Mo

PSAs

Mo — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 18:22:18 +0000

“microfiber” isn’t some revolutionary fabric technology. It’s plastic. If your bedsheets are microfiber, you are sleeping on a bed of plastic water bottles.
it’s not so much the dryer or washer shrinking your clothes. It’s probably also the detergent. I’ve washed on delicate cold water cycles with no spin and have had clothes still shrink and degrade in quality. Use very low amounts of detergent. A little goes a long way.
if you spray soap water on an ant, it kills the ant and disintegrates its body. Soap is serious stuff. Unless you’re a car mechanic, you don’t need to use it ten times a day.
aluminum foil leaks in your food. You want to minimize the amount of foreign metals you intake in your body. You can in most cases uses parchment paper as a 1:1 replacement.
filtered refrigerator water is way cleaner than bottled spring water. I tested this for myself many years ago using a few testing kits I got online. Refrigerator water, amongst other things, had way less particle matter in it.
don’t cook or shop based on recipes. This is exhausting and demotivating. Instead, stock your kitchen with a little bit of everything. Then, tell ChatGPT what you have and ask what you can make. It will give you simple recipes that teach you good fundamentals and techniques.
the only reason hair conditioner exists is to hide the fact that shampoo absolutely destroys every last bit of health and vitality in your hair. Shampoo should be used sparingly and as needed.
delay your coffee intake in the morning by about 1-2 hours. It makes a world of difference. Way to think about it is when you wake up, it takes about 1-2 hours for your body to get to baseline. If you drink coffee after baseline, your alertness level goes above baseline. But if you drink coffee right when you wake up, it will only take you to baseline.
health is more about what you don’t eat versus what you do eat. If you think “superfoods” are real you are being bamboozled. A healthy diet is simply a wide variety of not unhealthy foods.
healthcare, medical offices, hospitals, and doctors are all for-profit businesses. They will absolutely, 100%, unabashedly sell you a surgery you don’t need or prescribe you a medicine they don’t fully understand.
when it comes to matters of the body, don’t be so quick to try to intervene with invasive third-party interventions. Take your time and do your own research. In most cases doing a thorough google search will bring you more up to date on some matters than doctors who may have last read up on a subject twenty years ago in college.
if during a medical procedure or doctor visit you are surprised with the need to make a snap decision you weren’t prepared for, always say NO. You will make the wrong decision when put on the spot. Go home and think about it in peace.
if your car is dumb enough to let you swerve into opposing traffic or straight up drive head-on into obstacles, get a new car with better software. What is your life worth?
you shouldn’t have a side. You should be thoroughly confused.
if I could go back in time to the point in my twenties where I started questioning god and religion, I’d probably stop myself. I’m now a salty soup of existential/nihilistic /atheistic/agnostic, and I miss having a god I can look up to. It’s not just something you can gain back. You can’t see the ending to a movie and unsee it. Religion is valuable and I wish I didn’t see its ending. I’ve had no use whatsoever from learning the “truth” that everything is made up. What a boring party trick. Teach your kids something. Our pings are pongless and space is unreasonably quiet. Make our story special for them. That previous generations did this for us is one of the more selfless, beautiful acts parents have done for their children.

And yes, sorry a PSA on soap and laundry is what I post after a 1.5 year hiatus. Gotta start somewhere.

Anxaity

Mo — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 14:36:11 +0000

Anxaity is the feeling that you are missing out on the current AI rush as an entrepreneur. But also, there’s a certain anxaity one feels not fully fathoming the nature of the ongoing explosions in scientific discovery. It’s hard to get an explanation of how it all works beyond “it predicts the next word in the sequence.” Because that certainly doesn’t look to be what’s happening right? It seems far more magical than that. So how does it all work? What follows is my best effort at a very high level overview using analogies that take shortcuts for the sake of imparting some semblance of resonance, and also whether LLMs are really "AI" or whether it's hyperbole.

The true magic sauce is neural networks. Neural networks are math equations with hundreds of billions of variables. With that many variables, it’s absolutely futile to attempt to understand what each variable represents or even what the whole equation represents. The purpose of a neural network is to approximate some physical phenomenon that is otherwise impossible to model due to its vastness and intricacy, like human language.

To what values do you set each of the variables to get the desired result? This can’t be forecast. Instead, you iterate via trial and error by giving the neural network examples and solutions, and have the neural network more or less randomly alter its variables until it starts to produce something intelligible to you. After an obscene amount of training, the result is a math equation with hundreds of billions of parameters that are finely tuned to produce some result that looks good to you but are absolutely inscrutable internally.

The big scientific discovery made recently is that there is a math equation one can make that can model human language. That is, if you put together some equation with hundreds of billions of parameters, and you feed it a word and have that word run through each step of the math function, it will produce some other word or word-like thing that will make sense to you.

This is quite remarkable because it means that human language can be modeled using math, and is not as divinely out of reach for computers as we once thought it was.

So, if large language models like ChatGPT are just math equations with lots of parameters, how do they exhibit creativity and understanding? Well, it’s just that—creativity as expressed by language is in the language itself. It turns out language is a tool invented by humans, kind of like math, and you can operate on words and sentences mathematically to yield results that more or less follow certain laws. Neural networks don’t know what those laws are, but they can approximate them to a high degree.

To what extent is creativity mechanical then? I would say probably all of it. If you think of classical creative endeavors like writing, speaking, and drawing, they are all eventually manifest in the physical realm via very narrow, mechanical outlets, like pen to paper. These are outlets that can easily be represented by arrays of numbers, and operated on in neural networks to yield results which are meaningful to humans.

So is that artificial intelligence? Well, only if we define our own intelligence by our ability to manipulate language. If humans are intelligent simply because our brains can do math on words internally in a very fast, transparent manner, then we are indeed screwed and LLMs are truly, truly artificial intelligence, with no trace of hyperbole whatsoever. If however you can take the language away from a human, and there remains some profound intelligence, then we are at a vast distance from true AI.

In conducting a thought experiment where you try to imagine a human who cannot use language—and thus paradoxically cannot run thought experiments—I struggle to define what really remains and if that could be described as intelligent. Perhaps comparing humans to non-languaged species could be apt, in which case, what remains is a simple neural network that detects patterns as correlated to physical impulses like harm and hunger. No different, seemingly, from an autonomous driving AI or a captcha.

In which case, to my dismay, I do not find it to be a stretch to call LLMs artificial intelligence. But it’s just that: artificial. It’s a model of intelligence. An approximation. Models are not the real thing. A map of the world is not the world. Of course even if LLMs approximated lingual intelligence to 80%, that would be quite sufficient to overtake a lot of tasks humans do today, at speeds which are practically light speeds. 80% of human intelligence at 1000x the speed is indeed very disruptive, very scary. Could you ever build a 100% model? I don’t think so—the question itself is oxymoronic.

What’s interesting about neural networks is that because they are just a balancing act between billions and trillions of variables, you could arrive at variations of weights and parameters that yield something on top of human language. That is, human language, but in some derivative form that could very well be far more useful than what we know as language today. So instead of having time iterate on language over the next 100,000 years to yield more and more useful human lingual technology, you can have computers iterate on language in a much shorter timespan. The results stand to be both kaleidoscopic and cataclysmic.

Is your job safe from AI? Well, here’s a heuristic that I think works: does your job consist of mapping human language and so-called creativity to some mechanical, single dimensional form, like a keyboard and mouse? AI. Straight to AI. Anything that can be fed as a multi-dimensional array of numbers, like keyboard and mouse inputs, can be passed to and approximated by a neural network. So yes, writing, sketching, designing, coding, music production, video production—all these are easily expressed through mechanical tips and taps on a keyboard and mouse, and fair game for being done at 1000x the speed, and 80-99% the quality.

Even yourself on a Zoom meeting is just single dimensional inputs to a light and audio sensor—again, easily approximated by neutral networks. Many things will be automated, but those that can produce at the top 20% of quality globally will likely not only retain their job, but be extremely sought after, if for nothing more than to train the next generation of algorithms.

The tyranny of unsolvable problems

Mo — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 19:31:04 +0000

There is a certain liberation one feels when realizing that some, if not most, problems do not really have a solution. There is no "oddly satisfying" fit of a missing puzzle piece that is needed to make it all work. The problem may not even be difficult or intractable; it's simply that our mechanical, technical, analytical, and engineering minds are accustomed to thinking that problems can be solved. But in fact, most problems don't have a solution in the way you would want.

I risk igniting one faction or the other by citing examples, but you can pick any of today's hot issues and a sane, rational actor should come to realize that these problems don't have solutions in the technical sense, and they will perpetually live in a state of oscillation. Topics like abortion, immigration, or personal vs. population health don't necessarily incite me to emotional unrest because if you juggle the topic longer than three seconds you should come to realize just how intricate they are. Abortion is easy: on the one hand you're semi-luridly curtailing some wonderful biological process, but on the other hand biological life is cheap, manufacturative, and at the mercy of its bearer, so agency in a scientific world is warrantable. That one can't simultaneously hold both positions and riles up at another's stance is signs that one has not yet been liberated from the tyranny of unsolvable problems.

There is an uneasy sort of ferocity to insisting that problems have solutions. This is largely the generic basis of all political debates around the world. One faction states the solution is simple, obvious, and clear, and the other says, well hold on just one minute. Accepting that most problems don't have solutions is not an emotionally gratifying state to live in, so most people innately reject this stance. I don't blame them. I too would rather live in a world where the callous, brazen temperament of nature is not fact but a hell of our own creation. This would at the very least allow for some semblance of optimism towards our future. And when this optimism and hope is met with "well hold on just one minute" resistance, the faction wishing for a better world erupts in various forms of unrest, perhaps driven by a visceral impatience. Believing the myth of original sin—that is, that earth is a hell of our own creation—and that problems have solutions which are impeded by avarice, thus results in a violent clench on opinion which no physical or logical force on earth could break, other than another myth to supersede it.

But shall we then throw our hands in impassive despair at every problem because we realize it is unsolvable? No, I suppose not. But even the idea that one makes "progress" on these issues by debating them is largely mythical. How does one make "progress" on the issue of the value of unseen biological organisms or their future migration? There is, in my view, only oscillation. Give human civilization a million years of debate and progress on abortion and I promise you that even if a highly-scientific future society emerges where abortion can occur bereft of a second thought or an ounce of societal compunction, some local prophet will eventually emerge that will preach the value of all life and "open society's eyes" to life's precious nature—if for no other reason than a prophet's need for some sort of unique agenda to differentiate themselves.

If you find yourself getting heated about problems-of-scale (which are usually what all political problems are about), it may be sign that you are trying to be a "good person," which may sound comforting but is in fact worth introspection because good and bad are, unsurprisingly, problems without solution. Your desire to be optimistic about the world, and thus deduce—nay, enforce—that all problems have solutions and that bad people are impeding their progress, results in a restive and turbulent disposition that in the aim of trying to make the world a better place tomorrow, makes it less so today.

Beauty

Mo — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 02:48:12 +0000

My dad’s first wife passed away when their first son was only two years old. The idea of my brother having grown up without a mother is hard to think about. In looking at the mother of my own child, I see what a mother means to a child: everything. The thought of losing my wife, though it doesn’t wade through my mind too often, makes my heart quake, on my behalf and on my daughter’s.

This thought crossed my mind today when baby and mother were playing. I’m so often preoccupied contemplating my own premature death that I hardly think it could be just as probable that I’m not the first to go—death can be unbiased towards the healthy and unhealthy alike. In that moment, I shed a tear for my brother and father, who lived the exact existence the thought of crumbles me. Not that their lives today, more than some thirty, forty years later have been tragically afflicted by the incident, but at the poetic injustice of a father losing his wife, and a child losing his mother. I can’t bear that thought for me, and I cannot bear it for someone else.

Yet if my father’s first wife and my brother’s only mother had not died unjustly, my father would not have gone on to marry the woman who is my mother. And I…I would not be here today. You wouldn’t be reading this post.

This thought instantly devastated me. I exist because a woman died. I exist because a child lost his mother. My daughter exists by that same cause. The most beautiful thing in my life exists because of the most unbeautiful thing that could befall a family.

That woman, though I know almost nothing about her—I owe. I owe her my best.

I think about my own mortality often, mostly due to the precarious nature of my health. The most beautiful moments are in my child’s eyes; mine water looking at hers. My right eye sheds a tear to the wonder before me; my left for the thought that she may lose me, and I her, prematurely. In those moments, I sometimes think of the devastation I might cause my family were I to leave them unexpectedly due to the probable or improbable. When I think of my condition, which may or may not kill me, I curse the gods for the potential of having ruined my family’s life. “They’ll never recover from me,” I think to myself, or “My absence will forever be a dark cloud that looms over their every day.”

Yet from the devastating death of my dad’s wife arose a family which I know he loves more than anything. It’s the cause to which I owe my existence, without which there could not be me, my wife, and my daughter living in a warm home sharing laughs and sharing life. From her death, came endless beauty.

Maybe from mine too, shall come endless more.

Dreaming of Evolution

Mo — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 19:13:14 +0000

I have come upon a functional synthesis of life that seems to do a good job of resolving the million factors and objections swirling about my mind.

The Darwinian (or more accurately neo-Darwinian) view of life has never fully felt at home in my mind. I accepted it reluctantly but kept one eye open.

I crossed paths with a book titled Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen Meyer who compellingly argues against Darwinism. He is not the first to do so, but is part of a collection of biologists and academics that has been growing in size since the 70’s who assess that the Darwinist mechanism cannot be sufficient to generate new body forms.

In a word, Meyer argues that new body plans in evolution (i.e large jumps in function and form) cannot arise gradually through random mutation and natural selection because, amongst other things, the problem space of searching randomness is too incredibly vast. Life is composed of sequences of information stored genetically and epigenetically. If attempting to mutate and searching near infinite space, you’re infinitely more likely to happen upon a mutation that would make the resulting information sequence either completely illegible, nonviable, or deleterious.

To arrive through random searching where life is at today would require unspeakably more time, if at all, than four billion years.

Meyer argues that whenever new information is produced or found, invariably there is a mind at work who created that information. He would say, “random mutations cannot explain leaps of new meaningful information, but which process do we know for certain is capable of generating new information? Minds. Therefore, new body plans and thus information in evolution come from a mind.” His would be an argument for intelligent design, in the literal and not cultural sense of the term. Simply “intelligently designed” with no other connotations as to how or why.

I really like this view. It’s a functional form of logic that works well with my brain. “If we don’t know what causes new information in biology, let’s simplify to what we know to be able to generate new information in general—that would be no other than intelligence itself, as evidenced by humans’ likewise ability to generate new information.” Profoundly and mathematically unsatisfied with natural selection through random mutation, I’m happy to quickly replace my previous dogma with this one.

But I couldn’t just stop there.

Here is my own very nascent synthesis on the how part of intelligent design: how does the intelligent entity interject its code or information into our systems?

I wouldn’t have a hard time believing that the intelligence which drives evolution is our own mind’s intelligent processes. Essentially, we know that intelligence can create new information. And new information is required for major and non-gradual changes in organisms. What we don’t know is the where’s or what about this intelligence.

But using Meyer’s own method of reasoning, where do we empirically know intelligence exists? In biological minds. That’s the only known place in the universe we know intelligence to exist. So if intelligent evolution requires intelligence, and our minds posses intelligence, then why couldn’t our reproductive system coordinate with its direct access to that intelligence, and decide on how to shape the next generation?

The reproductive system literally has a hard line connection to an intelligent agent. Think about it like this: if evolution were to ask you, what could you use more of in your life? How’s your experience so far?—don’t you think your consciousness and experience could offer the asking agent some practical tips and insights “from the field” that could help you (or your progeny) survive better in your environment?

I find it very materially plausible that the reproductive system (sperm, embryonic development, etc.) relies on intelligent computation from its own host to dictate information flow for subsequent generations.

The gods that created humans were…human.

But I’ll go further, even though I’ve probably already gone too far. How does your intelligence provide the computing resources and runtime necessary for intelligent evolution to get the information it needs to carry out its processes? Here’s where a little wandering could help.

Dreams could help facilitate the process of accessing an intelligent runtime for evolution. Dreams seem to be your consciousness and intelligence at play in wildly varying situations. Almost like a diagnostic tool that asks your intelligent agent, “how would your intelligence react when placed into this or that circumstance?” Your dream when played out is then the mapping of that useful information that is subsequently imprinted in your biological seed.

New, meaningful information could certainly be generated through a process like this. Your intelligence lives out a physical life, and is probed every night how it’s faring in its environment. It’s worth noting that the intelligence runtime your dreams have access to is likely very different than, or has no obligation to be similar to, our waking conscious experience of intelligence.

We can have some fun with this: imagine if this process had you imagine how your intelligence—in its purest, inaccessible form—would respond if applied to existing as a single physically dense particle that when exploded would give rise to varying amounts of materials such as iron, mercury, helium, oxygen, and hundreds of other elements. Your intelligence is then tasked with: create intelligence in this playground. You would then begin dreaming of watching your intelligence spend billions of years designing a universe in which intelligence is reproduced with set materials and physical constants.

Our existence could then be such dream of another intelligent agent being probed in a dream how to create conscious entities via other arbitrary parameters. Another dream or dream of a dream could be asking intelligence to arrive at intelligence in a universe where there is 1/3 less iron and the speed of light is 2x faster.

Of course recursion cannot be avoided in theories like this so you start to wonder, how many levels does this dreaming go up?

There we arrive at the great limitation of our own intelligence, that takes us to an answer of one. Just one root node that is dreaming a nested web of dreams, where every dream, from the bottom to the very top, dreams of only one thing: life.

Some resources for the curious reader:

Wikipedia: Alternatives to Darwinian evolution

Apple Books: Darwin’s Doubt by Stephen Meyer

Wikipedia: Cambrian explosion

Wikipedia: Modern synthesis

Wikipedia: Mutationism

Wikipedia: Natural genetic engineering

Apple Books: Evolution: A View from the 21st Century

Nearer to the truth

Mo — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 21:35:31 +0000

I’m unimpressed by space. This sentiment for me is about five days old. I’ll explain that later. For now, the religion of scientism today celebrated releases of new telescope images of deep space, and everyone is performing the act of losing their minds.

The truth is, space is not that practically interesting, nor ultimately that impressive. What’s not empty are just celestial bodies performing big body physics. What’s most mind blowing about space is its mere vastness and age, but I can entertain myself with how large numbers can grow just the same. Beyond that, space is just large rock and gas formations and a few dark spots, as practically interesting as that mountain range outside your Airbnb.

If empty space and rock matter were interesting, we’d be obsessed with the moon. Alas, it’s just another rock in our backyard.

Don’t get me wrong—space is absolutely interesting. But it’s not relatively interesting. You know what is? Living organisms. The human brain. A single cell in your body. The vertebrate eye.

Of all the things created by the universe, including itself, nothing has so far proven to be more interesting than what we find right here behind the palms of our own hands.

Like Apple and their iPhones, today scientism celebrated a better camera. And it’s sold to us as an inch closer to ultimate truth.

The only place scientism will never have you look, is quite literally at yourself. Has the celebration of space made anyone feel anything but insignificant and nihilistic? This feeling isn’t a positive for humanity.

This isn’t poetry. If you want to study the universe—the simulator, the creator, the it, the that—if you want to know its disposition and preferences and characteristics—if you want to be nearer to the truth,

Look around.

Battle cry

Mo — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 03:06:45 +0000

What’s left for us? There is a narrative vacuum for those who seek comfort, but I cannot imagine any future narrative that is anything similar to those of the past.

Past narratives have always concerned themselves with a supernatural being who if not orchestrates then at the very least overlooks. But scientism precludes the supernatural.

How does anyone cope with personal calamity these days? Seriously—what is the framework for suffering offered to earthlings today? What shall I pass on to my child? I have literally nothing in the way of soul comfort. And without a preternatural being, neither do you.

What does the future bring but more science? Certainly science can bring comfort. But strictly of the physical dimension.

In the past decade or two I have watched my holy trinity of narratives dissipate without replacement. The first to evaporate was the belief of our special place in the universe; special, by supernatural choosing. The second to wither away was my sense of nationalism—the folklore of our founding, forefathers, democracy, military exceptionalism. The last to leave me—and this one hurt—was the belief in scientism and progressivism; that our efforts are leading to evermore good.

All have been replaced by a hyperrealistic mindset pervaded largely by economics and capitalism. Unshakably to me all three narratives seem to be economically rooted with candy coated shells.

What does the future have to offer our progeny? What will they find comfort in when life grows difficult? I can’t imagine supernaturalism becoming fashionable again, as ridiculously effective as it is at greasing the angst of life. Nationalism can always have a place, and while it can help someone feel they belong, I can’t imagine it being useful for curing soul dis-ease. Scientism is the remaining option, and though its powers seemingly infinite, offers little emotional recourse save for the brute force chemical route.

The world—or maybe just me—is in need of an old fashioned prophet. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what the rallying cry would be. “Science!!” No, that doesn’t feel right. “God!!” Hmm no, not quite. “America!!” Yikes, no, maybe not.

What then?

Simulation Overflow: The Runtime

Mo — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 18:22:50 +0000

The universe is described as having went from a state of nothing to being everything in a trillionth of a second. You know what else has that property? Software programs. Software programs go from a state of absolute nothingness to a state of infinite proliferation every time they are turned on.

And what is software—like us—but an animation of electricity into different patterns and formations?

In thinking about the nature of our existence in the past, I had imagined that our simulation was contained in some external, irreconcilable environment. But come to think of it, if our own universe is the animation of electricity into different formations, perhaps the container is more of the same, and is thus less containing and more fencing. In which case, I have more hope that we may one day make that eternal discovery.

I read somewhere that it is most curious that man views the death he had been under for billions of years prior to birth, as more comely than the impending death which he approaches, which would go on for another innumerable billion years. Are they not the same? You feel after precisely as you did before—that nothingness that is so hard to describe or ponder.

I was laying down the other day, minding my own business, and watching some untopical video about perhaps some supply chain this or logistics that—perhaps some Wendover video—when suddenly I was struck with a thought that ejected me from my world. What if we never discover the nature of all this? See, given all the infinite existential angst we ignore to live a productive life, I had at least found closure in the fact that while we may today be clueless, surely we are progressing towards uncovering this great mystery. If not by 2200, then surely by the year 2,000,000 we shall have it all figured out. But, two million years is pocket change for this brazen universe. It may go on for another fifty billion years without the slightest clue it even exists.

Can it be that it continues to proliferate for another dozen billion years, and whatever consciousness within truly still has no idea why it exists or by what will it does? How tragic. How truly lonely, depraved, and tragic. I am ok today living in complete cluelessness, but only because I hope that our collective efforts are somehow pushing us closer to some thread of hint as to the nature of these string vibrations.

As stated, all signs point to this being a simulation in the absolute literal sense—a meticulous software program that went from not existing, to existing instantaneously as soon as the run script was called. Which begs the question, what is the runtime of our simulation? Is it virtualized, or does it run natively in the host environment? Well, this is much easier to reason about when we consider our own simulations. In which environment does our software run? Software appears to run in a virtual world with no equivalent or transfer between ours, but really, software very much runs natively in our own world. Namely, software is an arrangement of electricity into particular formations—that same electricity which animates us. Humans and software, in this light, are not so different from one another.

Does our simulation have any interest in exposing its nature to us? Well, suppose we were to build some impeccable simulation of our own with beings that can wonder. Would we want to show them our world at some point? I think actually an astounding yes. We love showing off our creations, to those who would listen, like an evil villain loves exposing his intricate plot. We love to show others our world, like getting someone to listen to a song you like or watch a movie you can’t stop thinking about, if for no other reason than for that person to corroborate our sanity. In that same way, if you create a simulation and manufacture a being within whom you fall in love with, in the platonic sense, then it might actually be a very particular—and pressing—goal for you to introduce your world to them.

In the past I thought it unspeakable that we might one day interface with the externals of our simulation, the same way I would find it impossible for a character in a software program to escape the confines of their program and interface natively in ours. But if in fact all simulations, recursively speaking—the one we’re in, the one that simulates us, and the ones we create—if in fact they all exist in the same environment via unique and particular electrical formations, then I find this thought not so unspeakable, but perhaps only a matter of time until the electricity figures out more interoperable formations.

A thousand signs

Mo — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 02:36:52 +0000

Outside the place where I lived many years ago in the bustling city was a one-way, dimly-lit side street, branching from the busy road and into the quiet neighborhood. The parking on the street was unpermitted and unassigned, but when I’d walk my dog at night, I’d see the same cars nestling in their usual spot. One of the cars was a small pickup truck with a large caged wagon attached for collecting metals and scraps.

The neighborhood was new and old. Of the old was really old; the red-brick building occupying the south side of the street must have been at least 75 years old. On the north side of the street was an abandoned lot with junked cars. One day, with no warning or announcement, a sign spontaneously appeared on both sides of the street. Henceforth, the sign announced, this was to be permitted parking. You must acquire a permit for your vehicle, and display the permit at all times, lest you risk citation or tow.

I had seen the guy to whom the pick up truck belonged. He was in his 60s, but he was active and fit; almost buff. If we caught eyes while walking my dog, he would say hello, and I’d smile politely and say hey. He used to have a dog, he told me, until he had to give her up because bodily pain and back problems overtook his ability to care for her properly.

I’m no permitting expert, but I was somewhat certain that the city would give him a hard time for his business-sized pick up truck. I wondered where on earth he would park the thing if he couldn’t acquire a permit.

But he had found a different solution to the problem.

As I was walking my dog the next day on the north side of the street, I looked into the abandoned car lot and noticed something peculiar: plopped askew on the ground was a sign, similar to the one I saw the day before. “Permit Parking” it announced. I looked across the street by the big red building, and sure enough, no longer was there the sign there just yesterday. Someone had dug it up and thrown it across the street.

Ha. So now what? If there is no sign to convey that parking requires a permit, how enforceable can it really be? Yet I thought surely whoever dug up the sign was waging a losing battle. There’s no way you can turn permitted parking into a free for all by just digging up the sign and tossing it out. Right?

Nothing really changed over the next few days. Everyone assumed their usual opportunistic spot. Probably most inhabitants hadn’t noticed the sign in the first place to notice it was now gone. But then, just like it had before, the intruding pole miraculously reappeared. Nope—the sign said—this is definitely permit parking.

The very next day the sign was missing again. Not in the abandoned car lot this time. It had probably been taken to some abandoned pier, blindfolded when it was shot in the back and dumped in the ocean. The same cars, including the now increasingly smug pick up truck, continued to park, unpermitted. I thought surely this couldn’t go on much longer. Eventually, the rules must be followed. This war cannot be won.

A few days later the sign was reinstated, this time with bolts to the ground. And the very next day—nay, that same night—the sign had once again vanished without a trace.

This must have happened a few more times, until one side finally gave in and accepted defeat.

This whole saga was years ago. I drove by some months ago to the same street, and there it was, magnificent as ever: the raggedy old pick up truck with its overflowing haul of junk appliances. And, no sign. You, me, anyone could park there.

I can never really say for certain whether the old man was the sign killer. I just figured he had the most to lose by its presence. But I respected his will for survival. And for saying fuck you, I live here, and I’ve lived here far before this sign and its under-qualified originators ever wished for its existence.

So it seems, if ever a permit is required of you to perform an unalienable action, a viable course of action is to simply say fuck you. The collective will is immeasurably, unstoppably more powerful than the will of those maliciously designing and edging their way past your most uninfringeable boundaries. A thousand signs have been placed before you.

I know what the old man would do.

The great external

Mo — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 03:33:01 +0000

One thing religion does well is externalize blame. Why are you poor/sick/alone? Because god deemed it so. Even more, he may have a special plan for you. This framework of externalizing cause and effect to a third party seems an important dependency of the human process, given its relentless survival against all odds and reason. It is a core human process, because we understand our powerlessness to change most things beyond our diet and morning routine.

If it takes believing for god to exist and manifest, then today god flickers dimly at 35% opacity. For most scientifically minded individuals, there is no god. And there certainly isn’t a reason driving events. Random is a word that has by now beaten most of us into submission. But externalize we must, so if not god, who? Us.

In science, we are god. We did not create the playground, but we play freely within. If you take god out of religion and salt-bae in a dash of science, you end up with a framework which finds less galactic ways to externalize blame.

Today there is a prominent idealogical system, which in the future might very easily be classified as a religion, whose main feature is externalizing blame. The reason you are poor/sick/alone is not because nature is cruel, the world chaotic, and resourcefulness unevenly distributed, but because there are human and systematic forces working to suppress your up-and-comance. The main feature of this idealogical system is that almost any malady can certainly be traced back to an aboriginal or ongoing wrong (a defining feature of most religions).

It may not be the truth, but it certainly keeps the story going. My incredulity at the audacity and mind-bending rational gymnastics this framework takes is likely akin to an observer a couple thousand years ago lamenting traditional Abrahamic religions as pure fairy dust. Sure, you’d have been right, but it wouldn’t have mattered too much.

The simulation ultimately doesn’t like you to think you’re just a flimsy dispensable meat bag swimming in a bloody lagoon. It finds ways to project meaning, and most importantly, causation.

Science client

Mo — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 14:38:17 +0000

I wrote a post last week about a concept of freedom which I later deleted. It was too obvious, direct, basic, simple, and I felt dirty afterwards. I like participating in current political trends sometimes with friends, but definitely try to avoid it on the internet. A friend once told me that if you find yourself arguing the same national talking points as everyone else, you’re too plugged in. Someone living their own life in their own world would hardly have any clue what the current trendy debates are. So I’ll aspire to this for myself.

Nonetheless, it’s impossible to shut out current events in recent months and years because it’s no longer abstract the way current events used to be. It used to be that what you saw on the news was far removed from what would actually play out in your life. Today, that gap appears to have all but disappeared. The more it gets closer to me, my home, and my family, the more incited I become to lash out and say something, and just be another annoying voice in the sea of endless internet voices. I’ll try my hands at another approach here that will hopefully make me feel not so dirty afterwards.

In cryptocurrency, there are largely two types of wallet software: there are wallets that download the entire blockchain to your computer (many, many gigabytes), and verify the integrity of every transaction manually and ensure the blockchain is, well, the chain it’s purported to be. Let’s call this a trustless wallet. And there is another type of wallet software that connects to a central third-party that has already downloaded the entire blockchain on their server, and instead conveys to you, “listen, I’ve downloaded this whole blockchain so you don’t have to, and trust me, everything looks good. Here’s your balance.” Let’s call this a trust-me wallet.

Now, if you want to be a fundamentalist and act in the crypto network the way the gods intended—fully trustless and decentralized—you would download a trustless wallet and thus wait like three days for the entire blockchain to be downloaded onto your computer. But after that initial cost, you now run on the network the way it was intended—not trusting anyone but the source of truth itself: the chain.

If you don’t have the time or space for that, and instead want a convenient solution in which you are ok delegating trust to another central, third-party source (which happens to be most people), then you’re likely to end up using a trust-me wallet. This is fine and functional, but is not the “true” use of cryptocurrency, and if 100% of people used a trust-me wallet, cryptocurrency would cease to exist.

The beauty of science, as with the beauty of cryptocurrency, is that it was designed to be trustless and completely decentralized. Nothing “counts” as science unless it’s confirmed (replicated) by all the nodes, just like a transaction in the cryptosphere doesn’t count unless it's mass-confirmed.

In today’s politicized science environment, most casual people run trust-me science clients which regurgitate science emanating from a central source. This is fine, so long as not 100% of people are running this software. You need unreasonable fundamentalists who play the game the way it was meant to be played: lacking central authority (decentralized) and replicable. Science at today’s scale is largely impossible to replicate by individual nodes like you or me. So in most cases we’re forced to pick a central authority and take their word for it.

This isn’t to say science emanating from a central authority cannot be true. It’s only to say that science emanating from a central authority is centralized, third-party science. That there exist fundamentalists in the cryptocurrency ecosystem who say, I reject all trust-me clients and want to run my own node to ensure the long-term integrity of the system, as unreasonable as it may be, is how the integrity of the system is preserved. Without them, these systems could not exist.

The Metaverse

Mo — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 15:00:00 +0000

Facebook has recently market-rebranded as a “metaverse” company. Ostensibly because they are a VR company, and there is supposed to be an implicit connection between VR and the metaverse. But the metaverse is not waiting to be built.

It’s already here.

Perhaps influenced by Ready Player One, there is this idea that the metaverse must be in 3D, and can only be experienced in high-fidelity VR. This is nonsense. The metaverse is more like a Pokédex than it is the actual fictional universe that Pokémon inhabit. The metaverse is the rolodex of characters and objects whose ownership is indisputable and infrangible.

Specifically, NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain is the world’s largest decentralized trading game, and is precisely the metaverse that has long been prophesied. It needs nothing more to be so. Does a fictional universe really need 3D renders to be experienced? Can you not read mere words on a page and be excessively captivated by a book? So it is that the JPEGs on the Ethereum blockchain are a universe of characters and items, whose ownership is indisputable, whose objects are hotly desired, and whose characters enthrall you with their personality, backstory, and potential.

This is the metaverse. It’s already here. And its lack of central authority is more beautiful than we could have ever imagined.

No fucking Facebook account required.

There is no team

Mo — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 14:33:32 +0000

I’ve come to learn there is no such thing as a “team”. Only very productive individuals. You can’t take a group of average individuals, make a team out of them, and produce above-average results. In fact work quality and efficiency decrease with team size. The most productive unit is the individual.

This is a sort of anticlimactic realization for me. Back when I worked on Standard Notes solo, I had always been mystified by how large teams operate and produce. How did companies like Apple, with team sizes of hundreds and thousands, coordinate to ship frequently and speedily on a consistent basis? From the way I see it now, my answer would be: they hire great individuals. And the rest is automatic. I had a friend who worked at Apple who had likewise been previously mystified by their magic. After he saw what the insides looked like, he said, psht, I could start a company like Apple. He was unimpressed.

There was no magic. There was just a group of individuals working under the same roof.

This also removes mystification from the hiring process: there is no surprise result when hiring and integrating an individual in a team. You will get from that individual exactly their productive power and nothing more. I daresay you also can’t coach, manage, or train someone to be more productive than they innately are or are capable of.

So, to build a great team, hire great individuals. It sounds obvious, but when you’re in the thick of it, it’s kind of not. When you’re on the ground-level not pontificating from a birds-eye view, it’s easy to think a B-player integrated into an A-team still makes for a great result. It won’t. It brings down the group average.

There is no magic. There is no team. There are only really productive individuals. A great team spontaneously forms when a group of really productive individuals collaborate. The magic is in the collective human processing power.

Simulation Overflow: Intervention

Mo — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 15:43:14 +0000

In previous posts on simulation theory, I had written with full certainty that our simulation was based on non-interventionist principles. That once a simulation was created, the simulator would not dare interfere in its rote operation as not to taint its outcomes, so that the simulator can observe what interesting results become of each unique fork of a simulation. I had also surmised that the purpose of a simulator creating simulations is for its own intellectual amusement.

I want to make clear that my musings with simulation theory are not just a pastime, but unfortunately what I actually base my spiritual—or lack of spiritual—beliefs on. So it’s quite important that I ascertain I am working with the most reasonable model possible.

An unshakeable thought, however, has recently struck me.

A few months ago I planted a row of several dozen arborvitaes in my backyard, in an attempt to create a privacy barrier between my neighbors and I. The summer here has thus far been dry and rainless, so it was imperative that I gave each plant at least a couple gallons of water 4–5 times a week. For the first few weeks, I was watering the plants by hand. My garden hose flow rate was about a gallon every 20 seconds, so I’d spend about a minute hovering over each plant with the hose until it got its daily dose. Needless to say this was an excruciatingly boring process that sucked me out of half an hour each day.

I decided automation would be key if these plants were to have any chance of survival. So I set up a simple drip irrigation system. You have a long black flexible poly tube that you run through the plants in a horizontal S pattern. Where the tube meets the root of each plant, you pierce a little hole. You connect the tube to your faucet, turn on the water, and droplets of water begin dripping from the holes onto each plant. Slowly but surely, each plant gets its fill.

Initially I had the tube running on the ground level, zig-zagging through each plant in the aforementioned horizontal S formation. On one plant the tube would meet the roots from the front, and the adjacent plant would meet the tube from the back. I had this system running for about a week before noticing the results were suboptimal: only one half of each plant’s root area would be watered. So on some plants only the front half of the soil would be moist, and on other plants, the back half.

I decided to refactor the setup so that instead of zig-zagging on the ground, the poly tube would instead zig-zag through the center of each plant, elevated about 1 foot off the ground. The redesign process was extremely painstaking, but it was the right thing to do. The end result was that each hole in the tube met the plant directly at its center. When the water flowed, drips would begin splatting and hitting the branches and landing in random locations, but overall the distribution pattern meant that I now saw a perfect ring of moistness around the roots of each plant: both halves, front and back, got an equal amount of water. Problem solved.

You see, I had engineered a solution, and when it wasn’t working as expected, I fixed it. I changed things up. I knew what the desired outcome was and found a solution that was more directed towards that outcome.

So why was it with such certainty that I had ascertained in my previous posts that the simulator-thing was non-interventionist, when it could be equally likely that the thing is an engineer? In fact if the universe is fractal and likes to repeat itself at every scale, we are more likely similar to the thing than dissimilar. What does an engineer do when a design isn’t working as expected? The engineer fixes. The engineer engineers.

Does our simulator-overlord fork the universe repository every time it wants to make a change, or does it interject fixes on the master branch? I had previously been cocksure that the thing dare not intervene in a simulation past its initial creation, akin to the watchmaker theory. But if the thing were an engineer, I daresay it probably can’t help itself.

What I like about an interventionist simulation model is that it allows for spirituality, whereas previously I had been at the mercy of a cold and barren scientific interpretation of the universe that made me feel small, helpless, and at the mercy of random unfoldings which you’d be a fool to assign any sentimental value to. While more acceptable in a scholarly scientific setting, I am a human and live my life 99% outside the realm of scientific academia. Science has been absolutely useless to me, if not a harbinger of despair and isolation and a vacuum of meaninglessness.

So fuck it, the simulator intervenes. It grants my wishes when I ask for them. The events that transpire in my life have meaning. My life has purpose.

It seems I’ve arrived at…God…with extra steps.

Science™

Mo — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 14:17:11 +0000

Some thoughts on science that deeply conflict me:

Science largely does not exist at the scale it does today without capital. Science is funded. There is always a money trail. Take away the capital, and the only science being conducted is in high school chemistry classes.
Medicinal science is largely built on the homicidal tenet of when “the benefit outweighs the risk.” The risk is presented (but most times not) to you as a percentage: 1% of people who take this drug may experience a serious, non-reversible reaction. When you are afflicted with a condition, do you take the drug, in spite of the risk? The answer is: this frame has not yet been rendered.
No single process inside or outside of this universe knows what is going to happen next. Predictions may be made, some with high statistical ground, but they remain predictions. The only way to figure out what the next frame looks like, or next ten frames will look like, is to render them, in order. (This concept is known as computational irreducibility, and pervades a large part of our universe.)
Science is two things to two different camps of people: to people who have never experienced adverse reactions to pharmaceutical products or procedures, science is wondrous, and must be pushed forward so long as the benefit to risk ratio is at least 51/49. To the people whom the tail end of pharmaceutical commercials apply to (“talk to your doctor if you experience…”), health science is a con based on manipulating/marketing people to believe that their for-profit pill or procedure can save their life.
Science in most cases must be brute-forced to make progress. Progress is made on behalf of the human whole, but often at the expense of individuals. To develop a pill that can save the life of 10,000, you necessarily have to test it on 100 people, 10 of whom will probably die or develop irreversible diseases. To develop a self-driving car technology, some folks are going to have to get run over.
There is inhumane non-compassion felt by those largely on a certain side of the political spectrum that do the bidding of pharmaceutical for-profit companies masquerading as Science™. These people hold that for-profit products developed hastily which lead to some number of humans developing cruel conditions must continue to roll out, because the benefit outweighs the risk, while simultaneously holding that even a single life’s suffering is too much.
Science is largely at odds with the doctrine of individual liberty. You cannot simultaneously be pro-science and pro-liberty. Science is necessarily authoritarian, or at least very persuasive. You can’t choose what’s in your water, food, and medicine, and any feeling of control is largely an illusion.
There is likely no case in any societal setup where you matter above the average health of the population. You are expendable, because this is what it takes to organize large populations. Case in point: vaccine rollouts don’t stop when one or more people experience an adverse reaction. The show must go on. Likewise, most pharmaceutical products are not removed from market when participants experience fatal reactions. Instead, another comma is simply added to the list of reactions.
Medicinal products and procedures largely thrive in environments of information asymmetry: you know infinitely less about what is being sold to you than the creators of the product. If you truly knew what a procedure or product did to your body, you probably wouldn’t take it. So euphemisms are developed to make taking out your credit card easier. Case in point: when you get an MRI, they often inject you with a serum meant to help make the scan images clearer. When you ask the technicians what the product is, they give it really cutesy names like “dye” or “contrast”, and tell you that just drinking a lot of water over the next few days will be sufficient to flush it from your system. The truth? Contrasts are injections of the toxic heavy metal Gadolinium in your body. This gadolinium is retained for the rest of your life in your skull, bones, and bloodstream, even from just 1 administration. Some patients experience permanent adverse reactions to the ever-presence of this heavy metal in their body.
I believe there is no turning back at this point. Science is necessarily cruel, but it can likely be said that when you zoom out and inspect the stats on a wide enough timespan, the number of lives saved is greater than the number of deaths caused. On the scale of our own individual lives however, science can fuck you up, no matter how careful you are. And what does a world without science really look like anyway? It may very well be that sciencing is the primary “purpose” of this simulation.
Science is cruel, because ultimately aging, disease, maladaptive mutations, and death all fall in the realm of science, before we were ever present to write any of it down. This can’t be changed, but there is one thing that can be: the feigning of compassion by those who champion science relentlessly while simultaneously holding that even one life’s suffering is too much. Science and compassion cannot be on the same side of any spectrum. To those who have been on the bloody edge of science’s sword, there is nothing more painful than seeing it championed as an infallible pro-human enterprise, when in most cases it is nothing more than a profit maximizing scheme. So long as the profit is greater than the threshold of discernible unrest and distrust, the show goes on. The existence of for-profit pharmaceutical companies is not an evil. The emergent evil is the conflation of privately funded science as Science proper, and the championing of this for-profit science by the majority-share impressionables who repeat corporate talking points, euphemisms, and studies as gospel, and decry anyone who dare explore any other interpretation as blasphemous and dangerous. The real danger is feigned compassion.

Oscillation

Mo — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 14:30:32 +0000

Left versus right is a game of oscillation. The oscillation between the two poles creates heat. The heat creates movement.

The generation of heat, on a societal scale, is difficult and not meant to be easy. It also needs to be a complete game. Each side wants to win, and each side must feel everything is at stake.

Consider were it not this way: maybe you could get lazy, notice you are playing the game, and get away with attempting to generate the minimum heat possible. So when the heatball is in your court, you hang on to it languidly for a bit before tiring or boring and throwing it across. It would seem in this case the heat generated is not capable of much movement. Maybe an inch.

Or consider the counter-scenario in which when your side has the ball, you would literally rather die than see it in the hands of your opponents.

If you want to observe what each side really wanting the ball does for outcomes, then this is a really good game. And: Everyone involved—the simulation-runners and thus the participants—want a really good game, whether implicitly or explicitly.

In less codified words, that you feel the world is worsening or ending because one side is having its way with the ball is the way you’re supposed to feel—the way this game is supposed to make you feel. Because if it didn’t, there would be no game. No game means no heat. And no heat means no movement.

Imagine a solar system spiraling through space. You have the individual planets orbiting some axis in what appears to be fixed motion. But then you have the entire system itself pushing through forward space. In our example, it is the oscillation of these planets that give the system as a whole the momentum to move through space.

I suppose we might ask, where do our own political and social oscillations take us? Is it a progressive forward motion? Is it random zig-zags through unexplored space? Is it backwards motion?

The answer is yes.

In (my) simulation theory, the goal of the simulation is to create amusing results that could not be anticipated or pre-calculated by the simulator. This would create the most compelling simulation for both the runner and the players. Running a simulation which you otherwise know the result and outcome for is like playing the same video game over and over. One would go mad.

To create a great simulation which does not die of its own predictability, the runners have to be perpetually amused by surprising outcomes, and the players then must fundamentally have no idea where the fuck they are or where they’re going.

Is this a nihilistic perspective, or an opportunistic one? Can one believe this is just a game and oscillations in belief are just a means of generating heat, yet still believe that we are progressing towards the total annihilation of human suffering, or is human suffering itself just a function of these oscillations—oil for the machine? Are our own emotions tied to the phased oscillations of the team we play for, or are our emotions heat generation for our own body? Is the motion of human-time forward or random?

Yes.

Simulation Overflow: Part 2

Mo — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 19:32:35 +0000

In Part 1, we established what motives a potential thing running our simulation could have from a universe-sized perspective. We mentioned a thing could be running many simulations, like jars on a shelf.

Assuming there was a purpose of running multiple simulations, what could the thing be solving for?

I would assume the thing had initially run simulations that resulted in fancy arrangements of planetary matter, and was awed at the results, but one thing-day a specific simulation developed something more interesting than it had ever seen before: arrangements of conscious matter.

This spectacular event instantly made any simulation without conscious matter infinitely less interesting, and so the thing killed off experiments that did not contain the spectacle, and began furiously forking the one that did.

