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Links are kept outside of my YouTube descriptions after YouTube threatened me over linking to the New York Times:
For information on how to use git: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumOmMA6hDI
Or, make chili: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v2gmNWGHm0
Blog: https://blog.tangentfox.com/
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A little over a year ago, I published a blog post about equality and the history of trying to achieve it. That blog post was based on notes I took almost two years ago, of which I lost several individual notes.
Today, YouTube recommended this very short video to me explaining how git works. I thought I understood it pretty well already, but this helped me realize I was mistaken, and what to do about those lost notes.
Note that orphaned commits are removed periodically from a repository, so this kind of recovery is only possible recently after a mistake was made, or if you’ve kept an untouched copy of the repo around like I have.
First, we need a list of commits to check.
In my case, there are hundreds of these, so I copy-pasted the output into an editor and formatted it into a list of hashes in Lua.
I started manually checking all of these by checking them out, (meanwhile forgetting that I made an ordered list and not a key-value hashtable, making these counting steps and using pairs completely pointless).
In this case, I know the file name of where the changes were lost, so I should’ve made a list of files changed within each of these commits. So I did that.
Then I searched through every commit to find only the ones that touched the notes on Equality.
For each of those, I checked out the commit so I could look for the missing data.
Unfortunately, as I’ve long suspected, the issue was with how I backed up data through git to begin with, and the changes were never committed before being overwritten. But hey, hopefully this can help someone else in a similar situation in the future.
Also, I am mortified to announce that just like two years ago, I am again in danger of becoming homeless due to the economy being used as an excuse by companies to fire people. If you can afford to help me out, I would appreciate it.