Author: Willa Lambert

Voicing Voice

There is this idea of one’s voice, that a person has a voice which only they are capable of developing and uttering, but this is different than the mere act of saying words out loud or writing words down—though those are two common mediums for voicing one’s voice. Searching around online for this idea of voice turns up mostly songs or political websites for different causes (in addition to linguistic and/or psychology related results), though the Merriam-Webster dictionary tries define this sense of voice (see 4a & 4b), but fails to capture all that it is: one’s voice is not just an opinion held and uttered nor solely one’s right to expression nor just a rhetorical device / political tool.

I claim that a human being’s voice is that being’s uniqueness as an entity, incarnate. Someone writing this some years ago may have chosen to use the word “soul” or “essence” instead of the phrase “uniqueness as an entity”, but I tabooed those because (1) I don’t think they clearly convey what I’m communicating and (2) they are curiosity stoppers in ways that “uniqueness as an entity” doesn’t seem to be (you can ask about the idiosyncrasies of an entity and how those differ from those of another entity, and so on). One’s voice comprises their identities, their lived experiences, the material composition of theirself, and all the other things that make one particular human being a unique mind and entity despite sharing so much mind and material design with all other humans. Only one person has a particular voice, only that person can voice that voice, only that person can experience their own life experiences, and only that person can write their own story (for a lovely and inspirational song with this message, see Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten”). I take it as a given that it is beneficial for each human being to develop and enrich their own voice, and ask: dear reader, are you growing and nurturing your own voice? Don’t answer that question yet, hold it with you as you read, please, now to what this voicing voice stuff looks like and why I care about it so much via stories from my life.

At the age of 7, I explicitly believed that I had a secret to take to my grave. Back then in 2002 or so, I had no idea that trans people existed and didn’t learn so + the terminology until much later, but I knew culturally that “someone like me”, who I was and how I felt (born male but noticed a strong desire to be female from a young age), was shameful and bad, that my family would never accept me, and decided then that I’d have to hide myself for the rest of my life. I thus grew a deeply entrenched, competent, and powerful habit of hiding, of being hidden and acting according to how I was expected to act: I became a very good actor and lived a life that wasn’t mine and watched from behind the scenes in despair. Thankfully [skips over a ton of life experiences because those aren’t quite germane to the subject of this post], I broke free of that crippling fear and slowly learned to accept myself, eventually managing to begin my transition from male to female: I’ve been on estrogen for almost 3 years now! Yet, despite getting rid of that fear, accepting myself completely, and living life openly and happily as a trans woman, those habits of hiding have persisted in me.

I consciously and emphatically reject those old habits of hiding, I am an out and proud trans woman, and I think thoughts about so many things in this world. I refuse to hide any longer and now choose instead to cultivate and grow my voice and join the broader public discourse (for whatever topic sparks my interest); I join the world publicly. I’ve spent so many years consuming information, opinions, ideas, etc. but not writing nor discussing what I’ve encountered (this poem is an attempt to describe what that feels like on the inside). I used to be too fearful to do that, even my first post on LessWrong now seems saddled with crippling fear in retrospect. I’m glad I wrote it though, it was one of my first forays into publicly writing (one of the first times I publicly voiced my voice) and helped introduce me to that habit, though writing in my shortform in the style of a log or journal + beginning to comment on posts recently has helped push me out of those old fears and now writing publicly feels much more comfortable.