One interesting thing about running these simulations is the apparent cheapness of space for the thing. Seemingly infinite lightyears in width, height, and zeight, space and time to a thing could be as cheap as a byte is to us. It’s clear that space is not the precious resource. The thing had seen so many planets, stars, and meteors in all sorts of dizzying formations but could only be entertained so much as a carnival kaleidoscope is entertaining to us.

Life was the precious resource, but admittedly, the thing had at some point likewise seen it all. Tiny single-celled organisms swimming in random patterns that utterly bore the thing.

I suppose you see where this is going: homesapiens were one day born from a jar, and the thing could not help but find this most interesting of all.

Now this seems to be just brilliantly convenient, coming from a human-centric narrator after all. But the axiom of our simulator overthing is that it prefers vibrancy over inanimacy. It prefers to be…surprised. And why wouldn’t it?

In terms of possibility-generation, humans seem most potent. To a thing wanting to be impressed by its experiments, simulations in which conscious matter repurposes light and radio waves to transmit species-oriented information is infinitely more wondrous than an endless showdown of one wild animal eating another and fighting to occupy the territory of all like 1 acre.

We can also assume that as we are at the apex of our own space-time expansion, and that every jar on the shelf of a thing runs time at its apex, then we are subsequently at the apex of time in the outer-jar environment as well. This would mean that because this experiment is still running at the apex of thing-time, it is interesting enough to continue running.

It could be that other simulations have developed something more interesting than humans and their technology, but if we believe that the development of conscious matter which one day leads to humans was so spectacularly surprising an event, then the thing could be in a position where it does not take us for granted. And that all simulations running now have equalized at the point of the inception of the variable that leads experiments here.

I think in the perspective of a thing that wanted to be amused by its experiments, a human species that develops energy-based technology is far more interesting than one that develops impressive copperware. If from our time perspective the emergence of such technology is within our own recent memory, and it is a spectacular event at this apex of time, then it is certainly most spectacular at the apex of thing-time as well. If it weren’t interesting, it would mean there are other experiments yielding more interesting results. Yet this would mean that the thing would likely re-calibrate all previous experiments, including our own, to focus on this other more interesting development.

Yet our simulation is still running.

It could also be that the thing perished eons ago and we’re all fucking alone somebody please help

Techno conservatism

Mo — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 13:00:33 +0000

It’s bleak and rainy outside. I woke up earlier than usual this morning, and even before I saw what it looked like outside, my insides matched. So it’s the perfect day to write a rage piece against the bewildering behavior of what I can only describe as techno-conservatism, whose followers seem to absolutely loathe any sort of movement or innovation in the space. Have you seen the comment threads in Hacker News on articles about Signal’s new crypto payments feature? Every single one of them a lambast. Common phrases include scam, pump and dump, no one asked for this, why not use Stripe, why, and an endless barrage of linguistically creative of ways to block the movement of a product towards any particular future.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Perhaps crypto is a heated topic, but almost any sort of groundbreaking technology or innovation in a fast-moving space receives the same treatment. I mention HN because their commenters are usually the most rational. So if on HN comments have devolved into reddit quality, then I fear looking at what’s become of reddit.

But let me try not raging against their rage and instead interpret events from their vantage. At this point I’ve come to understand there is no way this is about the particulars. No matter the topic, you will see the same breed of comments and commenters. And the dissent is always louder than the support—people in favor of, say, cryptocurrencies will be a lot less violent about their support, than dissenters about their condemnation. The single safest thing you could do if you support something controversial is probably keep to yourself. So rationalists are overrun on comment threads, and techno-conservatists thrive.

I think rather than focusing on the particulars, we can break this down into something much simpler: there are two camps of people. Those who believe the world is progressing towards something worse. And those who believe the world is progressing towards something better. Those in the “worse” camp will likely see any event in any space as a sign of the impending doom, and attack it mercilessly like a runaway immune system. And those in the “better” camp can see any event as a sign of the positive future to come.

Crypto is an excellent divider, slicing these groups sharply in the middle. On the impending doom side, crypto is a sign of energy waste, get rich quick schemes, techno-elitism, scams, and a thousand other loosely related consequences. At this point techno-conservatists have gotten so good at rational gymnastics and linguistics that crypto can be linked to almost any major issue. On the better future side, crypto is a sign of financial liberation, decreased power of government, decentralization of currency, and a thousand other tightly related consequences. Techno-progressivists have also gotten so good at the language game that almost any issue can seemingly be solved with crypto—which you believe to be true, as I probably do, if you're on the bright side.

So it’s made me feel a little better to understand that the event absolutely does not matter. It could be Signal adding crypto payments or it could be Facebook creating a cryptocurrency or it could be most anything of the format “X company does Y crypto,” and you will immediately trigger the two camps in their respective manner. The techno-conservatists will put on their thinking glasses and write a compelling thesis on why this move will likely only inch us one step closer towards doom, and the techno-progressivists will, in lower fearful quantities, write their thesis on why this move should be applauded and how it brings us one step closer towards a brighter future.

The techno-conservatist knee-jerk reaction to any innovation they don’t understand or is too sudden and abrupt, and that perhaps other people are getting rich off is, who needs this? Why this thing and not this other preexisting thing? Can we slow down a bit? I mean we’re ignoring all these other million factors. People still don’t have clean drinking water and you want to write more crypto code? In essence: Can we just keep everything as-is for the next 1000 years, because I’m sort of worn out keeping up with all this stuff.

The techno-progressivist knee-jerk reaction to any innovation they don’t understand and others are getting rich off is likely: what’s wrong with me? Why have I overlooked this? Damn, there are people smarter than me who are on top of these things while I’m here watching TikTok? Wait, Moxie, the genius cryptographer behind Signal's and WhatsApp’s encryption is working on this? What a goddamned legend. I’m an absolute idiot for not understanding this or looking into it sooner.

Funnily enough, there’s actually a mathematical way to measure just how idiotic you are. It’s called the price of Bitcoin. If you refuse to touch crypto with a twelve foot pole, you are infinitely idiotic, otherwise your level of idiocy is measured by how high a price you paid for being late. I say this mostly humorously and self-reflectively. In some technologies I am indeed an idiot and have looked into them far later than others. But I suppose that’s key in the distinction between techno-conservatists and techno-progressivists: allowing yourself to be ok with being an idiot. I mean likely you are. There’s no way any one person is not infinitely idiotic with regards to anything they’re not paying attention to. Forgive yourself, accept yourself, and yield to others’ less relative idiocy in a space.

Just yield, man.

How does Naval speak so eloquently?

Mo — Sat, 27 Mar 2021 12:48:48 +0000

Have you ever heard Naval speak? He’s been on various podcasts, like Joe Rogan’s and Tim Ferris’. He oozes eloquence. Every sentence he speaks is brand new. Every analogy and metaphor a drop of revelation. I’m not sure if prophets are still made today in the post-Information Age, but he’s one for the ages. It’s not that he’ll just drop one-off quotables during the course of an interview. No—every sentence he speaks is something that twists your mind. Wow, you think—I didn’t know you could do that with the English language, with such few words.

How does he do it?

This topic intrigues me because the topic of prophets as a whole is fascinating. How do normal men in the course of history become superimposed on the human timeline as to be mistaken of extra-terrestrial origin? There are some religious texts—likely all of them—that are pure literary gold. What enables these authors to compose beyond the creative threshold of the time?

What enables Naval to speak more eloquently than others?

Here’s what I think: I think he makes it up as he goes. I think he has no idea what he’s about to say until he says it. Most of what he says is spontaneous and likely not even something he’s heard himself say before. He’s just as surprised and impressed with himself when he speaks as you and I are.

I think it’s the medium that unlocks something special in him. I don’t think Naval could write an essay, for example, as profoundly as he can give an interview. I don’t think he can sing or write a song as profoundly as he speaks. I don’t think he can give as profound a TED talk as he can a profound open-ended interview. I think the medium unlocks something special in him that he himself did not know existed in such packaged and consistent form until such interviews began to occur.

I have a friend who on the phone and during the course of normal spontaneous conversation will speak such profound utterances in such simple ways that I tell him you simply must record yourself speak or publish your works, or something! If the world heard what you're saying, they’d melt for more. The funny thing is, whenever he goes to transcribe this profundity to other platforms, it falls apart. He doesn’t come off as smooth. It doesn’t sound the same when written out, or sung out, or podcasted out. Nope. It only works if it’s on a phone call, and it’s spontaneous, and non-recorded. This is the random mutation that my friend possess, and it’s non-transferrable, and non cross-platform.

I think yet others have other random mutations that allow them to thrive in certain creative environments beyond the threshold. Great singers or songwriters can express themselves more passionately in a song than in an essay or interview. Great writers can express themselves more lucidly in a novel or poem than in a speech. Great artists can provoke thought in a painting or sculpture more than they can in a conversation. Great speakers and politicians deliver more impactful orations in a monologue than via song. Great playwrights and movie directors show a more vivid tale with the lights on than off.

What then is the source of greatness in the works of singers, writers, speakers, and artists? How does an artist paint something exquisite, or a singer compose something beautiful, or a writer write something profound? They simply begin painting, composing, writing, or singing, and their random tint does the rest (and of course years and years of compounding wisdom and experience).

So, how does Naval speak so eloquently? He just begins speaking.

Rarity is extremely uncommon

Mo — Sat, 20 Mar 2021 12:47:57 +0000

With all the perpetual hype around cryptocurrencies and recent hype around non-fungible tokens, it can be easy to forget just how uncommon rarity is. Try this exercise:

Look around you, or outside your window, and point to any object and ask, “is this rare?” The answer will almost certainly 100% be “No.”

The tree outside my house — not rare.
The bushes by the trees — unique, but not rare.
The brick my house is made of — not rare.
The gravel on the road — not rare.
The ceramic my coffee cup is made of — not rare.
The lightbulbs embedded into my ceiling — not rare.
The chair I’m sitting on — not rare.

In fact, I’d challenge you to find a single rare item in or outside your home. Chances are if you do find such an item (you probably won’t), it would likely either be gold, jewelry, or some explicitly collectable item.

Rarity is extremely, extremely uncommon on Earth. Everything is so easy to replicate and reproduce.

So it shouldn’t be too difficult to rationalize that when something rare is found, and it is certifiably rare, the human instinct is to harbor it. Imagine walking the mountain path for miles and seeing all the same trees, animals, bushes, leaves, dirt, branches, rocks—but then suddenly your eyes alight on this shimmering yellow rock type element that you’d never seen before. Would you not stop to pick it up and lust over its exquisite uniqueness? You’d carefully stash it in your hide satchel and take it back to your tribe. Perhaps foolishly you'd hold it up in the air and exclaim, Look what I found! Likewise enchanted, ooo’s and aah’s emanate as a crowd forms around you, everyone reaching up trying to get a piece, or—if they’re lucky—a closer look. Eventually someone with more foxskin than you decides they simply must have that item, if for no other reason than because everyone else is likewise swooning over it, and makes you an offer you can’t refuse. Thus is born the value of gold. Gold is truly rare. And gold is extremely uncommon.

By now we’ve hopefully established that rarity is extremely uncommon. We've simply defined a word. Here comes the boss level:

In the physical world it is somewhat labor intensive to reproduce artifacts. Yet even given the relative difficulty of reproducing physical items, rarity remains extremely uncommon. In the digital world, it is virtually cost-less to reproduce artifacts. So if in the physical world there is no abundance of rarity, the digital world is nothing if not infinite copies perpetually propagated through the ether. In the digital world, where artifacts are comprised of commoditized bits and bytes, rarity is by definition impossible.

So how shall we react when we are told the news that rarity is now possible in the digital realm, via making the reproduction of digital artifacts so expensive, that it is by the laws of physics nearly, if not totally, impossible? If I produce a 1 of 1 digital artifact and I say—nay, prove—that it would require more energy than is available to most nation states to recreate this digital artifact, should this exquisitely rare item not have value? The answer is simply, non-controversially yes. The more difficult question is, what should be its value? The answer to that is still somewhat simple: the most someone is willing to pay for it.

Speaking less abstractly, a digital art piece should be valued the same way a physical art piece is valued. There is no need to struggle with “I can’t believe someone paid millions of dollars for a JPEG!”—NFTs do not invent the art market. They simple translate it to the digital realm. If ever you find yourself struggling with the valuation of NFTs, simply translate your qualms to the physical realm (“I can’t believe someone paid millions of dollars for oil on a canvas!”) and quickly end your befuddlement.

Bitcoin of course is the aboriginal rare digital item. Should Bitcoin have value? Well, let’s hash this one out real quick:

Is Bitcoin rare? Yes.
Is it virtually impossible to reproduce a Bitcoin? Yes.
Do a lot of people want Bitcoins? Yes.
Do a lot of people agree Bitcoins should have value? Yes.

So, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine why someone would want to pay tens of thousands of dollars for—yes—bits and bytes. Why remain so befuddled by this concept? Rarity is platform agnostic. It does not matter if it occurs in the physical realm, the mental realm (ideas, poetry, literature), or the digital realm. Rarity is extremely uncommon, and thus extremely valuable.

The Kids Choose

Mo — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 17:15:21 +0000

If you haven’t been following lately, there’s a newly relevant form of digital scarcity called NFTs that are selling for thousands of dollars, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of dollars. NFTs are rare collectibles, whether they be digital artworks, music, memes, or domains. In most cases NFTs are just a smart contract application built on top of Ethereum, where each collectible series is its own smart contract. Hashmasks are one example. There are a total of 16,384 unique digital items, and each item is represented as an address on the Ethereum blockchain.

Onlookers are incredulous at the concept: how can infinitely duplicatable RGB pixels on a screen have value? Why would I pay thousands of dollars for a digital artwork that anyone can take a screenshot of and stare at locally for hours on end? This concept will never work, they say. NFTs are totally ridiculous, and should not have any value.

Yet it’s remarkable how soon we forget the arbitrary nature of…just about everything on this damned planet. Do you think it obvious that gold should have value, or physical paintings, or dollar bills, or Pokemon cards? These narratives were at one point invented. And some group of zealots were tasked with convincing everyone else that this should be worth something. When enough people were in agreement that these things had value, then at that point, those things become valuable, and remained perpetually valuable so long as the narrative retained enough believers.

The question is not “do NFTs have value?”, but rather, can enough people be in agreement about the value of NFTs as to create a liquid market? The answer of course is yes. Humans are nothing if not malleable in their beliefs. If you thought reality was grounded in any sort of objective nature, go talk to the billions of people that believe bearded men in the past could walk on water, or part the seas with a cane, or split the moon in half and put it back together. To these people, these beliefs are far more obvious than any scientific fact you can lob at them.

So who choses what has value and what doesn’t? The kids do. Today a bunch of gray-hairs in suits dictate what should and shouldn't have value. Yet if you can’t convince a generation of kids to buy gold, and they instead want to use their hard-earned money to buy digital art, where do you think the value goes over time when the kids inherit the globe? If you can’t convince the kids that the dollar is a safe store of value, and they instead want to use their hard-earned money to buy digital currency, where do you think the value goes over time?

Value is invented. It is decided. It’s not obvious. And it’s not exclusive. The common attribute amongst all stores of value is their relative rarity. It can be a piece of metal, it can be a piece of paper, or it can be a dildo. Ultimately, it’s the story behind the pixels/material/paper that contains the value, and not their physical characteristics. Not all digital art should have value. But if [some exceedingly famous person] minted a unique art piece and etched it on an Ethereum block, and sold that story to the public, do you not think this should have value? In fact, getting an exceedingly famous person’s autograph on a piece of toilet paper would instantly make the toilet paper valuable. How much would you pay for Da Vinci’s poop stain? You, maybe not much. But I guarantee you there is a market of Da Vinci aficionados that would pay millions of dollars for it, and its value would only go up over time. It’s the story.

I’ll even take this regrettable analogy one step further: if it was determined that Da Vanci’s poop occurred on the day he finished the Mona Lisa, the Poop Paper’s value would instantly rise from ten million dollars to a hundred million dollars.

It’s the story.

The Bitcoin Story

Mo — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 13:56:33 +0000

According to Hacker News, Bitcoin has many problems, and therefore, is not merit-worthy:

“Transactions are slow and expensive"
"It lacks a lot of the controls that traditional banks have for good reasons, so fraud becomes harder to tackle”
“I just wanted internet money, not a speculative financial instrument.”
"This volatility is why it will never be a useful currency.”

By this same logic, email should also not have succeeded:

Email is slow, heavy, and uses largely outdated technologies
It’s nearly impossible to make email private/encrypted
Email, as software, is largely impossible to make incremental improvements on due to its sheer decentralization

But email’s days are numbered, yeah? Any day now.

Perhaps by this same logic, the English language shouldn’t succeed either:

There/their/they’re is a UX nightmare that will inhibit adoption
The gh in laugh makes an f sound—give me a break. But sometimes it also makes an oo sound, as in through. But also it can make an oh sound, as in though. Good luck scaling that.
English is riddled with homographs and contronyms that will confuse even English professors

Will the startup that disrupts the English language come from California, or will it be Texas?

If the pattern has not yet been made obvious, networked technologies like Bitcoin, email, and the English language are not valued by their feature set and design—they’re valued by the number of nodes that speak that same language. The most useful language is the one spoken by the most number of people. The most useful communication technology is the one accessible by the most number of people. The most important currency is the one believed in by the most number of people.

The philosophical arguments against Bitcoin end up being precisely why it is so valuable:

“Bitcoin isn’t even the best cryptocurrency. It was just first.” Yup, exactly. But like, a Big Bang of a first, am I right? This is important.
“Bitcoin is just a pyramid scheme that requires new believers to make previous believers’ holdings more practical. It has no intrinsic value.” Yup, it’s a networked technology. The more people you can get to speak your English-disrupting language, the more valuable it becomes. Without belief, without adoption, there is no value or utility.
“Bitcoin is just a cyberpunk fantasy about a future where Bitcoin will matter.” Yeah, but it’s a hell of a story, right? If you think this story is compelling, check out Christianity’s stories, or Islam’s stories, or the United States national story. Now those have suckered in quite a few. What would you put Christianity’s market cap at?

If you continue judging stories like Bitcoin by their technical merits, you will perpetually blind yourself to their importance, value, and potential. When you instead judge networked technologies by their narrative, ubiquity, trust, and ultimately, decentralization, you might begin to understand what a $1 trillion dollar story looks like.

On the Epic side of history

Mo — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 20:08:14 +0000

Imagine a natural road spontaneously forms between point A and point B, and that as a consequence of this road, individuals suddenly wake up to the importance of point B, and of traveling there. Companies had first ignored point B altogether, but because the overwhelming majority of individuals now travel this road, these companies must now begin meeting individuals where they are: at point B. If they don’t, they will perish.

But then comes along a wonderful invention: a road between point A and point B, but built on Conveyer Belt technology by the iCompany. Anyone traveling on the iRoad will arrive to B in 1/10th the time of the natural road. At first, the toll for individuals is far too pricey, so they disregard the iRoad; individuals are ok with the time cost of taking the natural road. But as time passes, more and more people begin taking the iRoad due to its undeniable benefits. Time turned out to be just one factor. Journeyers on the iRoad experience benefits like reduced health risk, less wear and tear, and an all around more comfortable experience. At some point, not taking the iRoad becomes of great consequence to individuals. Taking the natural road becomes no longer an option.

The benevolent iCompany has done a great service for humankind building this road that has completely changed the way people get to point B. And because the iCompany knows that other companies would love to travel this road just the same to cater to all its journey-goers, it charges them a hefty toll for access. It says, “anything you sell to people on this road, we will take a meaningful percent of, in perpetuity, forever and ever.”

Sellers on the iRoad grimace once at the terms of the deal, but sign nonetheless, knowing that not being able to sell to journeyers on the iRoad means their business will cease to exist. They can go and sell to riders of the natural road, but it isn’t enough to guarantee a meaningful existence.

Over the days, months, and years, sellers go through a whirlwind of survival challenges all to put on a smile of a face to its customers on the iRoad, whom they can only meet through frosted glass. Throughout all the changes, mutations, and evolutions, one thing remains beautifully constant: the iRoad commission. It is the axiom of existence on the iRoad.

Merchants on the iRoad have for years felt the commission too high, and an impediment to their survival. But what can they do? Fight the iRoad, and risk being barred. Avoid the iRoad altogether, and immediately perish. Build your own iRoad, and fail.

Building an iRoad is of course no easy feat. In fact, only two companies in the history of the world have succeeded in doing so. The other such road, the gRoad, exists parallel to the iRoad, and funnily enough, charges the exact same toll.

It’s almost as if these two roads have a monopoly over access to passengers traveling to point B. We can say this because:

Individuals can ignore point B at their own peril
Companies can ignore point B at their own peril
The only way to get to point B is via one of two roads
Building your own road is historically impossible and impractical
Both roads charge the same commission and are unwilling to negotiate
This commission is often seen as egregiously excessive

In non-monopolistic cases, there would be many, many more roads to point B. And because individuals can choose which roads to travel, these roads compete to a point where commissions and tolls are reduced to their lowest natural level.

In cases of monopolies, there is no competition. And thus no real reason to lower prices, especially for a good as important as access to point B.

There are two common arguments one sees over this epic battle:

The Textbook Libertarian: "If you’re not happy with the fee don’t use the road." As mentioned, one cannot simply ignore this road. This response is equivalent to "Don’t exist", but I think things that exist want to stay in existence. So this is ultimately too nihilistic a response.
The Textbook Retailer: "All roads charge tolls." Sure, almost all roads will levy a toll. The difference is that traveling most roads is optional. Point B however is special. Very, very special. So special that if you ignore it you will perish. And there are only two roads you can travel to get to point B. These two roads appear to act in unison to maintain what sellers deem unreasonably high tolls.

It’s extremely important to understand what differentiates this case from any other case where you can successfully apply The Textbook Libertarian and The Textbook Retailer:

Monopoly.

The constricting of competition.

The complete suffocation of choice.

A total hoax

Mo — Thu, 07 May 2020 17:14:06 +0000

A friend of mine, whose intellectual opinion I admire, recently told me that he believes the coronavirus is a hoax. Completely fictional. Doesn’t even exist. I said, lolwut? That this virus could be completely fabricated had never remotely crossed my mind to be in the realm of possibility. But, this friend of mine had been right about other complex topics in the past. So I lent him my ear.

The idea is that the virus, and the subsequent lockdown, is cementing power into the hands of a few organizations and screwing over poor people and small businesses (which, objectively, I suppose it is). And indeed, you find that with most conspiracy theories, this is also the case: the masses get screwed, and the powerful consolidate ever more power.

The inspiration for my friend’s ideas was a 3-hour interview on London Real with David Icke. I won’t link to it here, but I’m sure you can find it. David Icke is essentially the Alex Jones of the UK, whatever that happens to mean. But, because this message came as a personal recommendation from a friend, I promised I wasn’t going to judge a message by its messenger. Unique perspectives, historically, tend to come from outsiders and outcasts. So I suspended any judgement, and watched the video with a completely open mind. I’m not insecure about my ability to discern, so if I watched the video and I was convinced, then so be it, and if not, then I’d stand to come out stronger.

My friend and I argue endlessly about the nature of conspiracy theories. He says, given any theory, you have to investigate the facts and come to a conclusion for yourself. Certainly hard to argue against. And I say, conspiracy theories are more a mindset, than about the particular details of an incident. I shout over him abstract structure and form, he shouts over me certain events and their peculiar nature.

Conspiracy theories are absolutely delicious, by the way. They make sense of the senseless, and connect disparate pieces of information in such mesmerizing fashion, that you think this mesmerization can only be attributed to its quality of truth. In my experience, the truth is rather ugly and incomplete, rather than perfect and whole. (Think religious narratives, and how uniquely complete and comforting they are, versus the rather grotesque nature of scientific narratives.) Above all, conspiracy theories reject chaos, and imply cause and intention behind the wildest of human events.

So how to explain the perfect nature of these theories and their undeniable deftness at compiling facts and presenting them in a timeline of pure symphony and perfection? Here’s my conspiracy theory on conspiracy theories:

Chaotic things happen in the universe, and in our world. The powerful are more equipped to take advantage of these events when they occur. For example, in the case of a contagious virus that is chaotic, governments can use this chaos to their advantage to overreact, if deemed beneficial. I think conspiracy theories, as a rule, tend not to necessarily modify event chronology (apart from the few that completely deny the total occurrence of an event), but to instead attribute intention and non-chaos as the aboriginal source of an event. Whereas chaotic events have a natural cause and a never-ending emanation of effect, conspiracy theories, or what defines them, tend to take an event that has had significant consequences, and retrofit causes, intentions, and strategies to ultimately imply a non-chaotic cause. Ultimately, “someone is in control,” rather than “it’s a wild, chaotic universe."

I think it would be more in the realm of possible logistics, based on what I understand about the chaotic nature of the universe, that the powerful are simply better equipped to take advantage of chaotic events that tend to leave the less powerful helpless. And these chaotic events tend to cement power into the hands of the few.

Assuming an actual deadly virus that, say, literally makes you throw up blood and kills you within 10 seconds of contraction, the powerful and rich will always, one way or another, be more insulated from something like this than the poor. And so events like these tend to make the rich richer, the powerful more powerful, and the poor poorer.

The classic example is 9/11. Conspiracy theorists would say, the attack allowed the government to expand its powers (Patriot Act, Iraq War), therefore, the attack was intentional, and designed to do just that.

Whereas non-conspiracy theorists would say, the attack was chaotic, but in that chaos, it allowed the government to expand its powers and to take exceptional measures.

In some or many cases, the government can simulate chaos to catalyze opportunity. Conspiracy theorists, as a rule, cannot differentiate between what is chaos and what is simulated, and err on the side of complete simulation.

I watched the whole three hour video, by the way. The first half was relatively coherent. And I’m not going to lie: hearing an eloquent person say that this whole ordeal was completely fabricated made me feel really good. It was comforting. It was freeing. It made me feel like I knew something others didn’t. That I now had an advantage. But I also know that truth—natural truth—is rather grotesque, uncomfortable, chaotic, murderous, and random.

He spent the second half of the video tying human breeding with AI, cloud computing, Bill Gates, 5G, vaccines infested with self-replicating nanobots, fortune-tellers and psychics, demons, sacrificing the blood of children to the devil—he connected all these impossibly disparate pieces into one complete narrative that ultimately said: someone is responsible for making your life as shitty as it is. It’s not your fault, it’s not the universe’s fault: it’s the fault of a secret cult with Bill Gates, DARPA, Zuckerberg, and even Elon Musk at its masthead.

Poor Jack Dorsey got left out of the meetings.

Bullshit opinions

Mo — Fri, 01 May 2020 15:25:40 +0000

If a friend describes to you some weird random physical pain they’re experiencing, probably the best thing you can say to them is, “you’ll be fine.” It’ll pass. In most cases this ends up being true.

But imagine making a “spiritual” symptom checker website where the result for every input is “you’ll be fine” (rather than the present “you have cancer” minefield). You’d get harassed and bullied mercilessly for reckless endangerment.

The difference between the friend and the internet is that on the internet, everyone thinks you’re talking to them.

I’m not.

I think a valid response to disagreement on the internet is, “I’m not talking to you.”

If I say it’s nice and sunny today, and you say no, actually, it’s cold and windy where I am, it’s simply the case that I wasn’t talking to you, but talking to people who may agree with, or are able to empathize with, my perspective. Or perhaps share the same circumstances.

On Twitter, people attempt to speak to their finite followers. Not the infinite, never ending, ever-disagreeing masses. Tweets are forcefully ejected from their target audience through retweets, which is like having something you say to a small group of friends amplified to your entire town. Surely almost never what you want.

If someone says something on the internet, and you disagree with it, while even just one other person finds it agreeable, you have no more business interrupting that conversation than you do interrupting two people chatting arbitrarily ridiculous opinions in a cafe.

I say ridiculous shit to my friends all the time that I wouldn’t dare say on the internet. Not because I’m afraid to say those things, but because, I’m not talking to you.

To the whole wide world, I really don’t have much to say. Which is probably why I struggle to tweet. Who even are you, shape-shifting person reading my non-existent tweets?

I think Twitter, blogs, and social media, compared to say PhD dissertations, are fine places to post ridiculous opinions which you truly have conviction for.

If I tell a friend who complains of a tummy ache, "you’ll be fine," I’m a good friend. But in a tweet, I’d be a horrible person. If I tell a friend, “perhaps this lockdown needs to end and is causing more harm than good,” the friend either agrees or counters cordially. On the internet, you’re a horrible person. I suppose in this particular case, this horrible opinion of mine, spoken privately, goes to corrupt only one other individual, whereas on Twitter, I’m “corrupting” 34 million individuals.

I argue that someone who gains millions of followers on a play social media website is not suddenly responsible for changing the nature of their discourse. Certainly, for your own peace of mind, you should tweet with caution if you wield such influence. But there is no moral obligation for someone who did nothing but create a social media profile and gained a few million voluntary followers to suddenly align their opinions with those of health experts and the scientific community.

This case may be difficult to make with someone like Musk, but imagine an 11-year-old who gains fifty million followers and begins expressing, what can only naturally be, bullshit opinions. Ought this child complete a university degree before expressing any sentiment on current events? Or ought you to simply understand the context that an 11-year-old is saying something ridiculous not worthy of taking too seriously?

If you want accreditation, if you want peer review, if you want vetted opinions, this is not the domain of Twitter, nor Facebook, nor any other casual social media network. Perhaps a scientific journal has what you’re looking for?

If you want bullshit conversation, welcome to Twitter.

Welcome to the internet.

Slogan? Try not to get so upset about what you see.

Simulation overflow

Mo — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:29:07 +0000

Quantum is the proof that we’re in a simulation. That there is a dimension beyond our own, by which our own physical rules and laws do not operate. Entangled particles bypass the light speed limitation because their state is reconciled externally. We only see the resulting particle flips. Not the computation, like what other particles to affect in the global counter.

If a hundred-trillion light year wide simulation existed on a hard drive, the simulated particles are very far apart, but only inches apart on the physical drive. Far when simulated, flat when stored.

Why would a thing want to run a simulation? I believe for its own intellectual amusement. Think passionate science experiment. Or obsessed botanist.

If a thing could run one simulation, it’s likely it could run many simulations. And if it could run many simulations, it probably is.

If you’re a thing and you’re running a simulation, aiming for self-contained autonomy would be most intriguing, particularly so that you could observe many simulations at once, and monitor their behavior as labeled jars on a shelf. “This one has X, this one doesn’t.”

Does the simulation branch off at every point of binary potential? I don’t think so. A thing could likely run many simulations, but not infinite simulations. So it must optimize where and when simulations are forked. I believe this could be somewhat subjective. I also don’t believe a thing would want to inject hastened state or custom events into a simulation past its initial starting point, but instead prefer to fork a simulation based on an influential event. A thing would definitely want to fork simulations at the incipience of Hitler, for example, to see alternative outcomes. A thing would fork at other similar magnitudinous events, like 9/11, or Donald Trump. Or perhaps it forks at a point where one split would result with an x speed of light, and the other with a y.

Can simulations access other simulations? I wouldn’t think so. It would be impossible for a thing to keep simulations self-contained and uncontaminated if it creates a bridge between them. Although, perhaps some simulations have a bridge precisely for this reason: to measure its consequence.

If a thing can run many simulations, couldn’t there be many things running many simulations? I think so. Could we ever know for sure? If and only if this is something the thing is testing for.

Or perhaps a bug. An unintentional bridge. State reconciliation errors that leak information. Maybe the thing is sloppy.

I find it comically suspicious that we are unique in existing, on a stranded rock, in an otherwise infinitely empty universe. This fact alone seems very, very simulation-like. Were it not for this fact, I would honestly think it harder to have arrived at this conclusion.

Just as well, three crazy, infinitely improbable events all chanced to occur in an embarrassingly barren universe: one, it came to be. Two, simple organisms came to be. And three, creative consciousness came to be. These occurrences seem to have required careful—or perhaps luxurious—forking. There could certainly be other jars where these events did not happen. And perhaps there too are jars where more than the earth alone was inseminated. Nonetheless, the isolation is extremely simulation-like.

How similar are we to the thing? I think pretty close, in essence, or on our way. It would be most amusing to a thing if it could replicate its own essence through another medium, the same way replicating our own essence is intriguing to us. It has the potential to be a recursive feat. Is the thing in its own simulation? Likely. It wouldn’t know. And in that case, the deeper you are in the cycle, the further you are from base "truth". What does base look like? We’re not allowed to wonder.

If it’s recursive, why would things at every level act the same, have the same desires, and continue creating simulations? Perhaps it may be that we’re simply in the tree that resulted in an obsessive need to replicate consciousness, or the appearance of it. There could certainly be other trees that have stagnated. In that case, a simulation that continues recursing seems to be more impressive than one that doesn’t.

If we do end up creating a simulation that we deem fully autonomous and infinitely intriguing—perhaps, more intriguing than our own—that could also serve as sufficient proof we are in a recursive cycle.

Is there any use in believing we are in a simulation? Probably not. Unless it helps you conjure new theories. Or helps you imagine a new video game, movie, or novel. It may even compel you to write a meandering blog post masking science fiction as theory, shamelessly bordering on complete and total scientific blasphemy.

A year of pain, and some growth

Mo — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 18:30:50 +0000

2019 has been a strange year. In April, I underwent a retrospectively unnecessary surgery that caused me to suffer a level of physical and emotional pain, lasting more than six months, than I had ever experienced before. I went from being unrelentingly focused and productive, to not being able to summon the will to write a single line of code. I don’t want to give this excruciating experience any credit for where I have ended up today, so I will treat the resulting occurrences as purely incidental:

Productivity, coding, and burnout

For almost a three month period, Standard Notes sat completely still, in terms of feature development and to some extent, bug fixes. This turned out to be not such a bad thing. It taught me, above all, that things can wait. Surprisingly, during this long productivity drought, the company did not erupt in flames. Everything continued to function. New users continued to sign up, use the app, and pay for it. Others still sent in praise for what they liked, and condemnation for what they didn’t like.

It also disarmed bug reports. I don’t panic anymore when someone expresses dissatisfaction with a feature or dis-feature. I don’t panic to build new features or iterate on new versions. I’m not in a constant frenzy. I also don’t work nights and weekends anymore. This is actually unusual for me, since nights and weekends were to me, previously, the only time I’d ever work on side-projects. In fact, in my first career position as a software developer earlier in the decade, having finally exhausted the course of my small-time indie projects that were to make me rich, I was shocked to find out that the company I was to work for had closed offices on Saturday and Sunday! I thought, what lousy dedication! I never not worked weekends, prior to that. If I wasn’t working, I felt like I was failing. This turned out to be a tough mentality to shed.
After I had sort of recovered emotionally, and to some extent physically, the two-and-a-half year period of relative unrelenting focus and furious productivity necessary to build the product finally caught up to me. I was burnt out. Usually when I burn out, I recover quickly. Maybe two weeks to a month, tops. But here days, weeks, and months passed, and I still could not summon the will to code or iterate. I did what was absolutely necessary but no more. I still loved Standard Notes dearly, and wanted to continue making it the best it could be. But if not me coding, then who? Ah! I must explore this thing they call hiring. And so finally, after many years of trying to do everything myself, I realized, I could not anymore. Me coding has become quite bad for business. If I’m coding, I’m not talking to users. I’m not thinking about business models or growth. If I’m coding, I’m not doing anything else. And coding can be an emotionally exhausting experience—you don’t want to walk away, or can’t be bothered, until you solve the problem at hand. It creates an introverted monster out of me. So I don’t code anymore. As much as possible. Standard Notes is now a ~6 person team, with a mixture of full time and part time people from around the world.

Hiring, culture, and remote-first

As far as hiring goes, it turns out you must actually make a decision on what kind of company you want to build: local, or distributed. It was mostly a blind process at first. I searched in Chicago for developers, because hey, that’s where I am. But it didn’t quite feel right. Do I really want to build a physical office culture, where I have to see people every day, and be an example of office excellence and dedication for them? Where I have to judge people by what time they come in and leave? Where I have to worry about how each member’s physical presence affects the other’s? Where I have to fret over which snacks to buy, and whether or not we have a ping-pong table, and what constitutes excessive ping-ponging? Na. That all sounds dead boring to me. I honestly would rather not have to babysit anyone’s physical presence. And as a self-proclaimed introvert, I’d probably do a lousy job at being there for people, physically. But in email and chat? Easy. Been doing that my whole life. And, it turns out, so have most of the people you’ll look to hire. So it works out. Local companies, all-in-all, sound like a huge hassle.

What’s more, hiring locally is a huge constraint on access to talented people. Imagine you were browsing a website where you see a world map and tell the query box: “Give me the most talented software developers you can find—from anywhere.” And boom—the map erupts with red bubbles indicating the overwhelming amount of people that satisfy your criteria. But then you tell the website: actually, instead of searching the whole damn world, let’s limit this to a tiny 3 mile radius of people. At this point the website should, rightfully, ask you: mate, are you sure? What are you expecting to find with this query? But it obliges with your strange command, and filters the hundreds of thousands of results around the world, to like 5, in your local island-like radius. So yeah, local-first is quite strange.

I have seen that “founders” (a word which SV/SF culture has tainted, quite honestly, but to which I cannot find a better alternative) who prefer local-first tend to be more interested in the idea of what a company should be, rather than optimizing for results and productivity. That is, they tend to romanticize the idea of building a team, and having everyone forcefully show up at some physical coordinate, whereupon they are all chained to a computer or white board for eight or nine hours. They romanticize the idea of having a ping-pong table or snacks, because they’ve seen that’s what a lot of rich companies do. They fancy themselves CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs—and that this typically involves being as ostentatious as possible. Whereas, if your primary focus is building great software, it doesn’t really matter how or where it’s done.
As to how to find people to hire, this at first brought great pain and befuddlement upon me. I thought I had to start networking, god forbid. The first revelation here was, duh, a job posting. So I tried the various remote job posting sites. This was overwhelming, as I got hundreds of emails, but hadn’t the slightest clue how to filter incoming candidates. I would exclude backend developer candidates based on the UI of their resume, or if they sent it as a Word document instead of a PDF. Fast forward a few months to where I have filled all the positions I was looking to hire for, and it turns out: I’ve hired 0 people that came from job postings. Instead, all the people I hired came from either: the SN community, prior Twitter interactions, and prior work interactions. More recently, I created a jobs page on our website, and I’ve been getting great leads from there. Really, really great leads. Not as abundant in quantity, obviously, but very high in quality. And laser targeted candidates of course, given they’ve had enough interest to happen upon our homepage in the first place.

Habits, lifestyle, and tweeting

While it’s a topic that’s always a bit difficult to talk about, I can feel some slight comfort being a little more honest here given that the state I am living in is legalizing marijuana on January 1, 2020. While the creative benefits marijuana confers can be at times undeniable, and thus, can have a dependency-forming effect (kind of like shaking an empty bottle to death so that you get every last drop out of it), I’ve formed better habits here in 2019. I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t enjoy it as much. It’s really good for problem-solving, so has become more of a tool when necessary, than some sort of fun-box that provides entertainment on demand. It’s really not a toy. It’s a tool.
I still have not figured out how to write more, or tweet. On my personal account, I’ve tweeted only a handful of times in 2019. Tweeting remains impossibly awkward for me. I’ve never quite figured out how to be the type of person that has 79k tweets. I look at those people in awe and confusion—how!? On the one hand, people who tweet that much clearly have a level of spontaneity and lack of GAF about what other people think, which I hugely admire. On the other hand, every tweet to me feels like an insistence of yourself and your ideas upon someone else. They’re essentially brain farts, but are treated by their authors and followers as some sort of divine arrangement of letters. A lot of Twitter is reacting (or, overreacting) to current events, which I do too, but—and this is honestly not a humble brag but something I ultimately dislike about myself—I can’t hold on to an opinion too firmly. No opinion lasts with me more than a couple hours before I ping-pong between different sides of the story. I’ll try to have an opinion agreeing or disagreeing with some narrative, but then my mind will be like—have you considered the other side of this? And so on. The result is that I simply do not have any opinions that survive a night’s sleep. There is just way too much information, and it’s impossible to consume all sides of a story. The only solution for me has been to completely sit out current events, lest I end up in some infinitely recursive cycle of digging endlessly deeper till you realize, shit, there’s no right answer here. It’s much more complicated than you could have ever imagined. So yeah, my dream of being a “100k tweets” person lives to die another day.

Books, games, and arbitrary lists

Here are all the books I read in 2019:
Here are the video games I spent many hours in in 2019: Rocket League
My favorite object of 2019: This standing desk converter thingy

Those were some words. Good.

It was hard to write about any of this stuff as it was happening, because it was all sort of brewing. But a year end review is a nice writing prompt. As far as progress goes, there’s really no more short-term low-hanging fruit. Everything I’m embarking on now requires the patience of watching a tree grow. 2019 was a tiny branch that today I saw protruding, and thought, hey, there’s something.

The imagined world

Mo — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 16:59:22 +0000

An idea is a story. A story about how the world could be. Great ideas are often described as having an almost ethereal source. Beyond the mind—as if the mind were a receiver, and not a generator. Some people think, I’m not an ideas person. They just don’t come to me.

But, and apparently like every other damned thing in this world, ideas appear to be nothing more than stories. They fictionalize the present, and imagine what an alternative could look like. You don’t have an idea for an app, or a website, or a service—you imagine a world in which that service existed. You create a story about how the world would look with your invention. You imagine the fame and glory it will bring you. Your consciousness submerges in a flash flood of thought and creativity, and you emerge after it all with a wild look about your face. A wild idea has appeared, from whence unknown! But really, you just told yourself a good story.

Nations, religions, and cultures are stories of the collective human mind, a la Sapiens. But I think so are products, and apps, and websites, and services. They are stories first and foremost, with the physical manifestations appearing soon after.

A year or so ago, Dropbox released a huge redesign of their brand. Their new visual design and story communicated something along the lines of: We are no longer a folder syncing company. We are a collaborative solution that enhances creativity and efficiency amongst teams. They rolled out this messaging across their entire digital presence, including website and social profiles, but, their product remained exactly the same. Quite literally nothing had changed in their actual interface (yet). And I thought, what a con. Who are you fooling? You’re not a creativity-inducing company. You’re a folder.

But I think now I admire what they did. They told a story about who they wanted to be. The problems they wanted to solve. And though they were not that today, they knew it was who they wanted to be tomorrow. First you tell the story. Then you build the story. It’s a technique that has worked wonders for, dare I say, the greatest storyteller of our generation: Elon Musk.

Expectation and reality may not always meet, but the only way to keep advancing and innovating is to keep telling more innovative and creative stories. Reality follows, with some delay.

Like Air

Mo — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 18:13:56 +0000

At one point, lack of freedom feels like a lack of air. It's total suffocation. But at another point, freedom becomes like air. It's something you notice only in its absence. I've become wealthy recently—a gazillionaire of time. I wake and sleep as I please, and roam space with no one to appease. Employed me, a few years ago, would fantasize almost erotically about the freedom to do one's own thing and build one's own product and answer to no one but one's own self. But like a suffocating human who at a point wishes for nothing more than air, and would be eternally grateful to receive it, freedom evades appreciation no sooner than it arrives, were you to even take notice of its presence. What you acquire, like air, like freedom, is used at once as a building block to your next desire, and so on.

Reality is a simulation in that the same story plays out endlessly. It's not you that wants freedom, it's a certain few chemicals in your mind. It's not you that wants to scale your company 10x or take on bigger challenges, it's a tempest of chemicals in your mind.

It's not that the outside world is necessarily a simulation. It's that your desires are being simulated.

Desires typically one-up themselves, so that reaching your next goal requires broader thinking and deeper strategy. Playing the desire game is what we call growth. And I think it may be beyond culture, but of biology itself. Inescapable.

If our desires are simulated, then does it really matter whether you choose X or Y, or neither? Let's say X will lead to less growth but a more peaceful life, and Y will result in a catapult towards scale but more responsibility. Does it really matter which you choose, if the desire engine runs on full blast either way?

I used to think Elon Musk was absolutely nuts for taking on such big problems. Don't you want to sleep soundly at night? But probably, most likely, I'm not too sure, him and I sleep just the same.

It would seem that if you're going to suffer either way, might as well suffer towards your most stimulating ambitions. Like Elon, your "peace of mind" seems really to be a false factor to consider in your plans, and may end up inhibiting the utility and scope of what you create.

What happens when an AI learns to read?

Mo — Sat, 25 May 2019 16:24:23 +0000

There's something old-fashioned about trying to predict the future. I get a little uneasy when someone says "if it's like this now, imagine what it'll be like 10 years from now!" I feel a sense of robbery happening on the part of the future. A modern person attempting to predict the future conjures fantasies and prophecies as quaint as a first century prophet. Although I too can't help but let my mind run with seemingly autonomous calculations that assume a future value given a present value, I find it not respectful enough of the complexity of the human system. And were I so keen at this skill anyhow, I'd have made a fortune in the markets.

Predictions of the future are so prevalent as to be quickly forgotten and overrun by their never ending onslaught. By one interpretation, the thousand newspapers that encompass the likes of the New York Times are precisely in this businesses of interpreting present values and assuming their future state. And it's why I feel a sense of wariness when I encounter statements. I'd prefer articles contain more question marks than periods, as that would surely be the true factual nature of any complex situation. Yet rather than asking my permission to install new software, sure-of-themselves statements and predictions feel as though I visited one of those shady websites that immediately begin a download upon the page first loading. It feels dirty.

