Recent content on Sebastian Mellen's Blog
Something funny happens if you work in a particular field long enough, which is that you start to see everything that happens through the lens of the field you work in. For example, my current company (Cerebrum) operates in the background screening space. So I’ve started to see everything through the lens of background checks. Economic news is about companies, and news about companies is…
If you’ve ever experienced it or seen it in action, chemotherapy doesn’t seem very good. It is a brutal process. Oncologists practice the fine art of killing the cancer without entirely killing the patient. But the balancing act isn’t always successful. Suppose the earth were semi-sentient, and had some vague billion-year-long evolutionary memory that suggested a looming…
All knowledge is provisional, because it has to be encoded in language. This is a fragile arrangement. Knowledge and knowing does not exist without some degree of circularity, because the mesh of language is built upon itself, like a sweater woven into multiple dimensions from a single line of string. This means that knowledge is foundationally dependent on the language or symbology that encodes…
So much writing is boring now, and juiceless. There used to be a kind of charm to even the worst writing, because it came from someone just as flawed as you. Now, everything is airbrushed and edited so that we no longer see the real face of things. We see a tiny little snippet of humanity drowning in a sea of inescapable averageness. Contemporary writing often feels stripped of vibrancy.
In a world of more, be less. Then you will have more time for what needs doing. Too much emphasis on the immediate, too little emphasis on the eventual. You are made for infinities and multitudes, yet you fill yourself up and become singular. Focus on true understanding, and momentary illusions will disappear. It is the emptiness within a pot that makes it useful, and it is the emptiness of the…
I would hope that you, my dear reader, have not had the extreme displeasure of flying on a United Airlines flight recently. If you have, perhaps you should turn away now, such that you might avoid triggering any latent traumatic memory material. This story is about a wonderful adventure with the ever-helpful airline, which commenced on Christmas Eve: December 24th, 2023. Sleepwalking into a…
I often drink matcha. Matcha is a bright green powder ground from green tea leaves. Taking matcha powder and swirling it into water renders a luxuriant smooth tea. A cup of matcha, as imagined by Midjourney. This tea is something of substance — a suspension that would not be the same without its constituent components — a solid and a liquid blended into something entirely new.
This is a bundle of somewhat unstructured notes from a Twitter Spaces event about value investing. The Spaces event was put on by a good friend of mine, Jason Wong, almost a year ago (May 21st, 2022). While going through my notes recently, I realized that these bullets might be worth publishing if I could turn them into a slightly more readable document. This is about the best I could do.
The killer use case for large language models (LLMs) is clearly summarization. At least today, in my limited experience, LLMs are incapable of generating unique insights. While LLMs are good at writing creatively regurgitated text based on certain inputs or writing generally about a topic, they’re unlikely to “think” something unique. However, LLMs appear to be quite good at…
Begin. I’m going to experiment with free writing for the first time in a long time. I’m in the back of an Uber right now and it’s not that I don’t want to talk to the driver, it’s just that I’m not in a huge talking mood right now. For that reason, I’m going to experiment with free writing in this altered state of consciousness… We’ll see how it goes.
Some women are… you know, they’re fine. They’re gorgeous and beautiful and smart and they’ve got everything. But they don’t have it. And it’s just… well, I have no idea what it is. It’s just there. And I know it. And she knows it. And she has it. And it’s something there, something under the surface, something sparkling, something that dances…
Childhood — oh, you are the great universal. You bound me into who I am today, but you are just a shell — I had to shed the dreams you enthralled me with to writhe away from your grasp. That boundless freedom of having every option was a prison all the same, and I knew it. But I miss you still, and sometimes I wonder… Have you forever slipped away from my reach?
Introduction I recently bought a drawing tablet to use as a sort of “digital whiteboard” on video calls. I think in large blocks of architecture, so having a whiteboard makes it a lot easier for me to communicate what I’m thinking to others. Using a whiteboard in real-time helps me sketch out and explore new ideas more concretely. Unfortunately, COVID has preempted in-person…
Please note: I write these posts more for myself than anyone else. I’m no preacher. As the (as of yet unknown) outcome of the 2020 US Presidential Election looms large, I think it’s high time to reflect on all the ways in which we vote, and not just in governmental elections. In fact, the non-political votes you cast are probably moreimportant, given that you cast these votes nearly…
I recently installed System76’s Pop!_OS on my desktop computer, which uses an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER . The Nvidia support from Pop!_OS is great, and it’s a wonderfully polished Linux distro, but I ran into an issue using ddcutil , a utility to adjust the brightness of external monitors.
This is an assortment of edicts I try to hold myself by, as of June 2020. They are inspired by my reading, life experience, and moments of tranquility and clarity. As my conscience “grows”, and I come up with more, I will post installments to this series. Do note that these edicts are not written as admonishments — they serve as a reference — I use them to remind myself of insights…