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Diary writing prompts

I began this year writing a diary entry every day. My diary writing has dropped off recently. One reason is that my entries were excessively mundane; I would usually concentrate on the day’s activities to the detriment of larger topics.

One way to reinvigorate my diary writing might be to have a prompt for each entry. I’ve added this feature, which looks like this:

$ diary prompt
Prompt: Describe someone you know.
Start writing. EOF (Ctrl-D) finishes the entry.

The prompt is taken randomly from a prompts file, which looks like this:

Recall an old memory.
Describe someone you know.
Recall something someone said recently.

I want a much larger repertoire of prompts than the three above. I’ll experiment with different prompts to see which are effective, i.e. which ones lead to interesting writing.

What can computers do? What are the limits of mathematics? And just how busy can a busy beaver be? This year, I’m writing Busy Beavers, a unique interactive book on computability theory. You and I will take a practical and modern approach to answering these questions — or at least learning why some questions are unanswerable!

It’s only $19, and you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

After months of secret toil, I and Andrew Carr released Everyday Data Science, a unique interactive online course! You’ll make the perfect glass of lemonade using Thompson sampling. You’ll lose weight with differential equations. And you might just qualify for the Olympics with a bit of statistics!

It’s $29, but you can get 50% off if you find the discount code ... Not quite. Hackers use the console!

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