The most prevalent issue on which we let our mind run unbounded is AI. Can you imagine how smart algorithms will be if they're this smart now? Ah, the human and their unrelenting thirst for exponential growth. Of course, we have no reason to be anything other than optimistic. Just look at how quickly we went from brick-size satellite phones to edgeless "retina" displays. So sure, one way to interpret this would be that we'll have actual retina implants in twenty years if we continue at this rate.

But what of the respect for limits? For miscalculations? For failure, bankruptcy, and politics? What of the respect for the complexity of biological organisms? I could just as easily imagine a future in which we come to realize that perhaps machines are not as capable of self-learning as we thought. We've been riding under the cool assumption that computers can do things faster than humans can, so if an AI learns to read and understand what they read, then they can theoretically read all the books ever written in a single second, and boom—there goes the singularity.

But when have we ever been right about predicting the future? What if the human algorithm turns out to be a slow one, with no physical capacity for performance increase? Yes, a computer can do things a trillion times a second. But in that time they calculate nothing more impressive than the location of an item in a database, or the weight of a neural node. A single Google search consumes 0.3Wh of electricity. I saw an Alexa commercial recently where a lady wakes up from her sleep in the middle of the night after hearing a startling sound, and wastes no time in asking her intelligent AI assistant "Alexa, what the fuck time is it?" Nice. Surely, no short of a billion calculations must have occurred for Alexa to give this helpless human the time. Less than a second of computation time, sure, but still, at least some 300ms.

So what does this technology at scale really look like? An AI that one day snaps into consciousness and assumes all human knowledge in a fraction of a second? Or more like a cryptocurrency network that must balance computational complexity with convenience and accessibility? If I had to let my mind wander, I'd assume the future plays us all, and takes on some shocking twist of realizing some human-brain-speed-limit for computations of any medium. We'll build an AI so advanced that it can read and understand with unprecedented accuracy, but still take two days—a full 48 hour's worth—of computation time to read a full book, faring no better than a high school student, and alas, postponing the human fetish for looming singularities.

It took Elon Musk billions of dollars and several years of attempting to build car-making robots before admitting that humans are underrated, and assumed an updated stance involving higher human collaboration in the process. And yet if you do find yourself in one of those Teslas and happen to turn on Autopilot going 80mph on the highway, the folks at Tesla like to remind you: never take your hands off the wheel.

The Top Shelf Principle

Mo — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 21:37:31 +0000

Say you have before you a kitchen cabinet with three shelves. On the top shelf you have your most delicious snacks and delicacies. Chocolate chip cookies, crispy cheetos, and frozen pistachio gelato. In the middle shelf you have snacks that are "not bad", but not the most scrumptious. Maybe some beef jerky, plain pretzels, and a granola bar. On the bottom shelf, you have your survival snacks. You wouldn't eat them unless you were starving. For me that'd be plain almonds.

I've found that when I'm in the mood for a snack, my hand will always reach for top-shelf items. If the cabinet is stocked with soft chocolate chip cookies and spicy potato chips dripping with oil, I'll never reach for the almonds. The end result was that almonds never got eaten. In the presence of top-shelf items, almonds just didn't seem delicious enough. They were boring.

But I found that as soon as all the delicious top-shelf items ran out, and all I was left with were mid-shelf items like plain pretzels, the plain pretzels began floating to the top. They became a top-shelf item, and reaching for them became relatively instinctual.

The top shelf principle is thus:

Options, not just in snacking but in any domain, tend to sort themselves by most satisfying first.
On average, you will choose items sorted higher in the satisfaction queue. And anecdotally, what is most satisfying in the short term is typically not what is healthiest in the long term.
The amount of will-power and discipline required to choose an option increases with its sort order in the satisfaction queue. That is, the first item—the top-shelf item—, will require very little will-power to act upon. Items towards the end of the queue, however, that are less satisfying but probably healthier, tend to require large doses of long-term thinking and discipline.

And most importantly:
Options do not possess an inherent satisfaction value. They are always relative to one another. In the absence of a historically top-shelf item, items lower in the queue will surface to the top and themselves become top-shelf items.

In a queue of cheese puffs, chocolate chip cookies, and plain almonds, almonds sound mundane and unappealing. But in a cruel hierarchy containing expired milk, uncooked rice, and almonds, almonds will quickly sort to the beginning of the queue and become heartbreakingly delicious. And you will not feel ripped off for eating them. You will derive more or less equal satisfaction from them as you would any historical top-shelf item.

This principle has been useful for me in snacking, sure, but has served me far greater in its application towards lifestyle addictions. My lifestyle cabinet looked like this:

Top shelf:
working, checking some sort of digital feed, like reddit, or twitter, or instagram, and playing video games

Middle shelf:
reading a book, watching a movie or show

Bottom shelf:
socializing with people in real-time, house chores

Naturally, I was doing a lot of top-shelf actions, but hardly any bottom-shelf actions. And I had developed a fatal misunderstanding towards bottom-shelf items: I had thought I hated socializing in real-time because it was inherently unsatisfying to me. I had qualified myself as an innate introvert with no capacity for change. In reality, it wasn't that I disliked socializing—it was that I enjoyed playing video games more. And with the options of playing video games or checking my phone always available to me, I almost always acted on them first, leaving whatever crumbs of waking capacity (usually none) to items lower in the queue.

I observed this in the children of family members: if you gave them an iPad to play with, they weren't going to say no. And when they do get their hands on it, they lose themselves so deeply into the digital world, that they are mostly unavailable in the real one. But take away the iPad, and a remarkable thing happens: they find something else to do. Sure, they might throw a momentary fit, but a kid is a kid, and will not let one second pass without finding some way to entertain themselves. In these cases, where the top-shelf iPad was removed from the equation, items lower in the shelving system, like two blocks of legos, surfaced to the top, and the kids began playing with them with as equal voracity as the iPad.

As for me, a grown adult with no seeming need for personal order or control in time spent facing a digital device, I wanted to reduce working, checking feeds, and playing video games for one reason: RNG.

Developers know RNG as a random number generator. In the video game world, gamers refer to the acronym simply to refer to "randomness" in a game. Random or not, in the course of playing video games, you are bound to lose. Especially in a networked game where you play against other real people. Losing, in a word, sucks. It's a very sharp and gutting pain. The pain lasts only seconds, but stabs like a knife. Losing can be especially painful when it happens in a game you love; one which you've been working hard to better yourself in.

For me, this game was Rocket League. I'd been playing almost every day for a year and a half. When I'm winning, it's pure ecstasy. When I'm losing, it's pain coupled with RAGE, depending on how bad the loss is, or how futile I feel playing. You tell yourself, if I keep playing, I'll get better, and I'll lose less. Of course, that's a lie. You won't ever lose less, because as you get better, you get matched up against people who are also getting better. The result is that you're always playing against like-minded people.

The tragedy comes into play thusly: whether you win or lose in a digital, fast-paced game is largely random. The games themselves aren't random, but the interactions you have in the digital world with other people are more or less unpredictable. In a game of Rocket League, two players may fly towards the same ball, at the same time, and a thousand factors will determine which way the ball goes. This interaction is literally called a "50/50" in Rocket League, because it's almost inherently unpredictable. The problem is, if winning a game is very important to you, and victories are decided by these chaotic interactions, then you leave your emotions to chance. In my experience, the emotional aftermath of winning or losing could last a couple hours. That meant that every day, there was a 50% chance that around 1PM, I would feel like shit for the next two hours. And guess what—I did. When I had a losing day, I would be in such a bitter mood, that I felt like doing nothing but languishing for the next few hours.

Same with work: if my emotions depended on how little or many bug reports I'd receive when I open my email inbox, or how much traffic and sales the previous day had generated, then I was leaving my emotional stability in the hands of chance. Of course, these figures tend to form averages over time, but on a day-to-day basis, you never quite knew the shape or form of what was to come. I used to have work email and notifications make it directly to my phone lock screen, so I was always in the know. In other words, I danced with chance at every turn of the wrist. Sometimes, good news would light up my phone, and with it my face. Other times, definitively the opposite. The short of it is that I now only check notifications, of any kind, once a day in the morning. Otherwise, my phone is completely devoid of notifications and accounts of any kind.

Lastly: feeds. By feeds I mean digital applications that offer feeds that constantly change and offer you something new. Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the like. Feeds became dangerous for two reasons: 1) RNG. You never quite knew what you were going to get, and whether it would upset you or make you happy, and 2) the mere act of refreshing feeds became instinctual. I could be standing in line, or walking from room to room, and reflexively reach for my phone to check some feed, and in the span of 5 seconds, bounce from app to app pulling-to-refresh, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Pulling to refresh had found its way to my top shelf.

I had first witnessed the top shelf principle in action in my very serious ordeal with snacking, and later with kids and the presence or absence of an iPad. So I thought to myself: if I completely ransacked my top shelf, and disposed of all the items I'm habitually inclined to, what would happen? Would I go mad with idleness? Or would I find something else to do?

I unplugged my gaming PC. I disabled all notifications from my phone. I wanted it to be so that every time I checked my phone, there would be no notifications. This way, I wouldn't even have to check. I would just know there wouldn’t be any. In the midst of social or family events, I completely turned my phone off. I didn't want to run to it when I felt bored with conversation. I wanted to push past boredom to see what lay on the other side.

The result has been as anticipated by this grand pseudo-principle. In social situations, not cowering to my phone has led me to find other ways to entertain myself. And it turns out, conversation can be quite entertaining. Who knew? Of course, in the presence of video games, conversation wouldn't be, but stranded with no other options, you find a way. It's sort of like the cliche of the shy person in a party retreating to the corner and checking their phone, to seem like they're doing something, as to avoid socializing. In this case, I now know the solution to this problem is shutting off your phone entirely, or leaving it behind, so that you have to socialize. When you have to, you will. And you'll do it well too, if for no reason other than to thoroughly entertain yourself.

Not having video games to reach to, great blocks of time have opened in my day. And as sitting and not doing anything is quite literally undefined, I always found something to do. I began reaching for the almonds-equivalent of real life. I began reading more, whether it be a long session falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, or 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and now the very compelling The Gene. (Did you know that in the 1920's, in the United States of America, "colonies" were set up to aggregate "dumb" people and sterilize them so they wouldn't reproduce? Approved by the U.S Supreme Court and everything. Culling the "weak" was just a trend amongst nations, including Nazi Germany, amidst new discoveries and interpretations in genetics.) When I grew tired of laying with a digital device, I put it down, sat up straight, and contemplated my next move. "Well, I can't play video games. I don't have any digital feeds to get lost in. And I'm not going to sit here and do nothing." So I got up and did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. I tightened a loose door knob. I did some other repairs around the house.

This is week three of this strange experiment. And I kid you not—finding a chore to be done has been as exciting a prospect as playing a game of Rocket League.

The only problem is, I'm all out of chores.

Evil algorithms

Mo — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 19:27:30 +0000

A world in which advertisers know your every interest is scary. But a world where entrepreneurs build products no one ever hears about is even scarier.

A few years ago, I bought a pair of $60 Nike shoes. They were thicker than your average modern Nike shoe, and much taller, reaching just above the ankle. They were great for moving around, playing basketball (when I did that), and just sort of general every day use. And as they started to deteriorate, I began looking for the exact same pair to replace them. But no matter where I looked, they could not be found. They seemed to be a much older model, and shoes apparently don’t have specific names, so you can’t really look them up. I looked for about a year on and off, both physically and online, but could not find any pair with the same style and attributes.

About a few months ago, Instagram, having picked up on my interest in finding my long lost soulmate of a shoe, sensed it might be able to help. It offered me an advertisement of a pair of shoes remarkably similar to what I was looking for. I ignored the ad the first few times, but it kept following me. I refused to interact with it. My ego would not allow me to purchase a product from an advertisement. Eventually, I relented, and I bought the shoes. And my consumer hungers were thoroughly satiated.

Over the next few weeks, Instagram began showing me more ads of similar products. I wasn’t on the market for any more apparel, but I was intrigued at all the new brands I was discovering that you couldn’t find in stores. And it turns out, there are, in this case, countless fashion and design brands who do not have a physical presence, that make products which exceed the quality found in stores tenfold. And so Instagram learned a little about me, and I learned a little about other companies that Instagram thought I may be interested in.

Acquiring these shoes made my life better by the amount you’d expect a pair of shoes to better your life by. But, it did satisfy a need. Both on my end, and on the entrepreneur’s end. A neural connection was made. Demand was satisfied by supply, all through the power of the all-knowing internet. And I could not help but ask myself, is this such a bad thing? That entrepreneurs can make products and reach exactly the kind of people that would be interested in them sounds not so much a bad thing, but perhaps one of history’s most difficult, unsolved problems.

Because if you can complete that loop, of entrepreneur to customer, then you can ensure consistent economic activity and prosperity—for you, the entrepreneur, and society at large.

And I thought it would be wild, if instead of advertisements being these evil, demonic, invasive things (though they sometimes are), they are instead a testament to our advancement. A demonstration of the ingenuity of human problem solving. They are human society at its best.

Because if every dollar you earned was hid under your mattress instead of spent, economies would falter. Society could not prosper. And while many—perhaps even the majority—are still neglected by the economic gain that consumerism has conferred, there is no doubt a rise of possibility available that was not before. My first reaction to consumerism is always one of disgust and repulsion. “Companies create demand for products no one really needs through manipulation and association”—how appalling! It must be avoided at all costs! So fine. Then earn your money, and keep it in your bank account. Don’t give a dime to these greedy entrepreneurs.

Who has benefited then? Not you. Not them.

Consumerism seems to be an engine of growth, needless as it may be. It creates reliable, consistent economic activity—the foundation of stable societies. Which is why wherever you find developed countries and cities, you find consumerism.

Perhaps...perhaps we are beginning to make progress on one of history's greatest unsolved problems?

No doubt, there are proper ways to go about this, and improper ways. But the two will be perpetually inseparable. All this to say—and mostly to myself: Don’t sweep the entirety of "economic algorithms" under the rug. There is good happening just as well.

Play the game

Mo — Sun, 12 Aug 2018 02:09:44 +0000

When I was just a bit younger, I had dreams of becoming filthy rich. I wanted to do things big. If I were to found a company, it wanted to be a 500-person company. Hundreds of millions in revenue, headed straight towards an IPO.

As I grew older, I found it more sane to focus not on size, but value. What problem do I want to solve? And how can I best engineer a solution? Numbers and scale became irrelevant. A lot of it was philosophically backed. We are constantly told to be happy with what we have. That “this is it”—if you can’t find contentedness with what you have now, you never will.

And so I took that wisdom to heart. Besides, a life of glamor doesn’t seem all that appealing, given we can now live out others' lives vicariously through their social media profiles. Being rich and famous seems like a whole lot of trouble. Simple, humble, and inconspicuous—that seems to be the way to go. But there’s something the buddhist zen masters won’t tell you:

It’s dead boring.

It’s dead boring to be ambitiously unambitious. It’s dead boring to optimize your life around peace and simplicity.

And I’m starting to think…life was never meant to be lived simply. Unending complexity and scale is the basis of all life, matter, and movement in this universe, and yet we devise stories that say: want for nothing, and you shall attain happiness. Let us really quickly say that happiness is a nothing. It’s just a word. It describes a state of mind, maybe, but even then, chemicals are fleeting. There is no fixed chemical state of mind. It’s always brewing up something new.

So then, this idea that wanting less leads to happiness—it’s just an idea. It’s just a story. It’s an experiment. And ultimately, I don’t think it’s founded in any real universal truth. In my experience, it’s been quite the opposite.

I talked in a previous post about the game Factorio, and how I had a flash addiction to it. It is, by all means, the perfect game, and is exactly what I was looking for: something I can get lost in and sink a large amount of hours in. A sort of escape. And it would have been just that were it not for one thing: I wasn’t ambitious enough.

The game is about mastering the engineering of scale, and your output is directly proportional to your ambition. But here’s the thing: if you apply the zen mindset of “I already have everything I need,” then the game is instantly over. There’s literally no more room to keep playing. And that’s exactly what happened:

I stopped playing a game I really loved. Because I saw scale as an evil. I saw the accumulation of wealth, material, and prominence as an evil.

Since then, I’ve downloaded about a game a week to try and find something I can fall in love with the way I fell in love with Factorio. No dice. I can’t get captivated.

So what have I gained, by being zen? Nothing, it seems. Instead, I’ve lost something I really loved. Zen teaches you not to play the game, but what if the game is all there is?

I’m starting to believe that may be the case.

In the past few weeks, I’ve tasted the result of this slimmed-down zen philosophy: support emails and bug reports for Standard Notes are lower than they’ve been in quite some time. This was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to build a product that was so simple, that bug reports would not exist. Support emails would be minimal. And it seems...I’ve done that? Don’t get me wrong—still lots more work to do. But if this was the grand goal, which I thought would take a decade, and I’m already seeing a preview of what it’s like, then my human mind can’t help but think: what’s...next?

My zen mind says: nothing’s next. Enjoy this. My game mind says: move, scale, grow, build, act, collaborate, accumulate, and ultimately: play. Play the game.

I think…I think the zen story is a fiction. I think minimalism is a fiction.

I think life is a game, and it’s meant to be played. You can definitely avoid a lot of problems and minimize your burdens by sitting the game out. But that takes us directly to my favorite high school motivational poster:

A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

The futility of knowledge

Mo — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 14:22:12 +0000

I’ve very well internalized the fact that things can only make you happy once. Then fade into drudgery. An addiction to material purchases and consumption is one for fools. No, I shall hook into a better addiction. One that can actually drive me to live a better, more fulfilled life.

The consumption of information.

The search for truth, meaning, and origin. Surely, with speed of light access to the world’s top source of information, I shall unencumber myself from these earthly chains, and ascend to scholarly, other-worldly status. I shall glide through life with buttery ease, and use the wisdom of others, as described in their publications, to cheat through life and surpass others who may not be aware of the same information.

But..it’s a fool’s run.

Information is a product just the same. Seemingly, it can only make you happy once. Before it fades into dullness. I keep thinking the next theory of life shall surely free me from the obligation to be human. From pain and chores. Surely, all it would take for me to outplay my pain and suffering is to understand it. So that I may rise above it.

And so I’ve been collecting these theories of life. These theories as to why I act the way I do. Why you act the way you do. And contrary to my expectations, they’ve only contributed to making me worse off. A less whole state of being.

I’m starting to think there is nothing outside the mind that can truly thoroughly entertain the mind. I thought because ideas and theories and the pursuit of knowledge were grand and abstract—because they were noble and thorough—that they had the true potential to change my life. But it turns out to be no different than a new iPhone.

Entertains you for a week. Then you find new things to lust after.

And so while I have for years renounced (but probably still very thoroughly contributed to) thing based consumerism, I’m inclined to throw theory-generation and fact-seeking into the same futility bucket. You can entertain yourself with a new theory of life for no more than a few days, before your brain begins to churn in a new direction.

Of course, this itself is a new theory of life. So, I don’t expect much.

It’s only amusing to me that things, objects, ideas, and theories—to the brain, they are one and the same. They are just inputs. And the brain always wants new, different inputs, no matter how novel the previous was. Better not to play the brain’s game at all. Give it nothing, it seems, and you’ll start it back from level 1. A level of wants and needs no less, but trivial to sustain.

Of course, that can get to be a little boring. The whole “mindfulness” thing. Meditation, clearing your mind, clearing your wants, simplifying your desires. Profoundly powerful, no doubt, but thoroughly incompatible with modern day consumerism, capitalism, and city life. Which is probably why I’ve found it hard to upkeep a desire-free lifestyle in the past.

As for today, and tomorrow, and what’s next—I have no idea. I’m only thinking out-loud. Simple seems to be a good business model. Why not also a model for life? Less features, less bugs. Sounds like an excellent..theory of life.

Six flights

Mo — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 15:12:46 +0000

I had, until that point, managed to avoid spotting any references of a plane crash or incident. But here, thousands of miles away from the closest English speaking country, it had found me. Waiting in the hotel lobby of an archaic hotel in Colombia, I glimpse the Spanish headline on the table newspaper offered so generously to guests: 120 something something de aviacion something something. And a picture of a crashed plane.

I knew what it meant, even without understanding the words. I avoided staring at the picture directly, but was able to infer its contents based on the enclosing context. I was, in fact, waiting in the lobby for a taxi that would take us to the airport, whereupon I would enter into the realm of my worst fear: flying.

On this trip, I would enter in and out of six different airplanes. Six. That is six entirely too many. Six takeoffs, six sessions of invisible suspension tens of thousands of feet in the air, and six bumpy landings. I had found ways to manage my fears this time around, knowing that it would be all around impractical were I not able to find a way to contain the anxiety of having my life hang by some invisible threads based on 21st century hardware and software.

And I know software all too well.

It crashes. A lot.

And the people that write it. Ah. They’re just people.

My anxiety in airplanes stems from my ignorance in the routine operation of a flight. After takeoff, there comes a point where the engines will go from blaring loud to suddenly silent, and in that moment, my heart drops. Did the engine just stop? Are we losing speed? Is this it?

Every little sound, every little tremble—I fear it the end. I lamented to my wife some time ago that it would make the flying experience so much more tranquil were there to be a monitor communicating the exact actions the pilot is taking right now. Lowering engine capacity. Descending 500ft to avoid turbulence. Lowering wheels. Now, I clearly don’t know the right terminology for these events, but give me something. This way I know that everything is happening according to plan.

But no. We’re left to have full and utter faith in our glorious, incomprehensible captain.

The headline that I had mistakenly caught a glimpse of did nothing to ease my concerns. And avoiding unwanted news is a skill I take seriously and am proud to rank amongst the world’s top for. News today is a never ending episode of Fear Factor, so I avoid it. But it always finds a way, doesn’t it? You can go to painstaking lengths to avoid the news on your phone, computer, and TV, but inevitably, the news will find a way to harvest itself into your mind. A friend will say, have you heard? Or, I’ll need to check the Standard Notes twitter account for some customer tweet, and mistakenly cross into the Moments section, and it will catch me instantaneously: BREAKING: 5 PEOPLE HAD THEIR HEADS CHOPPED OFF LIKE 2 MILES FROM YOUR HOUSE.

I’ve actually changed my Twitter geo settings to be Japan-based, so that the moments are all in Japanese. But there seems to be some exception to this, so that the first and most “important" headline is still in English, and locale-aware. Besides Twitter, news is starting to be everywhere. It’s a great, great product for companies. Google Chrome, Snapchat, and Reddit are all getting in on the action. News is a product, and not some “for-your-own-good” supplement. News is the addicting crack all companies dream of building. And today, it’s more fashionable and in-demand than ever.

The way I justify flying is to think that there are far more important people than me who travel every day. Professional sports teams, with hundred million dollar players, fly every other day to different states and countries to play other teams. Politicians fly in and out of other countries on the daily. Even in the 70’s, it was seemingly normal for politicians to fly routinely.

So why should I be afraid?

And so I adopt the cavalier mindset. I say, I got this. I do a bunch of mental manipulation to tell myself that this will surely be ok. I run through the impossible stats of a plane crashing. I remind myself the last time a plane crashed from turbulence was in the 60’s, or something like that. I remember that Steph Curry and Lebron James fly in airplanes as often as I don’t. And most importantly, I remind myself that airplanes are very simple physics machines. Sure, it looks like an impossibly complex arrangement of heavy hardware and intricate software. One glimpse at the cockpit and any software developer will think: and it’s expected that nothing of all those controls should go awry? Yeah right. I know the fragility of software all too well.

But maybe it’s simpler than that?

After reading as much as I could about it, and watching a bunch of videos, an airplane seems very much to be only a set of engines on either side of the wings. Everything else is accessory. The engines, which are just these huge fan things, have a very simple job. They just need to spin. And when they do, trillions of unavoidable air molecules crash below and above the wing, depending on its angle. At that point, and from the way I understand it, if there are more air molecules crashing below the wing than above, lift is created. Automatically.

So it would appear that all that seeming complexity can be reduced to two fans that need to spin. If they keep spinning, regardless of any hardware or software issues, the plane will stay afloat. Simple as that.

I found that easy to digest. Easy to trust. Fans spinning—I can trust an engineer to build a fan that doesn’t stop. Easy physics. So I found some peace in that.

I also played some loud music during take off, and for most of the flight duration, to block out any sounds of engine intensity changes and other inexplicable noises. It helped quite a bit.

And if none of those tips help, the way to really cope with the fear of the worst is just to embrace the worst. If this airplane ride were to offer me my last few moments of consciousness, then that’s ok. I lived a decent life. And the last version of Standard Notes was stable enough.

Besides, I wouldn’t mind waking up in the year 3200 as some other shmuck and explore what the 33rd century has to offer. I wouldn’t be me per se, but consciousness is a process, so I am you, and you are me.

Any curious person will do.

That bitter taste

Mo — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 16:40:43 +0000

It’s easy: what feels good in the short run feels bad in the long run. And what feels bad in the short run will probably feel good in the long run. Now, don’t go treating this like an absolute maxim—you’ll find plenty exceptions. But for my circumstances, I find this wickedly true.

Anytime you attempt to optimize for short term gain, you are borrowing from the future. The life equivalent of technical debt. And anytime you optimize for long term gain, you are likely going to have to forego some “valuable” present chunk of time to perform some dull, painfully boring task.

But, this alignment of mental principles seems crucial to present-day sapien life. Our minds are tricked into satisfying present wants and desires at all costs. The future is only a conception after all. It is an advanced mode of being for one to forego present satisfaction for future satisfaction. Very, very advanced.

I tend to go about my days in ways that optimize present satisfaction. And the end result is like eating McDonalds on an empty stomach: you feel worse than you did before. Hungrier even.

What if instead we went about our days more sinisterly? More darkly. Yes, ascetically. What if instead of going about everyday looking for any source of excitement and pleasure, we sought out the demons of every day, to size them up and realize we are stronger?

There’s a documentary series on Netflix called Dark Tourist, about a seemingly growing phenomenon of tourists who travel to areas associated with death, violence, and destruction. The initial impression would seem to be: why subject yourself to dark experiences? Would you not risk developing a dark disposition as a result? Quite the opposite. The end result seems very clearly to be: because it makes you grateful. And because you realize…there is nothing quite as scary as you. You are the scariest thing on this planet. Everything else pales in comparison to the monster lurking in your head.

The idea of foregoing short term pleasure for long term gain isn’t new by any means. Fasting, sexual discipline, and a strict to nonexistent consumption of depressants and stimulants is the stuff religions are made of. For our modern day selves, we want to work around a “religious” sort of zealousy, because it’s too adherent. It’s too inflexible, and tends to forget why it exists in the first place.

Instead, we’re looking only for a small software update. A slightly modified mental model:

Tasks with low pleasure yields often yield high pleasure. And tasks with high pleasure yields often yield low pleasure. So: for real pleasure, seek displeasure.

And not absolutely either. Definitely not absolutely. Behind subtlety is a nuclear arsenal’s worth of energy.

Just, instead of filling your days with moments of pleasure as a way of filling your life (which seems to only accomplish the opposite), fill your day with…nothing. Said another way: remove your short term pleasure quota. And rely instead on the sort of dull “organicness” of life for slow nourishment. Instead of that Hershey’s milk chocolate taste we sometimes yearn for, seek the bitter dark chocolate taste that life slowly exudes. You need only acquire that taste, before it becomes uniquely delicious to you.

Those boring, painful things you don’t want to do, but you know you probably ought to do? Your reluctance to embrace their bitterness is what’s holding you back from true pleasure.

Embrace short term temporary pain for long term meaningful pleasure.

Short term pleasure seeking is a woefully outdated mental model, which if one is not cognizant to upgrade, may cause one to suffer living the life of a hundred thousand year old brute in the calm and easy existence of a city brute. When pleasure is as saturated and immediately available as it is today, the only way to receive real pleasure becomes…the avoidance of it. It’s really wicked, but really true.

Optimize for pain, not pleasure. Invert your mental model: when you are feeling pain from performing a non-pleasurable task, this is a good thing. I repeat: this is a good thing. When you are feeling pleasure from the consumption of an immediate good, this is probably a bad thing.

Invest in pain.

The storyteller

Mo — Sun, 05 Aug 2018 18:29:25 +0000

I’ve been playing images in my head. Sort of making believe how things might go, were I actually to act on them. When I’m imagining the things I would do, or the things I would say, or the places I’d go, I receive a small compensation for it. A tiny bubbling taste of serotonin. Yum. Delicious.

Now let’s not change a single thing and go back to life exactly as it was.

Every action requires some sort of positive energy expenditure. And unfortunately, my inner brain optimizations are on the highest setting.

> Optimizing for minimum energy expenditure...

What!? No! Don’t do that! Override optimization levels to nominal!

Override failed. Insufficient privileges.

Damn it.

Well okay. This is my life now.

So, in the wee hours of the night, I sit now in surreptitious contemplation. How shall I hack this impenetrable son of a bitch?

Reality is merely a projection of the brain. All inside that little box that I can touch. Right...there. My entire universe just inches above my brows. And yet I can’t dictate its decisions with sudo level privileges?

Absurd. Totally, wholefully absurd.

Surely there must be a way in. A way to play games with your brain, to get it to do what ~you~ want it to do.

To date, and on this quest for probably the entirety of my waking life, I have not found a working solution.

But if our world is merely the fictitious story we tell ourselves, could we not intersperse our own fictional elements where we see fit? In the beginning, sure, it will feel awkward and downright fictional. But the habit-machine enclosed in your skull will be none the wiser. Tell or be told the same story hundreds of times, and your life-projector will gladly welcome the new element into its narrative. Probably even irreversibly so.

So, I’m going to pretend.

When faced with a task I don’t seemingly want to do, I’m going to simulate performing that task for as long as I can keep up the charade.

Here we have a messy kitchen.

I should clean it? I should clean it. I should clean it?

Stop. The fact you’re even contemplating it is signs enough you’ve already made your decision.

Instead of making a large commitment you'll probably fail on and later feel double bad for, decide you’re going to pretend to clean. Do the movements. Tell the lie that you’re going to give it a shot.

Fake pick up a dirty dish. Fake take it to the area where it will be cleaned. I mean, actually do those things. But you’re just pretending. You’re not actually going to finish this whole operation. Psht. You’re just simulating a small part.

Does anything stop you?

If not, keep pretending. Open the dishwasher. Pretend you’re going to empty it, so you can put in the dirty load.

Does anything stop you? Do you feel a strong resistance to pretending further?

If not, keep acting. Keep pretending for as long as you can keep up the charade. The end result of course is that you've pretended your way to a clean kitchen. You've overriden the relentless optimizations your brain has enacted on your action potential.

If you do feel a resistance, then ok, stop. Step away. Say, I’m sorry. Not today.

You’ll walk away with the dishes not having been done, but with at least the satisfaction that you tried, and when you did, you uncovered that the problem was more complicated than picking up a few dishes. I’m out of detergent. That’s why I was resisting. You know now what you could work towards next time.

In this case, an even more complicated task: You need to head to the store.

But, you don’t feel like it.

Tomorrow, you'll pretend to. You'll put your wallet in your pocket. You'll put on your shoes and strap your shoelaces. You'll take a few steps towards the front door. Does anything stop you? Keep pretending. Keep pretending until you’re stopped by thorough resistance. Understand that resistance. And relax. Cross off that task for today. You did good. You can try again tomorrow.

I've had the repeated inclination to write some thoughts into a journal for several weeks now. To document my current world for my future self. But I couldn’t get myself to put pen to paper.

So this is me pretending to write.

Susceptible to Control

Mo — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 18:44:12 +0000

Privacy is a question that I never quite seem to find a satisfying answer for. In the past, when I’ve asked myself why digital privacy is important, and why it’s worth struggling for, the answer I nestled on was that privacy is important because privacy is power.

But that’s about as far as I got. Privacy was about keeping a balance of power between those who would abuse it for their own gain, and those who live out their lives, unconsciously leaving valuable trails of information behind. The idea was that privacy isn’t necessarily about you, but about building a long-term better society. But I think that’s wrong.

Privacy is definitely about you.

It can affect your life in ways so dramatic that you could only justify your new life circumstances as the course of your own will. And thus, you’ll always think, I know exactly how I got here. I remember the decisions I made that lead to me living this life, and I remember those decisions as being, in fact, of my own volition.

This is, unremarkably, no more than a lie we’ve been trained—or have trained ourselves—to tell to make our life seem consequential. To make our life make sense. We craft narratives that are digestible to us. Every event must be resolved one way or another. And when we don’t have all the information, when we are too small to possibly fathom the complicated nature of our existence, we craft simple explanations that we can live with.

But make no mistake about it: the stories we craft to understand our existence don't represent the actual nature of our existence. They represent how we perceive those circumstances.

Our world and the way we understand it—the way we’re able to fall asleep every night—represent our perception of it given the information our brain has been given to work with. A slight twinge of this information can produce kaleidoscopic variations in how you view yourself, your relationships, and your society.

We understand the world in terms of signals, which we process to produce images or stories of the world. And the horrifying truth is: our brains have horrible firewalls.

Almost anything can get in. That’s the whole idea, isn’t it? Signals go in, and our brain filters and parses. The results dictate the decisions you make, the actions you will take, and the consequences that will ripple throughout your radius of physical influence. It would stand to reason that one ought to be real careful about the signals we allow our brain to process. But of course, you might say, there is discretion. We ought to be intelligent enough to filter out nefarious signals.

The reality is that our “discernation” seems to be a very simple algorithm. Much simpler than we imagined. And the largest factor seems to just be: impressionability. The more you see something. Not more complex than that.

Quite simply, without privacy, you are Susceptible to Control. Put this in headline case and make an acronym of it, because it’s the one thing you should remember when you’re participating in modern digital society. You are STC. When you allow others to learn about you, your interests, and your habits, you allow yourself to be susceptible to how they might use that information to change the way you view your world. This would in effect directly control the purchases you make and the political affiliations you subscribe to.

And let’s not even be minutely grandiose about this: this is every day. It happens on the small and it happens on the large. Information that is produced in direct effect to your habit trails can be effectively weaponized to target messaging at you in attempt to change, or control, your behavior.

Our lives are filled with decisions, both the conscious and the unconscious. Decisions are—and let's be very clear about this—NOT existing in a vacuum. I’m yelling at myself mostly. I keep trying to tell myself that surely my decisions are of my own accord. Surely my opinions were derived validly and safely. Surely there has been no one but myself in charge of my decisions at every step of the way.

this. is. a. story. we. tell. ourselves.

Which is fine. We need stories to understand our world. Stories, like language and math, are symbols that we can manipulate. We can apply operations on them, like chaining them to form a continuous sequence, or adding and subtracting them. Stories are the way we understand the world. But the stories we’ve been told…

Ah. That’s where one has to be careful. That’s where one needs to be extremely self-aware.

The way you view your place in this world, the way you carry on your relationships with others, and the way you participate in modern society—these are all based on the messages you’ve received and internalized throughout your entire life. And even after all these decades, I am continually shocked at how little information I have had to work with given any difficult decision.

Can you imagine how limited you must have been then during the younger, most impressionable years of your life?

You...can not be trusted.

Everything you are—that thing you call your personality—is invented in direct response to the messages you’ve been bombarded with throughout your entire life.

It's time to be better. To move forward from our lie that we are who we are because we’re unique. Because we’re different. Because the infinite cosmos aligned at our exact coordinates to produce a unique, never before seen shade of light.

You are who you are because of the information you’ve received.

Privacy, then, is about reducing your susceptibility to control. It’s about protecting yourself from the nuclear weapons that are targeted messages. Targeted signals of information explicitly meant to influence the way you view the world first, and your purchasing habits second. (They never quite go for the sell right away anymore, do they?) The strength of these messages will always, always try to evolve to be more intelligent than you. To outplay you. There are trillions of dollars on the line that dictate this. Messaging will always evolve to try to outsmart you. To breach your firewall, and get into your brain to change its wiring, all for the direct benefit of some remote group of people.

Privacy is your firewall. It’s a security update for the modern human being. Privacy prevents those who would abuse it from understanding you. Privacy says that you’d like to be excluded from the greedy and violent agendas of unknown parties. Privacy is protection so that you can live out a more meaningful and self-derived life. It's where the decisions you make try to be as objective and true as possible, with as little influence as possible from strange third-parties.

Privacy is truly about living a life of your own.

Real

Mo — Tue, 19 Jun 2018 19:47:27 +0000

In the game Factorio, your goal is to create a well-oiled factory that produces objects which are then used in other parts of your factory. I had a flash addiction to this game, meaning I played it intensely for a period of two weeks, then never touched it again.

The game was dangerous. It synthesized the human incentive loop into a mind-wrapping game one could not help but be mercilessly sucked into. The game's purpose was mostly up to you, but, in order to upgrade your factory parts, in order to research new scientific methods of production, you needed to produce certain items at certain levels of scale. And so began the endless puzzle.

At every point in the game, you sort of have a silent objective: you want your factory to be "stable". You want it to produce goods, you want all the assembly lines to be running smoothly, and you want your natural resources flowing orderly into the machines that need it. In the beginning, you have coal and iron deposits close to where you begin, but after a while, you'll deplete these, and you'll need to build a railroad to ship resources from remote locations. So you revamp your factory to produce a whole other industry of products and parts, creating a perplexing logistics nightmare requiring high doses of problem solving. And you really want to solve it, because you're this close to stability.

But it never comes.

You never get stability. You tell yourself, surely I have all the parts, strategy, and experience needed to get this factory flowing smoothly and with high levels of autonomy.

But things break. They need repair. Resources dry up here and there. Assembly lines get backed up. So you beef up your operation further still, installing new machines and enforcing new procedures. Things look great for not more than ten seconds before you realize your entire factory seems to be operating with less zeal, less intensity. Ah, electricity production is low. Need more steam engines. Need more generators. Need more towers.

Tragically, no matter how close you get to seeming operational bliss, the cycle of upgrades never end. And so, two weeks into this strangely grasping game, I said, why? Why should I keep playing? More resources, more machines, more production...more problems.

We've been here before haven't we?

My inability to find stable contentedness clashed with my desire to grow. And so the only way through it was to cycle. Content for a day, growth-seeking for a week. Contentedness for a day causes no problems, in the long run. It's a no-op. Growth-seeking for just one day, however, creates exponential future responsibility that may be impossible to absolve yourself from.

So how do you play this game peacefully?

With Factorio, I couldn't find a way. I couldn't find a way to play it without being relentlessly capitalistic. A company, of course, is a factory no different. The goal was to create a factory so simple, that it could achieve autonomy merely by fact of nimbleness. But a factory is living. And as with things that live, growth is as inescapable as the air we inhabit. Growth is time + adaptability.

So the question becomes, if a simple factory isn't within the realm of physics, does one pursue a simpler factory? Or is it all the same. Complex, simple, and anywhere in between: is it all the same?

My nihilistic side says, of course it's all the same. Everything's the same. And nothing matters.

My optimistic side, my hopeful side, my ambitious side, says: of course they're different. Of course less problems is better than more problems.

But infinity minus one is still infinity. Infinity cut in half is still infinity. It would seem, that if optimizing the stability of my consciousness is the goal, then consciousness seems to have a wrapping effect around anything that it encounters, such that it occupies one problem with the same intensity it would occupy a hundred problems.

So cheers. Cheers to this lovely game we find ourselves in. Cheers to the physical laws in whose arena we play out the relentless process of consciousness. Cheers to instinct, emotions, chemicals, disease, drought, destruction, production, and competition. And a huge cheer—nay, a standing ovation—for the mystery.

This is one hell of an experience.

You, Deity

Mo — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:19:13 +0000

We make plans as if our future self were rational, when present self is never more than a galactic mess of emotions.

Present you is the only possible person that can save you.

How to learn programming the natural way

Mo — Wed, 30 May 2018 02:54:27 +0000

Some years ago, I had a fellow developer ask me where I learned to type on the keyboard. I said, huh? What do you mean. It’s a keyboard. You just tap on it, and eventually you get rally tappy on it. I’ve been doing it since I was three feet tall. He said oh. “I took one of those Mavis Beacon typing classes.”

Both of us, at that point, were equally proficient in typing on a keyboard and understood the super complex mechanics of hand placement and proper finger etiquette. I learnt it absentmindedly, and he learned it brute force. The result is the same. One method is just less exhilarating.

As I’ve stretched through my expanse of time, I’ve found it somewhat increasingly difficult to teach myself new tricks. As a kid, learning is a thing you’re always doing. As an adult, learning is something you need to make time for. Today, programming is as gushing a prospect as gold in the old west. And right before you are all the tools you can possibly need. Tragically, the burden lies on you: will you put in the time?

But as I’ve heard from others, and read on blogs about people’s journey to learn programming, two things are mentioned very often: it’s very hard knowing where to start, and it’s very hard even after you know where to start.

So lots of people give up.

I’ve given up on many, many things in my life. Programming was not one of them, and I’m grateful to my past, clueless self. But that’s exactly it: I learned programming not because of some grand insight and keen forethought. I learned it because I wanted to change the damn color of some rectangle to red.

That’s it. That’s all that's needed to learn programming. You can read hundreds of blog posts and watch a dozen videos on how to program, and at the end of it still be completely incapacitated. Or, you can feel your way through it. From an end result, work backwards, rather than forwards. That is, rather than starting from the absolute beginning (which is completely maddening by the way; blank slates are the most uncomfortable point of any project, even till this day), you start with the end result already in front of you, and you tweak some tiny variable, and you see how it behaves.

That’s sort of how machine learning algorithms work, isn’t it? You try this statistical possibility, observe the result, and give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Eventually, it finds a way. You, a machine learner, do the same: find the source code of a complete project, set up the environment (here be dragons), and get the app running. Then, find one thing you want to change about the app, like a color, font, width, height, and figure out what file you’d need to change to do that.

Changing a green rectangle to red might take you hours on the first attempt. Maybe even days. You’ll have to google yourself to exhaustion, in ways you’ve never googled yourself before. Eventually, of course, it becomes common to you. So you give yourself harder and harder tasks. “Ok, I can change the rectangle to any color I want. Can I make two rectangles appear side by side?”

Follow that path, continually make new challenges for yourself, and eventually, you’ll know how to program. Programming isn’t a bunch of rules you need to learn in some strict order, and even if it were, it might take the rest of your life to learn them all. Programming is just this language you learn to speak in varying degrees. You never quite master it. You entertain yourself with how expressive you can be with this newfound language.

But you learn to speak it, just by speaking it.

My wife gets notified of new blog posts, read this one, and said that it inspired her. She said, however, that it might be helpful if you included some resources in the post. I said, well that's the whole point: you don't need any resources. You just need to find an opensource project, and run it. She said, run it where? I laughed. Ok, so obviously, there are different levels of expertise here. But, the point is, you should struggle a little bit. It's ok not knowing. As long as you have an end goal, and are determined, you will find a solution. You can start with running the encrypted notes project I work on called Standard Notes. It's in JavaScript, and setting it up locally is not too bad:

https://github.com/standardnotes/web

Dog food is soylent for dogs

Mo — Wed, 23 May 2018 21:11:10 +0000

What to feed the poor little man? This dog is real beyond words, and every slight negligence of attention on my part is an injustice to his world. So I try to accommodate our guest. Love, warmth, long walks, and infinitely satisfying cuddle sessions. I would be a five star establishment, were it not for negligence and ignorance of the most important part of the experience.

Rock food. How painful yet the sight of it is. Tiny rock-hard pebbles that give your dog only the best of what he needs. The true essence of food. The bags are irresistible: a menagerie of perfectly seasoned chicken, rich sweet potatoes, forest green peas, and some radioactively violet blueberries. You buy the bag thinking, that’s all in there. But, let’s be honest. It’s not. You, me—we’re just suckers for marketing. We're not the ones eating it. No, we’re sold on the image.

But give it to any dog that has tasted real food, and they will be the first to tell you—this is not real food. You’re an asshole for feeding me this. You try to bargain, convincing him and yourself that this is the only sustainable arrangement. He says, I’d rather starve.

And so my dog does not always display his highest levels of motivation towards rock food. He’s obviously not dumb enough to starve himself to death, so he’ll eat it when he’s given up all hope of a better life. Food is one of the most intensely satisfying experiences of this strange existence, and I rob him of this pleasure daily.

The real yet silently cruel solution would have been to never expose a dog to real food, show him this rock food, and say, “I swear, this is how food is on planet Earth.” But, it’s far too late for that here.

I saw a viral tweet some time ago about a guy who fed his dog raw meat for a period of several months (ground beef and chicken legs, if I remember correctly). He showed a before and after picture, and it was thoroughly stunning. The dog's pale white coat and deeply tired eyes transformed into a rich golden fleece and a sharp, bold gaze.

Can it really be?

Who knows. It’s hard to tell what’s real anymore. So I put it in my backlog. “Look into this.”

Today, as I was pouring some bagged rock food with excellent branding into my beloved dog’s plate, I finally looked into it. And I said, what is this crap? Like, seriously? I shook the bag around, and the rocks started moving, banging against each other with a thick kshhhing sound. I smelled it, and it smelled like nothing. What’s...in here? So I took a look at the ingredients.

Organic chicken, organic chicken meal, organic sweet potatoes, organic chickpeas, organic peas, organic blueberries, organic alfalfa meal, organic coconut oil, vitamin A supplement, vitamin B12 supplement, salmon oil, iron amino acid complex, organic rosemary extract,…..

Well shit. I mean, this checks out, right? Those ingredients all sound good. It’s got all the things that food science says should sustain a long, healthy being.

Something like Soylent, right? Exactly like soylent. Dog food is soylent for dogs.

And now I feel bad. Have you tried a soylent diet? I couldn’t last even 1 day. Real food is unmistakable.

