Date: 2021-03-02 12:25 pm (UTC)
sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
From: [personal profile] sdi
[...], kudos for Vi!

My first job was under a grumpy old French Canadian UNIX sysadmin who insisted I learn to use the POSIX tools for everything, since if you need to fix a broken server in single user mode in the middle of the night, they're all you're gonna have. Sound advice, I've ended up in that situation more times than I can count! But now I just use vi, sed, awk, grep, etc. for everything.


May I ask how are you using this set of correspondences?

I mostly use it for meditation on the figures. This is a very visual arrangement of all the building blocks of geomancy, so it helps make some things more apparently (like how the figures relate, etc.) Following the paths can tell stories, too. But also note that the overall arrangement shows some peculiarities: mobile figures are at the top of the page, stable figures are at the bottom of the page; yin figures are on the left of the page, yang figures are on the right of the page, that sort of thing. (There's a lot more than that, but I wouldn't want to take away all your fun of studying it!) So it also makes a very good geomancy cheat sheet, and I have a copy on my wall for just that reason!


What kind of computer stuff do you do?

I've been programming for almost thirty years! Once upon a time, I made video games; more recently, I owned a tech startup; after selling it, I now work for a tech giant. In that time I've done a lot of different things, but image processing, statistics, and data visualization were some of the big ones. I've mostly worked on the server side at very large scale (millions or tens of millions of consumers), so tricks to make the computer process things very quickly have been important (for example, knowing your trig identities so you don't have to compute cosines in a tight loop). I've also had to deal with numerical stability issues a lot, so things like Stern-Brocot trees, which lets us work with integers instead of floats, help avoid those kinds of problems.

I suspect there's an occult angle to the deep study of algorithms, but honestly in practice I think one becomes a good programmer mostly by having a lot of silver bullets in your toolbox!
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