
I don't have that button that fires off on new years because we're at the same point around the sun as we were last year. I've rarely started and only once finished a new year's resolution. That one that I did was to stop me being so damn emphatic. So I removed the word 'is' from my vocabulary for a year.

This year:

I'm doing a yoga retreat in March and walking the 600km Camino de Santiago in July. So getting closer to touching my toes is on the cards.
Mentally; I'm aiming for at least two 10 minute sessions of meditation a week.
Skills; I'm learning python and experimenting with writing AI code.
Creative writing; Proofread and edit my novel "Demon Spawn Goes to High School"
Commercial writing; Try my hand at writing scripts/screen plays for short Youtube videos.
Emotionally; I'm working on being more present when feeling hurt or in trouble.
Musically; I'll be focusing on the ocarina because I just bought a new one that is an octave lower and easier on the ear.
Languages; Khmer is a long term project, but I'll add some Spanish in this year, I bought the Language Hacking Spanish book.
Artistically; sadly I don't think I'll have time to keep learning the 3D software Blender this year.
Charity/Social; I still believe that nearly all of the little fires that everyone spends their energy trying to put out, would all go out on their own if we banned all forms of donations to political parties accept personal donations capped at a level where the majority of the population would donate, like $20$80. So that will continue to be my battle.

That was worth spending the time thinking about, MiningHabit. And because of this, I'll probably stay more focused on it and get better results by the end of the year. It was a good exercise, so I'll quote you to end this:

What's our top self-improvement goals for the year? ... edited as per Alan's excellent suggestion.

You're my brother from another mother. I started up a yoga practice about 2 years ago. And it was amazing. At $89/mo, the local studio got to be too expensive. But the 14-16 months I was going regularly were amazing.

And I'm right there with you w.r.t. writing AI code. I really wanted to get deep into this stuff last year, but my hobby time was spent on building and maintaining a mining rig, as well as building out various crypto investment decisions. With mining winding down, and my crypto trading on autopilot, it's time to go back to this. Especially now that the whole thing has been demystified for me a little bit. We are building machine learning models for our computer vision stuff. And it's been really fun listening to my new Israeli colleague describe her struggles building a machine learning model to put inside a part of our code.

It's magic, but no more magic than mining. In fact, I was bemused by hearing her mention some of the registry and virtual memory tweaks she needed to make to get the model made. Literally the same things I was going for my mining rig!

I'm thinking of doing the Johns Hopkins specialization on Coursera. But maybe that's too deep. Like with mining, maybe it's best just to dive in and learn by doing.

I really like your creative goals too. One thing I know I need to do a lot more of is processing/journalling out my thoughts and experiences. Life is coming at me so fast that I don't spend a lot of time processing, only doing. It's a source of a lot of anxiety, and I know that focusing more on mindfullness and high level end-of-day processing will be massively helpful here. You seem to be tracking right along the same lines....

Thanks for the spreadsheet link. I think I'm going to mod that a bit and use it myself. Thanks a lot for sharing it!

I certainly agree MiningHabit, we've got plenty in common. I'm a big believer in the power of social filters to bring like minded people together, and this DNotes thread, with its well informed discussions has certainly done that for me. With AI, I'm really right at the beginning, but want to actually understand the emergent properties, not just that they're there and how to leverage them. So I've got a working ANN with 1 input node, 1 middle layer node, and 1 output node. And it still works. So technically it is just a single complex algorithm. Next step is to tease that apart and understand it.

I'm glad you find the spreadsheet useful, and you'll probably see that my first week didn't go well. This week will be better.