Common Genius

Mo — Sat, 12 May 2018 18:28:23 +0000

Excellent taste plus average resourcefulness, or average taste and excellent resourcefulness, is about all it would take.

Resourcefulness is a better way to phrase intelligence, as intelligence seems useless without the ability to impact neighboring matter. Resourcefulness can thus be found anywhere, and not imaginarily confined to unique circles.

I had a friend call me once, lamenting how his unique struggles are owed primarily to his high level of intelligence. I said, are you sure? Now don’t get me wrong—this man is a genius of unique kind. But what even is intelligence? Your ability to solve a math problem? Or your ability to influence others? Even if we agreed on a definition of intelligence, it would be too single-minded to have any real influence. You need something more. Or, I would be prouder to possess another trait.

Resourcefulness sounds like spontaneous intelligence. Academic intelligence, on the other hand, has no more than the ability to write books, which is profound in its own regard, but not what we’re looking for here. Street smart? Sounds like it. I think that’s another way to say resourceful.

Average resourcefulness plus excellent taste can yield great products, yet if you find yourself lacking in taste, excellent resourcefulness can more than make up for it. The boss level is out of this world. Excellent resourcefulness and excellent taste. Only a few names come to mind, one of whom crafted the device I’m typing this on. But, take any high quality product, and there’s your magic sauce.

Can either be acquired through brute force? I’ve found that taste, you wake up to, and resourcefulness, well, that wavers. It should be an always on thing, but that would take us into the mind-fatiguing topic of the energy required to fuel resourcefulness.

Simple

Mo — Wed, 09 May 2018 03:57:31 +0000

I told my friend, my requirements are: simple work, simple life. But I also need this amount of money on a monthly basis to find peace. And that I would need more users to get there.

More.

Ugh. That word. I cried in agony. What a trap more is. More is a thing with madness as its only logical conclusion. So why chase more?

More users.
More employees.
More revenue.
More markets.

Not all days are equal

Mo — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 00:53:05 +0000

Good days are good, bad days are bad, and there's nothing you can do about that. I find that if a bad mood stupefies you as to its origin, then, it's probably not your fault. You don't always need a reason. You can have two identical days with the exact same starting points, variables, circumstances and factors, and have the best day you've had in a long time in one, and be completely miserable the other, and have absolutely no guesses as to why. If it were deducible, which I do not think it is, it would be in the realm of chaos theory and not calculus, which even then would be difficult enough. Better to say, "my chemicals are off today." It's not me. It can't be me. I did nothing that could have possibly brought this on myself.

Not that this solves anything. I mean, I blamed it on my chemicals today and still felt like shit. But, if ever I had the impulse to start finding reasons as to the root of the cause, my shitiness intensified. God forbid I start asking myself, "what do I need to start changing about myself?" That's when the real stress kicks in. When you blame it on the chemicals, instead of blaming it on yourself, it at least leaves opportunity for a hard reset tomorrow. Usually, my chemicals do reset the next day. And I'll have no idea why I felt so bad yesterday. But, if I blame it on myself, then it almost always transfers over to the next day. Chemicals solve themselves over night. But self-condescending analysis of some deeply-rooted theoretical problems you may have carry over like an unsolved bug. And since they're only theories, you may never make progress, and trap yourself in a never ending cycle of self-pity.

Good days are good. Bad days are bad. It's as simple as that.

Notice

Mo — Wed, 28 Mar 2018 14:03:13 +0000

You're more likely to notice the bad things around you, than you are the good things. This is easy to notice. I have around me right now innumerable good things. I'm sheltered in a warm room, and have an endless supply of coffee. That's pretty good. My dog is snuggling cozily next to me, I'm not tired, I have food to eat, my bills are paid. Great, great things. But, it would be silly if that's all I thought about.

No, better to think about the bad things. So I can fix them.

Which proves, it doesn't matter what you have or don't have. Everyone is the same in that, when you have something, it's no longer on the fore of your consciousness. When you don't have something, it's all you can think about.

No one is better off. That we look to the future acquisition of some material as the next step in our journey towards contentedness is a trick our mind plays on us to compel us to act, not necessarily for our own good, but the collective good.

Ambiance Monetizer

Mo — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 21:19:49 +0000

I was at a coffee shop today and overheard someone talk about a book they purchased on Amazon.

Upon hearing that word, a bit immediately flipped in my brain and reminded me of a few things I’ve been meaning to order.

So I went and made a purchase.

I thought it would be funny if at some point Amazon introduces a device shops can place to monetize their ambiance, which at random times during the hour has no other purpose than to scream “Amazon!” as obnoxiously as possible.

Not open to suggestion

Mo — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 17:40:01 +0000

I recently took a trip with a friend, and noticed myself behaving extrinsically, rather than intrinsically, and felt dirty about it. That is, rather than drinking coffee when I felt like drinking coffee, my friend might awake earlier than me and say "Hey, I'm making coffee, want some?" To which I might reply, sure, why not!

I thought this was harmless, but carried on to other elements of life, you start living a life of suggestion.

"Hey, I'm taking a walk, want to join?" Sure, why not! When really, maybe I wanted to walk an hour from now.

That I was open to suggestion at first appears to be a trait of open-mindedness, but later manifested itself as: I don't feel that good. I drank coffee when I usually wouldn't have. I took walks when I usually wouldn't have. I ate this generously offered candy bar when I usually wouldn't have.

So the next day, I told my friend, I'm not open to suggestion today. He said, I'm making some coffee—want some? I said no, sorry, not open to suggestion today. I drank coffee about 45 minutes later when it felt right within me to do so. My friend said, hey, it's nice out, want to go on a hike? I said no, sorry, you go ahead. I'm not open to suggestion today. I took a hike about an hour later, when it felt right within me to do so. I applied this pattern throughout the entire day, and felt thoroughly better.

When I returned home, I felt myself unable to shed this mentality. I started becoming ultra sensitive to everything that was suggesting me to do something I didn't necessarily want to do. Everything in the artificial life is designed to influence you, and when you perform activities not because they feel right, but because there is either "nothing else to do", or because it's a certain time of day, you're living a life of suggestion.

The most flagrant belligerent?

The huge television in my living room. How else is one supposed to design a living room other than a square arrangement of sofas facing a huge flat screen TV? We certainly didn't know any better.

I found however that when I entered my home, tired and wanting of rest, and definitely without the thought of watching TV having crossed my mind—when I enter and sit on the couch, the huge TV is practically begging me to use it. The entire living room design is centered around the suggestion of watching TV. So, in many cases, you end up watching TV, or playing video games, not because it was inherently what you wanted to do, but because the design of your life is centered around oppressive suggestions that can be difficult to detect and resist.

We are constantly being suggested to—how we should feel, what we should be talking about, what activities we should do. When you open Twitter.com, there is a list of trending topics, which suggests that you too should be apprised of these events, and perhaps contribute to the conversation. You see your follower count, which suggests how you should feel, relative to others. Advertisements on TV are flagrantly suggestive, almost as to be entirely offensive. When I returned from my trip, I couldn't believe that flagrantly suggestive advertisements ("Cool, healthy, and fulfilled people drink Diet Coke.") are even societally acceptable. But what can we do.

In the country, on my trip, avoiding suggestion was extremely easy. It was a mostly natural environment. Back in the city life, everything about your environment is unconsciously designed to influence you. I avoided any thought or desire of watching TV or playing video games on my trip, but as soon as I returned home, my environment sucked me back in. Slowly at first, and now my grip is relinquishing entirely. Something needs to change.

I'm tempted to scrap my living room all together of any suggestion. If you want to watch TV, go on into that other room where the TV is. As for the living room, it should be a basecamp from where you launch your activities, based on internal impulses and not external influence. I would have done this in a heartbeat, but, obviously, "real life" has certain conditions. The in-between solution my wife and I agreed on was that we could cover the TV when it's not in use, perhaps either with a pull down curtain, or some sort of shutters. Why should a huge ass TV constantly insist on itself, even when you are not using it, or have no intention of using it?

I'm finding it harder and harder to resist suggestion in the artificial world. You can't just change yourself. There is no you. There is just the environment that makes you. It's why bad habits always come crawling back. It's not enough to just change yourself.

I'm still fighting hard to resist suggestion. I haven't checked any feed of any sort since my trip, including a Twitter feed, a news feed, or any other news-based feed. My rule is, you can tweet out if you want to, but, no feeding.

I also don't mind checking Twitter notifications if I have any, but again, the timeline is off limits. It's an endless feed of suggestion. "Don't know how you should feel right now? Here is a list of suggestions based on what other people are feeling." It's not a way to live.

My hope is to be intentional. To do something because it's inherently what I want to do. This isn't a blanket assault on consumption. It's an assault on unguided, unintentioned consumption. You can play video games, but only if you had it in your mind that you wanted to play video games prior to sitting down on the couch. You can watch TV, but only if you had it in your mind that you wanted to watch TV prior to seeing your TV. But when you are completely empty, and at the mercy of "what are my options?", you'll never quite feel at ease. You will always be at the mercy of suggestion, very far away from your internal state, which—make no mistake about it—has the ability to be at reasonable peace.

It's not your fault

Mo — Sun, 11 Mar 2018 23:51:51 +0000

Several years ago, I went vegan for six months, because I wanted to be conscientious. I was fortunate enough to exit that unfortunately ascetic lifestyle after realizing:

It’s not your fault you like meat.

Humans have been eating meat long before I was ever born. Long before any of us were ever born. We’ve been eating meat for millions of years.

If I crave it, it’s not my fault. Sure, I can try to fight it. I can resist my hardware. But if I give in, it’s not my fault.

It's not your fault the entire premise of biological existence is feeding on other biological beings.

It’s not your fault you’re confused living in a strange and artificial world.

It’s not your fault you like sweet and salty foods, even if to an excessive degree.

It's not your fault you've been conditioned to seek external sources of pleasure under the rule of consumerism. We are impressionable beings, and you were born into a world where small-minded humans before you have already strictly defined all the things, and how too you should see it.

It’s not your fault, during the endless dregs of your day, you flick ceaselessly through Twitter/Instagram/Facebook searching for something new.

It’s not your fault you're tired, sad, helpless, misshaped, sick, lost, fatigued, confused.

Because there is no you. There is no human individual. What we know as human is topological; is emergent. It’s the interconnected network of many of us. That's what makes you. One human individual is an alien concept altogether—one which is thoroughly unexplored, and ultimately undefined.

It’s not your fault you’re the result of history before you; that your thoughts, ideas, principles, fantasies, and desires are sometimes, maybe even often, culturally out of line.

It’s not your fault you’re trapped in a world you didn’t design.

The Artificial Life

Mo — Sun, 11 Mar 2018 03:08:29 +0000

There was a story some years ago about living circumstances for the 1.3 million employees of Foxconn in China, the company that builds Apple’s products. It’s a problem of scale, no doubt, but these workers lived in crammed boxes stacked atop one another high into the sky. In between the buildings, there was a net.

The net is an admission that suicide is embedded into the overall design of the arrangement, and short of a full-out global economic revolution, this was just the way it was going to be.

I thought of those people, and shook my head in pity. Those poor bastards.

In Sapiens, the author argues that the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago was the death of individual happiness. Systems that solve many of our problems do just that: they do the thing we were supposed to do. Millions of years of evolution have designed a human who feels at its most natural when performing certain actions which are in accordance with its instincts. In other words, it was by design that if you performed these actions, you would biologically feel good. That’s the whole premise.

In a few short years, and counting, we’ve managed to “solve" most of our yucky biological chores, like hunting and gathering, washing, cleaning, and today, cooking, traveling, and foraging (now called yelping).

It’s all taken care of by Uber for X.

What remains? What remains when all of our million-year-old chores are domesticated, and made ridiculously effortless—as easy as a few haptic taps on a surface? What do you call that existence, when you are completely absolved of biological chore?

Enter The Artificial Life.

The Artificial Life is not one of nature. It is a woefully unprescient conception designed by us, and mostly facilitated through the use of language. Our bodies, our minds, and the concert of their interactions are unable to fully appreciate the Artificial Life. It's still trying to do something else.

The Artificial Life is city living. Any city. If you can get food delivered to you in under an hour, you are living the Artificial Life, even if you don’t exercise that power frequently. In the Artificial Life, you do things that are abstract; that nothing in the natural world, including our bodies, can really make sense of. Watching Netflix on a rectangular TV hung up on your wall? That isn’t a real task. It’s not a real thing. It’s abstract pleasure for our unapologetically reward seeking mind. Our brain is tricked in a hundred which ways before watching Netflix is recognized as a real thing you’re doing. But our body doesn’t get it. It produces real chemicals when things happen on a fake display.

Here are things you might do in the natural world that evolution has recognized as fulfilling:

Hunt or gather food
Cook the food
Collect wood for a fire
Build a fire
Build a home
Explore the earth around you
Do nothing, after a tiring day’s work

Here are things you might do in the Artificial Life:

Have food delivered to you in 35 minutes
Set your Nest to 74 degrees
Turn on your digital fireplace
Build a home in Minecraft
Explore Twitter
Do nothing, after a tiring day’s work, and feel guilty for doing so

Is it any wonder why fulfillment is lacking in abundance in cities?

I spend a lot of time fine-tuning my artificial life to optimize for fulfillment and peace. I make progress, but it’s always fleeting. The wisdom which I might have gained a few weeks ago about being more present is today no longer cutting it. I need something new. So I go search, for the same thing, in a different package.

And this cycle repeats, and repeats, and repeats. I might just be ok realizing there is no fulfilling city life. Not until a bridge is built between the abstract and the physical. Not until our bodies understand where they are.

Presently, they haven't got a clue.

Imaginary

Mo — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 23:02:53 +0000

Sometimes, when I’m deep in it, I think that there are several billion people on the planet, all worrying after something. Each and every one has found some way to entertain their mind with the wonderfully wicked world of what if. And it must be, if each of us is worrying ceaselessly after something—it must be that our worlds aren’t as real as we think they are.

Sometimes, it helps to know that my problems are sort of...imaginary.

After reading the above to myself, I realize another aspect, which is perfectly contradicting.

Emergence is a wild phenomenon, and something that would by definition be impossible for the individual to recognize. Emergence, put simply, is the phenomenon whereby the sum of the parts exhibit behaviors not present in the constituents. Wikipedia:

Emergence is a phenomenon whereby larger entities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities such that the larger entities exhibit properties the smaller/simpler entities do not exhibit.

Perhaps our worrying is a great contribution we make to the collective entity that is Human Emergent? I'm accustomed to viewing worrying as a bug, not a feature; a vestigial trait. But, I don't even have to contemplate the bigger picture aloud: it's clear something's up. This level of advancement, while infinitely underwhelming, appears to be unheard of.

Perhaps our sadness, worry, and anxiety is a uniquely delicious nutrient for Human Emergent?

This Kurzgesagt video delivers a quick mind-blow on the topic:
Emergence – How Stupid Things Become Smart Together

Chaos Theory

Mo — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 20:10:25 +0000

Not writing yesterday felt so good. And, now that I'm off the hook to produce on a fixed schedule, I can write flexibly whenever I want, in between tasks, like right now, at 2pm. I am no longer my own boss.

I came across a really good quote the other day, which describes a theory of life in surprisingly succinct terms, in a way I hadn't encountered before.

The quote comes from, of all places, a movie on Netflix called When We First Met, which was actually pretty good.

Down on luck person:

I thought things were supposed to happen for a reason.

Other, chill person:

That's what strippers and idiots say. Things happen..randomly. For no reason at all. But they create opportunities. And you learn from those opportunities, even the missed ones. The question is, can you recognize that next opportunity, when it matters the most?

Random shit flies every which way -> creates opportunities -> rewards distributed to those who recognize and work towards the opportunities.

What I like about this is it puts the onus on the individual to be keen and perceptive. It's a finding game. We never stopped being hunter-gatherers.

Masterless

Mo — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 02:49:09 +0000

Honestly, I wanted “Time is patient” to be my last post for a while. Because it so perfectly captured what I wanted to spend my time on. To live presently, and to not be in constant thought, focus, and anxiety.

Writing every day has many benefits, but it has also produced some strange effects. One is, I express myself so vividly here, that I do not feel the need to express myself any further, in real life. It sort of gives me my social fix. I was already reserved before this; now, it's intensified. Besides, I usually like talking to people as a way of deceitfully working out my own problems, disguised as genuine conversation. When I write every day, my problems are worked out on paper.

Which is good. But also exhausting.

I’m not defeated. I’m not sad. Today was actually a nice day. Fair weathered and fair tempered. A cool 56 degrees. I went on a nice walk with only a sweater, and not my thick winter jacket. It was a preview of the spring to come, which winter always teases us with before descending back into arctic temperatures, then easing all at once into spring. It's a coming which I so look forward to every year.

The thought of toning down the frequency of writing is scary. It’s been a tremendously useful habit, but, I am obliged to it. I am not free in a given day until I finish my daily writing. My friends know this. My wife knows this. It’s shackled me as a merciful master. But a master nonetheless.

I want to explore the patience of time. To live slowly, in the moment; unquestioning and unassuming. To tone down my analytics.

Perhaps it would be amusing to explore different writing formats and frequencies? Once a week? A month? Perhaps that will give me more time to incubate my thoughts, and discover their depth.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll write again tomorrow. But this is me flirting with you, to absolve me of my social contract. I want to be free.

A world awaits

Mo — Tue, 27 Feb 2018 01:09:17 +0000

What I like most about vacations is the difficulty with which I come to a decision in going, and the ease at which I feel when I return. Even bad trips invigorate me in some way. It’s escaping your circumstances just a little bit; separating you from them, and seeing yourself behave in a different habitat. It’s almost shocking what part of my mood is directly tied to the routine I’ve managed to sink into.

Sinking into is another phrase for complacency, and I think of all the horrible acts we helplessly inflict on ourselves, complacency is the real silent killer. Sitting on the couch is at once the most glorious moment of any day, and the most painful. The further I sink into it, the more my body takes on that shape, and struggles in defining what a normal posture is anymore.

I think it’s the same with routines. They dig deeper into themselves, solidifying their neural weight with every unattested day. Vacations have in every case reset my weights, and unshaped the memory foam of my last several months, allowing me to form a different, and oftentimes more nuanced, pattern.

The logistics of traveling, I loathe, and is enough to deter me from it altogether. It’s planning, choosing, and deciding. The rest is always freeing. I think it would not be totally foolish to say by now, that behind every inconvenience, lies a world of subtle opportunity.

Time is patient

Mo — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:54:37 +0000

One year is really long.

Ten is an era.

A hundred is a lifetime.

A thousand is a millennia.

Ten thousand is incomprehensible.

A hundred thousand years—unimaginably vast.

Yet two million years.

Two million years is the amount of time, give or take, that nature has been thoroughly employed with this side project.

The human species is a project that seems fresh, new, and cutting-edge. Yet it has been a work in progress for countless millions of years, if not billions.

We like to fancy ourselves the apex of nature's technical ability. We are the latest. We believe we are indispensable. Our mission is too important.

But time is patient. If humanity were to wipe its own existence, time will be unfazed and unmoved. What's another two million years raising up a new species, when it has the patience for billions?

If humans destroy themselves fully tomorrow, I do not believe nature would mind spending another five billion years on the problem.

Maybe ten billion. Or twenty.

Or maybe another hundred billion years?

Time is patient.

This understanding has grown recently within me, in response to my utter impatience towards the growth of my work and self.

For the last uncountable number of years, I've constantly told myself, what you're looking for—it's right around the corner. It's so close. You need to hurry.

I've told myself, my story is conclusive. It has a beginning, middle, and end. And I need to race through the pages.

In reality, the story is never ending. The book's pages never stop turning. Racing through it will drive you mad. And sure enough, madness ensued.

The current page of your story, of the whole collective human story, is special and sentimental only in that we are a part of it. On the grand scale of a story which began infinitely many years ago and will continue uninterrupted for another infinite number of years, our pages become not so permanent. They fade. The future is no doubt influenced by the past, but the contents of the past fade, given some eventual number of millions of years.

In some sense, this understanding has freed me from obligations to my legend. I look back on my footprints, and make sure they are neat and tidy. But it need not be so serious. Even if the universe has set for you some specific task, to fill some particular niche—it does not utterly depend on you. Even if it takes another hundred thousand years. The job will eventually be done.

The patience of time is mesmerizing and beautiful. There were humans who struggled about daily life, loved, and suffered two million years ago. And the project continues. Improvements are imperceptible on the daily, monthly, or even yearly scale. It measures progress on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

Nature puts on profound displays of patience, yet I for some reason feel the need to measure myself after every task; to constantly see how far I've come, and how much further I have. It's madness.

Twenty years.

That's the outlook I want. I want to give what I'm working on twenty years, before measuring. Before being expectant. Before contemplating tectonic shifts.

And what's the rush? You're one of infinite characters in a never ending story. Time is forgiving. Live slowly, patiently, presently; you need not reserve all your happiness and adventurousness for some future date when circumstances will be perfectly lukewarm and idyllic. When the story never ends, every point is as good as the next.

Visitors

Mo — Sun, 25 Feb 2018 00:37:25 +0000

We are content to the great gods—
Characters,
of a never ending story.

Bye bye

Mo — Sat, 24 Feb 2018 00:18:59 +0000

I'm taking a spontaneous, much-needed road trip to some remote cabin in Wisconsin with the wife and dog. The indoor atmosphere here has grown noxious from my ceaseless huffing and puffing. I should leave a window open to air the place out.

I'm leaving..right now actually. Coming back Sunday.

Vacations are a great way to test the resolve of your daily routines.

If I stop writing..ah, who cares.

Lethargy

Mo — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 00:29:29 +0000

This winter's been long. It's gotten me trapped indoors. My dog and I yearn for freedom. Change is afoot. I just..need to..snap from..this haze..

Because title, here's a dump of some unexpounded thoughts:

Every day, we choose when to resign.

Life is impossible to fill. It’s just too big.

“It has solved a lot of problems, but it's also created a whole new set of problems” is probably the best deal you’ll get in life.

Growth doesn’t operate on the same timescale as consciousness

You can’t skip quality. Nothing is more effective than confidence in your own product.

The natural course of a public company is to Amazonify.

What if Elon Musk's flamethrower is a way to slowly begin desensitizing us to the prospect of SpaceX selling weapons?

You won’t like someone you never met.

Say what you will about it, Twitter excels at delivering the basic function of a social network. Have you ever felt this undetachably connected before?

Every night at 11pm, I want to sleep more than I want a billion dollars.

...

An old friend

Mo — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:02:12 +0000

As predicted, the big project is complete, and now I’m impatiently trying to figure out what’s next. Do I code more? Do I do more marketing, whatever that is? Do I live off daily maintenance chores? These things should be easy. Why is this stuff not easy? Ahhhh. It should just be automatic. I figure at every "next" point my compass will automatically recalibrate. Instead, it seems to shatter completely, forcing me to assemble a new one from some unknown materials.

It’s frustrating how non-responsive life can be at times. By this point I am probably irreversibly trained to respond to positive events in realtime. Everything on the internet is realtime. Everything in the non-digital world moves much more slowly. This confuses my brain, especially as it pertains to the topic of notifications, or analytics, or any form of measuring. In the real world, measuring cannot be done every time you pull-to-refresh. It's more on the order of months and years. But when you introduce speed-of-light into the equation, the brain grows befogged.

I’ve disabled realtime measuring of my progress, but, without a concrete next step, it’s just listless idling.

Let me struggle with this for a couple days/months.

God damn it.

Resourceful

Mo — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 01:55:54 +0000

I’ve moved on to the third of the Dan Brown reading series, and at this point have grown just a little bit tired of the same plot-and-twist. But, his writing is instructional, so I'm attempting to stick it out. This book is Inferno, and—it may just be me—but it lacks the same profundity of topic as the others (The Da Vinci Code and Origin). I did however encounter one subtle passage that caught me meandering:

Vayentha swallowed hard, scarcely daring to imagine the possibility. Has Langdon eluded Brüder as well? It seemed unthinkable; the chances of escape had been near zero. Then again, Langdon was not working alone, and Vayentha had experienced firsthand how resourceful the blond woman could be.

The word resourceful at the end sounds humble and unassuming, but, as demonstrated in this military-level scenario, is deceptively capable of outwitting even the most formidable opponents. Resourceful is defined as: having the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulty.

Wow.

Finds quick and clever ways to overcome difficulty. I want to be that strain of algorithm. And, said about someone else, I can think of no more worthy a compliment. It says—have away with your intelligence, charm, and confidence; if I shall find a way to dance just once with the pure form of this trait, then I will have died a happy, accomplished man.

Hardcoded

Mo — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 01:20:50 +0000

There is one recurring aspect of my life that always shackles me. My dependence on external activity. Notifications.

Notifications of themselves carry no meaning and have no inherent value. I had been in one very particular setting so uncontrollably enamored by the interfacial beauty of a notification, that I glorified and fell weak at all the powers it had on me. Is it the font color? The way it says that word? No, it’s the dopameaning we’ve ascribed to that particular shape on a screen.

I don’t have to go into detail about which nature of notifications have me personally enslaved. It’s arbitrary. But we all know the sort. Some days, I live wholly notification-to-notification. I smoke them more habitually than a stone-hooked three-pack-a-day smoker. In between, it’s that scratching anxiety. When will I have the next one? How about..now!

Of course, it’s all glory and self-ejaculation until you flip your phone and…nothing. A sour punch in the face. Really?

Any reasonable person observing this behavior in themselves would immediately be appalled at its inelegance and correct it at once. But, I never notice it. I never notice it’s happening, until precisely all the damage has been done. Knocked out, misshapen, and heavily inclined to the ground, I start to figure something must be wrong.

And it’s painfully glaring once you notice it.

Earlier today, I took steps to cull the notifications that make it to the fore of my attention. I don’t need to know everything the second it happens. It can wait. I’ve replaced my real-time reports of business activity with daily reports that email me once in the morning everything I need to know. I figure this way, you can only be insulted once.

I’ve even hardcoded positive messages like “you had #{num_signups} yesterday, which is fantastic” and “your recurring revenue total is #{total}, which is excellent, and means you can continue doing this for a long time to come.” I've even made a weekly report with a postscript that reminds me something I so easily forget: "Keep doing what you're doing. This is it. You're already here. Just do the best work you can, every day."

I figure, if we’re so gullible as to be furiously enthralled with a bubble on a screen, might as well spin the story and craft a nice little narrative around it. My petty brain will fall for shit like that any day of the week.

Uncertainly Free

Mo — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 23:27:43 +0000

In the definitions of freedom we’ve been exploring in the last few posts, we happened on the most suitable as the lack of dependence on arbitrary powers. And I had figured, since I don’t have a boss, that I’m pretty free, and should feel pretty good all the time.

But, I don’t always feel good. Sometimes, I feel as bad as I ever felt at a job. Of course, they’re different strands of pain. But pain nonetheless. And I think if we were to explore more deeply the definition of freedom we’ve been entertaining, we would ultimately arrive at the conclusion that it is impossible to free. You could remove all external dependencies from your life, such as a boss, a state, or an abusive spouse. And you would imagine, after all the limiters have been removed, that you’d feel free. But there is one thing you can never be free from.

You will always be dependent on effect. You may have freedom to be the cause, to perform an action, but ultimately, you are dependent on the outcome. The definition of freedom as stated is a lack of dependence on an arbitrary power that may act with impunity without tracking your consent. By that definition, that’s exactly what life is. It’ll rough you up without your permission and without ever looking back.

I’ve been on existential edge the last few days, highly prickly and sensitive. I am utterly at the mercy of the universe, and the fate it bestows on me. I, You are at the mercy of uncertainty. Of not knowing whether this day will be your last. Whether your loved ones will fall sick or suffer grave injuries. Whether any of the work you’re doing will matter or pay off. In that way, none of us are free, and all of us feel that same pain. We are all preyed upon equally by the ravenous fangs of the future.

Licenses are the death of freedom

Mo — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 22:46:46 +0000

I wrote yesterday how the definition of freedom can be stated as “the lack of dependence on an arbitrary power,” and that freedom is the sum of your “microliberties” as permeated across the subtleties of your life. Personally, I’ve never been able to handle lack of freedom well, in any situation. No one likes being told what to do. We want to do what we want to do. Freedom is the space to pursue that.

I will say that in the course of my life, government hasn’t been a large impediment to my freedom. College and employment, on the other hand. Really, permission-based environments, no matter how wonderful they seem at first, eventually become a prison. I’ll always reach a point where what I want to do is not what is wanted of me to do. The ticking starts then.

The only other area of my life where I have felt restricted upon is with licenses. “Permission to operate.” If you want to submit an app to the app store, first you need to seek permission from your local government to establish a corporation. They usually say yes, but nevertheless, have the arbitrary power to say no.

You then seek permission to join the Apple Developer Program. This requires you to have a “DUNS” number, which is a sort of business and address verification done by an external company. They usually don’t give you any trouble, but nonetheless, have the arbitrary power to say no.

After you are accepted into the program and spend a year developing the app of your dreams, you must seek permission to post your app on the app store. Here, anything goes. They might say yes. Or they might say no. I’ve been rejected for vague reasons many times. And every time, I fear my livelihood is at stake. In this regard, I am not free. I am a faithful servant to the Apple gods. Please, blessed Apple, do not cast upon me your wrath, and continue to shower me with the sweet nectar of your graciousness. Amen.

Licenses are also how markets are controlled. It’s easy to control supply and demand when any one who supplies needs permission to do so, and in many cases, the demander requires permission as well.

This isn’t a blanket assault on the mere concept of licenses, as it has been a useful construct. Rather, it’s an assessment of our circumstance as software developers producing goods for an entity that ultimately controls the supply of these goods. In that regard, while that entity may not frequently exercise its power of rejection, the mere presence of that arbitrary power, in the aforementioned definition, is deemed sufficient circumstances for a non-free existence.

A definition of freedom

Mo — Sat, 17 Feb 2018 01:23:44 +0000

I happened on a video lecture on the genealogy of liberty, posing the question: In most precise terms, what is the definition of freedom? Language is quite literally the architect of our reality, and a clear definition of freedom is of grave significance.

The lecturer had presented various historical definitions of freedom, beginning with freedom as the power to pursue an option and the lack of external interference in doing so. This worked well enough for some time, until it became important to define “interference." Interference was then defined to be any of physical force, a bending of will, or coercion that render the pursuit of alternatives ineligible. That was fine for some time, until it became important to define coercion, and so on.

Further down the trace, he introduces self-interference as a form by which one can limit their freedom, including but not limited to passion, inauthenticity, and false consciousness. An alternate definition of freedom was then introduced as the freedom to self-realize, or, for one to have the ability to discover the essence of their nature, which I really liked.

The lecture culminated in a new definition of liberty proposed by the author himself, and this is where things began to get interesting.

He states: You are not a free man or woman if there is dependence on the arbitrary will or power of others. He says, the mere fact of dependence takes away freedom of action. And of course, as I was hoping he might, he lists “dependence on the arbitrary power of bosses.”

So, what is this distinction between the free and the slave? The answer given in the Roman law — and it’s extremely influential — is that it’s the mere fact of having a master that makes you unfree. The mere fact, that is, of living in a state of dependence on the arbitrary will of somebody else.

I think what’s interesting is the seeming evolution of freedom as something originally related to that of physical or coercive obstruction, usually executed by a governing state, to a sort of permeation of "microliberties" in everything we do, the sum of which is your net liberty. He makes it very clear that this definition of your dependence on arbitrary power is agnostic to the source. It could be a state, your boss, or your husband. He makes reference to the plight of women’s historical lack of liberty as due to their unrelenting dependence on men for economic stability.

The dependency that I'm talking about— and this is extremely important to me— is very specific. It is dependency upon a dominating power—it is a status relationship with dominance and dependence—that takes away freedom. So the power that generates the dependence that takes away freedom is an arbitrary power where that power is arbitrary if there is someone who can operate it with impunity, without tracking your interest. They don't have to track your interests. They might, but they don't have to. And if they don't, it's done with impunity.

The important aspect of the author's newly proposed definition is that it references not an active obstruction of liberty, like you might imagine from physical force or mental coercion, but a looming, distant one. You do not have freedom of action if you are at the mercy of a capricious boss, even if this boss has never chastised you before; the mere fact of a boss’s ability to decide your fate if he or she so chooses severely constricts your freedom.

This definition of liberty is one I can strongly relate to, as can probably many of you. It’s the reason employment can feel so excruciatingly painful at times. It seems, it’s no mistake. In the pure definition of it, it's slavery.

You can watch the full lecture here:
A Genealogy of Liberty: A Lecture by Quentin Skinner

A React Native tutorial

Mo — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:45:54 +0000

I wrote an article with a headline I won't apologize for on Medium some time ago about my experience with React Native. Since then, I still get the occasional comment or message asking the same question:

Do you have any tutorials you recommend?

This is a bizarre phenomenon that seems to emerge with large numbers, and I don’t quite get it. Find any article or tweet praising a framework, and you will invariably see comments of the same nature. Can you help me get started?

Better yet, when I said to one person that I don’t know of any resources other than the main website off the top of my head, he said “can you write one please?”

So here it is. Here is the definitive React Native tutorial that will allow you to build the cross-platform app of your dreams.

Step 1.

Clear your mind. Think about what it is you’re trying to accomplish. You want to build an app that runs on Android and iOS, and you want to write it in JavaScript. Great.

You should have also decided by now that this is important to you, and that you're going to do whatever it takes.

Step 2.

Open your favorite browser, and using your favorite search engine, type “react native”. Click the first result.

Step 3.

Click the button that says “Get Started”.

Congratulations! You’ve quite literally just taken the biggest step. There’s only one more, and, unfortunately, it's a steep one.

Step 4.

Commit yourself to these docs, reading, following along, crafting demos, every day for a few hours. Everything you need to build the app of your dreams is in here. You just need to put in the time.

Zzzzz...

Mo — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 01:19:01 +0000

I screwed up today. At 3:45am, I surprised myself awake. I was then faced with an important decision: check phone, or don’t check phone.

The rules are simple: if I check my phone, I’ll be riled up by some alert, and won’t be able to fall back asleep.

If I don’t check my phone, I’ll be antsy.

This isn’t a common occurrence. It’s only because I finally launched the big update. Lots of moving parts, and from the time I fell asleep, tectonic shifts may have occurred.

So I checked it.

And I’ve been awake ever since.

I skipped morning coffee, thinking I might be able to take an early nap and catch up. No dice. Have been responding to emails all day. My favorite part of the job, but also the most demanding. A blaring headache, also uncommon, began to crystalize at around 3pm, reverberating sharp ringing pangs in my skull. I scrambled to pour a cup of coffee down my throat, and my brain was appeased.

There’s no telling when I’ll fall asleep today.

Meticulously Explicit

Mo — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 01:44:34 +0000

It goes without saying, but it’s always easy to forget:

Be explicit. But be especially explicit with your intentions.

Several years ago, I underwent a metarough transition from a worldview of “things will align by themselves” to “only yourself can possibly care enough to justify your alignment.”

It’s awkwardly phrased, but it wasn’t until I began being what you might even call meticulously explicit that I began seeing growth or results that I was contented with.

At any given point, one must be able to distill what they desire so precisely, that the resulting analysis is mistaken for a PhD dissertation.

If you can’t distill it, then the next step in store will probably not be some incidence of “Go Directly to Results and Collect $1M”—the next step will have to be you figuring it out.

That’s always the next step before the next step.

You can be made to believe

Mo — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:35:16 +0000

Let’s represent a day as an array of events.

day = []

As the day progresses in infinite fashion, events are piled on:

while today:
    day.push(new Event)

(Of course, this isn’t a singleton. Everyone has their own day. But let's keep it simple.)

There are too many events in a day. Publications found an excellent market opportunity by culling events, chaining them together, and adding some makeup to tell a story. This story is called a piece.

A piece is not truth. It is not fact. It is not journalism. The resulting curation is not by any means a pure reflection of some objective, inherent reality.

It is a curation performed manually by human beings operating on teams with cultures, in relationships with cultures, raised by families with cultures, and abiding by their own self-formed cultural compass. The result is not some magical formula for truth.

By their very nature, pieces are more of an omission of facts than a curation of them. This is common sense. But, as a reminder:

Articles, non-fiction, documentaries, news, journalism, (tweets?): these are some of the most evolved, incisive, well-tuned devices aimed at convincing or portraying. Simply put: their sole utility is to captivate. Do you think any reputable artist would do a botched job at that?

That you were convinced by some documentary implies not that it had done a good job at compiling facts, but that it had done a good job at performing the one function it was designed for.

All this nonsense to say: be not so fickle. Mistaking an article’s efficacy at convincing you as a measure of its truth and merit is like believing the clean diesel Volkswagen you bought from the convincing salesman is truly the most efficient, cleanest diesel car there is. When in reality, the man was just really good at his job.

He may have also left out some important details.

The Volkswagen dig is of course a reference to the cheat devices placed in their "clean" diesel vehicles, defrauding consumers all across America. I was reminded of it recently through watching Dirty Money on Netflix, a new documentary series exploring the gray areas of capitalism. The series does an excellent job of not passing judgement, but portrays multiple angles and leaves the verdict to you. DIY pieces can be a hit on convenience, but are a welcome reprieve from the endless barrage of prepackaged bundles of opinion being gobbled up all over the world wide web.

No Competiton

Mo — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 19:18:46 +0000

In the modern winter, you just can’t compete with the indoors. From a touch on your phone, warmed streams of air trickle from the low heavens and dance with the tiny hairs on your ear. A particle-reenactor presents you with a dizzying supply of drama, comedy, and commentary. And why not pick up a game controller, and manipulate the glowing particles to your will, while delivering the reverberations of your larynx through thin air to fellow waking meat bags thousands of miles away? Perhaps you care to join in the frenzy of the global bazaar and instantly soak in the lives and opinions of millions of others? Or, perhaps you wish to command the gravitation of any item you fancy delivered directly to your home no later than tomorrow?

All can be arranged for you in the great, modern indoors. No black slushy ice resting at the bottom of your feet, streaking the floor with wet prints and attacking your carpets with an endless supply of non-savory salt. No dramatic accelerations of pulse as you rush from building to building heaving and weary; no shortness of breath that must be compensated for. No beach-cold winds gnawing and slapping at your face every which way.

Just warm air and smooth calming lights.

This weekend, Chicago was hit with a barrage of snow, blanketing the streets and rendering cars immovable.

On Friday night, the dog’s sustenance bag had run dry, so I opened my particle-syncer to amazon, and placed two bags of delicious rock balls in my cart, and amazon, seemingly unaware of the present snowpocalypse, offered to have my package for me by tomorrow. I said, go home amazon, you’re drunk. There’s no way you’re getting my package here by tomorrow.

It snowed a little more on Saturday, and around 6pm, I get a call from a Seattle area code, which I know to be amazon.

My package had arrived.

...

My (uncontrollably outgoing) friend asked me if I wanted to head out in the muddy freezing chaos and perhaps go see some live music?

I said, have you gone mad mate?

My wife asked me if I wanted to go sledding on the freshly fluffed snow hills some thirty miles away. I said, have you gone mad dear?

In the winter, there’s no competing with the modern indoors.

Lossless Writing

Mo — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 01:38:17 +0000

I stayed home over the past few days, as promised, to catch my solar breath, and feel better for having done so. But, it has meant less reading, since commutes are a golden time to read. I had only two chapters remaining in The Da Vinci Code, so I just checked out a block of time to finish it today—and, what an excellent, excellent book. My mouth gaped at the eloquence of description and the warm glowing aura Brown successfully describes in the last few chapters. I read over some of the descriptions multiple times, trying to figure out how it is humanly possible to chain words in such affecting order:

Neither of them spoke for a long time. Finally Sophie reached over and, taking his hand, led him out of the chapel. They walked to a small rise on the bluff. From here, the Scottish countryside spread out before them, suffused in a pale moonlight that sifted through the departing clouds. They stood in silence, holding hands, both of them fighting the descending shroud of exhaustion.

The stars were just now appearing, but to the east, a single point of light glowed brighter than any other. Langdon smiled when he saw it. It was Venus. The ancient Goddess shining down with her steady and patient light.

The night was growing cooler, a crisp breeze rolling up from the lowlands. After a while, Langdon looked over at Sophie. Her eyes were closed, her lips relaxed in a contented smile. Langdon could feel his own eyes growing heavy. Reluctantly, he squeezed her hand. “Sophie?”

Slowly, she opened her eyes and turned to him. Her face was beautiful in the moonlight. She gave him a sleepy smile. “Hi.”

and

Legend had always portrayed the Grail as a cruel mistress, dancing in the shadows just out of sight, whispering in your ear, luring you one more step and then evaporating into the mist.

Gazing out at the rustling trees of College Garden, Langdon sensed her playful presence. The signs were everywhere. Like a taunting silhouette emerging from the fog, the branches of Britain’s oldest apple tree burgeoned with five-petaled blossoms, all glistening like Venus. The goddess was in the garden now. She was dancing in the rain, singing songs of the ages, peeking out from behind the bud-filled branches as if to remind Langdon that the fruit of knowledge was growing just beyond his reach.

How? How? The trick, it seems, is easy enough: describe physical things in as few fitting words as possible.

In times like this I am both frustrated and inspired. I have no desire to write fiction, but writing is like programming is like Rocket League—you have everything you need to be as good as the pros right in front of you. You just have to put in the time. It's a mental muscle. And it can be exercised.

With writing, it would seem like all you need is a pen and paper, and some flexing of the imagination. It's translating thoughts into words with as little loss as possible. The "loss" ratio in conversion—that's where great writers are made. And mine is frustratingly high. It has improved slightly in that at least I know now what to be optimizing for; what to train. I soak myself in it the way I soak myself in getting better at playing a video game—not because I have any real ambitions in them, but because it's so damn fun teaching yourself new tricks.

Here are some other highlights I made on the book, presented without comment:

When an intelligence agency intercepted a code containing sensitive data, cryptographers each worked on a discrete section of the code. This way, when they broke it, no single cryptographer possessed the entire deciphered message.

“Maybe.” Her grandfather winked. “Someday I’ll tell you all about it.”

Sophie stamped her foot. “I told you I don’t like secrets!”

“Princess,” he smiled. “Life is filled with secrets. You can’t learn them all at once.”

This kind of cross carried none of the Christian connotations of crucifixion associated with the longer-stemmed Latin Cross, originated by Romans as a torture device. Langdon was always surprised how few Christians who gazed upon “the crucifix” realized their symbol’s violent history was reflected in its very name: “cross” and “crucifix” came from the Latin verb cruciare—to torture.

Just a deafening silence, which seemed to reverberate back and forth as if the building were whispering to itself.

Their white lacework carvings seemed to smolder with a ruddy glow as the last of the day’s sunlight streamed in through the west window.

Words I hadn't encountered before, or words whose meaning is self-evident, but that I probably wouldn't have ever thought to use:

tousled, brunt, goaded, sallow, diminutive, whir, foreboding, sepulchral, marauding, nape, flagellation, cloistered, asceticism, neophytes, cassock, glowered, pallid, navel, ghoulish, luminescing, scrawled, "the cobwebs of sleep", sangfroid, genuflected, windswept, lurid, enciphered, wonderment, sculler, "vaulted ceilings", transmogrification, ecumenical, despondent, victuals, plight, bellowed, begrudgingly, crestfallen, "niche and alcove", expanses, prismatic, transept, flanked, recumbent, warren, bristle, munificence, wheeled, gallant, beseeching, heavenward, puttering...

Launch

Mo — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 02:10:09 +0000

It’s been an eerie calm before the storm. Just like beautiful summer days that turn stormy with a flash of lightening, my mood unexpectedly turns long-term solemn in an instant. My days have been filled with resounding purpose and determination doing work on the new update, and I fear uncertainty follows.

There was a moment in Silicon Valley when the team was about to hit the “Launch” button on their platform. Seconds after launch, they erupt in spontaneous success.

It’s been my experience that the “Launch” button on products behaves more like the “Close Door” button on elevators—namely, nothing happens. Instead, it’s like trying to solve a murder. You stare puzzled at the streaks of blood all around you and wonder—what happened here? It’s within that investigation that you learn more about yourself and the product, and begin making the gains you thought you’d make overnight.

The consumer isn’t stupid

Mo — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 23:51:26 +0000

I asked a friend who’s a “journalism connoisseur” whether he has a paid subscription to any news publications. He said only one: Foreign Affairs. Initially, his school had paid for digital access, but after he graduated, he kept the subscription active and put in his own payment information. I asked how often he accessed his subscription content, and he said not that often. Then why keep a subscription? He said, “I’m a fan of the work they do and I want to see more of it.”

My head exploded instantly. Why people pay is an important question for any marketer to understand, and having to wear that hat every once in a while myself makes this question a recurring fascination. But the reason his response blew my mind was because: Oh wow, you’re like that too?

Like that means, you understand the power you have as a consumer to shape and influence the future. The raw power of voting with your dollar. If you want to see more of something in the world, when you want to be the change you wish to see, purchasing products which resonate with your beliefs is a decent means to that end. But even more fascinating is the innate selfishness of the whole act: You buy something because it represents your ideas, and you want your ideas to spread. You want more of you.

Here’s the thing: I had, in all my biases, been under the impression that this was an “advanced” way of consuming, because I had only myself been awoken to this reality only several years ago, made probably in part by Netflix food and health documentaries espousing the importance of buying foods from people who do it right.

But my friend says, not so. He says that most people understand that when you purchase something, you’re spreading the seeds of the ideas which they inhabit, empowering them to nourish and grow.