Only through writing publicly and some other public creative works have I began to truly grow, nurture, and develop my voice: back when I just consumed content, whether it was high brow, erudite, entertaining, or absolute trash, I wasn’t growing, I was changing in response to other people’s words and creations, but I wasn’t putting anything back into the world nor growing myself deliberately in response to what I encountered. That’s why I asked you, dear reader, this question: are you growing and nurturing your own voice? I personally find that publicly writing is the most “leveling up”, empowering activity I currently know how to do, especially for developing my own thoughts into more refined ideas and eventually further refining those ideas into useful, actionable knowledge (for reasons why, please see adamzerner’s “Writing to Think”, and my response to that), but you may find that a different activity provides you with such benefits: do you know what activity(ies) help you level up, empower you, and do you regularly engage in those activities? It’s important to me that I develop and grow my voice further, because I believe doing so is an integral part of getting stronger so that I may solve significant problems in this world that need solving (my particular problem area will be death: I believe we as a species need to strive for immortality and rid ourselves of all causes of death; more on this in a post next week), plus voicing my voice is fun, I like doing so!

Only you can develop and voice your own voice, are you doing that? What struggles do you face in doing so?

My Oath of Reply for this post lasts until August 28, 2021. Writing notes: I wrote this post in about 1 hour and 30 minutes; however, I wrote 2.5 drafts, sought feedback from friends, and reflected considerably for about a week before outputting this post just now.

Crossposted from LessWrong, please comment there.

Interfacing with 2FA Protected GitHub Account Repos via Git on Ubuntu

The goal:

Follow this guide to enable command line git access to your two-factor authentication (2fa) protected GitHub account repositories!

Difficulty:

If you have some experience using the bash shell and/or navigating the Linux filesystem then this shouldn’t be too difficult. If you have no experience with either of those things or want a refresher then please follow the links embedded in this guide to read tutorials on relevant topics or programs.

Why do this?

  • Enabling two-factor authentication (2fa) for your GitHub account helps protect against security breaches / unauthorized access to your account. Generally you should use 2fa for every app or website or login provider that supports 2fa; note that 2fa isn’t perfect and won’t make you immune to security breach / unauthorized account access risks, but it helps.
  • Accessing a 2fa protected GitHub account via git in the terminal requires a few more steps than accessing a non-protected account.
  • Some gui applications for git such as GitHub Desktop or SourceTree (to name two such applications I’ve personally used before; there are other gui applications for git out there) make it easy to access a 2fa protected GitHub account, but they aren’t available on Linux. Plus, git doesn’t have too steep of a learning curve and offers great productivity and version-control benefits to even novice users, so learning how to use command line git is quite helpful for programmers, writers, and generally anyone who benefits from using professional version control systems. More on git here.

Who is this guide for?

Anyone interested in learning how to use git on Linux (in this case, the Ubuntu Linux distribution and GNU Bash) via command line (aka the terminal) to interface/interact with your GitHub repositories. Git isn’t just for programmers! I think it’s one of the best tools available for writers as well, plus anyone more generally who needs or wants the great convenience and quality of life improvement that comes from using a great version control system. More on using git for writing here and here.

Initial Steps:

  1. This guide assumes that you have a GitHub account, if you don’t have one, you can create one by going here.
  2. Enable 2fa for your GitHub account.
  3. Configuring GitHub account’s implementation of 2fa.
  4. If you want to access GitHub via the command line and connect to your repos via HTTPS, you need to create a personal access token that will be used instead of your password when authenticating via git.
    • Save this personal access token and keep it in a safe location because you only see it once!
  5. Create a new repo on GitHub.
  6. Make note of the name you chose for your repo and copy its URL. Usually a GitHub repo URL looks like: “https://github.com/*username*/*reponame*”

Onward to the Terminal!

  1. Open terminal and run the following command to check if git is installed on your system:
    ‘which git’

    • If you see some output such as “/usr/bin/git” then git is present though you may want to update it in case it’s an older version.
  2. If git isn’t installed on your system and you’re running Ubuntu Linux then open terminal and run the following commands to install git:
    ‘sudo apt-get update’
    ‘sudo apt install git’
  3. Configure git: Associate your GitHub username and email with your local git install via these terminal commands:
    ‘git config –global user.name yourusernamehere‘
    ‘git config –global user.email youremailaddresshere‘
  4. Clone your GitHub repo so that you have a local version of that repo on your computer.
    ‘git clone https://github.com/*username*/*reponame*’

    • Note: This will create a folder containing that repo within whatever your current working directory is. To check your current working directory enter this terminal command: ‘pwd’

Start Writing / Programming!

