Nathan Laundry's Blog


Hi, I'm Nathan. I'm a Computer Science PhD student with two passions: homelab, and self-improvement. I write about both and some other stuff:


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It's the Comforts That Make us Feel Numb.

Time Management My Life Philosophy
I heard once, “It’s the comforts that make us feel numb” - Hozier And you know what? I think he’s right. I think the ways in which we save time, the little eases and comforts, the ergonomics of our lives numb us and erode our sense of meaning. Now, does that mean I churn my own butter and sew my own clothes? Of course not, but it does make me think about the little moments that make up my life and how they make up my sense of meaning. Read more...

Stop Trying to Remember Everything you Read.

Stop Trying to Remember Everything you Read. The Having vs Being fallacy of digital second brains and remembering everything you read I was seduced by the Capture Everything, Remember Everything you read, Digital Brain, trend for 2 years. You know what it got me? A Notion AND Roam Research so full I’m terrified of looking through them and a long list of books I’ve speed read but can barely recall. Read more...

Turn GPT-4 Into your Personal Literature Review Bot

Academia GenAI Literature Review
👋 Hey Friends, Getting into a new field of research requires reading dozens of landmark and seminal papers to understand that field’s foundations. This usually involves the manual process of searching key-words on google scholar, finding papers, polling friends, advisors, colleagues, and other experts for the most important papers. It’s an ad-hoc process that can take months. Even more time intensive is conducting a proper, methodical, literature review. Establishing a method, identifying the correct keywords, finding the right databases - it’s difficult but vital work. Read more...

Turn GPT-4 Into your Personal Literature Review Bot

Academia GenAI Literature Review
👋 Hey Friends, Getting into a new field of research requires reading dozens of landmark and seminal papers to understand that field’s foundations. This usually involves the manual process of searching key-words on google scholar, finding papers, polling friends, advisors, colleagues, and other experts for the most important papers. It’s an ad-hoc process that can take months. Even more time intensive is conducting a proper, methodical, literature review. Establishing a method, identifying the correct keywords, finding the right databases - it’s difficult but vital work. Read more...

ChatGPT is my Writing Coach and Editor: Here's How

Writing Generative-AI
💡 Truly great writing, the kind that moves us, comes from lived human experiences. This will always be the domain of Sapiens. — A trust me bro statement by Nathan Laundry ChatGPT doesn’t have its own stories to share, but it excels at finding mistakes in the ways I write about mine! That’s why ChatGPT and I make a great team. I bring real stories and ChatGPT helps me convey them effectively. Read more...

Prime then Immerse: How I Learn Difficult Things Quickly

Learning My-Life-Philosophy
💡If you want to learn French, move to France. 🧑‍💻 How I Learned Terminal Driven Linux This is my mantra and it all started in 2016, my first year as a Computer Science Undergrad at the University of Guelph. I had been looped in by SOCIS — the Society of Computing and Information Sciences — which sounds a lot more official than it really was. At the time, it was a small community of fellow geeks, nerds, and tech enthusiasts (it’s grown to be much larger than that these days) and the cool thing was Linux. Read more...

My Journey Through Reductionism and Determinism

My-Life-Philosophy Thought
👋 Hey Friends, Some kids grow up wanting to be firefighters, astronauts, or teachers … I wanted to be Laplace’s Demon. Let me explain. Pierre Simon Laplace hypothesized: if we knew both the laws of physics and the location of every particle in the universe, we would be able to predict everything that would happen in the future. — Paraphrasing Pierre Simon Laplace on Laplace’s demon Laplace attributed these powers to an imagined demon with almost infinite intellect. Read more...

How to Overcome a Fear of Writing: A Programmer's Perspective

Computer Science Writing My-Life-Philosophy
🔥 “I hate writing and I never want to do it again.” — Nathan Laundry 2013 to 2020 And I’m not alone. In Computer Science a lot of us wear our disdain for writing as a badge of honour. Honestly, there’s a sense of comradery in our shared hate for writing. I’d go so far as to say, in the undergrad’s natural habitat — the lecture hall — you can identify Computer Science students by the distinct groan they emit when an essay is assigned. Read more...

Reconnecting a New Graduate Student Community Post-Covid

Academia Community
Tldr; 📧 What Canadian Computer Science Lost in the COVID Years 📣 How the Loss of Pillar Events will be Felt by our Communities 📶 Connection for Graduate Computer Science Students 🦋 Emergent research ideas: how connectivity leads to inspiration 💔 The Splintering of Research Communities 🔗 How do we Un-Splinter The COVID Generation of Researchers? 📲 Concluding: a Call to Action 📧 What Canadian Computer Science Lost in the COVID Years We’ve all read enough “Covid sucks and here’s why” articles. Read more...

The 9–5 Graduate Student Schedule: Why I Treat Research Like any Other Job

Academia Productivity Time-Management
Between 33% and 46% of Ph.D. Students don’t complete their degree [1]. I don’t know about you, but that sends shivers down my spine. In my reading and previous article on how to succeed with one’s doctoral pursuits, we discussed the many ways that professors have seen graduate students fail to finish their degrees. While most agree on the big things: write consistently, learn by doing, don’t aim too high or low, a major point of contention was time management. Read more...
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