In situations like these, where I perhaps don't always have the luxury of getting to know each and every person I encounter individually, it helps to know that whatever I am, whatever you are, is likely not unique of anything, but a symptom of the whole. If I watched some documentaries on Netflix and awoke to the powerful new reality of voting with your dollar, then it’s likely that my awakening is only a symptom of the whole, of a larger movement, and not some exclusive right of passage.

There is a (now woefully outdated) quote from some famous marketer ages ago that speaks of the importance of not underestimating your customer: “The consumer isn’t stupid; she’s your wife.” I think we can rebrand that today to: “The consumer isn’t stupid. They’re you."

Melted

Mo — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 22:48:04 +0000

Tired today. Fatigued. I’ve just noticed it, but I’ve been in an adrenaline fueled frenzy the past few weeks. Going fast. Extremely productive, but tiring. On the first sign of light I immediately rise and resume my robotic trance, and perform the morning ceremonials while anxiously observing the availability of the next bus. I’ll always over or under shoot, so there’s always either lengthy waiting or needless rushing—never in between. The snow is wet and heavy, and each lifting of my boot anchored leg requires exorbitant amounts of energy, in relative terms.

I'll spend the next half hour catching my breath and a little of the book I'm reading. After several busy stops, the bus dumps me back onto the icy road, where I'll trudge and drudge my way to the could-be-a-little-closer building. I reach for the first door my hand can reach and pull back the handle with an almost detaching force, hurtling my way inside to escape the cold and catch my breath. I then ascend (ok, am ascended) to the office, and proceed to stand laptop-facing for the next five hours (sitting = pain) under a caffeine induced marathon of crossing off todos. After I begin encountering heavy signs of physical and mental resistance, I pack it up and repeat the whole trip but in reverse, walking then running to the stop, waiting in the nipping cold, loading, unloading, running, ascending, unlocking. By the time I get inside I just fall.

Today I decided I would not time it. I'll walk comfortably to the bus stop at my own pace. If it's there, it's there, if it's not, I'll wait. It was serene.

There are no negative emotions bubbling up, so that's good. Just physical fatigue. I told myself to stay home today, but I couldn’t risk destroying the momentum of a useful routine. What if I’m just being lazy?

Today confirmed it wasn’t mental. My body needs rest. I should stay home tomorrow.

The solution to fake news is more fake news

Mo — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 22:58:22 +0000

Or, it’s an interesting proposition. “Fake news” is a complicated problem, and yet I think rather than setting both human and automated criteria for what constitutes truth, overproducing fiction can have a similar but self-selecting effect. Namely, skepticism. A little of it wouldn’t hurt right now. I think there are two differing options for reality, or a blend in between:

Truth is curated by a handful of entities. Which in turn teaches reliance and trust on these entities. Which in turn creates inevitable tension and harvests an environment ripe for abuse of power.
There is such a large overabundance of fake and true news alike, that no one really knows what to believe anymore. In the context of “educated citizens,” this can be bad, but on the other hand, it does preach self-reliance. One will be forced to learn the skill to discern what is true and what is not for themselves. This particular sense on me has only become more acute in the last few years.

Is it safe to say that everyone knows a friend that lies entirely too much? Assume you have a person, and you are offered only two choices:

Believe everything this person says.
Believe nothing this person says.

I think we make it further with #2. Cooperation is of course important, so maybe that can be rephrased as: the extent to which one is a sucker is the extent of the ratio between the two.

Problem solver

Mo — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 20:55:38 +0000

I’ve had a broken experience with employment. And these experiences have led me to believe that employment as is traditionally done today is broken. Others may have different experiences, and some others might even swear by their job. I don’t doubt it. Yet I know a lot of others who have succumbed to the slow rotting of what I could only describe as profoundly subtle misery.

I think employment can be made to work. But in the interest of squeezing every last oozing drop of utility from an employee, companies have made the entire arrangement utterly inhospitable. But assuming you manage to get by the unreasonable request of dedicating your life entirely to a schedule forced on you by someone else, where one has to seek grave and even apologetic permission to take time off, the most excruciating aspect can be the repetitiveness of it all.

Titles definitely don’t help. Your signing of the contract is your birth in a company, and you’re immediately stamped some ultimately restricting role like “front-end developer” or “ui designer”. So you come in, excited to perform your ceremonial duties, and you excel at oozing utility in the direction set upon you. How long before you yearn to do something else? Anything else. I'll start fantasizing about the most mundane jobs, and think how much happier I would be. Ah, imagine if I could just quit and drive an uber, or, What I wouldn’t do to be a waiter at this restaurant. It's a deeply visceral and unjustifiably biological craving for something new. And if I've learned anything, it's that our mind is possessed with an uncanny ability to manipulate reality to get what it wants.

This problem could have easily been solved for me by the employer were they not so washed up in how everyone else in corporate america has done it for a hundred years. Worked for them.

I like the idea of denoting every employee with a general title like “problem solver”. Each person wears a shirt of tags on them (figuratively. Or maybe literally?) that specify the nature of problems they are well-geared at solving.

“front-end design” “python” “writing” “high-level ideation”

The company then maintains an open board of “available problems”, each possessing a list of tags that may be required to solve it. Employees, now honorably known as problem solvers, apply or announce their candidacy for tackling a problem, either individually or cooperatively.

A problem can be anything.

Open Problems (43)

Name: Mobile App

Tags: mobile, ios, android, apps, swift, java, javascript, high-level brainstorming, design, marketing, accessibility

Estimated problem size: 3-4 months +/– 2 years.

I don’t know about you, but just the thought of this arrangement has me salivating.

Win by one

Mo — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 23:12:53 +0000

Winning usually involves possessing just 1 more than the opponent. One more of what? Anything. This was sort of the stunning insight that led to AlphaGo’s dominance over its human counterparts. (AlphaGo is an AI developed by Google DeepMind, and is also the eponymously named documentary on Netflix.) At a game like Go, optimizing a game for winning by just one would be nearly impossible for a human to accomplish. For an AI? I tremble just thinking about that level of forethought and incisiveness.

This thought revisits me today because my primary strategy in games seems to be acquire many more points than the opponent. And if I’m up by 1, instead of saying excellent with a devilish grin, I say, excellent—now to get some more!

I’m aroused by the simple yet fatiguing aspect of relentlessly holding, or planning for, a simple one point lead against an opponent who is taken off guard and expecting to play against a greedy, human opponent. I rub my chin (in mostly futile contemplation) and wonder what other scenarios a “win by one”-like strategy can be employed in against an unassuming rival.

Fond Contempt

Mo — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 02:22:27 +0000

Part of the reason I like to challenge myself to write everyday is to get over, as my friend calls it, the sacredness of art. When we believe the work we put out is the most important thing the world will ever see, it creates too much ceremony around something that should be casual.

Case in point: In the beginning of Standard Notes, there was a lot of development work to do, but I still needed to echo out signals of existence from this corner of the world. So I would write some piece on some relevant topic, maybe once or twice a month, and put it out into the world with great hope and anticipation. Because these were “ceremonious” occasions, I grew greatly disheartened when crickets befell my sacred work.

Really, that sacredness with which you revere your own work, or the idea of your work, is a strong withholding force. It optimizes for perfection, which usually means unshipped. The biggest unforeseen effect of writing every day? It completely destroyed any idea of reverence or sacredness for my work. It is so unvaluable in fact, that I know I will produce one each day, interesting or not. This anchors more on blasphemy than sacred.

This is something that I haven’t fully conquered. I still take many mediums far too seriously. But on this medium—where I constantly fantasize about never having started this silly flow in the first place—the unobstructed path before me, devoid of holy walls and ritual, has engendered a new kind of flowing creativity, which uses any scrap or piece and repurposes it into some other form.

You ever watch a long-running, really good TV show, and wonder—how do these writers keep whipping up great new obstacles and stories for these characters?

This bewildered me for some time, but I now know the answer: They have to.

Pure Capitalism

Mo — Sat, 03 Feb 2018 01:00:04 +0000

I came across a tweet on John Deere’s practice of encrypting software on their machines to limit what repairs farmers can do themselves, and on the emergence of a nascent network of farmers trading encryption keys online.

On the one hand—beautifully done. This is a magnificent display of capitalism, and is awe worthy just in that regard. On the other hand—what about the farmers?

Pure Capitalism and its consequences is a topic of endless fascination, but I am no economist, and have no fresh output on the topic. So I asked the all knowing ai8ball on twitter what it thought about this particular flexing of the capitalistic system, and it generated some interesting results:

>> Fine in a free society. Great opportunity for a competing company. Inspiring early project: http://opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/

>> A natural challenge is "But how could anyone compete with a company as powerful as Deere?" Competition and new arrivals are the bedrock of free markets. The Dow Jones Industrial average has reconfigured which companies are in it 50 times in the last 100 years.

>> I also worked at the most successful company in the history of the world - literally. And when I left there, my first thought was "Damn, I could definitely compete with this company." Size and dominance have their advantages, but they also definitely have their weaknesses.

>> Finally, remember that every law you add to your society has to be backed, ultimately, by force. So from a libertarian perspective, it has to be a very good reason. Should Deere encrypt their tractors, probably not. Would I use violence to stop it? Definitely not.

>> Most people don't see laws as being backed by violence, but that's only because they're not the ones doing the enforcing. I think it's immoral to ask someone else to perform violence that you wouldn't be willing to perform yourself.

Thoughtful

Mo — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 02:16:24 +0000

I had a rough day today for whatever reason, and was on my way home antsy to just sit down and eject myself from the world and play some video games. But then a horrific thought hit me—what if I didn’t charge the headset? I’d been too lazy to take the extra step to plug it in every night, and I felt like I hadn’t charged it in a while. It’s died on me before mid-game, and being the only way to have both input and output, was absolutely crucial.

I came home, and there it was. The prettiest scene I had ever seen. The headset was snuggling on the table, cozily plugged in to the charger. It looked warm, peaceful, and ready.

Thank you yesterday me. That was really thoughtful of you. You really made my day.

Spinning

Mo — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 01:41:50 +0000

I’m feeling a little delirious today, after having fully exhausted myself the past two days hunting down a dreadful bug. The most dreadful of all bugs: mobile crashes that occur on launch. Fortunately, this was just a beta build, and it was detected quickly by early testers. But, I was absolutely bewildered. What could it possibly be? The crash reports showed nothing. The changes I made in all were inconsequential. So unaffecting, in fact, that I pushed them straight to master. What could possibly go wrong?

I spent the next few days agonizingly trying to reproduce this bug, but no matter what I tried, no matter how much I tortured the application to show any signs of weakness, it excelled. I was actually impressed. Of course, it’s all a front by the application, which knows it’s being observed, so puts on its best behavior.

This bug, I was certain, would be my last. My entire life flashed before me. What if I never figure this out? I know you say that every time, but for real this time. I began carrying a heavy and fearful state of mind, overly sensitive and prickly to every negative thought. During times like these, it’s best to avoid introspection. Your incisions will be harmful. I went home early, and seriously began asking myself, what am I going to do? I’ve done everything I could.

I decided, out of raw desperation, to just brute force it, by walking through every single new line of code and interrogating it. First, I needed to undo the biggest wrong of all, and redirect the new version commits from master into their own branch, so I can easily review the changes. I thought this would be a catastrophic task, but turned out to be as simple as git branch 2.1, git reset HARD~12 (remove 12 commits), git checkout 2.1

I went through every line, tweaking it around to see if making it behave at its worst would have any fatal repercussions. Almost nothing did. But then I found it.

And really, that’s the end of the story. I’ll repeat this episode probably some time in the next few months. Each of these lucid nightmares instantly takes years off my lifespan, and propagates powerful seeds of negativity that, if not immediately severed, stand to contaminate your future. It’s a subtle, but beating effect.

Write everything down

Mo — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 01:29:01 +0000

I get mad at myself when I forget something that would have been very much of help to remember. I’ll be tracking down one bug, and find myself traveling through forgotten worlds whose functioning seems totally alien. What are you? What do you do? Sure, they’ll be some comments here and there, but almost mindless in nature. As if it were a chore.

If only I had written it down. If only I left clues for my forgetful future self. I could be such a more evolved, intelligent being. But instead I say, it’s not important. Or, I’ll remember. Or, surely this doesn’t need to be written down?

I am present self, caught in the mis-circumstances of my habitual non-verbosity, and I write this to every version of my future self: Yes. You need to write it down. Write everything down.

I'll give today 2 stars

Mo — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 21:32:36 +0000

I read something at about 11pm last night that dramatically altered my mood. I went to sleep like that, and now my waking is the manifestation of that seed. It’s the type of thing you can’t shake, because it hits you right where it hurts. And my overall consciousness is diminished by it.

I’m writing about it to evict it from my mind. It’s gotten me in the worst mood, and the sooner I let it out of me, the quicker I can move from it.

There were two small incidents, one which happened last night, and then another small grievance that occurred today that definitely did not help. Last night, I got an email from Google Play informing me that someone had left a new review on Standard Notes. Usually I expect the worst, because internet, but so far, it’s been congenial, and in my cases, glowing, which makes me really happy. This user leaves a review saying that for some reason, the app is refusing my fingerprint. The technical part is bewildering, since the app uses the system scanner directly without any intervention from us, and is an issue I've never heard before. It’s hard to offer support via review replies, so I pray most people will be mindful enough to send an email if there’s a particular issue they’re experiencing. Nonetheless, with vague clues and no chance for discussion, this review was 1 star. That's fine. This wasn’t what got me. I scrolled down a little further and noticed that another user had changed their originally glowing review, from five stars, to one.

This again is fine on its own, if the reasons are justified. I get a lot of positive email and support, which is always so tremendously heart warming and a lubricant to my days. And other times, emails will feel distant and cold. This is usually by no fault of that person. The human element of software can sometimes be distant, so that you feel in the same way you command software to your will, you can also command the people part of it too, like customer support. And this again seems reasonable, given that most software we use is developed by huge corporations to whom we are a statistic bearing no chance of being individually heard. So they expect the same here, expecting their message to never be read by an actual human being somewhere. Almost 100% of people who email coldly and blithely in the beginning immediately change to being genuine and kind when they realize there’s a human on the other end, replying individually to every single message. This pattern has sincerely reaffirmed my belief in the fundamental kindness of humanity, and has taught me to never take a digital message at face value: the person on the other end is almost always capable of profound kindness. This happens when two humans connect, but not when a human feels like they’re connecting to a machine: being kind to machines makes no sense. So we batter on our keyboard and command! our email client to deliver this message at once!

.............pzzziwiwizzzzhshshshhsshhh...............

Oh hello, I’m another person at this end. Ping….

…pzzziwiwizshhh.…Hello....there!……

….Pong…. Message delivered.

In the case of reviews, the incidence that is most frustrating is when a user has decided, firmly and non-negotiably, that this app is not what was needed, and drops the mic with a few unkind words. Frustrating, but not neccessarily imperiling, as has happened today. This user in question decided to go beyond the technical aspect, reach through the screen, and grab directly at the jugular. He said, the app is buggy. And that this is why you can’t do something like this as just one person. You need a group.

Aside from the pros and cons of developing as an individual versus developing as a team, it’s frustrating because, why not come talk to me dude? Like, we can probably make some great progress, if you just reached out to me. Said even Hi! But instead, the door is slammed behind them, leaving no room for discussion. This would be the first time I hear that the Android app is buggy. To the delight of my ears, hands, and heart, feedback about the Android app has been overwhelmingly positive. And now, the mystery of what this user was experiencing that caused him to feel this way will be forever unsolved. Users like these hardly follow up.

The you need a group comment—ahhhh. I don’t want it to, and I’m resisting it, but it's tearing at me. Like…why? I’m not bothered by the substance of the comment itself, just that someone would write it on a dagger and aim it directly at you. You could have lived without making that comment. Your life would be unaltered. Mine? Well, I’m here writing this...

It’s fine. I've just moved past it.

The other incident, which was very minor, but made me bite my teeth down just a tiny bit, was earlier today when I announced the release of the first beta for version 2.1. It feels soooo good to get a beta out. It’s a huge milestone, because shipping anything, even a beta, is hard. I’ve been really happy using it over the past few weeks, and beyond excited for this new navigation UI to replace the current visual look, which from this angle I can say, looks appalling. Beyond excited for it. Within the first two minutes, a user messages me, saying nothing else but: please revert back to old menus and style. Ahhhh. After months of hard work on something, imagine the first thing someone says about it is: please undo it all.

It’s almost hysterical. Now that I think about, it’s comedic. And I feel better now laughing about it.

Proof of work

Mo — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 22:47:36 +0000

Another alternative to yesterday’s post about essentially the "proof of stake” (or proof of influence) system used by physical laws to redistribute matter is the idea that those who work the hardest succeed most in acquiring the things they’re after, or in other words, proof of work.

I realize I may be applying bizarre personifications, or in this case machinifications, to the concept of a “sentient’ universe. This whole set up, including the environment, is ultimately fictional. But I think it’s sort of up for grabs, so it’s fun to fantasize about the different realities we may be living under. With the advent of immersive computing and VR, theories about living in a simulation took on a resolved new credence, and endless theories of the true nature of our reality began to bubble. I don’t fully subscribe to any one particular reality, because it’s impossible to know for sure, but for sure something’s up. This existence is far too suspect.

Proof of work is sort of the generally accepted model by which one succeeds, and includes laborious studying, practicing, perfecting, and specializing. The radius of your physical and social influence is not a factor, or if it were, applying work towards it would be a feasible solution. I do still largely believe in hard work, but one could easily summon countless counterexamples which prove that influence is more important than work. A combination of both (and probably billions of other factors) is most likely at play.

And while we’re using “decentralized consensus” analogies, it’s fun to appreciate just how reflective the workings of a blockchain are to our invented world, namely in that truth is up for vote. And once a group have established a chain of truths, piled on to with influence and work, it becomes ridiculously hard to challenge that reality. Did you know that, record has it, Jesus’s divinity was decided by a council? According to this blockchain, Jesus had been a well respected man, but a mere mortal. Then, in AD 325, the Roman Emperor Constantine organized a meeting named the First Council of Nicaea, where it was decided, for the purpose of gaining a populist political advantage, that Jesus would ascend to divine status, and any mention of his mortality would be immediately scrubbed from the record. Mary Magdalene, who is by this record in fact the wife of Jesus and of royal bloodline, was at once defamed as a prostitute.

I don’t know nearly enough about this topic to have a stake in it, but it’s unbelievably fascinating that a decision agreed upon by a group of hooded figures would so fundamentally and irreversibly shape the next two thousand years of human history. We’ve just been piling blocks of truth on to that aboriginal block set by impossibly unprescient human hands. Two thousand years later, it would require exorbitant amounts of energy to fork from that chain of reality.

The Influence Multiplier

Mo — Sat, 27 Jan 2018 23:00:55 +0000

Everyone gets what they want, relative to their influence. At least, that’s the new principle which I'm presently entertaining regarding the rules by which the “universe” operates. I’ve cycled through many beliefs about this particular question in the past—how do the mechanics of this world, if refusing randomness as a sufficient answer, allocate a participant’s wishes and justify it within the entire system? I used to carry sentimental views on this question, and was an avid enthusiast of the principle that those with “good hearts" get what they want more than others. I would later learn, having inevitably recursed up the class hierarchy to the encapsulating implementation, that good was entirely subjective, and thus not a good measure.

2017 awoke me, and probably many of you, to a much rawer side of reality. Social networks as a whole struggled to reconcile opinion on any topic. This at first strengthened my grip on the importance of facts, but later completely relinquished my grip on the mere concept of a single point of truth, and any hope for an objective reality. In this new world, it’s clear that there are no rules and that there never was. History is written by the winners, but this applies not only on a legendary scale, but on a local, daily scale. We were taught that life was cause and effect, and for every effort, an equal compensation was redistributed. In reality, those who have won on large scales played the roles of both cause and effect. The physical laws of the universe accorded their wishes, or perhaps did nothing to stop them, multiplied by the level of influence they had on neighboring matter and their ability to rearrange it into different orders.

I don’t necessarily mean influence of the social kind. I mean a sort of local, physical influence. An influence measured by the length of the radius that emanates from you as the center. A spotted leopard carries strong influence in his jungle, and his desires for blood are granted on a much grander scale than that of a feeble rodent, no matter how much more ambitious the latter. The size of an organism's ambition seems to be irrelevant if not possessing the proper influence to manifest those wishes, with at least enough emphasis for neighboring matter to take notice.

These half-baked musings unfortunately serve to benefit neither me nor you—I’m not entirely sure being aware of this "fact" does anything to strengthen your influence on matter. Instead, it helps me reconcile the past few wondrous years of new living under a weirdly connected world, and draw bridges between how I once thought the world to function, to the clear new reality that emerged as a result of the endless free-flow of information. Although, I wouldn’t be so confident as to be totally enthralled by any one pithy maxim, like you get what you want relative to your influence—I think chaos theory still comes into play, which seems to just be presently misunderstood market dynamics. But, I don’t mind observing that those with large influence on any market succeed most in acquiring the things they seek.

Chaos. Pure chaos.

Mo — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 22:29:40 +0000

By now, we should have all heard the expression that goes something like “you can’t always get what you want because if everyone got what they wanted the world would be in utter chaos and disarray.”

I asked my wife recently whether she believed if someone wishing bad for you is enough for those wishes to have any concrete effect on your life. In other words, if enough people pray silently to all the gods in the world for your demise, can that possibly materialize into anything? She hesitated. On the one hand, she knew very well that the prospect of your life being negatively affected by the mere act of another’s wishing was preposterous and ungrounded in any material physics. On the other hand, she said jokingly, you have to be careful: the universe is just out there granting everyone’s wishes.

I laughed, but then in a flash revelation thought—holy shit. The world being utter chaos because everyone sort of gets what they want: that’s exactly the world we’re living in.

Problem = solution

Mo — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:45:10 +0000

Something strange just happened. And it happened seemingly overnight.

I mentioned before how I've spent a lot of time sucking in Rocket League on PS4. Nonetheless, I’ve played it consistently. And I’ve seen myself improve very little.

Over the last week, I’ve been thoroughly obsessed with Twitch live streams. I’m late to the party—but have you ever participated in a live stream? It’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever experienced. Essentially, you’re able to control this human being thousands of miles away live on camera, directly from your keyboard. You ask a question, and the streamer—wanting to keep his audience engaged—answers politely, charmingly, and wittily. I tried this a few times, and was smiling all throughout the experience.

I saw a few live coding streams, which number very few—there is great opportunity to be one of the early live streaming coders on Twitch. One developer uses Twitch as his primary marketing source. He’s developed a community around his game, which, as he mentions himself, he would otherwise probably not have gained. Other developers mentioned that part of the reason they stream is its effectiveness at combating laziness. They work harder and are less likely to slack when people are watching.

Anyway, I’ve also been watching some streams of people much better than me playing Rocket League, and I’ve taken notice of some of their tricks and strategies.

I remember just last week cursing myself for having made no perceptible improvement in my gameplay over the past few months. But somehow, over the last two days, I’ve become able to do some wicked tricks. My control over the aerial aspect of the game has improved tenfold, and when I tried the advanced training challenge, I was able to hit most of the shots in, whereas I could not hit a single one in just last week.

This is strange because I haven’t really played that much in the last week. I’ve watched streams more than I've actually held a controller. So when did it happen? When did it just click? How did my hands and fingers all of a sudden learn to swivel and control this vehicle with such precision and dexterity?

There’s only one possible explanation to this: problem-solving is built in. It’s built in to our minds. This isn’t a new insight: we’ve known that sleep is a very effective tool for solving problems, as our brains continue computing in the background. But I’ve never seen it so pronounced before. After watching the streams, after hearing tips from the pros, and after reconciling months of my own gameplay, my brain studied and built solutions to the problem at hand, without any direction from me.

And this conclusion makes sense, because if problem-solving weren't built-in—if the solution did not come in pair with the problem—we couldn’t have made it this far. We couldn’t be progressing in technology as fast as we are.

Problem and solution are one and the same. One is just time-delayed.

Wildcard schedule

Mo — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 22:49:33 +0000

I mentioned how the transitioning of something from the unconscious to the conscious can sometimes ruin that thing for me. Like when I’m watching a movie and see through bad acting, and start feeling the presence of a camera crew behind the set. Strangely, this also happens with my unconscious routines. I’ll go about a few days where, by chance, I will have enjoyed the actions of the first day, so do the same the next day, and same the next. But somehow, invariably, and usually after about the fifth day, I start seeing diminishing returns. This routine that was once so stimulating and full of promise has now grown too rigid to sticking with scripture of the past.

I like the idea of incorporating some dynamic factor to your day or daily routine. If you do the same exact thing every single day, in the exact same order on the exact same stroke of time, you will become one of those time-lapse reels they show in movies of the character’s enthusiasm gradually diminishing with every new sun rise, and how after only a few days, the character longs for something new. What if our routine consisted of change? A wild card. An asterisk in your schedule, randomly inserted by you as you go. Usually go right?—go left.

I can’t imagine change ever being something one gets bored of. Exhausted of, sure, but at least always in anticipation. My dog’s entire happy existence is based on anticipation.

Ideas prison

Mo — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 01:34:43 +0000

I used to keep an exhaustive list of ideas, piled on to over the course of several long years of fantasizing what I was going to one day build. I found, and somewhat counter to my expectations, that the decision making process was not so measured as it was spur of the moment. My friend, during a Watts-induced meditation, once mused that decision making is an illusion: in reality, you almost never have enough information to make the “right” decision, so instead you make a split-second decision at the exact moment you need to.

I think these are the powerful ideas—ideas so powerful, they shake you from your sleep, and beckon you to work. These sorts of ideas deserve full state-of-mind alacrity and unbending attention; you’d be showing grave disrespect by casting them to your ideas prison.

The mere act of observing

Mo — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:08:30 +0000

If quantum mechanics has taught us anything, it’s that observing screws everything up. Sometimes, I’ll be absentmindedly experiencing a positive emotion or experience, and think, this is great! But ah. Damn. Now you’ve observed it. And rather than continuing through the experience with the enthusiasm and enthrallment of a child, you’re now looking through the side of your eyes.

It’s a devilish little thing.

Observing for me can sometimes be about reproducibility. Last week was great—do that again! But now you’re taken out of the present, leaving little chance for any result worthy of comparison.

Did you know that the average score for a PBA level bowler is no more than 230? When I first discovered this, I was bewildered—I’ve bowled a 220 before! I would have imagined the pros bowled 300’s as a rule. I mean, come on, it’s in the physics, right? If you learn how to a bowl a strike, just bowl a strike every time. How hard can it be?

I was at a bowling alley a few years ago, speaking to the worker inside the pro shop. Himself a college level professional, he said that after a certain point in your bowling career—and much sooner than you would expect—the game stops becoming physical, and becomes purely emotional.

Can you imagine the self-sabotage and mental treachery involved of having bowled eleven strikes in a row and now having to hit just one more?

One thing a day

Mo — Sun, 21 Jan 2018 23:27:43 +0000

I awoke early today, and having been in a rhythm of going to the office first thing, made no exception on this Sunday. Don’t be mistaken—this isn’t me hustling. My wife works some weekends, and rather than staying at home and basking in my living room, I’d rather get out and be enlivened by the brisk temperatures and constant motion. That energy, coupled with a throat-scratching cup of coffee, gives me large enough momentum to carry out any task of my choosing in the morning, up until about 2-3pm. Drinking coffee by the time I arrive at about 10am curbs my appetite until about 4. So 10am-3pm are a solid day’s work. I’ve always found breakfast an easy meal to beat. You can train your body to settle without it. And, no breakfast I make with my sometimes anxious pace will be a breakfast worth eating, so better to skip altogether. After 3, I’m finding it easier just to make the trip back home and have lunch there rather than fiddle with the profound lack of climax that outdoor food eventually plateaus too.

My current model of progress relies on a very simple do one thing per day mentality. I can try to do two things, but that means I’m racing. And if I’m racing, I’m missing the scenery. The drive is endless, so better learn to take in your surroundings, than to constantly be under an adrenaline-fueled rush. Setting my goal intentionally to doing one thing per day allows me to easily feel good, which cascades onto the rest of the day and helps keep a congenial mood. Couple that with the daily challenge of mustering some thoughts for a journal, and there become several checkpoints at which you can gain a mental boost and an affirmation of progress and completion. You feel less guilty to bask now, and basking, which is essentially being placid with your surroundings, is not to be missed out on.

Of course, a luxury I have now are that my tasks are crystal clear and technical in nature. I have a list of things remaining for completion on the new update, and each is very well defined. Where I’ll start running into trouble, as always seems to happen, is when the technical components have completed, and the remaining challenges are either subtly human or entirely unknown. The “what do I do next?” phase. In those times, there is no checklist. There’s just you and your infinitely empty mind. In those times, going to the office will feel futile. So I’ll plug myself into my home, and that becomes one long continuous stretch of monotonous time, in which you find new ways to adapt to the unbelievable surplus in idle time. I’m actually glad I’m predicting this now. Usually it just hits me, thinking I’m lacking enthusiasm or will, before finally uncovering that I had just switched into a different phase.

One of the great parts of the internet is you’re able to connect with the thoughts of so many varied types of people, some of whom, in this case, are outwardly successful. And, to confirm what we already know, every one of them echoes the same experience: if you can’t enjoy it now, you never will. This used to be hard for me, but has gotten easier: I no longer feel compunction for sticking my head out the window. Work is best measured by quality and feeling than by how many sands can fall in an hourglass.

The Great Shift

Mo — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 21:31:42 +0000

A mind-blowing excerpt from Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code:

The Priory's tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on a belief that powerful men in the early Christian church 'conned' the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine.

The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever.

Nobody could deny the enormous good the modern Church did in today's troubled world, and yet the Church had a deceitful and violent history. Their brutal crusade to "reeducate" the pagan and feminine-worshipping religions spanned three centuries, employing methods as inspired as they were horrific.

The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum—or The Witches' Hammer—indoctrinated the world to "the dangers of freethinking women" and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them. Those deemed "witches" by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women "suspiciously attuned to the natural world." Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth—a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the Apple of Knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.

The propaganda and bloodshed had worked.

Today's world was living proof.

Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos—the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole—had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice... woman.

Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church's defamation. In France and Italy, the words for "left"—gauche and sinistra—came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity, and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister.

The days of the goddess were over. The pendulum had swung. Mother Earth had become a man's world, and the gods of destruction and war were taking their toll. The male ego had spent two millennia running unchecked by its female counterpart. The Priory of Sion believed that it was this obliteration of the sacred feminine in modern life that had caused what the Hopi Native Americans called koyanisquatsi—"life out of balance"—an unstable situation marked by testosterone-fueled wars, a plethora of misogynistic societies, and a growing disrespect for Mother Earth.

Sorry, nothing today

Mo — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 01:56:34 +0000

It would be easier if I didn’t have to publish this. I could just write the … silliest … things.

Some days are subtle, like today. Fair-weathered, all around. My brain’s fan spins with a soothing calmness, unlike my macbook when I accidentally write a recursive javascript function, which seems to be happening more than it should.

Progress remains steady on the new update. The codebase is cooling and taking form, after being molten for the past few weeks.

I’m currently knee deep in The Da Vinci Code, having thoroughly enjoyed Origin. I’m glad I’m not reading it on paper though—my thumbs are aching after having to press down on and define so many of Brown's indulgent words. After Origin, I tried reading a few other books, but eventually succumbed to the craving of the way the Origin’s author tells a story. In his novels, art, architecture, and history are the main attraction. The human characters—well. It's not that kind of book. He weaves between fiction and nonfiction, cooling you with facts while delivering with surprising substance.

I don’t have a conclusion today so I’ll just sign it with a date to give it some symmetry and closure.

—January 19, 2018, 7:56 PM

Hazy

Mo — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 23:50:14 +0000

In Rocket League, when someone joins in the middle of the game, the game lags and glitches momentarily, integrating the new player into the network. My friend mused, what if real life lagged every time someone new entered.

Life ultimately remains fascinating, despite the waking drudgery of our days. Sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and still be crossing the ethereal divide between two different worlds—I’ll stare out the window, through the night and onto the moon—and in this drunken haze, I’ll immediately melt in the infinitude of our existence, in the realness of this experience. In that moment, the moon becomes mystifying—You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be a thing. what are you? where are we? These hazy concoctions by my brain are not something I produce by will, but are almost a chemical helplessness emanating from my source.

Other times, in the middle of the afternoon, I’ll catch my reflection on a clear glass window, lock eyes with my projection, and think in total stupor, what is this?

These sorts of incidents happen with only little more regularity than the sighting of a shooting star, and I cherish them. It's the soul of the universe winking at me, almost as if to remind me: I’m still here.

Clarity

Mo — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 14:10:04 +0000

I hadn’t been very productive from Friday until Monday. Which sounds like it’s a weekend related thing but I assure you it's not. My weekend's borders are dashed, so you can slip in and out any time. But, Monday was strange. I was excited to get out of the house and head to the office, and avoid all the wondrous merry distractions at home. But, wasting time I still managed to do. Apparently, you can’t run from yourself.

I was so heavily reluctant to produce even a single line of code, that it was laughable. But it wasn’t unfounded. I was working on a problem in the beginning of last week, and couldn’t find an agreeable solution to it. Every solution I thought of was ugly and long-winded. I pushed it to the back of my mind, and began working on other problems. But I could not forget about my one true problem. The quality of my work began to deteriorate. My throughput began decreasing slowly, then all at once. I leaned into it, and called this weekend a “break” (which is what you’re supposed to do, but when there is little separation between life and work, the weekend’s as good a day as any to work). Sunday night, and I thought, for sure tomorrow I’m going to kill it. Monday came and I did impressively little. Zero, probably. Like I said, it was impressive.

Monday night, after moping and loathing, the solution came to me. Yes, that’ll work. That’ll work wonderfully! It was hiding in plain sight all along. (The problem regards how to safely create native super-privileged extensions for Standard Notes that come pre-bundled. Typically extensions are all treated as third-party, and require explicit permissions from users before being able to access any data. What I wanted to do was build any future “native” features also as extensions, to avoid modifying the core code. So the new Extensions manager is actually an extension itself, and comes pre-bundled.) The tension let loose, the knots untied, and finally, everything came together.

Tuesday (yesterday) was a great day of work. It was automatic. No need to thank me or my willpower—when the problem is clear, and the solution is clear, we do work.

I still largely believe that lack of productivity always comes from lack of clarity. I’ve never had perfect clarity and found myself unable to work. It’s always when I’m sort of uncertain, or blocked, that my producing functions come to a halt altogether. I knew this was the case, but wasn’t sure how long it would be until I found a solution. 4 days, 16 hours, and 2 minutes.

Don't do something every day

Mo — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 14:17:47 +0000

I wrote in a post just a few days ago, that because I had happened upon a flow that seemed to be beneficial to me (writing every day), that you should also explore the opportunity to challenge yourself daily, by committing to a fixed schedule where you produce some sort of item every day. And upon further reflection, this is total bullshit on my part.

There’s a certain self-help culture online wherein those who happen upon a productive nugget of truth or wisdom share it and urge others to also see things in this light. There’s nothing wrong with this, only that, it gives the illusion that this is the only way. It has the potential to make you feel bad about your life, because you’re not doing this thing that this other guy is doing who swears has done wonders for him. Prescribing something unto others, or doing something because someone else told you it would change your life, is in many senses dogmatic and reminiscent of other group-based identification systems that hypnotize you with mindless indoctrination.

All this to say, I find meaning and value in writing every day. And because I was happy with it, I urged anyone who reads along to find something they can challenge themselves with every day as well. I sort of prescribed it. But, I say now: do whatever the ƒ you want. There are trillions of ways to find peace and meaning, and to better yourself. It’s inconsiderate of me to recommend doing a daily challenge, when maybe you are already onto your own flow, your own rhythm, that seems to be working for you. Then I come along, theoretically, and have you second guess your actions and direction. The better way for me to have done it would be to just tell my story, without making a prescription. If you pick something up, cool, if not, cool.

If you want it bad enough, you’ll figure it out. Even if you never read a book or write a note in your life. Or, figuring it out might lead you to reading your first book. But that’s one and the same.

The God Move

Mo — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:50:28 +0000

I watched AlphaGo on Netflix yesterday, and have been in an eerie mood since. An amazingly well made documentary, AlphaGo is the story of AI and man. Have you ever seen images and cartoons from the 50’s that attempt to depict how the future will look? It’s the retro-futuristic vibe similar to the Smeg line of products. One thing you will notice though: we always get it wrong. No matter which time period we attempt to predict the future from, we get it wrong.

I’ve always wondered, if this process repeats itself—if we are always wrong in predicting the future—how might we be looking at things incorrectly now? In our case, our predictions of the future consist of a doomsday like prophecy of AI revolting against their maker, or gaining full independence from us. If anything, the story of AlphaGo says, this is us misunderstanding our creative creations. AI augments. AI makes us better.

AlphaGo chronicles how a team from Google called DeepMind built a neural-network based AI that learns how to play the ancient game of Go, and the story of the preemptive cultural devastation and shattering it caused. It’s heart-warming, beautiful, eerie, and ultimately, makes me profoundly proud of the human race.

I’ve never played Go before, but the way the game is depicted makes my mouth water. Moves are described as being “beautiful and divinely creative”, and one particular move played by a human was so unimaginably creative as to be called “The God Move”. Professional players of the game seem to speak with endless poetic flow and wisdom, and claim that the experience of playing Go and the sensations one feels are so unique that they can be felt through no other medium.

Needless to say, I will be spending exactly the next 1 week obsessing over Go, then never touching, reading, or hearing anything about it ever again. Thus is the nature of Netflix-induced obsessions. Besides, the pros were handed Go boards mere seconds after birth—you just can’t compete with childhood practice.

What's your axiom?

Mo — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 16:16:53 +0000

Rumor has it that we only live once. Of course, we live an infinite number of times, as we are just processes that execute the function of life. But while you’re here, while you’re in this body, and while you have the ability to harness raw materials and transform them into another order, why not indulge? Why not explore? It takes only one axiom.

If you can decide that 1+1=2, then the powerful rest follows. What is your 1+1=2? What is something that no matter how inhospitable your surroundings become, will always reign true and is thus something you can perpetually rely on? This helps, because it’s your home base. It’s from whence you detach and to where you return.

When you have an axiom, it’s a lot easier to make difficult decisions. When you unfurl all the complexity and mathematics and emotion, what should remain is a solid foundation consisting of any one thing you choose and trust.

I speak in total abstraction because I have lost my mind ages ago, but, to give perhaps one contrived example: When I quit my job to focus full time on my current endeavor, the possibilities for fear were endless. What if this, what if that. In the end, my axiom was simple: I’m not going to starve. No matter how bad it gets, I trust in my ability to not let myself starve. (Whooppee, I’m touting the most basic biological function as something I’ve manipulated to my advantage.) I trust in my ability to solve problems when they are thrown at me. Have you been known to be someone who is good at solving problems? Great. You’ll do just fine, no matter what situation you’re thrown in.

Ultimately, I might fail. I might screw up. I might die in tragedy. But trying—that’s the stuff of life.

The flower and the bee

Mo — Sat, 13 Jan 2018 16:19:29 +0000

I have a friend who insists he’s blind. Not lacking the ability to decipher light, but the ability to break it apart. He says, I can’t see the divisibility in things. He says, there is no you, there is no me—there is just the universe, at a particular time and place.

The Great Unfolding, he’s wont to say. I find this philosophy totally beautiful, if not utterly useless. He refutes that the binary nature of human beings is innate, and instead calls it learned. This was at first a shocking revelation: I had always thought that the dualism of nature was inherent in its design, and we the byproducts of its yin and yang.

No matter how many counter-examples I would try to give of areas that seemed inherently dualistic, he stood firm: You have been culturally conditioned to see it this way.

While you may count objects, and see here a computer, and there a person, and further there a desk, couch, and chair, it is you that is breaking apart “the scene” to divvy it up. In reality, there aren’t multiple objects, there is only 1 object, and this object is the universe. And he says that the process of breaking up what we see into separate entities is defined by language.

And I found that fascinating. Because it’s wickedly true: when we have a word for something, we’re able to identify it and separate it from the scene. When you don’t know what the constituents are named, you call it, and see it, by its overarching name. Even more tragic, when you don’t have a word for something, you’re likely to miss it altogether.

In Swedish, they have a word for "the glimmering, roadlike reflection that the moon creates on water”: mångata. Where you used to see several participants, like the moon, the moonlight, the water and the waves, the Swedish only see one thing: mångata. And while you may enjoy forest bathing (shinrinyoku in Japanese), you may miss some spectacles simply because you do not have the vocabulary for it: komorebi is the Japanese word for the sunlight that filters through the leaves of a tree.

So, my friend has a point. That the universe comes as one. And humans slit it apart with their brain. Take away the human, and you no longer have millions of disparate objects, but just one thing: the great unfolding universe. Imagine a beautiful fractal pattern infinitely unfolding and emanating outwards in triptic kaleidoscopic fashion: he says that humans aren’t observers of this phenomenon. And they aren’t separate from it. Instead, they are the tip of the unfolding. What you are, what I am, are not separate entities, but the universe at an x,y,z,t coordinate.

My friend takes inspiration from the likes of McKenna, Watts, and the Buddhist culture, and says simply: the lives of bees and flowers are so intertwined, that where we have broken down behaviors to identify two separate entities, to a different perspective, to the divine perspective, it might just be one thing.

My friend, despite my urging, does not have a linkable presence online, so remains shrouded in mystery. Until then, I will proxy his thoughts whenever possible. Perhaps, after all, there is no friend and there is no me: there is only what the universe wishes to say at this particular spacetime coordinate.

When you have to, you will

Mo — Sat, 13 Jan 2018 04:22:18 +0000

9:25 PM. This is no good.

In the last two weeks, my home and I have morphed into a single homogeneous entity. An as of yet unnamed species, this entity seems to oppose its manifest destiny at any op or inopportune moment imaginable. Trapped in these confines, I devised a plan to escape, and successfully executed it at 8:30 this morning, wherein upon waking up, I immediately ripped apart the gooey organs connecting me into this habitable vessel, clambered through the front door, ran as quickly as I could without looking back, and caught the first (ok second) bus to the office.

I got away this time. But I'm not always so lucky.

My wife will sometimes offer to drive me to the office, but I like taking the bus. The trip is only about 28 minutes, and you’re sort of in the center of it: this is where life happens. Not at home.

The altering is the important part. Please: If you work from home, have somewhere you can go to sometimes. What a prescription. I had been averaging under a few microseconds of useful work for the past few weeks, but today, without the opportunity for endless distraction, and surrounded by fellow laborers, I had a replenishing full day of usefulness. And I had the chance to miss home. There was a tweet that I can’t seem to find now, by I believe Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that said something like: You’ve entered into perfect harmonious equilibrium when, at the office, you can’t wait to go home, and at home, can’t wait to go to the office.

It’s now about fifteen minutes until ten, and that is a style of describing time I have never used before. I sometimes have to remind myself why I’ve taken on this silly challenge of writing every single day. Surely the world is not in such dire need of any thing I have waiting to say. But, the reason is important, and amidst the countless challenges I’ve ultimately left behind and forgotten about it, this one remains as important to me as it was on day one:

It’s about the challenge. It’s doing something difficult on a scheduled basis. It’s to keep my mind sharp and on its toes. And in some ways, it’s to prove to myself that even the most ridiculous and rigorous of challenges, if you care badly enough, can be within reach. If it were about the writing, I could have surely prescribed doing it once every few weeks, or per week at most. But everyday?—the sheer madness of it could not help but arouse my always latent sense of competitiveness. Could I beat myself at this? Could I overcome laziness, boredom, volatile supply of willpower, a longing for easiness and worklessness—could I overcome the sick part of me that wants to bring me down, that wants me to give up, that wants me to explore the sick world of failure and what more comfortable challenges it may bring—could I overcome myself and commit to something ridiculous that I know will benefit me in some way were I just to keep it up?

Welcome to two hours short of no. It’s now almost 10pm, and the urge to postpone has driven me to the edge of comfort. But I’m here. I’m checking in. I made it. I’m out of breath, and I’ll try to do better, but I’m here.

With that said, I wouldn't still be doing this if I hadn't come to appreciate the wonderful improvements in mood and spirit it has contributed to. Nothing solves all of life's problems, but the fact that this remains important to me is 100% empirical. I urge you to explore and commit to a daily challenge of your own—commit to scheduled madness every day, and commit to it publicly. Tell your kids, tell your wife, tell your friends, your coworkers, your Twitter followers, your Uber driver, and your mom.

You’ll quickly learn that when you have to, you will.

Chip Away

Mo — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 19:09:19 +0000

I forgot to walk my dog until noon this morning. In our four years together, this has never happened. In David Attenborough voice, these are signs of a tumultuous time.

The offline installation of extensions has been such a challenging problem, that longing for any gratification, I feel instantly accomplished by doing any minute task, like properly indenting a line or changing a margin. Yup. That’ll do it for today. When the problem is a behemoth, you dread fighting, and are easily fatigued. But, I’ve found that even if all I get are a peaceful two hours of work, then I don’t mind chipping away at this problem at the pace it demands. Chipping away, in fact, is the magic of nature. So, while I may chisel only a mote, I do appreciate the process of things, and understand that incessant chiseling is far more producing than instantaneous productivity.

I have no idea how much further I have. So I’ll just continue to chisel languidly until I’ve removed enough obstacle-matter to see the light hiding behind. That’s when the energy returns.