Whether you use a gui application or a terminal based editor is totally up to you and it doesn’t really matter so long as what you’re using helps you create whatever you want to create. Don’t be afraid to try many different applications / editors out as you craft things, some tools will work better for you than they work for others, each person is different. It’s fine to read recommendations and retrospectives on individuals’ and/or organizations’ experiences with various tools, in fact that can be quite helpful, but make sure you spend more time just trying things out and fooling around rather than trying to research the perfect tool for you to use when writing or programming (or for anything really): the reading and research can help point you in a good direction but you need hands on experiential data to truly know what works best for you, so go play with different tools. I’ll be using nano and staying in the terminal for the rest of this guide. If you aren’t familiar with nano and/or want a refresher on how to use it, here’s a tutorial on how to use nano.

  1. I cloned my GitHub repo while my current working directory was my user account’s home directory, thus the folder containing my repo is located at “/home/useraccountname/reponame“.
    • If you aren’t familiar with the structure of the Linux filesystem and/or navigating it, then I recommend checking out this guide and this guide.
  2. Navigate to your repo via terminal; in this case my repo is located directly in my home folder: ‘cd ~/reponame‘
  3. Create a file, any file! e.g. ‘nano helloworld’
  4. Now tell git what you’ve done so that git can create an index readable by GitHub containing the changes you made: ‘git add helloworld’
    • Note that you need to specify the path to your file when using the git add command. I didn’t have to because my working directory at time of entering that command was the directory containing the helloworld file I created.
  5. Once you’ve made all the changes you wanted and added them now you need to commit them to finalize those changes prior to uploading them to your GitHub repo; make sure to to leave a concise comment describing the changes you made. ‘git commit -m “created helloworld file and said hello”‘
  6. Push your local git repo changes to your corresponding GitHub repo online by running this command: ‘git push origin master’
    • If you’re curious about why that command pushed to the “master” branch, then I recommend reading this documentation on how git branching works.
  7. Congratulations! Refresh your GitHub repo webpage and you should see the changes you made and pushed appear on that page.

Git is incredibly powerful, but getting started is relatively easy and even using git at a novice level provides immediate benefits to your workflow!

Sources other than the ones linked above that I referenced while writing this post:

Hello World

Hmm.

Staring at a blinking cursor on a draft post does elicit quite the runaway stream of thoughts about what on earth I’ll write about, how I would go about writing whatever that might be, all while concurrently reflecting on the impressions my writing style, content, and signals might make on any passerby.

Oh well, guess I’ll write anyways. I’ve spent too many gorram years lurking, reading, absorbing, etc. and not actively developing my writing faculties or discussing interesting things with people who are of shorter inferential distance to me that most. This seems like a problem that’s easily solved by simply starting to write, not allowing my efforts to be vanquished by my personal perfectionist daemon, and doing what is good enough for the moment…plus, writing and participating in discussions dramatically increase the rate and quality of my intellectual development, so, yay!

I don’t think it’s possible to convey how absolutely weird it is to me to see words published with a moniker I use attached to them. Not sure if that will ever stop being weird, because isn’t it ridiculous? This whole writing thing as a “crystallization” of one’s present state of being and cognition into a less ephemeral medium is certainly a great boon to trying to have human civilization, since it allows for “permanent” records of ideas, culture, blah blah, etc. you get the point…but as a social animal it does feel rather scary to “put oneself out there” for the world to see and judge. But, what else am I supposed to do? Not do that? Pah. I need and want to write and explore things! So I shall 🙂

Take care of yourself, valete

(vaguely cross-posted way after the fact here; original version is on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QTRwYw7pbjHRsBNou/my-hello-world )