One great reading list item alternate Thusrsday, with context as to why you might find it interesting.
I’m going through what I hope are the most physically exhausting weeks of my life. Decades of poor lifestyle choices have caused injuries that Ayurveda is attempting to fix. I can see light, all is well. Now Ente is running free in my absence. The first few days were difficult because This was not a planned break There are streams for which I’m still a blocker It is interesting how both parties,…
Renjith writes about a counter proposal: instead of doing the easiest thing first, do the most ugh-inducing one : Because Leap Tasks threaten the brain’s desire for a predictable environment, your brain will instinctively try to prevent you from doing them. This gives us a powerful tool for developing our prioritization skills. You don’t necessarily need a complex system to figure out your true…
Eric reminds us that there are no gods, aside from those we’ve built ourselves : You and your friend do your best to make sure that your letters to each other are phrased in such a way that the slot machine picks it first. You shape your sentences, avoid specific words and topics, because you desperately don’t want to lose that connection you’ve built. Over time, this too will erode your…
Recently I came across the “Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”, a term defined by Jai Dhyani in a now-offline blog post: When you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it It rang a bell, and I think it describes many phenomena around entrepreneurship, social media, and also just the general aversion to doing (and not only is doing punished, critiquing the doers is…
Mike Egan argues, and convincingly, that instead of midnight, the next day should start at 4 AM . They step-by-step outline why 12 and 1 are too early, 2 is last orders, 3 is end, and by 4 AM, Put on a pot of coffee and accept your fate. The fun is in the rigor!
It is rare to find accidental poetry these days, in blogs, or otherwise. Structurally, it is prose, but in spirit, and in refrain, a poem. computer, Show Me Less Like This. show me Parisian streets and their denizens, show me futurist art and central american architecture. show me black forests and crystal pools, steady wildlife and bad poetry and confused yellow cabs. computer, show me the…
Before podcasts were a thing, Bill Simmons would trade e-mails with somebody successful for his piece on ESPN called “The Curious Guy”. I ran into this exchange with Malcolm Gladwell from 2006, where Gladwell broke down the risks of working hard. The (short) answer is that it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard.…
Last time we talked of how libraries are more than just books, they become a thing in itself. Nick Trombley demonstrates this with his digital notebook, barnsworthburning . You can start from anywhere; still, here’s a cove from which you can start surfing — The signature : It has long been understood that striving for originality as an end in itself is the mark of an inferior artist.
Talita writes about the thirteen years she spent learning how to be a librarian . The post is a love letter disguised as a warning. The first time I read it, I felt it was reframed sadness. But rereading it today while drafting this post, I found myself chuckling at her rants, and finding inspiration in her finding her world within this one. Two wisps in particular stay with me. The first was:…
Frogs don’t see like us. They don’t see things that stay still. They will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. They only see things that move, things that change. Sean Costello recounts how he has developed his own way to selectively cultivate such Frog Vision . However, the most important factor for me is that I have heard “Tom’s Diner” so many times that I no longer hear it.…
Siddharth wonders, Am I my algorithm? Now every playlist Spotify makes is drenched in melancholy. Even my ‘workout mix’ sounds like I should be crying on a treadmill. He concludes: No. Your algorithm isn’t a reflection of you. It’s a prediction of who you will be in the future, configured from past data. A portrait based on your past self, a bygone era, the guy from yesterday who spent an hour…
I just loved the design of Chase McCoy ’s page, Broadsheet . ( Broadsheets is a term for newspapers, a contrast with the smaller sized tabloids ) It is a columnar listing of their bookmarks, Mastodon favorites, read laters, and other highlights. Enough rabbit holes to get lost into for hours, and more. As one specific, I’ll teleport you to their entry: Every day is science fiction It is considered…