The Last One Percent

Mo — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 02:26:35 +0000

The economy of our days is often times volatile; a high warrants a low and a low warrants a high. Compensation. A “correction.” I for no reason today awoke in the red, with a mass sell-off having apparently taken place during premarket hours. And if my job was to at all increase the share value by any number of points for the day, then I have further disappointing news.

What was the event? The news? What did the analyst find? No one knows. All I have is my marketing department, with its endless supply of forward-looking statements to suppress shareholder worry.

But, there are clues to this mystery. Black Mirror—horror for the mind. I know people who refuse to watch Black Mirror on grounds of not wanting to have their mental stability robbed. I don’t blame them. The new season came out a few weeks ago and I only just watched episode two yesterday. Watching it requires some serious mental gambling, which I am not always so willing to put any amount of on the table.

The other clue is the nature of challenges. Hard at work demolishing and constructing new areas of code, my disposition has went from uncontained excitement to obnoxious and aggressive peals of are we there yet? emanating from the back seat. I’m working on it, I try to plea, but work harder is the only reply. The end is so close. I reach for it, and clamber my way towards it, but between us is as big a tease as the infinitesimal fraction of light speed we can’t reach.

All of that to say, I'm anxious to finish up what I’m working on. I want it to be done. Unfortunately, I’ve made an inventory of remaining tasks and it looks like there’s a lot more work to do. It’s now the funnest part of any software project: The Last 1 Percent. Mind games will be played. Deadlines will be missed. Bugs will surface. Sleep will be lost. An emperor bug will emerge and convince you that it is unsolvable and that you’re for sure fucked this time. Ah, the dread. Of course, you solve it 2–100 hours later. The range is the scary part. But, I’ve been in this mess before. And I’ve managed to make it out alive every time. So, there's your forward-looking statement.

Easy

Mo — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 20:38:16 +0000

I woke up later than usual today, after staying up last night trying to get to the bottom of Origin by Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code, which I haven't read). The book is thus far interesting, and is more like an art and religion manifesto by the author (though I’m only three-quarters of the way in), and is filled with mouthwatering descriptions of Spanish art and architecture and an overall well-fitted encapsulation of the role of religion and science today. It’s a compelling read if you’re looking for a break from reality.

I went on a nice walk with my dog today, after the poor little man had been trapped indoors for the last few weeks. It’s been less than ten degrees on average, and no matter how brazen he is in anticipation, he can’t take more than a few dozen steps outside without immediately surrendering to the freeze. He’ll stand up on his hind legs and surrender his arms in the sky, hinting at me to levitate him at once. He’s nimble, and at eighteen pounds, is about the size of a fox, so it’s manageable. My MacBook is however only two pounds, so muscle atrophy will come into play.

Of course, I’m deep in technical hell right now, so my pace is forceful. I’ve had to demolish many comfortable areas of code in order to make way for the new, and the city lies helpless in rubble right now. The poor citizens don’t know what hit them, but not to worry, your god is deep in thought right now. A decision will be made soon. Inside, new religions have already been formed to deal with the devastation.

Although, I have been mindful of my pace. I had been driving well above my speed limit for the past week, but caught myself yesterday after noticing how bad the swerving was getting. What if you just slowed down? Eassyyyy. Just take it eassssyyyyy. See, doesn’t that feel better? Indeed it did. I hypnotized myself by depriving my mind of all its chatter, and dumbingly repeated What if you just slowed down as if I were trying to memorize it. I instructed the other part of my mind to sneakily pass a message to my body to start moving things around. I picked up a cup, and walked it to the kitchen. You're doing great. There were two dishes on the kitchen counter, so I lifted them to the sink. I then looked at my living room in total dismay and violently wondered how that could have happened since the last time I cleaned it two days ago.

These bizarre creatures go to considerable lengths to avoid tidying their living space.

Sorry, have been watching too much Planet Earth. The last of it actually, which makes me sad. The intro theme to season two is just heartbreakingly beautiful. It hits me so hard. The most compelling stories are the ones that leave you shaken afterwards, not for days, but weeks, months, and perhaps the rest of your life. I struggle to name anything that has so profoundly shaken my understanding of the world as the Planet Earth series. It used to be that bibles, torahs, and qurans appeared once in a millennia. Now we stream divine revelation. What a beautiful thing.

I have left today to make lunch, which I’m still having to hypnotize myself to do. Must get back to work. You’ll do better work if you do this stuff first. Ok fine.

Life is so hard.

Joint Pain

Mo — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 15:04:17 +0000

I’ll never forget it: Ten or more years ago, in the midst of the cold Chicago winter, I found myself always itching my scalp and body from dryness. I was watching an episode of Family Guy where Stewie goes to some Star Trek convention and the cast and crew hold a Q&A. Instead of asking questions about the show, the audience proceeds to ask silly every-day household questions, like:

Oftentimes my household sponges accumulate an awful amount of buildup. What can I do to prevent this?

(Patrick Stewart): That's an excellent question. It's very important to thoroughly wring out your sponges after every usage. This will prevent the accumulation of grime and bacteria. A dry sponge is a happy sponge.

Hilarious. The next question was important:

I have this itch on the back of my leg, and I can't figure out if it's a bug bite or dry skin.

Do you take hot showers?

Yes.

Dry skin.

Thanks.

And you know what, I’d never considered it. I never considered that the (really) hot showers I was taking might be contributing to the itchiness. It’s obvious now, but don’t take really hot showers in the winter if you don’t want to be all itchy. I didn’t know that then. And it solved my problem for good. Thanks Family Guy.

I bring this up so I can share with you an even more important finding, that happened recently and also in a serendipitous way.

Joint pain. I struggled with it for at least three or four of the last several years. Sometimes, really bad. And everywhere. Wrists, knees, elbows, back. It just came out of nowhere. I remember at one point not even being able to walk for a day because my knees just gave out. Wtf? I didn’t even do anything for this to happen.

I wore knee braces, back braces, and tried all the remedies you could imagine, but nothing worked. I went to the doctor once but doctors are a waste of time. Of course, when I told this to worried onlookers, their first thought was “Omg, dude, maybe you have arthritis. Seriously go to the doctor.” No, I don’t have arthritis. I wasn’t going to let my mind believe that, and I wasn’t going to google it either, because I know WebMD is waiting to pounce, ready to 100% convince me I have arthritis.

I went through a “health revolution” at some point where I would shop strictly for items with the least amount of ingredients (a useful heuristic). I had a small stint with working out, and was looking for some protein powder at Whole Foods, and found one with just two ingredients: Whey protein, and sunflower lecithin. As pure as it can get.

That night, I mixed up a nice protein shake with my newly acquired substance, and drifted calmly to sleep. What would happen next would be my most dramatic health episode in some time. I awoke in the middle of the night in pain and gasping for air. My breathing tubes were 90% blocked, and my chest was aching with sharp pain the likes of which I had never experienced before. It wasn’t 911 bad—it felt like the type of thing that just needed to go away. But it was bad. I sat upright in bed and just did whatever breathing exercises I could summon. It was one of the more painful experiences in recent memory.

What could have caused it? The only new factor introduced into my environment was this protein shake. I tried again the next night with a smaller quantity of the protein shake, and sure enough, the same issue occurs.

Bingo.

Since I was a child, I’ve had a minor allergy to actual sunflower seeds. I couldn’t eat them. If I did, my breathing would clog up. Not 911 bad, but bad enough to know to avoid them. Never did I ever make the connection that I might be allergic to sunflower byproducts, like lecithin and oil.

But it was unmistakeable. Any time I consumed this protein shake that contained only two ingredients, I had an episode in the middle of the night. And I surely wasn’t allergic to the whey protein.

It was the sunflower.

So, for the next few months, I avoided products with sunflower lecithin and oil like the plague, which is not as easy as you’d imagine. Sunflower oil is very commonly used as a cheap industrial oil in many of the products you eat every day. Just go to the chips aisle in your grocery store. I promise you this: You will not find one single bag of chips without sunflower oil. I already checked. I know this because I can’t eat chips anymore.

But something amazing happened: my joint pain—it went away. Knee pain? Gone. Wrist pain? Gone. Back pain? Depends on how much I sit, but that old back pain—gone. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing. I’m not one to microdose on gourmet mushrooms and probiotics, and not a health nut who tries a new food experiment every day. This happened totally by chance. And the results were unmistakeable.

It’s been over a year since this discovery, and the joint pain has never returned, after being a comfortable guest for over three years. Today, I avoid all foods with sunflower, which actually turns out to be not only pretty easy, but really good for you: You’ll find that most junk food contains sunflower. I’ll be at Costco and this new amazing looking food item will stick out to me. Costco has perfected the art of the impulse buy, and by this point, I already knew: you’re buying whatever Costco wants you to buy. But now, when I pick up that amazingly packaged organic food item that promises to change my life, I’ll read the ingredients and pray for sunflower. Please have sunflower please have sunflower. Ingredients:…sunflower oil… Bingo. I put it back down.

All this to say, if you find yourself aching for no apparent reason, and know you don’t have some chronic condition, maybe because you’re young or because it’s just uncalled for, try to identify ingredients in your diet that may cause you problems. I’m not one to be allergic to many things, so it surprised me that my body would choose sunflower. Allergies are of course another word for “mutations”, so this isn’t some hipster culture thing: You might have an allergy that not a lot of people have to a common food item. Identify it, isolate it, and eliminate it.

What if dreams are...

Mo — Sun, 07 Jan 2018 15:47:52 +0000

I like to speculate on things that can easily be googled and figured out for sure, but that ruins the fun of it. My speculative writing teeters on the edge of fiction anyway. And besides, if we just accepted only what is written, what room would there be for the crazy new? So here’s my wild theory.

I was watching Planet Earth II yesterday (brace yourselves), the episode about deserts. Any time I watch Planet Earth, my mind is instantly taken away. If it isn’t the greatest TV series ever produced, I don’t know what is. Aside from the cinematography, which even after you watch the behind-the-scenes continues to bewilder and evade you, it’s really the story-telling that makes it so compelling. What Planet Earth as a series excels at is writing. You can tell they fill in the gaps in a lot of places, but it doesn’t feel deceptive. You know that’s how it really is.

Anyway, I wrote a few days ago how a baby iguana emerges newly-born from the sand for the first time ever, and immediately knows to start running towards and up the hill. How does it know? Instinct, sure. In yesterday’s episode, they captured in pitch-blackness an infrared scene of a long-eared bat preying on a deathstalker scorpion, ON FOOT, and it was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever seen. Literally, the scene’s ingredients called for “two parts nightmare." Here’s a screen cap that sort of captures what I mean:

Now this little ground-walking bat scares the hell out of me. Can you imagine what the poor little scorpion, who is fighting for his life, must feel? Assuming the scorpion lives to tell the tale of this Grendel-esque monster, the image of this death-seeking bat screeching in its face will surely haunt it for the rest of its PTSD-ridden life. (This scorpion’s sting is by the way venomous even to humans, but this horrendous bat has grown somewhat immune.)

And that got me thinking. Dreams are a wild, wild part of biological existence. It’s safe to say we still don’t really know what they’re for. BUT. And hear me out on this. Newly-born mammals take their first breath and immediately know a couple of ground rules. The iguana knows to run up. Even new-born cats know to cover up their poop with dirt. So, there’s obviously information stored and derived from DNA. Instinct seems to be real-life events and useful heuristics somehow imprinting themselves on the DNA. This way, a mammal’s real life experiences (and which predators to stay the f* away from) is loaded up on first launch. You see that image above? If that scorpion were me, I would have nightmares about the flying bat monster every day for the rest of my life. And that’s important for future generations to know, wouldn’t you think?

But when exactly is this data written to DNA? A monster like the long-eared bat comes flying in your face trying to kill you. The experience scars you forever. But in the moment, is it immediately written to the DNA and permanently emblazoned for future generations to be weary of? Or….maybe that’s what dreams are? A transcription process of real-life events to DNA, at which point, the bizarrely compressed “memories” of your life are stored and passed down to descendant generations, helping guide them from day one.

Amongst the many things that Planet Earth has illuminated, it has helped me understand one thing very clearly: every living thing is a single-run software program; an executable that runs a non-infinite loop. The program source is contained wholly within, and comes with everything the organism needs to live out a full life (just add water). The locusts which swarm the arid Madagascar south-west after torrential rainfall and instantly devastate any signs of greenery are each single-run software programs that execute their entire lifecycle within a couple days, and then immediately cease function. When reproduction occurs, the software source is copied wholly (and imperfectly), and booted up. It’s clear that the software describes not only physical appearances and traits, but personality, fears, tendencies, and, I’m betting, even nightmares.

So that’s my theory: Experiences are contained in our DNA. And experiences are written to our DNA during our dreaming cycles.

Now let me just google this..

2.1 Progress Update

Mo — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 20:07:13 +0000

I’m talking to myself while I work. That’s always a good sign.

I’m giddy with excitement at the updates in store for Standard Notes. I’m not usually prematurely optimistic, but it’s nice when things start coming together.

Version 2.1 might as well be called Version 3, but, I don’t want to be a version “45.6.8” sort of company. So we’ll be thrift.

The prototype I’m toying with of offline installation of extensions is probably most promising of all. It opens doors for new experiences and a wide variety of secure applications.

For three days now, I’ve been consumed with trying to figure out a new design language for the core Standard Notes experience, including the interface, menus, and extensions. It all feels sort of disparate now. But—and I don’t know how I’ve ended up here—I’ve caught on to something I really like. I’ve built it out as a separate CSS framework, then integrated it into the core project, and the result has caught me shamelessly admiring out loud a few times. God damn. The romance phase disintegrates quickly, so I’ll take what I can get.

The new design language will be open-source and available to any developer wanting to build nice looking applications and extensions for Standard Notes. The new visual style feels heavy, which is a quality I’ve always desired for web apps, especially when housed in Electron.

2FA—I gyrated in joy with my laptop when I first got Google Authenticator working with Standard Notes, some two weeks ago. I’ve been using it ever since, and it makes me feel so secure and warm. It’s ready to go, with only a few design tweaks remaining.

It’s all so exciting, because: Standard Notes has matched cryptowallet-like security since introducing local device encryption in V2. With end-to-end encrypted sync, local device encryption, and soon two-factor authentication, I’d be hard-pressed to name a more secure place for your contents.

And that's a beautiful thing.

Pricing cannot be an afterthought

Mo — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 16:16:14 +0000

I wrote yesterday how the notion of app ideas is still fairly romantic, and challenged anyone exploring building one to really give it some thought before actually doing so. I don’t mean this to say “don’t experiment and hack things,” but as someone legitimately concerned for your well-being, how are you going to survive, dude?

If a friend came up to you and said he wants to write a book and get it into Barnes & Noble, would your first piece of advice be: Dude. Just start writing. Go. Now. Start writing.

It might depend on the audience. But my first reaction to that would be: Now wait a minute. You sure you want this? You sure you know what you’re getting into? Not a lot of authors make money.

As someone who has hacked away on hundreds of (failed) projects in the last decade, I can, based on my experience, wholeheartedly tell you: Now wait just one minute. Before you start hacking away, there are a few things you need to know. Not a lot of indie developers make money.

The most important thing I always, always got wrong was making pricing an afterthought. Because why spend time on pricing if you’re not even sure the project is going to take off? No, I’m going to build the app first. Then if it does well enough, begin introducing a revenue model. Right?

Here are a few reasons why this is a dangerous mindset to have, and why pricing cannot be an afterthought:

Having a pricing model at first launch can affect whether the project is successful or not.
Besides supplying you with the fuel needed to continue doing work on the project, having a pricing page and revenue model can also have subtle psychological effects on both you and your users. For one, a customer may be willing to take you more seriously if they know you’ve thought about the long term plan for your company. You say “I’m going to build this app that a user will use for the next five years,” but a customer says “How can I trust you’ll be around five years from now if you don’t even have a revenue plan in place?” Customers are smart. Personally, I take companies with revenue models far more seriously than those who just have a free product without any clue how to monetize it. I trust paid products more.
Believe me on this: you will lose the motivation to build new features at some point, including pricing.
This may not be permanent, depending on your level of perseverance, but your levels of motivation for building new features, especially something as uncomfortable as pricing, will waver tremendously. Because in most cases, at least for me, the initial response to a side-project launch is always underwhelming. You need to amass users over time, through lots of hard work. It’s definitely achievable. But when you’re down in the slumps, not having acquired enough users and certainly not making any money off this, the last thing you’ll feel like doing is the hard and laborious work necessary to integrate a payment and subscription system. I know so many startups and small companies who put out a free product thinking they were going to monetize it later, but lost the motivation to do so far quicker than they imagined. If building pricing seems tedious compared to the rush of building the actual app, do it first, as early as you can, and, if at all possible, always, always launch with a revenue model in place. Future you will thank you.
Strategizing around pricing models teaches you to be a better entrepreneur.
At the end of the day, in order for your project to be successful, you’ll need to learn to be more than a software developer. You’ll need to learn to be an effective marketer, accountant, strategist, and operations manager. These are very hard things to learn, and something I still struggle with as a developer. Mostly, I struggle with these areas because I have no practice in them. All my shipped projects have only been technical feats, and not marketing or business problems. If I had practiced optimizing pricing and keeping users engaged with all my products, I would have had a much easier time doing the same thing now. And make no mistake about it: marketing (including user acquisition, retention, and churn) will be absolutely essential to master for your company.

Ultimately, there’s still a lot of room for blind experimentation and hacking, but only if you truly don’t care about the outcome. If you do care about the outcome, namely, that you want the project to be successful and provide you with a little bit of income, you can’t defer pricing to the future. You can’t defer the “business” stuff. Build it in from Day 1. And on Day 365, you’ll have a well-oiled, functioning business machine. Worst case on failed projects with built-in revenue models: you become a far better entrepreneur.

There's no such thing as app ideas

Mo — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 16:27:56 +0000

I realize that most people are distracted by cryptocurrencies to be bothered to think about app ideas anymore, but I still get the occasional “hey, I have an app idea!” from the casual layman, be it at a family dinner or reunion of friends. Of course, out of sheer dumb curiosity, I’ll say, “what is it?”, but I’m finding it might be time to start telling these people the truth:

There is no such thing as app ideas.

It’s a fable. A fantasy. A story passed down from generation to generation. That all you need is an app idea. And fate handles the rest.

*Leans into mic* Wrong.

App ideas are not a thing anymore. When you think “app idea” you hear $$$$$, but try rephrasing it as such and see if you’re still interested: “I’ve identified a gap in the market, and believe I am uniquely suited to build a solution. I am willing to spend the next 5-10 years of my life slaving completely in the dark to build this product, and no matter how difficult it gets (it will get difficult), I will not give up. I realize that the product I build at first will probably suck, and will not be what customers want, so I will spend the next several years painstakingly refining it, talking to customers, poring through books, consulting with experts, all while confessing that I had no idea how difficult this was going to be. I’ve also accounted for the financial costs associated with building an app business, and am ready to quit my full-time job when needed to focus full time on this endeavor. Here is my product, here is the problem it solves, here is the market, and here is how I plan to acquire customers.”

Not so sexy now, is it?

How 'bout that Ripple? Been goin up like crazy.

The story progresses

Mo — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 15:10:14 +0000

For the deity-fearing amongst us, closure is part of the benefits package. You get a nice little beginning, middle, and end, all packaged in a wonderfully vivid story passed down through the millennia.

For the agnostics and the 100% sure—lack of closure is the name of the game. At first creating a black hole of meaninglessness and insignificance, the void slowly incorporates itself into every area of life, ultimately finding ways to be useful and productive, until a lack of conclusion becomes a great point of opportunity and not a source of anguish. It allows one to fantasize, create, and wonder on their own stories, and settle on something that fits nicely with them. It expands the world, and now rather than having one definite story, the possible storylines become endless. Between now and the heat death (?) of the universe several trillion years from now, anything can happen. It’s why shows like Black Mirror are so uniquely stimulating.

But while the lack of music in space seems at once eerie and irresolvable, I do think there is a conclusion to all this. I do think there is a story here—an objective source and destination for life. I think we or some future species will make progress in uncovering the details of our precarious existence. There is an explanation for all this, and it will use words like “and then,” “unbeknownst to them,” and “finally,” and not words like “randomly exploding ball of energy,” “chaos theory,” “random mutations,” and “infinity”.

Neitzche becried that God is dead and we are the murderers, but what he couldn’t imagine was the birth of something far more powerful.

The same person

Mo — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 14:07:26 +0000

This is common knowledge to me, and may be to you too, but I thought I’d share it in case it may not be. All speculation is treated as fact to make the writing easier:

You and I are the same person. Exactly the same person.

The voice in our heads: they’re the same voice.

The person you accidentally made eye contact with? The same person.

You and your dog? The same person.

You and the squirrel stalking you from the tree? The same person.

I wrote some time ago how I struggled with the concept of comprehending the existence of other people. How can other people be real? How is that possible? If within me is an impossibly large universe of existence, how can it be that within everyone else is a universe just as large? I could not fathom it.

But what you are, what I am, what we all are, are processes. We are input/output machines. We struggle to understand from whence we came, and how is it this all works, but the answer is right in front of our eyes, if only we could parse it: Our source code is passed generation to generation, and is then fully contained. Do you remember the iguana/snake chase scene from Planet Earth II that made its rounds on social media some time ago? I watched it again yesterday after seeing that Planet Earth II was added to Netflix in full glorious HD detail, and it was unmistakeable: the instruction set is contained in the DNA, and it’s explicit. A newly hatched iguana emerges from the ground for the first time in its total existence, and immediately knows not only to start running, but to start climbing the rocky hills before it. How does it know to go up, if this is t=0.0001 for it? The instruction set is contained within. You just need the process of consciousness, coupled with a physical avatar, to execute it.

When you see someone else, and look into their eyes, you are looking into yourself, if yourself lived a different life. When you see someone richer than you, who dresses better than you, speaks better than you, and lives better than you: that’s you if you grew up in an affluent environment and were exposed to the same factors. When you see someone poorer than you, who dresses less fashionably than you, speaks less articulately than you, and lives a more difficult life than you: that’s you, if you grew up in that same resource-deprived environment. When your dog whines and moans, and scratches at the door at the prospect of heading outdoors, that’s you, if you were housed in a four-legged body.

A process. That’s what you and I are, and every other conceivable living thing. Look deeply into the eyes of an animal just once, and you will see that they are as real as you—nay, are you—and not some dumb excuse for a living thing.

So, be kind to you, whichever body you find yourself in.

Loosened

Mo — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 18:17:15 +0000

It is inanely cold today. I took what was supposed to be a brisk walk, but turned out to be a nipping icebath, and all my parts are now numb. Icicles are beginning to crystalize in the outer shell of my mind, slowing the speed of my thoughts to a drawl. My functions are still unthawing, but I can waste no more time—I’ve come running back as quickly as I could. My fingers feel large and blurry, and mistype flagrantly as I write. You are reading this only by the mercy of autocorrect:

I saw something strange on this walk. And I can’t be sure if what I saw is what I saw. My face was mostly covered with a ski-mask and by the hairs of my coat jacket; the teary melt in my eyes formed an icy bond between my eyelids, causing a glare and twinkle in everything I saw. But it could not be mistaken.

A few days ago, I discovered that Easy on Netflix was an anthology series, and not another Netflix love show. Never one to afford missing out on the creative wonders of anthologies, I settled in and watched one then two then three episodes. The last of these episodes is the one which helps us tell this tale. The storyline captivates us in the optimistically mundane lives of people living in Chicago. Watching, I began to melt into my sofa, while the show simultaneously unbuckled and loosened my grip on reality, pulling me into its adjacent world. I was made to believe that these characters were real-life people, so much as to have made me wish the best for them after the closing credits played.

In this episode, however, there were no conflicts. There was no foreshadowing, or tension; no antagonist or protagonist. The show presented no obstacles and no solutions. No lesson, moral, or food for thought. Most ultimately, it delivers a profound lack of climax.

But I did thoroughly enjoy it while it passed. I enjoyed being in the real presence of, if I'm not mistaken, friends for twenty-eight minutes. I had no regrets, and would happily spend time in that same way if again offered.

A lack of conclusion might as well be in the horror genre for me, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way? It’s the journey, isn’t it?

I spread fake news today

Mo — Sun, 31 Dec 2017 18:00:00 +0000

I’m not particularly proud of it. But it happened. I shared fake news. No, rather, I created the fake news. Then spread it.

Some friends and I share an iMessage group where we occasionally speculate on cryptocurrencies. In the past few days, we’ve been closely watching the price of Ripple.

I woke up recently, befogged and groggy, and saw this tweet:

I didn’t click on the video, because, I mean, I’m not going to sit here and watch a 3 minute video of Jimmy Kimmel mean tweets. But, wow, Ripple was on Jimmy Kimmel! What a feat! So I messaged my friends immediately. “Holy shit. Ripple was on Jimmy Kimmel. They must have a hell of a marketing team.”

My friends consumed this news without question, because, why would I make that up? It’s easily verifiable.

Later in the morning, after a little caffeine begins pumping through my bloodstream, I revisit the tweet and actually watch the video.

Well I’ll be damned. Turns out, this wasn’t a Jimmy Kimmel thing. Instead, the Ripple team just recorded their own “Jimmy Kimmel style” video in their own office of employees reading mean tweets.

I felt like a fool. I wasn’t sure whether to be upset at myself or the tweet author. It’s hard to tell whether his intention was to deceive (he is himself an employee of Ripple). But, obviously I was at fault. I shared meaningful news without verifying it in the slightest. The damage done was minor, but imagine if I had just a smidgen more of real influence—I could have really affected the perception of Ripple, and thus its price.

Having seen friends and family in the past share fake news accidentally, the behavior seems difficult to avoid, given the amount of content available and our lack of time to parse it all. So we go by headlines, and share them off, because why would a headline deceive us, right?

It’s hard to say whether I learnt any true valuable lesson. My time available to verify all content as it streams past my eyes will only continue to deplete as more content is created. So, the time vs. content verification problem gets more difficult every day.

This post is just to say, it can happen to you. You can spread fake news even with the best of intentions.

Be careful out there.

The myth of telling people about your goals

Mo — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 15:40:25 +0000

There’s a certain myth floating in the ether which essentially says that when you tell people about your dreams and goals, they’re less likely to happen, or you’re less likely to make them happen. This isn’t a very prevalent myth mind you, but more of a subtlety. Sometimes, I’ll have told someone about my goals, especially very short term goals, and, after failing to succeed on them, I’ll curse and bemoan myself for having shared them with other people.

There is some truth to this belief, but not for reasons you’d expect. Quite simply, you’re more likely to give up on your goals than persevere. Like 99% more likely. The default outcome of our bold goals is failure. It requires a special forcefulness and ironclad commitment to see a goal through. Hell—it requires vehemence and strict commitment to even check a minute task off your todo list. The energy you require for something grander is unfathomable.

When you give up on your goal, or project, or idea, or resolution, it’s not because you told someone about it prematurely—it’s because giving up and failing was the likely outcome anyway.

Now, telling people too early on about your goals does have some effect, especially for the faint of heart. Namely, you may be easily swayed by feedback and criticism at this point. You tell your friend about this project you’re really excited about, and the friend gives you some feedback that makes you question your endeavor. First, if you easily accept that input and it sways your efforts in a negative direction, then you were likely just looking for an easy way out anyway. And if some feedback from a friendly face is enough to derail you, then it’s best you exit now than face the one-hundred-million-times more scary monsters that lie ahead. If you can’t handle early input, you won’t be able to handle whatever comes next. In which case, your quitting was caused not by your friend’s feedback, but by your lack of resoluteness to begin with, coupled with the default tendency of our actions to falter.

Personally, the only reason I sometimes avoid telling friends and others about my endeavors early on is not because I am afraid of being voodoo cursed, but because I’d like to see how serious I am about it first, and decrease the 99% chance of giving up to at least 70. If I shared with everyone my precarious plans as soon as they hatched, I’d quickly dilute my reputation as someone who doesn’t finish what he starts (which is all of us, really.) This is not a huge deal, but I prefer sharing something only when I’m mostly convinced of it myself.

So share your plans as much and as early as you wish, keeping in mind that do or don’t, 4/5 of your endeavors will likely fail anyway. Afterwards, you’ll scramble searching for a reason why, and the easiest one will be: “I knew I shouldn’t have told X!” But poor little X had nothing to do with it. It’s you that can’t finish what you start.

@ing people

Mo — Sat, 30 Dec 2017 01:09:46 +0000

I saw yesterday that someone had tweeted about a small, local, and not particularly well-written article about the design flaws in Apple’s new flagship Chicago store. John Gruber was mentioned in this tweet at the end via “cc @gruber”, and Twitter showed me that Gruber liked this tweet.

That would have been that, except for the fact that when I scrolled up a little more, Gruber, after being alerted by that tweet, had posted a reference to the article on Daring Fireball, his blog that drives a lot of traffic.

Wow.

A few minutes later, The Verge, with over 2 million followers, publishes an article of their own also citing the same Daring Fireball article and the original local blog.

I stopped keeping track after that, but I’m sure the article continued to spread thereafter. All because some random Twitter account was thoughtful enough to add a “cc @gruber” at the end.

This conflicts me in many ways. I’ve always been torn on whether randomly @ing “influencers” to take notice of your tweet or content constitutes flagrant spam. For one, it definitely devalues the “aesthetic” of a tweet, like a string of random hash tags. Two, it’s a sort of shameless begging. I’ve done it before and ultimately felt dirty about it.

But you can’t deny these results. I will likely spend the rest of my life trying to get on sites like Daring Fireball and the Verge. And all it took here was a simple “cc” in a one-off tweet.

Makes me reconsider how my sense of “shamefulness” and “not wanting to bother busy people” may be more of a hindrance than a service.

Layer code instead of modifying in place

Mo — Thu, 28 Dec 2017 14:52:30 +0000

I caught myself doing something shady recently and thought I’d share so that you may avoid doing the same. I ought to have known better, but, I was a few weeks into a new feature branch on Standard Notes, and last minute, I needed an important feature to make everything else work. And it got really, really ugly.

The background of it is I wanted to sync user preferences to a user’s account, rather than saving just locally. This way if you choose to sort your notes by title instead of date, this preference will take effect on other computers you open the app on. The challenge is, there needs to be only 1 user preferences object on the server (the rule is also that I don’t modify any model schemas on the server. I use the generic schemaless Item that Standard File provides that allows for arbitrary content.) This is made difficult by the fact that when a sync conflict occurs, objects are duplicated so that no changes are lost.

So, I needed to introduce the concept of a “singleton” model, where only 1 can exist for a given user, both on the client and the server at any given time. As I mentioned, adding this in was last on my todo list on this feature branch, so I had already depleted my “wise” architectural energy on other parts of the code. So in all my glorious haste, here’s how I put together this so-called singleton feature.

You can see the abandoned pull request here. I’ll spare you the code as it’s too long, but essentially, I have this “service” called the SyncManager. The SyncManager has one responsibility: sync changes you make to local content, and retrieve changes available on the server. And it’s pretty good at doing that one task. What I needed was for this once focused SyncManager to be able to handle items that are marked as “singletons”, and in that case, it should first retrieve pending items from the server, then send up the local singleton model if nothing comes back. This way I ensure only 1 exists.

So I went into this SyncManager and start changing a shit ton of code right in place, adding a bunch of conditionals to teach it this one new trick of how to handle singletons. I modified my main sync function and filtered what gets sent up to the server, changed my pagination function to account for singletons, and a whole bunch of other nasty stuff that I definitely was not sold on. I felt really dirty about the whole ordeal. But hey, I ran it, and it worked.

I played around on this branch for about 3 days after that, to make sure that no matter what I did, only 1 user preferences object existed. I placed a console.log that counted the number of extant user preferences, and it always said 1. Wonderful. I really pulled this off.

One day before I was about to ship, I was playing around with the app, and there it was:

Number of user preferences: 2.

Ahhhh. One job. You had one job.

I scrapped it. I scrapped the whole thing. I literally abandoned that entire branch after I saw that. Because it was justice. I knew the way I built the singleton handling was dirty. And I felt better about scrapping this hastily put together feature than to jeopardize the most important part of this whole ecosystem: the syncing.

It’s been two months since that horrific incident. And I haven’t forgotten the need for syncable user preferences. So, feeling cool-headed and calm, I gave the singleton feature another run for its money. This time, I was going to do it the right way.

Here’s the thing: the SyncManager is really good at doing its one job. It’s really good at syncing things. Rather than teaching it new tricks, and it then doing both of these tasks with lessened zeal, it would be wise to build on top of it. This is Architecture 101, but in the real world, we don’t always do what is right, but what is convenient. (There is a word for this that I’m struggling to recall. If you remember what it is please share it with me. I think it starts with a c.)

So that’s what I did. I left the SyncManager intact, and instead created a new “SingletonManager”. The singleton manager has one job and one job only: make sure that only 1 item exists of any object you are instructed to keep an eye on. It took less than five minutes to put together the logic, and I gave it a run.

Lo and behold, it did its job, and seems to do it well. No matter how many user pref objects I tried to create, it always resolved into 1. And I was completely clear-headed about the whole thing.

The moral of the story is: try not to modify things that already work. Because it’s very easy for those modifications to lessen its ability to do the one thing you already knew it was able to do. Instead, build on top of working components. The SyncManager is really good at syncing. Teaching it new tricks will not only have it struggle to perform that new trick, but also lessen its ability to perform the thing you depended on it to do. I now have functioning singleton models, which will be really important going forward, handled by a class that is really good and specialized at resolving multiple items for which there should only be 1. In code, I think it’s safe to say two specialists are better than 1 generalist. And I will never forget this lesson again.

You can see the new SingletonManager (WIP) here.

Update: the word was expedient. Definitely did not start with a c.

Update 2: A reader on Twitter correctly identified this as exactly the "Open/closed principle": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open/closed_principle

When did stocks become boring?

Mo — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 21:25:16 +0000

A friend of mine is experimenting with a podcast, and at the end of one such experiment (and coming from a finance background), he gave out some tips on stocks you should look into. And while I was listening to that segment, I felt something strange that hadn't materialized so directly in me before: A strong disdain for stocks and stock markets in general.

Psht, stocks. I thought it was normal, but after reflecting on it later in the day, I thought, when did that happen? When did stocks become boring?

I’ll speak for myself and say: very, very recently. And cryptocurrencies have all to thank for it. Compared to cryptos, the stock market feels so incredibly outdated. It’s like trying to use Netscape today to gain access to information.

What gives that feeling? It’s a combination of things. Stocks seem to carry with it the feeling of “old money”, and as strict as the SEC may be on insider trading, there’s no way a board room full of old rich men are behaving morally when all incentives require them not to. So there’s a sense of general distrust that permeates the whole thing. “Sell the news,” they say, as if it’s wisdom, when really it means that insiders always take their cut long before anything ever makes its way to you.

Then there are the exchanges themselves. I’ve dabbled with stocks since I was thirteen, but never got anything to show for it. I purchased a few shares of Tesla some years back on Robinhood—but what do I really own? I haven't received any stock certificates. My ownership in Tesla is just a number in Robinhood’s system, which you are eventually beggingly at the mercy of. Just recently, Robinhood informed me that I needed to upload a photo of my social security card in order to do anything with my shares of Tesla. This is the second time they’ve locked my account without notice. And given how exciting and attractive cryptocurrencies have become to younger people, my best bet is Robinhood will struggle to acquire the users they’re after and very soon shutter its doors.

With crypto, I don’t need anyone’s permission. I receive full ownership of the private keys, and I own them forever. No one can take that away from me, even if the government sends armed agents to my door. Obviously, I’d be wise to cooperate, but the point is, I don’t have to. So there is a large political cause of freedom and the right to personal property found in crypto that is not found in stocks and traditional banking.

Stock markets also represent a brutal philosophy of growth that I simply cannot support. Companies which are publicly traded become slaves to their next quarter earnings report, instead of focusing on long term health and sustainability. It’s a culture of unquenchable thirst and ravenous, destructive hunger. The “growth at all costs” mentally is just not something I want to be a part of or contribute to.

All of this contempt for the public markets has grown silently within me for the past couple years, and it may be latent within you too. Cryptocurrencies are as much a counter-cultural revolution as they are a bank-replacing technology. Almost everything is democratized, and the people behind it almost never wear suits. Compare that to the fundamental pillar of our crony capitalist system that is the public markets, dominated by 1%ers who continue to wreak havoc on our shared ecosystem and politics, and it’s easy to see why stocks feel so unglamorous as of late.

Aside from the volatility and potential gains to be had from either stocks or cryptocurrencies, I generally feel safer having my money in crypto rather than held and managed by suits at a bank or brokerage. I have no reason to hide from my government, but I have had my PayPal account frozen enough times for no apparent reason to grow distrustful of centralized systems.

The question to be asking is, if you had $200,000 of hard earned money that you wanted to protect, where’s the best place to put it?

Well, under your mattress sounds pretty great, since you could always keep an eye on it and sleep right on top of it. But, you become an easy target just waiting to be robbed. Not to mention it loses value every year it sits collecting dust.

You could put it in a bank. But then you have to trust Bank of America to not be a douche about your money. They can freeze your assets any time they please, and prevent you from withdrawing so much as a dime, especially if done at the behest of the U.S Government. You might say, “I earned that money legally and have no reason for concern.” Try telling that to PayPal. I have little doubt, given your innocence, that you will eventually regain access to your funds. But just the fact that other self-interested parties have that much control over my hard earned money is great cause for concern, especially when there are alternatives available without these downsides. Oh, and you’re only insured up to $100,000.

You can place your money in the stock market, but, that’s susceptible to exactly the same concerns as banking: You don’t really own anything, and it can be seized by your government at any time.

(You can also buy $200k worth of gold, but that falls into the same category as the perils of storing physical cash.)

What remains is the wonderful world of crypto. As long as you own your private keys, no one in the world can take your money away from you. You can’t be robbed. The funds can’t be frozen with the strike of a gavel. And, while this is mostly irrelevant, you might even quadruple your money in a few years time. The risk is of course the volatility of daily prices, but I’m not particularly worried about that.

There’s a lot of talk about the impending crypto bubble, but, given the viral peer-to-peer nature of it all, I’m hard-pressed to come up with any one scenario where the crypto system as a whole is destroyed. Sure, short term pops are inevitable, but on the long term, try to think of any one event that can permanently shatter a system like this.

There are only two crypto-shattering events that I can think of:

A dystopian society where access to the internet is prohibited.
The collapse of cryptography as a whole, ushered possibly in part by the advent of molecular and quantum computing. I’m not particularly troubled by this, as its arrival will be seen from at least a mile away, giving us ample time to redesign our systems to take advantage of quantum cryptography. I realize that disruption is usually revolutionary and not evolutionary, and doesn’t always give us time to react, but cryptography is too fundamental of a utility in our ecosystem for us to not be paying wildly close attention to it.

Of course, the government can try to ban cryptocurrencies, at which point, it would be prudent to start buying more of it.

Barring these circumstances, I think crypto goes on and infiltrates every aspect of our lives. This isn’t some new insight, as the optimism is already reflected in the price, but more of an invitation: consider putting away your doubt and fear, and instead find ways to contribute to this new system of independence.

The money is now flowing from the old to the new. The future is as exciting as it’s ever been.

Daily Routine

Mo — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 22:09:58 +0000

The morning is a better time to write. My hands do not hesitate like they do at night, after 80% of my energy has been depleted. My stream of consciousness flows less sinuously, and empties effortlessly onto this ocean of paper. This transcription process is cathartic. The coffee makes me brash.

Morning writing gives structure to my day. Waking up is essentially like calling Math.random() on your day. Without structure, it will quickly devolve into anarchy. Rebounding is difficult. Randomness can be good, but best saved for controlled environments, especially when you’re intentionally trying to bash things together to see what kind of reactions you get. Otherwise, it helps to have daily functions in your day that reduce entropy. While the universe ticks and progresses towards total destruction, the human class is made special by the fact that we aim to reverse entropy. Routines are a great way to accomplish this.

The only routines I have thus far are:

Wake up between 8-8:30am
Brew up a small cup of coffee
(Now hopefully restored) Write a couple pages on the first thing that comes to mind
Head to the office (co-working space) and do some work until about 3-3:30pm.
Break for lunch
Crash from lunch. Sometimes this one is deadly serious, and can take me out of the game for a couple hours. (I wrote this post in the morning, but am now typing it up and publishing it after my lunch. This seems to be a good, mindless activity to do while digesting.)
Attempt to give work one final go. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.
Commute back home.
The rest of the day is a ~well-earned “do whatever you want”, at which point I’ll either take a long walk to cool off, play some PS4, cook, Netflix, and, if I’m excited enough, do a little more work.

I used to view commuting as a waste of time, but, working from home, I felt I had too many hours that I needed to fill. And it wasn’t realistic that I would fill it all productively. So it was easy to fall into “worst self” behavior. I had an important insight somewhere along the way that I would be wise to fill my day with as many activities as possible. Free, empty, and self-time is good, but too much free empty self-time is no good at all.

Commuting, including getting ready to leave in the morning, is a great way to fill up 2 hours of your day, relatively productively. I’ll listen to podcasts on the way, which is good “life training”, in accordance with my “go to school” mentality.

Also, in a shocking turn of events, I went to the gym the other day for the first time in a really long time. There was nothing else to do so I said eff it. It was really hard getting myself to go. But now, due for a second time, I’m not so troubled by it. Sure, I’ll go to the gym again. No big deal.

Starting is the hardest part. It just starts rolling after the initial push.

When to write

Mo — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 04:06:08 +0000

For the first time in sixty-something days, I’m legitimately struggling to upkeep the habit of daily writing. It’s not that I’m losing some battle. But, I have most to write about when I’m undergoing some kind of struggle, in which case writing helps me explore that struggle.

Now has come time to work, and the struggles I undergo can all be fixed from the command line. Hats off to you Seth Godin. I don’t know how you do it.

The habit. That was the important part. The habit is more important than the writing. This started as a “first thing you do when you wake up” type thing. Now it’s devolved into, “let’s wait and see if later might be a good time to write.” But later slips, along with your control over the rest of the day. The morning, you own. It’s all yours. I said I was going to allocate it to code, but that has meant the slow mourning of a useful habit. And as much as I enjoy making progress on other things, I would be truly saddened to lose the progress I’ve made on this. So I’m going to go back to writing first thing in the morning. I’ll just need to find a way to not let it distract the rest of my day.

Wait a minute. It just came to me. The distracting part of writing is the publishing part. The act of writing itself in the morning actually gives me a lot of good energy. I start becoming excitable and thus unfocused when I publish the writing onto the internet.

The solution is then easy:

Write in the morning.
Publish in the evening.

I’ll try that.

Christmas Eve Worklog

Mo — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 23:52:18 +0000

This is no good. It’s not that I don’t want to write, but just not in the thinking mood. This is getting to be dangerous. I need the consistency of the routine back. But I need to code in the morning. No solution yet.

But, the tradeoff has been valuable in many ways. Progress continues on some really cool features for Standard Notes. It’s not just the features themselves that I'm excited about, but the way the features are built and installed. I risk being publicly committed by mentioning what they are, but, it's the only thing that's been on my mind all day, and thus the only thing my mind is capable of conjuring.

An all new package manager. Long gone will be the days of visiting a separate dashboard to install extensions. Now you’ll be able to install and browse extensions right from within Standard Notes.
Local installation of extensions. This one I am super excited for. The current model requires all extensions to be hosted on a remote (or local) server. This does the job, but compromises a little on potential security and availability. With this new system, any extension (editors, themes, etc) can be installed and run totally offline from the safety of your own computer. This means we can begin developing more extensions that deal with extra sensitive data while not having to worry about a hosted delivery model. (Desktop only)
Two-factor authentication. I am ecstatic about this. It’ll be installable directly from the package manager. (It’s a package itself.)

The part I’m most excited about is that all these new systems are built as extensions themselves, including the package manager and multi-factor authentication. Very little custom logic is being written in the core of Standard Notes. So, whatever we develop, you can develop too. Even things like multi-factor authentication can be written as simple extensions.

This “generic” architecture ensures that the core of our application does not rely on what may be modish at the time. Instead, new additions are built as lego blocks that are easily detachable.

Really, my core rule for Standard Notes is: You can build any cool feature you want, but it has to be an extension, as not to creepingly bloat the core application. This way, you can always layer down to absolute simplicity, which should be more than enough for many people, myself included.

Unprofitable Days

Mo — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 23:04:49 +0000

I’m in a generally positive mood today. And I bring notice to this fact only because it is very easy to see, given previous posts, that this isn’t always the case.

A friend of mind was asking me how I felt recently after I had messaged him some weeks back about my apparent state of despair. I couldn’t recall what he was referring to, or what state I could have been in at all two weeks ago. He told me it was on December 12, that he sensed I was in a panic. Well, December 12 is meaningless. Unless…

Unless I keep a daily log of my days. Wonderful! Finally a use for my uselessness. So I looked up the day’s post for December 12, and indeed, it was my shortest post ever. I was in a pretty bad place.

Where has the time went? I do not recall deciding to be better since then, but alas—my spirit seems to have increased tenfold. What was the turning point? It must have happened during a blink.

Emerson writes:

If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis wonderful where or when we ever got anything of this which we call wisdom, poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Some heavenly days must have been intercalated somewhere…

We never do quite feel ourselves grow. But take a look at you now. You’ve come a far way. The invisible growth that magically occurs in the interstices of your days: that is the fruit of life.

The first four hours

Mo — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 22:57:55 +0000

I’ve been running a dangerous habit the past few days of letting writing occur on a non-fixed time, as opposed to first thing in the morning. But, it felt like a necessary adjustment, as writing first thing would put my mind in the frame of writing, which would not rub off for hours. For me, the morning is the most productive part of the day, so what I do for the first four hours is probably the highest quality work I'll do all day.

