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I noted once that the most interesting potential for virtual/mixed reality wasn’t to put yourself in a virtual office or the ocean floor; it was that you could experience entirely different worlds with different physics, where time flows differently, where acoustics mutate as sound waves fly through the air. In VR, you could move through scales of experience, from nanometers to miles, as…
Someone asked me via email about my thoughts on the software engineering field, and what I would tell someone new to the industry. (Relatively speaking, I’m also pretty new to the industry! But it’s 5AM, and I ended up going on a long semi-rant. I thought the rant might be interesting to some other people too, so here’s the rant.) Interpretations of reality If you look one way,…
In the year 1972, a pair of spacecraft departs the Earth atmosphere, headed towards the outer gas planets of the solar system. These spacecraft, bearing the name Pioneer 10 and 11, become the first artificial objects to fly beyond Pluto and escape the gravitational grasp of the sun. They each carry a gold-plated plaque bearing etchings of the human form, our place in the solar system, and its…
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . Essays, photographs, videogames, podcasts – these are what we create. They live on mediums , like word documents, film, canvas, software, and audio. On the other side of the canvas or the lens or the microphone are the humans casting their ideas into form. And in between, at the point of contact between the creator and the…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . I’ve been working through Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory this month. The book covers the early history of the storied industrial research lab Bell Labs . Though I’m not finished yet, the book, combined with a week-long vacation in Paris, has triggered some thoughts in me I wanted to share. Bell Labs’ prolific…
American cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes . This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible , and that guided the shape and scale of everything. Software has similar analogues. There…
A while ago, I wrote on my main blog about more intentionally disambiguating “impossible” things from things that are merely very difficult . The idea has since grown with me, and recently I gave a talk for the Startmate Fellowship about a related idea, which is that you should approach new ideas with a “possible by default” mindset . I think as we grow up and go through…
우리의 얘기를 쓰겠소 (Writing Our Stories) by SG Wannabe, from the drama 시카고 타자기 (Chicago Typewriter).
Something reaches escape velocity when it moves fast enough to “keep falling forever” – when it moves quickly enough that even the gravity that pulls it back to the ground can’t bring it back to the ground. Once you reach escape velocity in space flight, for example, you are guaranteed escape from Earth’s gravitational grips. I think the metaphor of escape velocity…
I was walking through the Oculus structure in the World Trade Center train station in New York, and began thinking about signages and signage design in such a busy transportation hub. The battle between form and function is nowhere more fierce than in a busy transit hub, where utility and accessibility are top priority, but you don’t want to sacrifice the aesthetics of architecture. I…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . New York is a place that seems to demand that I justify why I’m living here. It’s expensive. It’s noisy. What am I getting in exchange? So I’ve been trying to go out more and see what’s in the neighborhood recently. Last week, I made a couple of visits to Strand Bookstore , a large and apparently quite…
I visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York earlier this week. The museum was more bare than usual due to social distancing policies and a smaller exhibit going on due to the pandemic. There were a few audiovisual works of art displayed in the rotunda, and smaller galleries around the corners of the museum. Every time I visit a place like this, I’m just as taken by the architecture and…
I consider writing (words) and writing (software) to be my two most proficient creative skills. There are many parallels between the two – in most situations, both take the form of writing letters down onto some document that gets interpreted by someone or something else. Both take time, require extensive pre-writing preparation, editing, and rewriting to be great, and both are skills with…
I spent an afternoon this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it got me thinking about artists and writers as vehicles for ideas. The most conventional view of creative work has the artist (or writer, author, videographer, whatever you want to call them) as the main character. An artist conjures ideas out of their experience and beliefs, and renders it into reality. But I think…
Most of the time, I don’t know how to make anything. I don’t know how to make anything because I don’t know what to make. I don’t know what to write about, or build, or talk about. I survive in a nearly constant state of writer’s block, punctuated by acute moments of clarity when the voice inside me speaks at three hundred words a minute, and I grab the nearest…
The first observed Anomaly was a small flicker. A singular quantum fluctuation. A “five-sigma event” – research-speak for about one in four million chance of happening. The spin of an electron neutrino flipping in silence. Physicists didn’t know what to do with the data, so they published it under a question mark. The press murmured echos of instrumentation errors and…
Hold, fast, to the things that hold you in this world. Hold on. Hug back. Run towards.