I was a bit surprised when reading James Reeves ’s website - the prose had an unexpectedly well-written quality (and the site beautiful). For example, here is a note from their notebook, dated Wednesday, January 7 : We had our first conversation when we were eighteen years old. Thirty years later, I’m still amazed that I can share a stray thought with her and an hour later we’re still chattering…
When observing the processes that drive his exploration, Alexander Obenauer mentions many things, but what stood out most for me is his ability to sit for long times with unanswered questions : A bias towards divergence can be hard to hold. People often have a natural inclination to converge new thinking and ideas as soon as they pop up; to settle them, relate them to previously settled ideas (and…
As adults, many of us have lost the ability to engage in unstructured play. We vaguely recall a period of childhood where we used to do it, but since we have lost the ability to get back into those states we assume it arose of idleness and boredom. We also vaguely recall those periods as having been “good”, so we then try to induce children over which we have control to “turn off” - sit idle, “be…
It is often, and for very good reasons, that people start with a name that names an idea, and then work towards manifesting it. For example, when building a web service, find the domain first, and then implement. Or when creating a YouTube video, write down the title and create a sketch of the thumbnail first before getting down to the actual content. Or when writing a blog, write down the title…
I’ve often thought of the code of itself as not being valuable, but the people who have a mental map of that codebase as bringing the value. Reading through Jimmy Koppel ’s explanation of The Benjamin Franklin Method , I could relate his exposition to that thought: Expertise is a process of building mental representations; expert minds store knowledge in a compressed fashion. … This is possible…
Jia-Bin Huang is not the first one to do it, but I found it oddly inspiring, his CV of failures . It has been a great year. Wishing you all an even better upcoming one. See you all on the other side!
Some questions do not have right or wrong answers; only different ones. In although of course you end up becoming yourself , Chris Peterson describes how each answer is a future self. This is unnerving, a trolley problem , killing countless future selves to engender the current one. And there is no way to trianglate what the alternative choices would’ve lead to. But there is a way of going about…
“Fear of error and fear of truth are one and the same thing” — Alexandre Grothendieck Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy? Yes, Michael Nielsen concludes, because of two things. Energy, and cocoons. To explain the energy, he cites Feynman: I told myself: “They’re on the wrong track: I’m got the track!” Now, in the end, I had to give up those ideas and go over to their ideas of…
It is a very long post. It is also about politics, in a country different from mine, and about a referendum where I didn’t have a side. Still, I learned a lot from reading it so I’d like to share Dominic Cummings ’s behind the scenes into what goes behind a public influence campaign: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’ . Reality has branching histories, not…
It is a common refrain that childhood was great, and things have go downhill since. Collisteru disagrees! Adulthood is awesome, actually , he explains: Adulthood is objectively better than childhood. Everything boils down to freedom , the golden gift of adulthood. I don’t think the average person realizes their own freedom. Most adults in the United States could at any time, if they really wanted…
I’m fairly minimalistic when it comes to note taking. Or so I thought, until I was schooled by Andrej Karpathy ’s full-on animal mode: He uses a single note! Any time any idea or any todo or anything else comes to mind, I append it to the note on top, simply as text. As things get added to the top, everything else starts to sink towards the bottom almost as if under gravity. Every now and then, I…
Is work enough? , asks Emma Pierson . It’s as if you’re sitting at an elegant restaurant with a spear through your chest and waiters keep bringing you beautiful courses. One asks you how your food is. “It’s lovely,” you say, “but I’ve got this large hole in my ribcage…” I don’t have an answer to her question, but I do understand it. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the…
Am I having a Good Time™? Michael Dickens argues that it is hard to tell ! Reflecting on an experience changes the experience. Fundamentally, it is impossible for me to check how I feel while I’m engrossed, because then I wouldn’t be engrossed.