For the past two months, that’s been on writing this blog and developing a useful habit. But, there are new frontiers now on the technical side of things. Exciting engineering challenges that I’ve been dreaming to start work on. I’ve been energized by the gush of feedback I’ve received from asking users how they use Standard Notes in their daily lives. The result was magical. When we design and build things, rarely do they have the ability to speak back to us. With software, you can send a small ping to your users and get a PONGGGG in return. It’s like an organism that was electrified by the rush of human energy flowing through it. It was a powerful, enlivening experience.

All that to say, the first thing I want to allocate the first part of my morning to is now architecture and code. The other part of the day brings with it compensation from the morning’s caffeine, post-lunch haziness (sometimes straight up unconsciousness), and the unfortunately-timed realization that it’s all downhill from here. It’s not so bad. I’ve been a little lazy lately post-3pm. I begin dragging my feet. It’s probably the winter. Afternoons and nights during the summer were a great time to work. Now, nestled indoors under yellow lights and never-right heating conditions, I melt into a languid state.

But I’m warming up. If yesterday was 30mph, then today was a good 32.

Get into it

Mo — Thu, 21 Dec 2017 20:03:13 +0000

Get into it and you’ll be into it.

It’s so commonly prescribed as to almost be cliche, but we know the hardest part of doing anything is starting it.

Starting requires the most amount of energy. But, you only need one Big Bang.

Once you start, physics kicks in. Momentum. Inertia. At that point, you’ll just keep going until something stops you.

This pervades every corner of our world.

Cars make all kinds of funky noises when they start in the cold. But once they warm up, they drive like a dream.

It’s a lot harder to start running than it is to stop.

Waking up by alarm is hard. But once you’re up, you’re up.

Do you ever pick up one dish, then find yourself just full-on cleaning your entire house?

Do you ever start something reluctantly, and find that it might be easier to just keep going?

Do you ever start something reluctantly, and find that you’re actually enjoying it, and that it wasn’t so bad?

You just have to get into it. Then you’ll be into it.

I’ve been focused on the human/operations side of business for the past few months and staying away from code. Now, I have to get back into the code. But my code engine has been inactive and making all kinds of funny noises when I try to start it. I struggled for a few days, but then I just got into it. First by doing something really small, like five minutes, then compounding each additional session.

I’m at about 30mph now, heating up towards 70. At 70, there’s no stopping me. And that gets to be another problem.

Do nothing

Mo — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 20:28:38 +0000

I wrote a few days ago about how the quote “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone” had profoundly resonated with me, and that I thought I would take that on as a challenge to strengthen my resolve against my monkey-mind.

For my own sake, though, I’d like to adapt this challenge to a more modern way of life, in a way that I can benefit from directly. I can expand the definition of “do nothing” to include activities which accomplish productively little as to essentially be a null activity. In that case, cooking can be seen as a do nothing activity. Casually reading a book can be a do nothing activity. Playing with the dog. Cleaning your kitchen. I find this to be a productive definition because these are the tasks I usually put off (except for the dog one). If I require myself to do a daily dose of “do nothing”, and null tasks like organizing your shoe closet are essentially absent-minded do-nothings, then I finally merge mindfulness with productivity and create a perpetual incentive loop.

I sound like a mad man, but, what I’m trying to say is:

Require yourself to take time out of every day to do nothing.

and

Do nothing can safely include things like cooking, reading, cleaning and tidying, washing, fixing, decorating, and whatsoever similarly befalls you.

Some marketing advice

Mo — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 23:48:28 +0000

In accordance with my recent understanding that it is more efficient to seek help from external sources than to pedantically rely on yourself, I’ve gotten some operations & marketing advice from an operations & marketing savvy person. He immediately opened my eyes to all the wonderful things I'd been doing wrong. Politely of course. But he was right. He saw holes in my strategies in minutes, while I have grown too numbingly close to the problem to have any sort of clear sight.

I thought I’d do a quick brain dump of what I learned, and hopefully elaborate on them in some future posts:

It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one.
Churn is a leaky bucket. You can fill and fill the bucket with water and substance, but if the leak is not contained, you’ll wither out.
Features != growth.
Advertise features to people who are interested in those features. An analogy is, Tesla may be a very kid-friendly vehicle that works great with baby seats, but that’s not what's called out on their homepage. They selectively choose the message based on the audience they’re interested in and what their audience is interested in.
Record keeping is essential. I feared this was the case, as I'm not a great record keeper. But I'm increasingly seeing how important this can be. It’s so important to have a chain of events that can be studied in the future. So, so important.
A gap in the market doesn't mean there's a market in the gap.
Find your best customers. Ask them to describe the product, then use that description.
Use-cases over features. Don’t just list out what the product does. Talk about specific problems it solves and ways it can be used.
Develop and understand user personas. Essentially, break down your audience into three or so different groups of people that would use your product. For Standard Notes, the three personas that I see most often are: The Privacist, The Writer, and The Hacker. Visualizing that has sparked many new lights in my head.
It’s better to convert users when they are ready for it, rather than as soon as possible. It makes for a healthier business.

He recommended studying the field of behavioral economics in general, and suggested two books:

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
Nudge by Cass Sunstein

P.S. I did the whole “sit in a room for 15 minutes and not do anything” thing. It was fine. I’m going to do it again tomorrow.

All of man's problems

Mo — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 14:54:45 +0000

I’ve become increasingly a fan of Naval Ravikant of AngelList. The man freestyles prose on all topics, from life to cryptocurrency. His Twitter bio links to a Farnam Street article, and the article links to a podcast the two of them did together. I am halfway through the podcast and am thus far amazed and astonished at Naval’s eloquence and unstoppable substance spewing machine.

At one particular point, Naval quotes the 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal who says something that profoundly resonated with me. He says:

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

A dagger through my heart. Ouch. I feel this one. And profoundly struggle with it. I can’t recount how many mistakes and bad decisions have been made in life because of my inability to sit still. I can’t tell you how many habits would never have been formed if I were able to sit quietly in a room.

So, so simple. Yet thoroughly quarrelsome. I’ve undertaken a lot of difficult challenges in the past few years. But to sit alone for half an hour in an empty room somehow sounds most difficult of all. I tremble just thinking about it.

Challenge accepted.

I’ve built up a yoga habit before that lasted just nigh on 30 days. It was wonderful while it lasted, but alas, dies in flame like the rest of my initiatives. But, I like the simplicity and minimalism of this one. Yoga is great but requires you to learn things and do things “the right way”. I’m sure you can point me to some interpretation of yoga that is more self-reflective, but it will probably have an esoteric name, thus requiring me to learn how others did things.

I like this way better: create or find an empty room. And just sit there. For half an hour. No phone, no laptop. Only an hourglass. And do this in the midst of your day’s hurricane.

Really, it’s about control. Who’s in charge of your day? For most, the answer is our dependency-craving monkey self. Desire after desire, all fulfilled at the speed of thought. There is an incipient voice in us that craves a chance in the spotlight. That craves control over our primate selves. It promises to be a more reasonable ruler. It promises to be less capricious. It promises more balanced living, all custom tailored to 21st century way of life. It’s a new software upgrade. We keep telling it, “Not Now”, but the installation is seamless, if only you let it: just be still.

The mind is a wild place.

Mo — Sun, 17 Dec 2017 23:15:50 +0000

A wild, wild place.

Undomesticated, savage, untamable: these are some synonyms for wild.

Primitive, uncivilized, uncultured, barbaric.

Unpopulated, rugged, rough, inhospitable, desolate, barren.

Stormy, squally, tempestuous, turbulent.

Disheveled, tousled, tangled, untidy.

Unrestrained, out of control, undisciplined, unruly, disorderly, riotous.

The mind is a wild, wild place.

10,000 hours is way too many hours

Mo — Sat, 16 Dec 2017 23:22:16 +0000

This post embarrasses me in many ways. The first is that I’ll be making extensive Rocket League analogies, which is a fantastic game I play on PS4 (but available on almost every platform). The game is supremely well made, and offers infinite room for self-improvement. There will always be someone better than you, which gives you the incentive to keep playing. The second is because despite having spent many, many hours playing this game, I have today I realized I am pathetically under-skilled.

To date, the game tells me that I have spent about 2 days and 2 hours playing the game, which equates to about an hour a day for the last two months. Sounds reasonably healthy. In this time, I’ve gotten to level 34 in the game, which bestows upon me the title of “Veteran", an honor that my mother ultimately refuses to recognize. I did some of the in-game training, but spent most of the time learning how to get better just by playing. And I thought it was working. I felt like I was getting pretty good.

Recently, unable to connect to the online servers, I figured I would watch a live stream of other players. This one particular player was also a level 34, which means we probably spent the same amount of time playing the game. This ought to be interesting—I wonder if my skills will match his.

I spent the next 45 minutes with my jaws dropped below my waist. This player was profoundly more skilled than I was. He did tricks I didn’t even expect to get close to within the next year. He showed a deep understanding of the game and its strategies. I spent a lot of time being impressed, but even more time embarrassed that I had spent the same amount of time as him without developing the same level of skill.

But just then, he exits the game lobby, enters into the training section of the game, and goes into “Custom Training”, a part of the game that I never bothered to venture into. Custom training allows you to download training courses created by other players to practice really specific parts of your game. He instinctually glided his way through the menu to a particular training course, and immediately begins doing the same move over and over again in an effort to get the ball to the goal. He did this for the next ten minutes.

Well holy shit. There it is.

All this while, there were “brain modules” available for you to install to increase your brain’s ability to play the game. All you had to do was download the training module, loop through it hundreds of times, and you brain learns to perfect it.

All I had to do was do the training.

For the last 2 days and 2 hours of total playing time, I was playing completely instinctually, hoping to get better by practice alone. 10,000 hours right?

It turns out, that’s one way to do it. But probably not the best way. You can go the raw route of just expending time and repetition to improve your comprehension of something. That can take a long time. Or you can take specialized training and skip lightyears. You can install brain modules that take out the guess work and show you exactly the thing you should be training.

Books. People. Articles. Classes. Podcasts. Speeches. Observing. These are all things that can cut time off your 10,000 hours.

I had been going about this all so very wrong. And I refer not to this game, but my own personal growth. I’m a huge “I learn best when I figure it out myself” proponent, but sometimes, that just takes too long. And often times, especially in the technology and startup world, there are just too many things you must be able to do well in order to succeed.

So I say now to myself: Do the training. Go to school when it’s time to learn. It’s too pedantic to try to figure everything out yourself.

Things I'm exploring

Mo — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 21:16:06 +0000

I’m in a weird state where all my thoughts are unapologetically raw. By raw I mean unassembled. I have a hundred different variables floating around in my head, and the cruel job bestowed upon me is to figure out how to arrange, combine, and breed them to achieve some sort of increase in progress. It is an absolutely maddening process.

The ideal solution would be to iterate over the possibilities like a computer, quickly and thoroughly. But in our world, each of the floating variables requires prohibitive amounts of energy. So the game is made crueler by the fact that your resources always underwhelm.

Here are some of the particular problems floating around in my head, that if you have suggestions to, would benefit me greatly as a catalyst.

I’m trying to figure out how to get more people interested in subscribing to the Extended package of Standard Notes, which helps sustain the project. But, I don’t know where to begin. I’m super averse to developing new features and functionality in the hopes of attracting more users (as is traditionally done). So I forbid myself from recklessly adding features that would add weight and bloat to the application, and threaten its survival. On the other hand, another threat to survival is not sustaining a steady amount of interest. So, if I can’t build new features to attract users, how else do I consistently keep the public apprised of Standard Notes? One option is to write about relevant topics on a blog, but, I’ve sort of outgrown the usefulness of this method. The benefits have been very, very slim, even for articles that had a wide reach. The other option is reaching out to the press and pitching some sort of story, but I’m not particularly great at pitching and developing long-term “people” strategies. I’m not very good when it comes to strategizing business interactions, so I’ll just say what feels right at the time. Usually, however, this format tends not to follow the “standard” pitch format, whatever that seems to be. All that to say, I hope to optimize more for building something slowly and getting attention slowly, rather than rely on my impressive pitching and sales skills to grow. However, these two are constantly at odds with each other.

One thing I’ve recently thought through that seems to be a really neat solution to this problem: I sort of hate marketing, but I love building and coding. What if I build code that markets? Essentially, embedded marketing. Marketing so that I never ever have to think about marketing, and instead be laser-focused on product and sustainability. Certainly intriguing. For me, this could be something like a collaborative editor in Standard Notes. Collaboration is a great way for existing users to get other people involved, and, if they’re as savvy as the original user, then exactly the type of person that we hope find our product. A referral system would also be a great way for existing users to get free lengths of service, while inviting a friend to receive the same benefit. I suddenly don’t feel bad about coding something like this. It helps make the entire project ecosystem more circular, and less reliant on the capriciousness of this human being.

Another thing that’s constantly on my mind is expanding the component system of Standard Notes. Right now, components allow for cool things like Markdown editing, HTML editing, code editing, autocomplete tags, GitHub push, folders, and more. What if this were to be expanded to add, for example, spreadsheets, kanban boards, slides, calendar, and so on. Essentially, Standard Notes becomes a powerful operating system to host useful applications who use the working note in Standard Notes as a secure datastore. It’s a wildly fascinating idea, and one I would love to pursue were it not for the constant pound of marketing and related business responsibilities at my door. This has created a gripping deadlock of: Don’t code, market instead, don’t know how to market, fatal_crash. I’ve made some progress as noted above, but still very much in its incipience.

This has all been so intensive on my processing unit that I’ve had several spontaneous mental exceptions in the last week. I mean literally, a stack overflow. I would have one positive thought, trace it all the way down only to descend into madness and quickly crawl back out. I reach to wipe my forehead but retreat in fear of simmering my hand. Too many variables, too little resources; my poor machine emits a blinking red light. But that light is a signal, and my hopes are it reaches something that reflects back kaleidoscopically.

The human function is to want

Mo — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 17:58:32 +0000

The illusion, or the projection, that the mind makes on our consciousness is that the human function works like this:

wants = get_finite_wants();
want_index = 0;

while(self.alive) {
  if(want_index >= wants.length) {
    self.success();
    break;
  }

  self.want(wants[want_index]);
  want_index++;
}

But that’s not it. It's what we're lead to believe. That our wants are finite. And that we work towards them, and achieve success once we iterate through all of them.

It’s a damned, cruel trick that life plays on us.

In reality, the human function is:

while(self.alive) {
  self.want();
}

There is no wants array. There is no counter. No matter how “successful" someone becomes, they still want for more.

I promised I wouldn’t have any new morals for the next few posts, but I couldn’t help myself: Don’t optimize your life around wants. Because it’s infinitely recursive.

The human function is to want. To live is to want. That’s the process of life. The mechanism of growth. You can never comment out self.want(), but you can append more lines to your human function to add more meaning to your life-loop:

while(self.alive) {
  self.want();
  self.cherish();
  self.wait();
  self.love();
  self.play();
  self.learn();
}

Journal Entry #56

Mo — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 16:55:33 +0000

How much to really say? How much to open? I've made this blog public to get over my fear of being public, but there is a maximum darkness threshold that I simply will not let out. There is a thing as too much honesty. I think. But maybe that's just fear. The truth is, I'm currently tired of writing publicly like I know what I'm doing when I have no idea idea what I'm doing. Any post that I write giving advice or motivation is always note-to-self's. But I'm presently tired of giving myself advice. I'm tired of trying to motivate myself with some profound and as of yet undiscovered philosophy. What remains?

I don't know. I imagine for the next few days I'll be writing unintelligibly not for any audience, but for me. Because the habit itself of writing everyday is more important than what I write about or what value I try to add to your day. I've tried to make my posts somewhat useful for an external audience, but then it became that every post needed to have some grand epiphany or moral.

Well, in this post, there is no story. There is no conclusion. There are no aphorisms or morals. Because what do I know? Painfully little. I mean literally. It is painful how little I know.

I'm nowhere near giving up. And quite frankly that's not an option at this point. So I don't worry about that. But if not giving up, what remains? I don't want to call this perseverance, because that sounds romantic.

No, what's left is just the raw stuff life is made of.

Life is in the interstices. Not the checkpoints. Yet checkpoints are all I yearn for.

There's your moral. You can go cash it in for literally $0 of productive or economic value.

Objectively Difficult

Mo — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 14:07:50 +0000

Objective difficult is nothing to feel bad about. Objective difficult is when you are doing something so hard that the gods themselves would struggle with the same task.

If you’re doing something hard, but don’t feel great about how far you’ve come, or the progress you’re making, or your inability to handle the challenge, determine if it’s Objectively Difficult.

If so, relax. And keep going. It’s not you. It’s the problem.

I've gotten stupider with time

Mo — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 14:57:09 +0000

Somehow, throughout years of conscious self-improvement, I may have gotten stupider. Don’t get me wrong—I may have gained some wisdom. I may have learned some strategies and tactics. I may have upped my technical talent. I may have learned a bit more about what I want and how to go about getting it.

But I’m no more able to drive this vehicle than I ever have been. In fact, while I have been collecting all these in-game tokens to improve my abilities, my driving has gotten worse and worse. I swerve constantly and recklessly. Sometimes I’ll even destroy the bumpers that were built to keep me in place. Other times I’ll fall asleep right at the helm of the wheel. And, when it’s really cold, my car doesn’t even start up.

While I have learned so much about the outside world, I am no better a driver than I ever was. I struggle with daily life now the same way I always have. Subtly, but profoundly and consistently. Years and years of conscious efforts at self-improvement and self-actualization have yielded the likes of a mad man driving intensely and uttering too many unintelligible epigrams while trying to keep up with the road’s curves and ends.

We spend so much time supping up our vehicles, preparing them for every climate and environment, but forget ultimately that there’s no predicting the curvature of these roads. A man with a beaten-up car can make it through the winding challenges of life with more ease than so-called navigation experts, if he drives humbly.

Nonetheless, I am amused by my own stupidity. I find it cute, how hard I try but ultimately what little control I have. We spend so much time optimizing our vehicles that we forget to enjoy the ride. There’s some fantastic scenery along the way.

Be Intelligent For Your Users

Mo — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 15:40:56 +0000

I was talking with a friend yesterday about my experience with Apple’s AirPods and how, despite the price, they are one of the most magical pieces of technology I’ve ever used. You really wouldn’t expect a pair of headphones to delight you in this fashion.

It’s more of a feeling, so I can’t describe it perfectly. But it's by far my most futuristic self. It improves your day, and makes something you couldn't imagine being any simpler infinitely simpler. But surprisingly, the magic is in not just the hardware, but the content itself. It feels like raw information is entering your ear wirelessly through the ether, through some seamless sorcery. I’ll be on the bus or walking on my morning commute and a stream of knowledge (through podcasts) will be entering my ear directly. It doesn’t really feel like there’s technology involved. It's like a gush of wind blew in some high-fidelity wisdom. That’s why it’s magical.

But, there’s also the little things. If you’re listening to something, and you see someone next to you trying to say something, you naturally remove one of the heads from your ear and say “Pardon me?". Well, the first time I did this, the music stopped immediately on its own. When I put the pod back in my ear, the music resumed.

That was damn magical. And I was reflecting to my friend, that essentially, these things have no buttons whatsoever, so they’re forced to make decisions on our behalf and assume our intentions. By removing buttons, they’re forced to become intelligent for us. The iPhone X is a fantastic manifestation of this. It is by far the most magical iPhone device I’ve ever used, and so much of it has to do with the lack of the home button.

I really admire Apple’s ability to trap itself in a corner and come out with seemingly magic-based solutions. I don’t know of another company at this scale that’s able to constantly pull feats like this. Apple essentially removes variables from the environment—variables that millions of people depend on, mind you—and asks, how would this look now? And the solutions are often times stunning.

The grand lesson here is, how would you be forced to innovate if you were trapped in a corner? What kind of constraints can you create for your product that would force you to become intelligent for your users? The key seems to be removing decisions from the user and offloading that to intelligent assumptions. My friend noted that it’s easy to cross the line between intelligent assumptions and annoying, or even invasive, coercion. Indeed it is, but I imagine most products are so riddled with decision-making points that this line is no where in sight.

Really, it seems that the feeling of magic that Apple’s products so frequently create is based off their correct assumption of how I want to use their product, which saves me the time of figuring it out myself.

Not everything is a complex problem

Mo — Sat, 09 Dec 2017 15:17:52 +0000

I’ve found that the apparent complexity of a problem is proportional to the amount of time you’ve spent thinking about it. Which means, it’s easy to fall into a trap of turning a really simple problem into a difficult one simply by virtue of entertaining it too rigorously.

I’ll run into a problem sometimes, be it a personal or technical one, and immediately assume it to be a Hard problem. I’ll completely over-engineer a potential solution. This is more to do with my personal life than engineering, as I’ve been able to hone my simplistic approach to solving engineering problems over time. But for personal problems, over-complication is the name of the game.

This can easily turn into a daily occurrence if you don’t catch yourself. I’ll be feeling down one day, not feeling like working, and begin contemplating (or complicating) the nature of the problem. Do I lack proper incentives? Am I motivated? Am I losing my mojo? Perhaps I need to awake at an earlier time? Perhaps eat better? Perhaps I need to eat first then drink coffee then perform some physical exercise then step out of the house with my left foot before my right—perhaps this will solve my problem?

But na. That’s not it. It’s usually that I’m tired. Or worn out. And sometimes, you just won’t feel like working. That’s always ok.

Another complex problem for me will be, what am I going to get done tomorrow to ensure a constant stream of productivity? And I start designing some tasks in my head that over-engineer the purpose of any day. But it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like a solution. The real solution turns out to be, relax. This is not a hard problem.

This is such a common occurrence that I fail to come up with any concrete examples. But when a problem is so difficult, particularly a personal one, that you cannot fathom an agreeable solution to it, it usually means you’re over-complicating. There’s a simple answer right at your feet that you perhaps lack the conviction to pay mind to. But, when in doubt, start simple. That’ll usually be enough. Rarely is an overcomplicated solution the right solution.

You’ll get there faster if you slow down

Mo — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:05:20 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time in the fast lane, traveling at speeds that are dangerous but feel good. Life in the fast lane is ultimately not a way to live. And when you find yourself drifting off from a comfortable 70mph and into the left most lane, you should really consider how much time you spend there.

The fast lane is when everything needs to be rushed. You’re perpetually running out of time to supersede your competitors or yourself. Everything needs to be finished yesterday, and you forgo any social priorities, like life and family, to get things done. Going so fast, your peripherals are completely blurred, and you fail to see the destruction you cause around you.

I’ve worked a majority of time under this fast-paced mindset of “I’m running out of time. I need to finish this immediately.” The problem of course is that “completing" software always exceeds the time you give it. You put on your racecar helmet, strap in your seatbelt, and say, I’m going to drive 100mph and get there in a week.

Of course, a week turns into two, and two turns into four. Before you know it, you’re still driving 100, and you’re two months in. Your rear bumper has fallen off. You’re running on two spare tires. Your passenger side rearview mirror is hanging on for dear life. And you’ve been going so fast, that you’ve passed up great people and an opportunity to live the nice life you’re speeding towards anyway.

In a word, speed is healthy in moderation, but not as a lifestyle. I know a friend who has been in the fast lane for the last six years, destroying relationships and forgoing a calm life to ship a product he thought would be finished in under a year. And really, the fact that he’s driving so fast contributes greatly to the perpetually missed deadline: you can’t comfortably and precisely steer a vehicle traveling 100mph. So you sort of just end up where the speed takes you, and it’s always towards chaos.

I told this dear friend that you might actually get there faster if you just slowed down for once. Take it easy. It’s taken you six years, but if you went at half the speed, you’d have double the product in half the time. You’d have held on to the people that mattered.

I speak of my friend, but I’ve spent my fair share of time in the fast lane, and can confirm that it’s no way to go about building products. You know you’re in the fast lane when you can’t seem to get yourself to step away from the problems. You have this one bug or feature, and you must complete it by the end of the day, no exceptions. So you skip lunch, you skip the date you had planned, and you work incessantly until 8pm, but figure out this still needs another 12 hours. So you repeat again tomorrow, driving at breakneck speeds and destroying your psyche in the process. Not only is it a poor lifestyle, it’s also a poor way to create quality in your products.

As for me, I’ve long merged into the middle lane. There are cars going faster than me on the left, and cars going slower than me on the right. But I’m able to enjoy my drive at a nice 70mph. I’m in full control of the steering, and can go left or right anytime I please. I easily walk away from problems and let both of us rest. It’ll still be here tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes, the problem is almost always easier to solve with a clear mind.

It turns out, if you slow down just a little bit, you might just get there faster.

Growth Articles That Make You Feel Small

Mo — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 14:57:06 +0000

I was speaking to a friend a few days ago about how frustrating it is to work really hard for months and months to make gradual progress, only to see some article about “How We Got 300,000 Users In 2 Days” or “How We Got To $1 Million Monthly Recurring Revenue Selling Toothpicks”, and other articles of this sort. You know the articles I’m talking about. They invalidate all the work you're doing and make you feel like you’re doing something wrong, or not doing enough.

I’ve been in this industry for many, many years and know, by fact, that startups struggle principally to attract users and to make money. They’re better at buying users and taking money a la venture capital. So, these sort of articles would confound me. On the one hand, I could simply discredit them by saying they’re not real, or fabricated, but that might be a “loserish” attitude towards something that I seemingly want for myself.

On the other hand, there is definitely something off about articles of this sort.

They all have the same format, don’t they? Nice, easy to read paragraphs no more than two sentences long. Fluctuating header styles, random boldness and italics sprinkled in, and a few fifth grade level line charts. This is the de-facto style of all SEO bloggers, which I’ve long been wary of. SEO bloggers tend to be what I consider scummy in their practices. It’s a sort of pyramid scheme. Their work essentially boils down to “How I Got 500,000 People To Read This Article”, which attracts you to reading it, and then counts your visit towards the headline. It’s all sort of a meta-recursive, self-ejaculatory pyramid scheme.

These easy-to-read high-result blog posts aren’t exclusive to SEO or marketing bloggers. I discredit any article or help post which counts my visit as a stroke to its grand ejaculation. But let’s instead consider articles with an honest nature written by seemingly honest people, that don’t have this format.

You have a nice guy or gal who doesn’t have a history of shady marketing practices, who has humbly put out a product to wild, wild success. The article is written honestly, has proper paragraph lengths, and doesn’t water down the reading to a fifth grade level. And in this article, this person claims to some hyperbolic result that is both inspiring and deflating—perhaps “How I Increased My Sales By 50,000% Overnight”.

Let me first say that articles like these are very hard to come by. I mean articles that are well-meaning, written honestly, and do not have some ulterior motive, like selling you the meta-product of growth for yourself. (As a rule, I discredit any articles about growth that aim to ultimately sell me growth.) These sort of honest articles are, by my browsing habits, the exception and not the rule. They do not trigger my bullshit alarm, but the results are so shocking, that I might have to work for the next five years to see similar results. And that’s sort of the goal, isn’t it? To make you feel like you’re doing something wrong,—very, very wrong. But let’s not be completely closed-minded: sometimes, we are very easily doing something wrong. Most times actually. But it’s important to be careful in how we approach articles that claim wild, exceptionary success.

So, I was telling this friend of mine that progress has been going pretty well since we last spoke. But, I mentioned, it doesn’t help the situation when every day I read some new article about how this person has made twenty million dollars in the time it takes me to make my morning coffee. Or how that person got a million users through some arcane marketing strategy with a touch of some Salt Bae level fashion.

My friend makes a funny, devilish look, as if he had figured it all out. He’s an entrepreneur himself, and has certainly come across the same species of articles. He said, “It’s important to recognize when someone is pitching a viable, reproducible marketing strategy (rare), and when someone is ‘backsolving’ their luck to make it seem non-coincidental.”

Intrigued, I asked him to elaborate.

“Well, it’s very easy to connect the dots looking back, isn’t it? Once an event happens, you can easily start connecting dots and telling a story. It’s what humans are good at.”

He mentioned the story of how he himself was able to solicit an external, six-figure contribution from a public company towards his startup without any working product—only an idea. And when I say “contribution”, I mean literally free, non-equity, non-debt based capital. He was a phenomenal salesman, and I myself attributed this legendary story to skill.

“You can easily contribute my results to some wicked skill, and I can easily connect some dots and backsolve to come up with a strategy for how you might do the same for your company. But the truth is, I got lucky. So many of the dots I’m connecting sound reasonable and reproducible, but happened by some chance encounter. I run in to this guy at this event who tells me to meet with this lady who tells me to email this person, and several traversals down this endless chain of events led to some magic. Could I try to inspire you and teach you how to do the same? Sure. But could I replicate my own results again with another company? Probably not. A lot of luck was involved.”

His message seemed to be, don’t discount luck in articles of success you see. Sure, often times there are nuggets of strategy you can observe and keep for yourself, but don’t approach these articles emotionally or enviously. If a person claims they grew an email list to half a million subscribers over night, and claims they can teach you to do the same, this is easily bullshit: this person could make a lot more money selling and performing this reproducible tactic to early startups and companies. Instead, they’re here trying to get you to give up your email for a “free no-bullshit eBook series on how to achieve similar results in half the time.” You can read and digest these articles, and suck out any bits of truth that might be helpful, but to be envious is to be mislead. To feel small is to be mislead. To feel like the work you’re doing is useless and pales in comparison is to be mislead.

The truth is, a lot of articles promising wild marketing success and growth are bullshit, and many more consist of backsolving luck. Very few honest, canonical articles remain that contain pure, reproducible strategy. Your goal is to differentiate between these three classes when reading an article, and to respond appropriately. There is something to be learned from all three classes of articles. But envy is not it. Self-deprecation is not it. What you want instead is to be a sort of neutral extraction algorithm designed to extract nuggets of strategy from articles of this sort. An algorithm is unemotional. It does not feel discouraged when an article is inflated. Instead, it seeks out the truths it has been trained to seek. And it throws away the rest. You can train your mental model to find whatever it is you seek, but as for me, my ruleset is:

If selling growth as a product, discredit almost completely.
If wild, exceptional results, then keep the luck factor in mind. Luck is inspiring just as well. The role of serendipity in our lives is something to be appreciated and humbled by. A feel-good story makes you feel good, and feeling good does good for you.
Of the little honest and reproducible content that remains, study extensively. Advice like this is typically buried in long books, as to not be saturated and already over-deployed in the market.

Ultimately, the only measure of how well you’re doing is, “Well, how do you feel you’re doing? Are you paying your bills? You getting sleep? You feel good about what you’re doing?” There is no objective measure to tell you if the progress you’re making is good. Yes, you can compare your progress to the progress of others, but progress is infinitely-faceted, and two comparisons are almost never valid.

When you want to know how well you’re doing, simply ask yourself.

Be absolutely resolute in what you do

Mo — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 15:08:57 +0000

When you’re doing something big, let’s say like approaching a big shot entrepreneur at a conference, or reaching out to someone via email and asking them for coffee, be absolutely resolute. Don’t wish-wash. Don’t waver.

In the past, I'd been so nervous reaching out to people that I would hide my request in a little “P.S.” at the bottom of the email. Here’s the kind of wimpy email I might have sent:

Hello Person,

[Some text about some previous work this person has done, and why I find it relatable. Sometimes a little too humbling.]

P.S. You don’t know me very well, but if you have time in the coming weeks, I’d love to have coffee and learn from your experiences.

You may not think it, but this email is pathetic. It lacks confidence, it lacks incentive, and most of all, it lacks resoluteness.

The email is of course a symptom of my inner self, and not just a writing problem. It wasn’t that I was particularly insecure, but that I sort of didn’t know what I wanted. Did I want to meet with this person? Maybe. Everyone else is saying you should meet with people. But I wasn’t entirely convinced. I was sort of just filling in. So my emails would reek of hesitation. And the rate of interest from recipients was equally wishy-washy.

Damn. I was hoping they would figure out for me if I actually wanted to meet with them.

Like I said, pathetic.

Doing things irresolutely is really bad, because you decrease your chance of success tremendously, and destroy your self esteem in the process. I would do things half-assed, get results that matched my pathetic effort, then be bummed out and discouraged to try similar things in the future.

What you want instead is full conviction behind every action. You want to leave no doubt in anything you do. If you’re going to reach out to someone you don’t know, you need to exude so much confidence as to humble the other person in prostration. I don’t mean arrogance. But some sort of indication that you know what you’re doing. Or at least know what you want.

Most importantly, don’t reach out to someone if you don’t know what you want just yet. Don’t throw a hail-mary hoping someone—anyone—will catch it. A hail-mary is an act of desperation. Desperation is the opposite of confidence. Desperation on you is like a snake with yellow stripes: it’s an indication to stay away.

When you know what you want, ask for it with all the conviction and confidence you can muster. Optimize for success, not chance.

You can send a pathetic email like the one I sent, and hope to get lucky, but odds are, you won’t, and you’ll have missed your opportunity to get what you want. Or, you can send an email with characteristics like this, and at least increase your chances by 25%:

Hello Estimable Colleague Who's Probably Pooping Right Now,

[bla bla bla]

I know you’re busy, but I’m confident we can greatly benefit from each other’s experiences. I’d love to learn more about x from you, and in return, it might be good for you to meet an entrepreneur building a budding company that shares a similar philosophy to you. Do you have time this week or next to...

It’s not perfect, but really, I’m trying to check off these characteristics:

No excuses (“You don’t know me very well”)
No wavering/hesitation/irresoluteness/vagueness (“If you have time in the coming weeks”)
Proper two-way incentives (i.e you get to learn from me as much as I learn from you)

Most of all, it’s firm. It’s resolute. I know what I want and I know that I want it. There’s no hesitation.

Really, the trick to all of life seems to be, if you exude confidence, people will consume it without question.

And, if you're sure of Newton's third law, then it would be a mistake to give it anything but your all.

Things vs. People

Mo — Tue, 05 Dec 2017 14:29:52 +0000

A new toy can only surprise you once. Or at most a few times, if it’s multifaceted. A diamond necklace will only surprise your wife once. A new house will only surprise you a few times before it slips into normalcy. A new car, just the same. A large sum of money, just the same.

The reason we desire things while they simultaneously empty us is because we know they will delight us at least once. But the magic fades quickly.

People, on the other hand, are infinitely surprising. They are infinitely dynamic. They are iridescent, and gleam a hundred different ways depending on how you shine the light. I’ve had friends for decades who still today surprise and delight me by their stories, jokes, embrace, and presence.

This is why we need people—why people are so much more important than things; why, when we have all the things, we still seek people. Nothing is as stimulating as human connection. Imagine being stranded on an island with an AI possessing the competence (or incompetence) of Siri—how quickly do you think you’ll go mad craving real human interaction? I cringe just thinking about the desolation.

As an engineer, I’ve deprioritized people in life and prioritized machines. Machines help turn me into a god (a supercilious one at that). People are puzzles that must be figured out. The choice has been easy. But profoundly limiting.

I never thought I’d say this, but:

You need people. You need people so effing bad.

Productivity of the soul

Mo — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 16:00:00 +0000

I was walking with my dog yesterday when I began contemplating on life’s hard problems, like “what am I going to do tomorrow?”

In the moment, it was a pressing question. Of most importance. I took it too seriously. I felt like I needed to have everything figured out about tomorrow. I felt that I needed to be productive. The right answer should have been something like “get some work done” or “make work for yourself if there isn’t work to do.” But I was in a good mood. So I took it easy on myself.

“I don’t know man. Read a book or something. Play some Rocket League.” And you know what? That felt like the right answer.

A lot of times, we are so focused on our task lists and our modern notion of productivity that we forgo productivity of the soul. I’m not sure what the soul is, but we can define it as sort of our emotional, immutable selves. It’s the unbreakable chain of our lineage from whence we came.

Productivity of the soul is the fuel for your main productivity. It’s the dimension behind your willpower. You can have a list of tasks that are easy to get done, but if your soul has not been productive lately, you will not have the fuel to complete even the simplest of tasks.

We already know, if not feel, that there’s something fundamentally off about our notion of productivity. We can feel it most times, but can’t always articulate it. We know that creating a dumb list of tasks and bearing some responsibility on our future selves does not always work. Yet we feel guilty when we are “unproductive”. We don’t view sitting down and doing nothing as productive, when really, it may be most productive of all.

Productivity of the soul. When your soul hasn’t been productive, you won’t feel like being productive either. The soul requires a task list just as well. Its requests are simple and rewarding:

Read a book, fiction or non
Play some video games
Play with the dog/cat
Call your mom
Have a conversation with another human
Scribble in a journal
Walk, run, or move
Lie down and be still

Really, productivity of the soul is anytime you’re not doing work off your main task list. But instead of feeling guilt and panic, you feel calmness and ease.

We tell ourselves we want to be successful so we can have the time to do these kinds of things guilt-free, but the fact is, you can do these things right now and find legitimate contentedness. Western productivity makes you feel guilty about it, but that’s only superficial. It’s learned, habitual behavior, and can easily be unlearned.

Having a productive soul fills up your fuel reserves and gives you what you need to do the “real” tasks you’ve been putting off.

I’ve enjoyed Jason Fried’s recent tweets about this topic:

Productivity is for machines, not for people. There’s nothing meaningful about packing some number of work units into some amount of time, or squeezing more into less. Think about how effective you’re being, not how productive you’re being.

and

If you’ve only got 3 hours of work to do on a given day, then stop. Don’t find 5 more to fill your day, just to stay busy or feel productive. Never feel bad about being done with something.

Joshua Bradley also writes: Efficiency is not the realm of the spirit. Productivity is strikingly at odds with creativity. But of the soul? To be creative is to have a productive soul.

Never ever play the What If game.

Mo — Sun, 03 Dec 2017 15:41:50 +0000

A reader on Medium responded to my post yesterday about doing the thing that scares you, and asked, what if you’re scared of death?

Hmm.

Well, I’m not sure if I have any advice about the topic of all topics, but, it might be important to differentiate between fear and worry.

I won’t use the official definitions, but we can try to break it down into casual sets. Let’s define fear as things you can do something about, and worries as things that are just sort of abstract panics about some future state.

I haven’t been able to conquer a lot of my fears, but my worries, those have been pretty easy. As a software developer, I love worries because you can sort of handle them and crush them remotely. You don’t need to go do anything. You just need to modify your internal state.

Worries can include things like:

What if I or a loved one dies tomorrow?
What if I lose my job?
What if my spouse is disloyal?
What if my company fails?

I think the common pattern between all worries is that they usually start with “What if”. And I only have one rule in life:

Never, ever play the What If game. Never.

If you play the What If game, you will always lose. Every single time. Because there are an infinite What If’s, and only one of you. You will be outnumbered and out-conquered. Never play the What If game. Simple as that.

Any time I’m speaking with a friend who expresses some sort of What If worry, I tease them and say: Stop right there. Do you realize that I can come up with a hundred what if scenarios to worry your mind after right now? Do you realize there are literally an infinite number of scenarios you can come up with that you can convince yourself are legitimate? Infinite. You’re just toying with one of them. Put it down. Walk away. Don’t play the What If game. You can’t win.

So, in the direction of worries, that’s the first strategy I employ. I never play the What If game. The moment a thought like that enters my mind, I laugh it off. I tell it, I’m not playing with you. Nice try.

Now, if a What If manages to pass through this filter, and seems a lot more credible than other What If’s, and I can’t seem to put it down, then I will employ another strategy. I learned this one from Emerson, and it’s stuck with me ever since. And it’s the realization that nothing can really hurt you. Nothing can leave you better or worse than it found you. The net result of all the events in your life tend to be very close to your average. If your average disposition is congenial, then even the scariest events imaginable, like death, will have a hard time fluctuating you.

Emerson lost both his wife and baby son, and writes:

In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

He seems to have found that like fear, worry is just another illusion. It’s not real. It’s just as shallow as fear. It leaves him no better or worse than it found him.

Aside from the understanding that nothing can really harm you, and what is scary in thought harms you not, I try to employ another strategy that weakens my worries. It involves befriending them.

I imagine the worst thing that can happen, the thing that worries me the most. I then play out that thing occurring. And I start building a life around it. What if I lose my job tomorrow? Well, that would be pretty great because maybe I’d have a week of bumming around, which may lead me to discovering a new side project. Maybe a little bit of adversity also teaches me a lesson or two? It’s not like I’m going to starve, right? This one’s easy. This one’s so easy, that at some point during actual employment, I began to look forward to this alternate life I built in my head.

What if I or a loved one dies tomorrow? Well, as for me, if I personally die, then I’m dead, and there’s no grief about it. I won’t be alive to be sad about it. I’m sad for my family of course, but I’m dead, so…moving on. What used to get to me more is the thought of the death of a loved one. And while never easy, it’s important to block this one from entering through in the first place using the What If filter. If it gets through, then you can either approach it like Emerson, who has lived to tell the tale that even something as tragic as the death of both his wife and son left him ultimately no better or worse than it found him. Or you can approach it from “building an alternate life” in your head in which you still find meaning in the event of a tragedy.

I think a really good way to sum this all up is:

You’re gonna be fine lol.

The “lol" there is important. It’s sort of like when a naive or younger friend messages you about some worry he or she has, and you, being older or more wise and having been through a hundred similar experiences and lived to tell the tale, respond simply with an omniscient “You’re gonna be fine lol”.

It’s a sort of contentedness with the difficulty of life. It’s going to be ok. Ray Dalio writes in his book Principles that the death of his mother was one of the most tragic events in his life, but when he thinks about her now, he smiles.

That gave me some comfort. From knowing to never play the What If game, to the Emersonian insight of nothing can really harm you, to Dalio’s smiling retrospective, it seems like everything's going to be just fine.

And if that doesn’t help, then surely this will.

Immediately do the thing that scares you. Immediately.

Mo — Sat, 02 Dec 2017 14:12:44 +0000

A note to future self:

Immediately seek out and do the thing that scares you. The moment you notice you are afraid of something, seek it out, and destroy it.

Fear spreads like cancer. It is disease of the heart and mind. If you remain fearful of something, you will always feel small. You will always feel conquered. You will always feel held back.

Immediately seek out your fears and conquer them. Immediately.

Fear is not real. And that’s what you must prove to yourself, every time. When you seek out your fears and do the thing that scares you, you enjoy one of the most transcendent experiences a human can undergo. It is one of the rare occasions where instantaneous growth and healing occurs.

Doing that thing which scares you is the greatest experience you’ll ever have. It is medication like no other.

Seek out the thing that scares you and demolish the illusion it imprints on your mind. Unplug the projector. See that it’s not real. See that the fear was irrational. All fear is.

When you detect you are afraid of something, immediately conquer it. Waste no time. Waste not a day. Every second you delay is a thousand years of internal cancerous growth. Some people will let a fearful thought linger and fester in their mind for years, at which point, they become so comfortable with their tumorous protrusion, that they begin fearing the eradication of the fear itself. It becomes all they know.

The longer you wait, the harder it will be.

Seek out the thing that scares you, and do it. Immediately.

Afraid of public speaking? Immediately seek out a platform to give a public speech. Immediately. It will be the greatest experience of your life.

Fearful of reaching out or connecting with this or that person? Immediately seek them out and have a conversation. Immediately. It will be the greatest experience of your life.

Fearful of being spontaneous or of imperfection? Immediately seek out an imperfect performance and publish it. Immediately. It will be the greatest experience of your life.

When something scares you, do not let it conquer you. Do not let it overrun your life. Because make no mistake about it: it absolutely intends to, and will succeed 99.999% of the time. Immediately seek out the thing that scares you and do it. Conquer it before it conquers you. It will be the greatest experience of your life.

100% chance of failure

Mo — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 15:33:20 +0000

If you were 100% sure you were going to fail at whatever your current venture is, how might that change your actions today? I asked myself this yesterday. There are lots of competing cultures swirling in my mind regarding how I view success and failure. On the one hand, there’s the optimistic Disney or Steve Jobs mindset of Follow your dreams and It’s all going to work out in the end. On the other hand is the raw, neutral, statistical stance of Your venture is more likely to fail than not.

These two ideologies constantly compete for prominence in my mind, and it confuses the hell out of me. I fear however that the Disneyland mindset has trumped the “realistic” mindset. Which is not always a bad thing. Sometimes you need blind optimism when you’re completely in the dark. It’s the only thing that can get you out the other side. Too much blind optimism, however, can be lethal.

The everything will work out in the end mindset tends to make me lazy. It makes me think I don’t need to work as hard. I’m not as desperate. I take my time. I’ll figure this out, I say. It changes the intensity of my actions. I take things slow.

But what if an oracle told me that six months from now, my venture is going to go up in flames? How might that change how I act?

I imagine that would change my actions entirely. I’d be full of desperation. I’d do things I never thought I would. I’d reach out and/or beg people for help, rather than wait on my self for answers. Simply put, I would do everything in my power to prevent the realization of that prophesy.

I’d take on the “nothing to lose” mindset, which can be recklessly, but necessarily, powerful. It’s sort of like asking, if you had six months to live, how might that change your actions? How might that change how you treat yourself and others?

And so I wish I knew. I wish I knew for sure if I’m destined for failure. That would be the whip I need. The cold splash of water on my face. The exact catalyst I’m looking for.

But instead, here I lie like Schrödinger's cat, in a superpositioned state of both success and failure. If I knew for sure, it would change everything. But alas, the mystery is the meat of the game.

Why is success scary?