One really alluring way for me to think about music (or art, more generally) is that it’s a holographic projection of everything that isn’t music that fills up life. Music isn’t a medium — life is a medium through which we learn to be better musicians and artists and filmmakers, and what we learn in life, all the emotion and the harmonies and the pain, we take that and…
You were navy when we met, the color of musky rain and warm evening skies and shadows flowing through New York City streets. Lost in a sea of pastel blazers and neon dresses I fell free into your blue, reaching out for something deeper, mesmerized by the stars I could only see in the dark. And then blue turned to purple, of scented candles and magic tricks and chandelier-lit velvet carpets. And on…
There are different kinds of silence. The loud ones that press against your eardrums, where you don’t want to move because everyone else is going to stare at whoever makes the first move. The cold ones where you’re on the phone, but you know the other person isn’t listening. The dead ones, because you know there isn’t a response coming but you don’t want to give up.…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . Sometimes when I look at the window, I can almost imagine that there is still a sky behind it. Even in the nicer rooms in this side of the hospital, the windows don’t quite get the sky brightness right all the time, and most of the time, the screen is a little too dim, and the clouds are a little too bright. But a few times a…
In technology (defined broadly), there are questions that are evergreen and related to the nature of science itself, and questions that are temporary and specific to the technological capabilities of a given era. A simple example of a temporary question is when Moore’s law for scaling semiconductor performance no longer holds. It’s an interesting question, and one that has huge…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . I’ve been thinking about Romanticism recently. Ironically, not the Valentine’s Day kind, the capital-R Romanticism. I wanted to share a couple of pieces of writing related to it that have found a way into my notes this week. First, from the French poet Charles Baudelaire: You have to be always drunk. That’s all there…
Don’t Hold Me by Dean Lewis, covered acoustically on the guitar.
Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley, a cappella arrangement (if you can call it that) by me.
I Won’t Give Up , by Jason Mraz, plus some improvisations and ad-libs as I felt so compelled. A vocal + piano cover, me on both.
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . By a studio , I mean a space for creative work that has grown and accreted the right tools in the right places over time. It’s a larger version of the “desktop” analogy. Looking at someone’s studio can tell you a lot about the work they do, their sources of inspiration, the kinds of mistakes they make and the…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . There is an Afterlife, but it’s not what you expect… In this Afterlife, you enjoy the rest of eternity without worrying about scarcity of any sort. You have as much money, time, and energy as you need to do whatever you please—provided that what you want to do is something you’ve done already. In the Afterlife, you…
Some time ago you asked me if I would come to church with you every week, and I said, “of course.” You didn’t ask, but in that moment, I imagined you asking, “Would you believe for me?” And I imagined myself pausing a little to consider the implications of me pulling the very basis of my reality of life out from under me. “Of course,” I repeated in my…
There are higher levels of thinking to any skill. Practicing a skill is really the process of teaching your brain to think at higher levels of abstraction. A beginner chess player only thinks in terms of individual moves and positions. Move the king here, the rook there, the knight over there. But when you watch a grand master play the game, the individual moves barely register. Instead, the grand…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I’m glad it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my…
I came across this quote recently, by Mark Kennedy: I don’t know what people expect to see what they look in a sketchbook, but they always seem mighty disappointed. I think people expect to see what they would see in a Hollywood version of a sketchbook. Whenever someone is sketching from life in a movie, it’s always supposed to look tossed off and effortless, but it’s really some…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . What makes a great conversation? Certainly there’s some degree of give and take, listening to the voice of your interlocutor and responding in kind. You want to move fluidly between topics, avoid jumping from idea to random idea without transition. In the best of times, it feels like exploring a mental landscape that you share…