Reinforcement learning, often abbreviated RL, is a way for a machine to learn by interacting with an environment, receiving rewards or penalties as feedback, and eventually learn to take actions in a way that maximizes cumulative rewards over time. Think of it the way one teaches a dog to sit by offering them treats. Jason Wei , in his post Life lessons from reinforcement learning , talks of the…
In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical. Anonymous, in not many more words, goes on to describe her approach to become a seemingly unattainable, nonlinearly better, version of herself. That is, her approach to becoming a magician : Surround yourself with…
Every dichotomy contains within it the seeds of a debate, and that between “Rationalism” and “Traditionalism” is one of the more fertile. So in that sense, there isn’t anything particularly new about Gavin Leech ’s viewpoints on this topic - Rats and trads . It is well written and an enjoyable read (his site has more!), but that’s not why I bring it to you today. I bring it to you because of a…
While I think Ben Kuhn could’ve come up with a better title, I agree with the contents of his post: Be Impatient . Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful. Other posts by Ben have an opposite effect on me - I like the succinct and clear titles he comes up…
One of the counterintuitive things I’ve found in my life on this planet is that working harder gives me more energy than resting. Doing things in energizing. This is not to say that one shouldn’t take pleasure in just existing. That is fine, and a great use of time. And of course some amount of rest is essential to get a baseline level of energy. However, if one intends to gain more energy, a…
What if I told you I can give you the entire gist of systems thinking in one post that will take you 30 minutes to read? Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System is just that. Written by the mother of systems thinking, Donella Meadows , herself, it will give you an executive summary of systems thinking (without ever using the phrase “systems thinking”). My favorite takeaway: You don’t…
Usually I have something to say about the core message in the link I share. Navigating the Anxiety Vortex is where I just wish to share the enjoyment of reading the words, regardless of the message within. I can try to briefly summarize what Peter Welch was trying to say in his essay - we have different levels of anxiety - social, mundane, philosophical, and the abyss - which need to be handled…
Living Proof contains stories from mathematicians who felt that they didn’t belong when they started out in their journey, illustrating the internal reframing, or external encouragement, that helped them get over their impostor syndrome. I particularly liked the story of Laura Taalman , Hitting the Wall : Having to work so hard that semester and develop a thick skin for feeling stupid all the time…
The 200 pages of Man’s Search for Meaning have stayed with me ever since I read them because they showed me how we have absolute freedom to do anything we want (though sometimes the freedom being taken away is needed for us to realize that we had that freedom in the first place) The space between by Adam Newbold highlights another flashlight from those 200 pages: Between stimulus and response…
In Andrew Lisi ’s book review, Dan Koe’s Purpose & Profit — After 10 Years of Living It , I’d come across a phrase that has stuck with me since. Personal agency . Andrew talks of and highlights multiple things from Purpose & Profit , putting them in the context of his own journey Koe’s counterproposal is grounded in personal agency. Purpose is built—not found—by taking action, solving problems,…
In Wizards and Sorcerers , Viktor Löfgren describes two ways in which people approach the task of getting computers to do one’s bidding (a.k.a. programming). There are many such dichotomies, but this one resonated with me since I’d recently tried a transition between these dichotomies. My natural inclination has been what Viktor describes as a Wizard, but a few months ago, just for experiment’s…
Computers are a means of individual expression and liberation. Computers can turn your weakness into strength, and allow you to live your life on your own terms. In Weaponizing hyperfocus: Becoming the first DevRel at Tailscale , Xe laso describes how they turned an IRL weakness into a strength, and do things their peers can’t. You might know Xe from the Anubis, the DDoS protector they created,…
Open Advice FOSS - What We Wish We Had Known When We Started is a collection of anecdotes from people in the trenches of open source - Founders, Admins, Programmers, QA, UX, Artists, Packagers, Documentors, Evangelists, Conference organizers, even Business people and Lawyers. The thing I like the most about this book is not the content but its reaffirmation that open source is not just about code.…
In his classic articulation of what sets competitive gamers and amateurs apart, David Sirlin distills it down to mentality, not skill. The professionals play to win . The scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game. You can practice forever, but if you can’t get over these common hangups, in a sense you’ve lost before you…
Federico Mena Quintero , the co-creator of GNOME, shares his vision of how software is like cities. Does long-lived software have the same patterns of change as cities and physical artifacts? Can we learn from the building trades and urbanism for maintaining software in the long term? Could we turn legacy software into a good legacy? The analogy focuses on not just how any software is like any…
I came across a tool that solved a problem I had, but I didn’t know anybody else also had, so was a bit surprised when I found it had been solved. I’m talking of jj, which I’ve been recently been giving a whirl as a frontend for Git. This is not a tutorial. I’ll describe the problem, and how jj solves it. Then I’ll leave you with some links should this interest you. I like Git. For me, it serves…