This is my [digital garden](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history). 🌱🪴🌳 🍐 I use [Obsidian](http://www.obsidian.md) with [TimeTail](https://github.com/c1sc0c0/TimeTail) to make it. I occasionally hit **⇧+⌘+P** to publish it. It's available at [c1sco.me ](http://c1sc0.me). TimeTail is a trivial piece of code I wrote to handle the lack of hooks in Obsidian for plugins when you use [Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish). ## Contact * Email: [email protected] | [email protected] * Github: https://github.com/c1sc0c0 * LinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/in/francis-dierick * Instagram: [@chalk_rebels](https://instagram.com/chalk_rebels) ## Recent Projects * I run [chalkrebels.com](http://www.chalkrebels.com): chalk & skincare for climbers. * I'm researching how LLMs understand logic reasoning for [[Cat's Grant]]. * I'm running the AI Arena at [Ludi.life](http://ludi.life): a place where AI & humans race to solve puzzles. ## About Me Hi! My name is [[- About Me|Francis]] and I've been working as a software developer for over 20 years. I have great [[Memories|memories]] of the early internet. I currently make high-quality chalk & skincare products for climbers at [CHALK REBELS](http://www.chalkrebels.com). **I write because I write.** This ain't content marketing. There's no hidden agenda. I'm not trying to [[My Biases|influence]] you. Writing helps me think. It helps me organise my thoughts. I guess that means I write because I think. And I think therefore I am. [[Cogito Ergo Sum]]. ## Climbing [[- Climbing|Climbing]] has been an important part of my life ever since I discovered it as a teenager. It helps me stay grounded. It offers me a tribe away from the mainstream. With [[Chalk Rebels]] I'm now giving back to my tribe. And for as long as I remember I have been using climbing to teach myself new bits of technology. I've built websites, training tools & search engines for climbers. Most with an audience of one. That makes me a fan of [[Learning By Building]]. ## Environment Solving the environmental crisis is the single most important challenge we face as humans today. But I'm not a doomer. Life has never been as good as today. Poverty is down. Life expectancy & quality of life are up. And all thanks to growth & innovation in the last 100 years or so. I've always been an environmentalist at heart. But I no longer am a romantic one. I have my feet firmly planted in the Anthropocene. Science brought us here, and science will save us. Or to say it with a Homerism of the Simpson kind: *Technology, the source of, and solution to, all of our problems.* I'm particularly fascinated by [[Geo-Engineering]] because it offers a way to mitigate the climate crisis that is rooted in science & engineering. But it's not a subject one brings up in polite society. And the contrarian in me wants to learn all about it exactly because of that. ## Technology I care a lot about [[- Technology|Technology]]. My background is in software development. I've spent the last 2 decades happily building all kinds of apps & websites. Yet I lost faith in software. It happened sometime in-between when the iPhone was launched and when social networks became ubiquitous. Then came the crypto bros & now the AI doomers. Technology is exciting, but the business of tech most decidedly is not. Today, if you're a software professional, all you do is re-invent the wheel over and over again. And if you're a software consumer the cards are really stacked against you: you suffer total loss of freedom and privacy at the hands of Big Tech. Better to stick to [[Building In Public|building]] things in technology for fun & [[Learning By Building|learning]]. ## My Digital Garden ### Why? I'm maintaining this digital garden because after 2 decades of learning in isolation I'm ready to learn in public. Writing has always been my way of exploring ideas. My writing has been messy, ad-hoc & was never really meant for consumption. That is, until I started doing research & product development for [[Chalk Rebels]]. I wrote down most of what I discovered about chalk & skincare for climbing in the [blog](http://www.chalkrebels.com/news). That was my first attempt at learning in public. Messy, half-assed & guided by marketing goals. The chronological nature of a blog and the constraints of content marketing made that a rather weak attempt at learning in public. It is what is. And now I'm ready to tackle bigger topics in learning: Climate Change, [[Geo-Engineering]] & Machine Learning. And I invite you to join me. ### State Of The Garden I actually started this digital garden in June/July of 2023. At the time I was exploring two major themes: turning [[Chalk Rebels]] into a more sustainable company and learning as much as I can about [[Geo-Engineering]]. I still think that it's inevitable that someone, somewhere is going to choose to [[Science|geo-engineer]] the climate & it's absolutely a topic that is under-studied because of the stigma attached to it. But right now I need to focus on the climbing [[- Business|business]]. The garden was offline for a while but now I have rolled all changes into one big update & pushed it. Garden is the best it's been since starting it one year ago! ### Gardening Tools I'm using the following tools to work in this digital garden: * **[Obsidian](https://obsidian.md) :** I'm slowly moving 20 years of haphazard notes, diary entries, and blog posts to Obsidian. * **[Obsidian Publish](https://obsidian.md/publish) :** Yes, I pay the USD 10 or so to make it easy to publish this. No, I don't use [Obsidian Sync](https://obsidian.md/sync). I use iCloud sync instead. * **[Zotero](http://zotero.org) :** I tried to use Zotero with [Better BibLaTex](https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex) and the [Citations](https://github.com/hans/obsidian-citation-plugin) Obsidian Plugin to manage references to [[Science|scientific publications]]. But I found the setup too complex, now I just copy/paste. ### Gardening Conventions I use emojis to annotate bits of text, this is their meaning: * **🌱 : Seedling** : this idea is till very rough and early. * **🪴 : Plant** : this idea has been cleaned up a bit. * **🌳 : Evergreen** : this idea is reasonably complete. * **🍐 : Fruit** : this idea has come to fruition. **The way I write is extremely chaotic.** It's full of half-finished phrases, ideas, words, TODOs, etc ... that don't mean anything to most readers. Over time I try to develop that into a coherent whole. **I use [Obsidian Markdown Comments](https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Basic+formatting+syntax#Comments) to tame that chaos.** Most text starts as a commented-out paragraph. All hail the \%\% ! 🌳 : *This page is reasonably complete but because it's an index page I think it will remain ever-changing.* %%ts%% Last Updated: 📆 2024-08-17 | ☠️ 10524d