I didn’t think “a year in recap” or anything like that was worth taking up real estate on my main blog , but was curious what I wrote and what people read most of my writing in 2020, so here we are. What I wrote I write in three places today: thesephist.com , which is my main blog dotink.co , which started out as a website for my programming language Ink, but is now where I dump…
There are a class of occupations where the job of the worker is to know and anticipate the unknown unknowns of a situation or domain. Aircraft safety engineers and investigators , for example, are tasked with anticipating emergency situations or failure modes of complex machines (aircrafts) that we might not have discovered to even be possible yet. Because commercial airliners are engineered to…
Science improves our ability to control and predict the future. Music stirs emotion. Cooking produces food. What does art do? I think one reason this is an interesting question is that art usually produces an artifact, so when we think of “what is art” we think of the artifact, like Jackson Pollock’s art being the paintings or Toni Morrison’s writing being the…
Timeglass is my second original album of compositions and improvisations on the piano. It was recorded in Berkeley, California in December 2020. The album is available on Spotify , Apple Music , and most other streaming services. You can also listen to it on YouTube . Track list Future Elegy Love, Please Remember Me Ataraxia Reunion Morning Song Precipice Unraveling Neverending
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . If all evidence of civilization on Earth was destroyed, and humans had to re-build society from the ground up, what would be different? Feynman reckons that pivotal scientific moments, like the discovery of the atom, will still happen in the same way. Perhaps mathematics will be similarly rediscovered. Someone told me once in response…
Pushing Daisies , by Loote. A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar.
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how I manage to get so much done – side projects, essays and blog posts, music production, so on, so forth. I think people expect me to have some rigorous and productivity-boosting tactic they can employ to be more prolific, but that’s not really true. I don’t really have great tactical advice to stay productive more of the…
I used to think that the classical computer, the universal Turing machine in our pockets and backpacks, was a one-of-a-kind invention. There is the human history before computers, and the human history after software; before, we are mortal, and after we are divine. I don’t think so anymore. Computers are powerful because they are universal machines , mechanical solutions to some…
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter . I don’t remember much about how I got there or where I was going, but I found myself on the back of a bus last night, squeezed in between seats that just barely fit my legs and my bag. Even on the comfortable ride, I could tell the road was barely paved by the way the kicked-up gravel clackered against the sides of the bus. The…
LAUV never gets old~ A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.
People ask me how I get so many ideas for interesting side projects and blog posts . I think the best way to describe my growth as a writer/maker over time is that I’ve become more efficient at discovering and refining my own ideas. There are always ideas floating around in your brain. Sometimes, it comes to you out of the blue in the shower. Sometimes, you’re reading the news over…
I’ve talked to a few different people in the last week about growing as a writer, and the process of going from “I don’t think I have anything to write about, and it takes so long” to “I’m regularly writing about interesting topics.” There’s lots to say about this journey, but I discovered one mental model that I really like. I think in that process…
A vocal cover, with me also on the acoustic guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.
On two assumptions: As long as humans exist, we will want to live longer. This seems like a natural consequence of neo-Darwinist understanding of evolution. Perhaps there’s a way for genes to replicate without human longevity, but I doubt it. Given indefinite time, technology will tend to improve in the long term. This prediction does not hold up in the short term – many times in human…
We can understand ideas horizontally , by studying the breadth of ideas available in a particular field. We can also study ideas vertically , by looking at the lineage of current ideas extending into the past. I think deep understanding of an idea requires both, but especially the latter. A horizontal survey of ideas gives you awareness of the status quo, the cutting edge, the current consensus.…
This is the third note I’ve written about my ideas around gap years. I think that’s probably three too many, but I also seem to keep getting questions about it. The previous notes were more about the decision to take a gap year . This one is more about what to do with it – given the immense whitespace for opportunity and choice in a gap year, how do you make the most of it? Some…