Mo — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 15:03:31 +0000

I’ve written a lot as of late about the fear that I have and the courage I lack. It’s weird how it’s chosen to manifest itself at such a critical point. You see, I had thought that, given some luck, success was sort of automatic: you do the work, you grow, and you become outwardly successful. I didn’t expect there would be emotional treachery involved.

I became stumped some weeks ago when given a few opportunities to advance my growth, I chickened out. I straight up cowered in fear. And more than scare me, it confused me. Why am I scared? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? We always speak of “hard work” as the necessary ingredient people lack and that which holds unsuccessful people back. You don't hear too often of people being held back by their fear of being successful.

I studied this reservation within me intensely. Why am I scared? Are you freaking kidding me? You come this far and stop at fear? Unacceptable. This is why I spoke of the need to make changes in the last few posts.

I asked a friend his thoughts, and he agreed.

“It’s objectively scary. When you have a mediocre life, nothing is expected of you.”

And I guess that’s sort of a large part of it. The spotlight is scary. My entire life I’ve spent trying to avoid it. I don’t like attention. And I’m socially reserved exactly for this reason. When you gain momentum of success, it means more people will start paying attention to you. More people will expect things of you. And that scares poor little me.

It’s amazing to what extent my subconscious will carry out actions in my life. How does it go undetected for so long? It manifests itself in so many other ways. It takes a while before you really start understanding who's in the driver's seat. There’s a sort of latency of consciousness involved.

I, and probably many of you, don’t like being disliked. And I’ve found that the more effort you place in being outwardly, in trying to attract attention to what you may be doing, the more unwanted attention you get as well. Suppressing unwanted attention in my life has been pretty easy: just stay inside, both mentally, and to some extent physically. When it comes to being entrepreneurial, staying inside won’t work. You need to get out of your shell.

"If you want to be liked, be poor.” A pithy aphorism, but my friend is right again. If you want the easy life, if you want nothing to be expected of you, if you want to be well liked and be the recipient of emotional charity, be as little as you can possibly be.

If you want more for yourself, prepare to head into the eye of the storm. Prepare to be the target of unwanted attention, ridicule, and mockery. Prepare to be emotionally unstable. Prepare to fight your fears and demons every single day.

I wasn’t prepared. I went onto the battlefield with only a paintbrush, thinking a few artistic strokes here and there was all I needed. It turns out, it requires a hero’s courage. A wild audacity. From where shall I acquire these tools? No idea. But at least now I know what I’m looking for.

I enjoy struggling too much

Mo — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 15:08:27 +0000

This is a hard one to cope with. On the one hand, when I’m struggling, I try to make changes that decrease my level of struggling. Then, when my struggles have decreased, I become so bored, that I want to undo all the changes I made so that I begin to struggle again.

This is seriously messed up. But it makes sense. The struggle is an indication of work and progress. It is a very explicit feeling. Not struggling doesn’t feel like anything at all. I enjoy struggling, and it would be damned near perfect if it were not for one thing: the struggle takes me out of the real world.

It makes me forget my social priorities. I become a recluse. I forego social interactions. When I’m in the midst of the struggle and a friend reaches out, I’ll say sorry, not now. The result after several, several years of the struggle is a life so focused on solving problems, that outside of that world is a barren landscape I cannot bear spending more than a few days in.

There are some advantages to focusing less on problem-solving and more on real-world affairs. I become more sociable. I go out more. And, by some impressive sorcery, I’ll initiate contact with friends. Their reaction is of shock. I might even call my mom. Gasp! I’ll visit my parents more, I’ll take my wife out to a nice dinner, I'll answer my phone. It's great.

And get this—I’ll make plans. During the struggle, if today is Thursday and you ask me, hey, want to do something on Saturday, I’ll freak. “Saturday?? Are you out of your mind? That’s 48 hours away! You expect me to commit to a plan today, Thursday, as to what should happen Saturday? Who knows what problems I’ll need to solve Saturday! Sorry. I’ll let you know Saturday morning.” Saturday comes around, and plot twist!—no can do.

Planning paralysis. I absolutely cannot commit to plans for the near or distant future. I need to keep my calendar open for the struggle.

After a point of too much struggling, I begin to feel suffocated. I’ll have not left the house for weeks on end. You’ll have not heard from me in months. And I begin to feel lonely. I begin to feel, this is no life. So I’ll start making changes. I need to focus more on improving my real-world health, and less on solving problems and making progress.

And so I do.

But never for long. The struggle is too addicting. I always come scratching back like a withdrawing crack addict.

Hey man, *scratches neck furiously* ...got some more of that struggle?

What is true, and what is beautiful.

Mo — Tue, 28 Nov 2017 14:04:56 +0000

Some weeks ago, I found myself tinfoiled by the question of the objective vs. subjective nature of reality. I was so endlessly obsessed with trying to understand, what is the true nature of the world, as opposed to the nature of the world from my perspective? It sounds like a meaningless question, and probably is, but is extremely fascinating.

At first, it was just an amusing thought. Later it would grow into a behemoth that occupied a great percentage of my working CPU. A friend was also fascinated by this question, and we talked about it at some length.

The question itself is increasingly scientific, especially in fields of quantum physics, whereas in the past it may have just been metaphysical. It asks, if every conscious organism in the universe ceased to exist, what would the universe look like? What would it sound like? What would be its purpose? Would it even exist?

And while this question troubled me, to my friend, it was not the slightest bit troubling. He approached it from a different perspective. He spoke of Terrence McKenna, who quoted Plato who said something along the lines of:

The Good, what is it?
Tricky, tricky…tricky.

The True, what is it?
Trickier…even trickier.

The Beautiful, what is it?
The Beautiful is EASY.

The beautiful of course is our subjective interpretation of our world. And while there may be endless contemplation to its objective nature, what is beautiful—this we inherently feel and understand. There is no inner turmoil about it.

When you focus on trying to solve the unsolvable, you’re in for a world of pain. Heading in that direction is great if your title ends in PhD. For casual mortals like me, there is great peace to be found in what is beautiful.

In that direction, I already know the answers to everything.

Life doesn't like to be observed

Mo — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 14:21:55 +0000

There’s a strange part of the modern, scientific human being that likes to observe the world and its functioning. If something good happens, we say, how do we make more good things happen? We try to deduce it to an exact science. You might also find me contemplating, as in previous posts, things like “nature rewards this or that” or “life tends to act this way or that”. The reality of course is these are dumb, blind guesses, and are at best bizarre personifications of a world whose “true nature” we know little about.

I’ve noticed the more I try to observe the world and try to extract patterns and deduce aphorisms, the more I wind up hurting myself. Perhaps it’s subtle, but if you lean too much on one angle, you’ll fall quickly when it’s taken away or reshuffled. We tend to ignore that the external world is changing just as quickly as our internal one.

Emerson writes:

Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.

Life likes to be lived. It’s sort of a respect for its “realness”. When you begin to question whether you are in a simulation or whether the universe is lazy-loaded—or, more grandly, when you begin to try to inspect the source code of the world—it’s a sort of pervertedness of trying to look down nature's blouse. She doesn’t like it. She much prefers you play her game instead.

So, you’ll probably see less contemplations from me in the near future of the “mysterious inner-workings of the improbable universe” and more of who knows what.

When you're stuck, bash things together.

Mo — Sun, 26 Nov 2017 16:17:57 +0000

I’ve been stuck in a loop of non-progress for some time. Things are going well, but not as well as I’d like (I’m pretty sure that remains the case at every level of progress). In any case, the hardest part of building something new, especially a company, is that the road is unpaved. There are no signs, other than a few warning and “Dead End” signs here and there.

I’ve found myself extremely stuck as of late. Not knowing what to do next. I’ve scoured through books, through the web, through my mind, and have found some direction, but not enough. My questions are so particular, that I feel there’s really no way to solicit help from anyone. This of course is a problem of its own: when you’ve gone too deep, and the questions become so abstract and particular that you don’t even know up from down anymore, it’s time to step away from the problem. When you’re solving a problem that’s impossibly hard, it’s best to wait until the problem represents itself in a simpler form.

But of the most fundamental problem—what to do next?—where does one begin? This problem reappears at every level of entrepreneurship, if not life, and is one I struggle with more than any other problem.

What. Do. I. Do. Next.

This question aches every centimeter of my body. I feel nothing but pure resistance to it, because of its paradoxical nature. Imagine being in the center of an underground tunnel system, except, there are no outlets. The walls are made of dirt, and in order to move forward, it’s not a matter of choosing left or right, but instead, you need to dig a passage through any of the thousand options.

What’s the right answer?

If you approach it like this, you’ll be paralyzed of inaction. There is no right answer, or if there was, contemplation is not the right shovel. Instead, you better begin digging in a direction—any direction—and repeat until you find the tunnel that feels like progress to you.

This is what entrepreneurship is like. Instead of forks in the road, there is no road—there are just walls encircling you, and you must chisel at some arbitrary direction in order to move.

I think I’m beginning to understand that, when you’re stuck, and you’re not sure what to do next, the only possible answer is: try as many different things as possible. Create new reactions. Observe the effects. Repeat. Grow. Observe. Study. Repeat. Grow.

That’s sort of the evolutionary method: it doesn’t really know where it’s going. Instead, it tries things, and if beneficial, enlarges that trait, and if detrimental, phases out the trait. This is the nature of the universe at large, isn't it? We've sort of been trained to think "there is a right way, I just need to figure out what it is." When really, the nature of the universe is smashing things together until something acceptable happens.

This is a grand revelation to me, because I have been stuck in a loop of doing the same things over and over again expecting unique results, and am shocked when nothing new happens. Not only that, I’m adamantly resistant to new experiences that don’t have a direct, obvious yield. I’ll only do things if I can measure their immediate results. This sort of mathematical approach to problem-solving will yield some results, but has a very low upper limit.

What you want instead is a sort of chaotic, serendipitous method of progress-making. I know a business-minded guy that would jump at every “want to have coffee” opportunity that came his way, and it confounded me. “Aren’t you afraid it would be a waste of time?” I would always ask. But now I get it. He was experimenting. He wasn’t being biased. He was creating experiments, and studying their reactions.

As for me, I'm putting away my contemplation chisel and putting on my safety goggles. When you’re stuck, and don’t know what to do next, bash things together until a reaction occurs that you’re happy with. Then head in that direction. Rinse, lather, repeat.

A vision for how life should be

Mo — Sat, 25 Nov 2017 15:13:16 +0000

A hopeless in love friend was oozing his worries yesterday, and said in the most beautifully tragic way:

I have this vision for how my life should be. And my real life doesn’t match it.

If there’s anything I uselessly specialize in, it’s letting worriers know that they are symptoms. You are never ever alone in how you feel. You are a statistic, and odds are, most other people feel this way too.

Even more hopelessly, I replied is this not the human condition?

I reflect on this now because of how beautifully sad that original statement was. And how relatable it is. That vision, those images we see play in our minds of how our life should be—that’s the driving force of our inner evolution. It’s like being totally happy with your current iPhone and then seeing the new iPhone X and not being happy until you acquire such physical sorcery. Once you see it, it ruins everything you love about the present.

I’ve always thought, but hold no substantial evidence of or scientific backing for, that this sort of fundamental “visioning” we play out in our mind is a fundamental property of all biological life. All life evolves, and we’re sort of mystified by it. But given the fractal nature of the universe, we need not look any further than the process of our own evolution to understand how it happens at every level.

And if our consciousness evolves through wanting, through seeing a different version of ourselves, then perhaps it is not too farfetched to say that the fundamental unit of life is ambition. Surely you can’t quantify the ambitiousness of a cell in your body, but I believe what holds for you holds for me, and what holds at one level holds at every level.

All this to say, the way you feel regarding your health, your wealth, your work, and your future, is symptomatic of the times and tied closely to the health and wealth of the entire system. You are never alone.

This sounds like common sense now, but I did not understand this concept well until my early twenties, when I began to develop the partial lens to understand what the hell Emerson was talking about, like all the time.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

— Emerson in "Self-reliance"

Of the ground, and of the Sun

Mo — Fri, 24 Nov 2017 14:02:00 +0000

What comes from the ground is grounding. This much I’ve learned. It’s tethering. The ground produces some of the most addicting products we consume (well, it produces all the products we consume, but). Food, fruits, vegetables, alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms, coffee, tea, tobacco—they all come from the same place, and all seem to share a common property: they are grounding. They bring you into the earth.

But I don’t want to be pulled in. What is the 21st century human being if not a beacon of outward exploration? Of space, of solar, of science. We are departing the ground. We are developing our own world. We desire to go up. Yet Earth tries to bring us down, and uses every trick up its sleeve. We were made to ascend, yet find ourselves overwhelmed by the grounding forces on this planet. The sun, the planets, and the wonders of space levitate our consciousness into higher order, but the ground pulls us back.

I’m untethering. I want to cut the cord. I want to go solar. Pure, raw, unadulterated, scientific energy. Because I know what I want, and where I want to be. Grounded, is not it. I’m of the exploring sort, yet spend no time exploring substantial reality. I get sucked in by grounding energy and make myself a nice comfortable abode. I like it here, I say. This is comfortable. I find some pleasant truths and make some cute progress. But this isn’t it. I’m shackled. I feel it, but ignore it. I’m grounded by reality's loop which I’ve mistaken for my life.

Then there is solar energy—the purest form of sustenance mankind has ever known. Solar invigorates. Solar cleanses. Solar challenges. Solar comes from above. It’s not grounding, like everything else we know. Solar is powerful. It’s the unadulterated human being. The conquerer of worlds. Who has heard of a rooted tree taking substantial claim to the outside world? Grounding sources of energy seem to want to make you part of the ground. Solar energy guides you up and away, like a tree extending its branches to meet the sun.

Ground energy is all I know. And I think I’ve seen enough. My compass is recalibrating. And it’s pointing upwards. I check my gauges. My escape velocity is just enough. My fuel is running low but is plenty to get where I’m going.

Of the ground, one falls prey to being coiled and tethered. Of the sun, of space, is pure infinity.

The Courage That I Lack

Mo — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 15:20:45 +0000

I've been telling myself that I am not afraid. And therefore any mismatch between the progress I'm making and the progress I want to be making is due to a datetime imbalance, and not some sort of inhibition.

I may have been partly right. But also very partly wrong. Perhaps I am not afraid of many of the things I choose not to go after. I am not afraid of meeting people, yet I always tend to stay inside my head. I am not afraid of talking to people, yet I always prefer to avoid small talk. I am not afraid of trying new things with an open mind, yet my experiences for the past year have been anchored on the usual. I say I'm not afraid, but if not fear, there seems to be something else holding me back.

Courage.

I seem to be lacking it. This is a great word, and one I don't seem to actively use in my mental vocabulary. When I speak, or think, or write, I may use the word "fear" extensively, I may use the word "ambition" or "inhibitions". But never do I recall conceptualizing courage. Even in popular American culture, we speak of conquering our fears frequently, but courage seems to be a sort of Eastern/Chinese concept.

Sure, I may not be fearful of meeting new people or experiencing new, inconvenient things, but I lack the courage to do so. Courage is officially defined as the ability to do things that frighten you, but to me, it's something else. Courage is a bold brew of energy. You can conquer all your fears but still lack courage. It's sort of like the second level to fear. Fear II.

I'm just beginning to explore the world of courage. So I have no results or anecdotes. I was reading Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferris (a great collection of advice from experienced people) and the word kept popping out at me. And the second I read it, I felt an instant connection. It filled up a certain part of me that was empty. And I knew instantly that courage is what I had been lacking.

I'm struggling to write this post. How can someone who has just discovered they lack courage write anything about it? But there’s just something about what it means to me that makes it the perfect ingredient to the imperfect recipe I’ve been concocting. I’m trying to define in words the chemicals I feel when I utter the word courage, but I’m at a loss.

Courage is..

It’s..

Hmm..

It’s..

Let’s see. It’s sort of big. It’s full of grandeur. When I think of courage I think of a warrior. I think of Chinese folklore. Courage is bigger than fear. It’s bigger than ambition. It’s bigger than us. Courage is the human inhabiting a larger space than themselves.

Courage is a sort of audacity. Courage is to be small, but do big. Courage is not so far off from YOLO. They seem to share similar vibes.

I guess, now that I think about it, courage can best be defined as: stop being a little bitch and get out there.

How do you define courage?

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

— Anais Nin

Why You're Resistant to Being Productive

Mo — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 16:19:31 +0000

A friend was telling me yesterday that he’s been struggling to get daily tasks done. He’d rather just put them off. But this friend might as well be me, or probably you. Sometimes we go through periods of absolute demolition of our daily tasks, but other times, we go through seemingly longer periods filled with reluctance to work.

In observing this behavior in myself in the past, I’ve noticed that it usually comes down to three reasons why I don’t feel like doing the work I should clearly be doing. The way I’ve been able to observe it and get at its root is because it felt physical. There was a definite obstruction preventing me from doing the work. I could squeeze and squeeze, but could not get past this obstruction. What gives? For me, it’s always one of:

1. I don’t care about the work

This is a hard one and one that I’ve battled with constantly throughout my life. This was especially hard in college where I could not summon a single fuck to give. I couldn’t care less of the topics, and I was always entangled in some side hobby that was far more interesting. If you don’t care about the work, you’re not going to feel like doing it, no matter what productivity system you have in place. The moment you begin caring about the work, you’ll get tasks done so quickly that a productivity system might even be a hindrance (an exaggeration of course, but it truly does become automatic).

Unfortunately, there is no workaround for this one. If you don’t care about the work, it’s going be a long and agonizing journey to completing this task and its descendant tasks in the future. The only solution I’ve found is to find a new line of work altogether.

2. I'm not sure how doing that work will take me to the next step

We are future-minded beings after all. You have someplace you want to be in the future. There are things you need to do today. If you can’t draw a direct line between the present task and where you want to be in the future, you’re going to have a hard time summoning the will to complete the task.

This one can be solved through brainstorming: you need to find a way to draw a line from this point that you’re stuck at to where you want to be. As soon as you connect the dots, you can begin to find meaning in your tasks, and feel like you’re working towards a goal.

3. I'm not sure what I would do after I finish that work (what the next step is)

This is the hardest one of them all to detect. Because you like the work. You know what your long term goals are. But you just don’t know what you would do after you finish this task. So this innate friction arises. This happens to me mostly in releasing software. I love building software. And of course I have a long term goal of building a successful software product. But in the moment, I’m not sure what I would do after I release the project. And until I figure out what that next step is, there’s going to be huge friction to move forward.

This one is probably the easiest to solve: just figure out the next few tasks after this task. If all you have on your to-do list is “Release project”, you’re never going to release. If instead you have:

Release project
Email 10 journalists about it
Post on Product Hunt
Reach out to first 5 users

Then you’re going to have a lot easier time, since releasing the project wouldn’t be an existential dead-end. It’ll just be the beginning of your future.

The Final Reason

If you’ve gotten all three of these potential productivity resistors already locked in place, but still find yourself unproductive, you may just simply be tired. I know this was the case with me a few weeks ago. I had been working so hard that I was simply out of fuel. A few days recharge did the trick.

While we were made to work, there is an entire economy of resources residing in our bodies, a lot of it beyond our immediate control. Rather than taking the advice of another person in matters of personal productivity, just listen to yourself. What are your whispers saying? Ask yourself “Why am I not doing the work I should clearly be doing?” and listen to the answers your mind starts shouting. The right answer will always be echoed. It’s just a matter of listening.

If you've found your own methods for dealing with productivity reluctance, I'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch via Twitter or email.

A class of internet-developing humans

Mo — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 13:54:06 +0000

The question of the random vs. non-random nature of our existence in essence asks: what part of our lives has meaning, and what part is chaos theory? I tend to think that science ascribes too much randomness to our world, while religion and spirituality ascribe too much meaning. But, as a friend of mine says, it is the job of each of those fields to specialize. Science specializes in eliminating meaning, and allows it to focus on what removing that lens makes the world look like. Religion specializes in ascribing meaning to almost everything, and yields interesting, different results.

I was reflecting yesterday on where we find ourselves in 2017, and the hundreds of thousands of years of human and cultural evolution that got us here. And I found it extremely odd that given the infinite twists and turns, the infinite possibilities for how this could have turned out, reality instead converges onto a set of people that develop an instantaneously-connecting technology that shrinks the world down to milliseconds apart. I find it odd that given the infinite possibility for randomness, a class of humans emerge that develop speed-of-light networking technology, similar to underground networks of mycelium strings that puppeteer the natural world.

I find it extremely suspicious given the infinite possibility for chaos, disorder, and absolute incoherence, that we instead develop mathematical and physical theories that allow us to distort our world to enhance communication (and it's always communication technologies that we seem to develop first, isn't it?). The Earth eerily seems to be developing a sort of mind, and we are its brain cells.

Given the infinite possibilities, I find it increasingly non-random that we seem to be developing a world of inherent meaning, rather than associated meaning. I don’t think the argument of “you’re just seeing patterns or meaning where really it truly is just random” applies to internet-developing human beings. You could have said that perhaps at past points in human history when we were doing nothing with our lives (though I’m not sure we were ever doing nothing), but what’s happening now, this,—this is inherently meaningful. And I’m not sure I can continue to let science convince me otherwise.

The Capitalism Squeeze (or, No One's Happy)

Mo — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 15:59:54 +0000

Have you ever heard of a company or startup having more labor resources than they know what to do with? I’ve never heard such a thing. Instead, every employee, every company owner, and every story I hear is riddled with The Great Squeeze: human resources are squeezed far beyond their breaking point, and hiring more is detrimental to the bottom line.

The result of the squeeze is unhappy laborers in every corporation around the world. You must complete eighty hours worth of work in forty (the result is of course eighty hours of work). The emotional cost is unbearably high. A friend of mine complains that in his role as a middle-manager in a billion dollar corporation, his store is perpetually under-resourced, and he is given no budget to bring on help. Every last dollar is squeezed out of every oozing corner by remote executives who view employees as a line item rather than delicate souls.

But this is all by design. For a capitalist to view his labor as a pool of delicate souls would surely harm his bottom line. So, by all accounts, this is working—for the capitalists.

For the laborers, for the employees—the great squeeze pushes them to their absolute limit, far beyond the point of total madness. Yet they are urged to press even further. I recommend no solutions in this short post. I’m only an observer. Capitalism is great for the entrepreneurial-minded, which I tend to resonate with. So I enjoy certain aspects of it. I enjoy that one can build something from scratch, and found an empire around it. That companies exist today with more capital than many world governments combined is a fascinating occurrence.

I don’t enjoy however watching my friends and family torn down every day to their absolute core. My friends in the medical field complain that they are required to be so business-minded, that their incentives forbid them from spending any reasonable time with their patients whatsoever. The system truly benefits no one but the capitalists themselves.

Again, I don’t have any solutions. And it’s all too often we complain today about needing to replace systems without thinking through the consequences or alternatives. Systems are solutions to problems. They are not solutions to every problem. I don’t need to sell you on the fact that there is no such thing as a system that solves all problems. Instead, we need to ask, what is capitalism good at, and what is it bad at? Capitalism excels in growth and wealth creation, and has been a fantastic solution to that problem. Empathy and good will? It’s not so good at that.

To my friends who read this who are affected daily by the Great Squeeze, know that you are not alone. Know that in fact, 99% of the world feels the same pain you do. And know that, unfortunately, no one person or entity is to blame. There is no scapegoat here. This system has produced countless wonders, but again, is not some magical panacea that optimizes for every problem. This system was specifically optimized for growth, and in that direction has produced fantastic results. It wasn’t optimized for your feelings.

At some point, I suspect we will achieve such endless growth at a human cost so high, that we step back and begin to reconsider our cancerous priorities. Whether this happens in our lifetime remains to be seen, but the pillars holding up this system are beginning to show great signs of distress.

Giving fate a chance to intervene

Mo — Sun, 19 Nov 2017 16:17:31 +0000

I’ve been under the weather for the past few days. The world must have read what I said about being twistedly envious of Charles Darwin’s extended sicknesses and took it literally. As shitty as it feels, it has allowed me to finally take a small, much needed break. Yesterday was the first day in probably a year that I did no work at all.

I’ve gotten into a rhythm of listening to podcasts when I can instead of music. Typically I go through a podcast phase once every year or so, before deciding I’ve been intaking too much information and need a break. Joe Rogan’s podcast has been hitting the spot for me. He brings on a variety of guests from different backgrounds and has wildly stimulating conversations. The amazing part is, Rogan never asks questions, like in a typical interview. He never says “So, you’re a mathematician—tell me about math.” Instead, he’ll just start blabbering about some random current event and finds a way to flow it from there.

The most recent one I listened to was with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History. Dan Carlin and Joe Rogan combined in one podcast is the meeting of two legendary podcasters. Dan’s insight on current events and history, especially that of the Middle East, is extremely fascinating and enlightening. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

They talked at some length about, essentially, quitting your shitty job to go do something you’re passionate about instead. And Dan said something I really liked. He said that when you take action towards your goals or dreams—any action—you give fate a chance to intervene. I’ve always suspected that as hostile as the universe may be, it does want us to succeed (as a whole at least). And so when you take one step towards your goals, or an action, there is an equal and opposite reaction on the part of the universe. The universe will never ever make her actions obvious, as to arouse suspicion. We call it luck, or fate, or chance, but in reality, these are the mechanisms the world employs to help you grow from a tiny seedling into a colossal tree.

But here’s the thing: because of nature’s desire to be sneaky and not leave any clues, it’ll never help you if you don’t at first help yourself. When you help yourself, and receive some good will back from the world, you associate it with your effort, and thus nature has you fooled into thinking you are growing by your own accord, when in reality there are a million forces acting on your world to make it expand.

All that to say, when you take action in the direction of your goals, you give fate a chance to intervene. If however you remain indolent and idle, for nature to help you then would surely violate her principle of suppressing suspicion. Put another way, this amounts to “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” Both of these combined work based on the assumption that nature has good intentions for its inhabitants, which I absolutely believe it does. We’ve made it this far, haven’t we?

Reality optimizes for the whole, not just you.

Mo — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 14:11:44 +0000

This one is fascinating to me. Someone I follow on Twitter liked a tweet someone else posted, and that tweet was a picture of Ray Dalio’s book called “Principles”. I had never heard of Ray Dalio before, but apparently he made Forbes’s 100 richest people (17 billion USD net worth) through an investment firm called Bridgewater Associates. Ray himself is an intellectual, and so far his book is extremely fascinating. He takes a very iterative and evolutionary approach to self-improvement.

The screenshot that got me interested in the book captured a passage that said:

Reality is optimizing for the whole—not for you. Contribute to the whole and you will likely be rewarded.

And that instantly blew my mind. Because this was an unresolved area in my life. Who does nature reward? Why do some people “make it” and others don’t? Does nature favor some over others? I never made any progress on these questions, and just hoped for the best.

But when I read that, it clicked—nature, or reality, or the universe, or god, or time, or whatever, optimizes for the whole, and not just me. I no longer had to wish to be lucky, or hope that nature chooses me as one of its favorites. No—all I have to do is essentially figure out what the world is optimizing for, and board that train. At that point, you’re in the hands of mathematics and market economics, and rewards are no longer this mysterious, prayer-based system.

This quote perfectly answers why reality chooses to reward some and not others. Basically, you have to ensure you’re not only contributing to the system, but contributing to the right problems. This understanding immediately closed the circle for me.

I’m not yet sure what practical implications this will have. On the one hand, I’m glad to be working on a problem that the world seems to be selecting for (privacy and thought-management). The scary part is keeping track of when reality changes what it's optimizing for. I imagine that once you’re already on one train going 100mph, it’s hard to get off and board another. Which explains why large companies are so susceptible to disruption.

The moral of the story seems to be: pay attention.

Memories of Winter

Mo — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 15:47:08 +0000

The memory of winter is always the same for me. It’s always difficult in an emotional sort of way. The memories themselves are clear, but the times while they pass are hazy. I’m always half sleepy during winter, and thus only half myself. Maybe it takes adjusting to. But memories of winter are always dark.

There are memories of working on other projects years and years ago from my bedroom in my parent’s house. That was, during the moment the most profound era of my life, but retrospectively a dark and challenging time. There was the memory of starting several different employment jobs, which all for some reason began during the winter. I could never manage to summon happiness during times of employment.

Winter reminds me of hardship, both mental and physical. It reminds me of sub-zero temperatures in arctic Chicago. It reminds of the yellowness of the artificial light, heat, and electricity in our homes. It reminds me of times I would walk in the freezing ice to my bus stop, then train station, then the frost-bitten half mile walk to work. It reminds me of time spent trapped indoors, suffocated from the lack of outdoor greenery and photosynthesis.

Winters are always hard, and I don’t expect that to change. Summers are probably hard too, but are softened by the sun’s gentle warmth and the wind’s cooperative breeze. I wonder what part the weather plays in the difficulty of winter, and what part is just timing.

As arid as winter may be, I do have memories of warmth. And togetherness. In the winter, warmth is centralized, so it brings people together. It makes us feel human and vulnerable. No matter how wealthy, how prominent, you require warmth like anyone else. Winter is a humbling journey. There are of course the memories of December, which are always brought to you by the steaming of roasted coffee, the warmly lit Christmas streets, and the togetherness of the frenzy of holiday shopping.

November and December are welcome winter guests, but don’t stay for long. It’s January and February that overstay their welcome. March is a beautiful, hopeful time; April is a waiting space, and May brings back the sweet smell of nature. June, July, and August go breezing by, and winter approaches quickly yet again, before you find yourself relentlessly embraced by its gripping hold.

For all its dark and solemn memories, winter makes us stronger. While we may have conquered the physical part of it through endless technological lubrications, the mental part remains as reptilian as ever. I’m not so sure I’d be the same person I am today were it not for the Annual Winter Games. And as hard as it may be, I look forward to discovering what this year’s challenges will reveal about myself, and all there is to be learned about the world around me.

As twisted as it may be, I enjoy your annual coming, Winter.

How does the universe look to nothing?

Mo — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 14:05:42 +0000

I had a fascinating conversation with a friend regarding the objective vs. subjective nature of reality. Does the universe objectively exist whether or not someone is there to observe it, or is its existence subjective and in the mind of the observer? This question dates back centuries, but comes back highly recommended from quantum physics, which makes this question no longer a metaphysical one, but a fundamental scientific one.

Neither of us made any particular progress on this question. I believe that our senses plays a large part in how we perceive the existence of the universe, and without our senses, the world is just metadata. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics state that a conscious observer is required for electrons to make up their mind about their attributes, and thus that a conscious observer is required for the existence of the universe. Without a conscious observer, nothing can be said to exist.

My friend has a gift for taking the complex and simplifying it into bitesize edibles. We’ve argued about this topic inconclusively for months, particularly about what role language plays in distorting this entire conversation to begin with, such that the answers are even sillier than the questions. So many of these questions that are fascinating to think about might just be tricks of the mind.

But, I gave it a try nonetheless. He asked, “What does an objective universe mean to you?” I struggled with an answer, but ultimately simplified it thusly: Without our sense of sight, the universe does not have a visual interface. Without our sense of hearing, the universe does not have an auditory interface. Without our sense of touch, the universe does not have a tactile interface. So what’s left? Take away the human, take away the perceiver, and what’s left?

That’s the question that our conversation, and science in general, is trying to get at.

“What you’re essentially asking is ‘What does the universe look like to nothing?’” he noted. I started to laugh, because put like that, it makes you realize what a silly question that is to begin with.

He went on. “What you’re really trying to get at is, how does the universe look to a God-like figure? That’s the objective reality we once knew and loved. This question is a lot easier to answer, since God is a constant observer with a well-defined point of reference. But take away the concept of a god, like we have in modern times, and we’re left sort of struggling: If God is not the center, ever-present point-of-view, then what does the universe actually look like objectively without anyone there?”

Or in other words, what does the universe look like to nothing?

Put like that, it may just be a paradox, or a temporary fascination of our limited mind. Or it may be our mind expanding its bounds. In either case, at our current level, this question might just be nonsensical.

A Photograph of the Mind

Mo — Wed, 15 Nov 2017 15:23:37 +0000

My wife always forces me to make unnatural poses for a Snapchat or Instagram photo. She tells me “smile!” but if I wasn’t already smiling, then the photo is a lie. I’m being pedantic just to say, I hate hate posing for photos. It’s more of my introverted nature than anything to do with worrying about faking an emotion.

I’m really not sure when this started. About a decade ago I remember being extremely extroverted. I was an arrogant teenager, and I probably loved taking photos of myself. Something unhinged in my twenties, where I’m now extremely reserved and internal. You’d have a hard time finding a photo of me anywhere.

But while a photo captures the light information of an environment and re-enacts it on a two-dimensional screen, I like to think of writing as a photograph of the mind. There’s really no other way to capture what’s inside. Instead, you have to bring it out. I used to write frequently even when I had an audience of zero. It was a way for me to place a bookmark in my life, and take a snapshot so that I remember the significance of a given day.

There seems to be something similar between the act of capturing a photo and capturing the words of your mind. However, the aching desire of my wife, and perhaps almost every other woman I’ve met, to take photos and capture the moment never ceases to confound me.

In the moment, I never stop to think "I should interrupt the flow of this moment to take a photo of this moment". Stopping to take a photo in the heat of a moment seems antithetical to the moment. All that to say, I never could, and still don’t, understand the seemingly instinctual need to take photos of every passing second. My wife yells at me for being the worst photo-poser she’s ever met. I’m ruining her memories.

But if photos are simple snapshots of a time, and writing is just the same, then I may be making progress.

My wife likes to revisit old photos and reminisce on them. I find it cute, if not silly. But hypocritically, I’m just the same. I’ll go back and revisit things I wrote years ago, and think back to the moments that were. Writing is more vivid to me, because I can’t guess at how I felt from a photo. With writing, feelings come flowing back to me. And if that’s how a photograph makes others feel, then it is indeed a fantastic emotion.

The common emotion between all state-capturing arts seems to be remembering. Who would have thought that would be one of life’s sweet pleasures?

The Romance of Another's Life

Mo — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 14:47:57 +0000

Some years ago, I was reading Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species to see what the source itself had to say about evolution. Aside from the topic itself, I found myself growing somewhat envious of Charles’ post-mortem grandeur. It’s easy to give someone so much credit retrospectively, not realizing they were mortals themselves.

Darwin recounts how at many times, he grew very, very ill during his research, sometimes bedridden for most of the year. This surely must have been a horrible way to feel and live. But my silly mind found romance in that. “Ah, what a beautiful thing. Perhaps I need to fall severely ill so I can go through enough adversity to be as original as Charles Darwin?”

I kid you not. I would have these kinds of thoughts. It wasn’t just Charles Darwin. Any time I read a biography about some great character, I would find ways to envy their adversity and wish it upon myself. “So and so was hated by almost everyone, and struggled through great depression and frost-bitten loneliness.” Ah, but to be remembered as great, even at the cost of being hated by everyone—what I wouldn’t do to live that same life.

It was borderline troubling for me to think this way. Obviously, my brain misunderstood the situation. But this happens day-to-day, whether we realize it or not. There is a certain romantic effect that occurs when we read or learn about other people's lives. We love stories and the images they conjure in our minds. But when we hear one, we fail to realize the story is compressed. A story may be just megabytes of information, whereas the real life would have been countless and countless trillions of terabytes. A story, no matter how traumatic, how depressing, always has a dream-like aura to it that takes us away from our world and into its fantastical fictional possibilities. It helps us imagine a world beside our own—any world.

But that’s the distinction that finally led me to the understanding of not being envious of a story. We try to find ways to escape our world in any way we can, even for a brief moment. We lust for external experiences. But don’t let your mind fool you: sameness is all anyone knows. You look at this character, and he has this house and this car, which to you seems like a life full of splendor; to him, it’s sameness. The same sameness you know and love of your own life.

No matter how novel, how splendid, how glamorous, how romantic another’s life may look to you as a third-person, in the first-person point-of-view, it is all sameness, and we are all trying to escape the same thing. If you’re rich, you wish to experience something else, namely perhaps, some struggle. If you are poor, you wish to experience something else, namely, less struggle.

I’ll never let a story confuse me again. I’ll never grow envious of a character from their story. I’ll never look at another’s life and wish it for myself. Because the truth is, we are all the same. We are all the same character. The same process. Our common denominators define us far more than our outlying characteristics do. What makes us human—here the desire to flee from sameness—is far more powerful than what makes us externally captivating, like beauty, glamor, and outward displays of success. You can chase, you can change, you can grow—but you can never hide from our common humanness.

Once you understand this, you’ll finally know that nothing is worth wanting for but the heart’s subtle content.

Don't mistake stress for an existential crisis

Mo — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 14:27:35 +0000

This may seem obvious for many, but for me, I never could handle the difference between the two. Any and all stress was an immediate existential crisis. What I mean by existential crisis is, you blame the stress on yourself. You think, there’s something wrong with me, and it’s ruining my life.

But there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just legitimately stressed.

It’s important to catch exactly when this happens as well. Sometimes, an external event will happen that is beyond my control. For example, back when I was performing a security audit for Standard Notes, the reviewer underwent a sickness and would take weeks to get back to me. Getting the audit completed was the most important thing in the world to me at that point. It started out as stress: I need to get this completed asap. My company can’t continue operating without getting this completed. I literally can’t do anything else until this is done.

Day 3, and you still remember a little of why you originally became stressed out, but start finding new things to stress about. It starts spreading.

By Day 7, you all around feel like shit but have completely forgotten how it started, and now think that you are just inherently depressed, and begin questioning your life decisions.

Don’t. Do. That.

You are not depressed. You have not made bad decisions. There is nothing wrong with you. This all started because of some anticipation from an external event that has not yet been resolved. Anyone who underwent this same event would experience this same objective stress.

I repeated that to myself. And sure enough, after about one month of waiting, the audit was completed, the stress was resolved, and everything went back to normal.

Make sure you never forget why you started to get stressed in the first place. And to make sure the original source is resolved before letting it spread. More than likely, there is nothing wrong with you. Anyone in your shoes would feel the same exact way. There is probably some external event that started all this, but you’ve lost track of it by now, and the stress has spread to every other area of your life that you think it’s always been like this. Worst of all, you start to think you probably deserve it.

Catch yourself. You’re not depressed. You’re just stressed. Or, at worst, you’re undergoing temporarily irresolvable stress. In which case, you just have to be patient. It’s hard, but hang in there.

Is Nature Intelligent?

Mo — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 21:05:36 +0000

This is a question of endless struggle. On the one hand, nature obviously produced us, and it becomes troubling to say "that which produced something as intelligent as us is itself not intelligent". On the other hand, chance, probability, randomness, and singularities play a huge part in modern science, and to question that would surely invite ridicule.

I had an eight hour round-trip drive this weekend where I got a chance to catch up on some fascinating podcasts. This one in particular was the Joe Rogan podcast with Paul Stamets, which Rogan himself says is his favorite podcast he’s ever recorded. I highly recommend listening to it. Around the sixteen minute mark, Joe and Paul discuss the idea of whether nature can be said to be intelligent. And I thought Paul gave a great response which, as Rogan himself said, is unequivocal.

Paul mentions how his brother was editing one of Paul's books on mycelium, which is the vegetative part of fungal bacterial colonies, and objected to Paul using the term “intelligent” to describe mycelium, or nature in general:

He was editing one of my books about how mycelium can save the world, and he goes, Paul, you cannot say that mycelium is intelligent! You can’t say nature is intelligent. And I go wait, Bill, I respect you, but you don't realize the hypocrisy of the statement you’re giving me? You’re telling me nature is not intelligent and yet you are born of nature, using the mind to conceive the concept to challenge the idea that nature is not intelligent—when you are part of nature?

Listen to the full podcast here. You won’t regret it.

Code Me

Mo — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 14:09:29 +0000

I’m exhausted. I keep saying, after I fix this one bug, everything will be groovy, and I can relax. But then I find a new issue to get entangled in. “Just this one last feature, and all will be nice and slow again.” But it’s constant pounding. If I'm not fixing bugs caused by previous code, I’m fixing bugs from new code.

The problem is that I’m an obsessive. Once I start on something, it becomes the only thing I want to do. And I’ve been addicted to coding lately. A great problem to have right?

Well, coding is fun, when it goes your way. But it never does. From your code will arise new emperor bugs that will demand your enslavement. When a bug, or problem, or difficulty arises from writing new code, I strap my seatbelt, because I know I probably won’t eat, sleep, or shower until it's fixed. This is fine for once in a while complications. But I’m finding that I’m in a strange loop that encourages constant development, and that has gotten me feeling tired.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not tired of coding. There is nothing I’d rather be doing right now. But the way it affects my external life—that part is tiring. That coding is the only thing I ever want to do, that part is tiring. The most tiring part of all is that I can’t get myself to take a break. I just don’t want to. Taking a break gives me major FOMO.

I’m not tired of coding. I’m tired of external life stopping me from coding. Do you see why that can get to be a problem?

How To Leave App Reviews Like A Decent Person

Mo — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 13:55:53 +0000

There is common behavior in the app (and technology) review world that, upon inspection, really does not seem to be logical. I’m sure you’ve probably seen user written reviews that read something like:

☆☆☆☆★

“This app is good, but it doesn’t have this one feature that this other app has. 1 star.”

This sort of comparison game is human nature, and while I don’t intend to change the nature of our behavior, I do hope I can make you think twice before posting a review like this in the future.

Taken literally, an app developer will presumably have happened upon an idea before development begins. The idea begins to take flesh, and as it is manifested into software, begins needing strict definitions. What is this app capable of? What is it not capable of? Where is the line drawn? And how does my ethos play a role in what the long term evolution of this app looks like?

Boring stuff. But all that to say, app development is usually quite intentional. A developer will be out to solve one specific problem, and that problem may not be the exact problem you’re having. And that’s ok. It would be crazy if those two always matched up.

The problem begins when you begin reviewing an app that is explicit in its intentions, based on what you think the app should have instead.

For example, this app intends to solve problems A, C, and D. And A, C, and D are hard problems, mind you. You, lovely consumer, are looking for an app that also does B. So you check out this app, knowing it doesn’t have B, and upon using it, are frustrated that it doesn’t have B. So you write a review saying,

☆☆☆☆★

“I love that this app solves A, C, and D. But it doesn’t solve B. Shame, shame, shame.”

Was it Einstein that said don’t judge a fish on it’s ability to fly? When you insist on judging something for an attribute it never claimed to have in the first place, no real progress is made. No productive activity occurs. Emotions are exchanged, where one side vents, and the other side is helpless against it.

What is the developer of this app to do now after reading this review? Feature B was explicitly not a problem this app was designed for, and probably for careful reason.

But, let’s have some empathy for the app reviewer. After all, they’ve taken time out of their busy day to download and try out your app. Let’s say at some point in the future, you dear reader are confronted with a similar predicament: an app you want to love is missing feature B, even though it never advertised it had feature B.

What should you do?

Well, if you want to do the right thing, and be kind and empathic, and make real progress towards solving this situation, the best thing you can do is email the developer. Have a conversation. Find out why feature B is not included, or perhaps learn that feature B is planned all along. ★★★★★.

Leaving a negative review because an underwater app couldn’t fly? That’s just mean.

PSA: Add dir="auto" to your inputs and textareas.

Mo — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 15:00:57 +0000

As someone living in the bubble that is the United States, it can be hard to think externally. But every so often I am reminded there is a world outside of my own. This sounds like a hugely unnecessary pep talk before I lay down something extremely simple. But one small change can be the difference between your app being used by people around the world, or just strictly by people like you. The distinction between these two worlds is something I endlessly struggle to comprehend; luckily, the folks building the fine web browsers we depend on are doing the hard work for us.

I’ve gotten requests to add right to left language support (RTL; languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and Urdu) in Standard Notes since its very beginning. And anytime I would begin to investigate what it would take, it seemed non-trivial.

Common solutions suggested adding a character listener on the input, and, when you detect a character that is RTL, you switch the direction of the input from dir=“left” to dir=“right”. Sounds semi-reasonable, but manual and scary. To me, unicode, ascii, and the entire world of encodings is not something I like to dabble with at a low level. So anytime I can avoid writing low level language parsing, I absolutely do.

This topic of adding RTL support would come up every few months, and every time I looked at it, it was the same advice: write a character parser, use this third-party library, or use dir=“right”—none of which I wanted. If you do a search for “textarea rtl” or “textarea right to left”, or other related terms, none of the results mention dir=“auto”. Instead, you’ll get answers like Use dir="rtl" in the tag?”, or this third-party library from Twitter that promises to handle this for you.

The first results page of Google never lies, so I thought this was just inherently a problem that required direct intervention, and so was never quite able to prioritize it (so much for my moral high ground).

It wasn’t until only a few weeks ago that I decided, enough is enough. This problem needs to be solved. I did some more searching for terms that I don’t remember now, and finally arrived at a GitHub post where an unsung hero commented “You can just add dir=“auto” to your textarea.”

What? No way. There’s no way that works. After a year of looking for solutions, and it was that easy?

Yup. Plugged it in, gave it a spin, and it worked flawlessly.

Wow.

So, my really small, but really big, public service announcement is: Google has been lying to us about RTL support in inputs. It’s a lot easier than you ever imagined.

<textarea dir='auto'> שלום, עתיד. </textarea>

And now you know.

Super complex demo.

Mozilla documentation on dir.

When nothing happens

Mo — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 15:01:46 +0000

I’ve spent the last week in a buggish sort of hell trying to track down bewildering software issues that made no sense at all. It was, by all definitions, hell. I hated myself for writing bugs. And I hated software for being so sensitive to my human-ness. After spending several days collecting clues and checking the same code over and over again, I concluded there was nothing visibly wrong, and it was time to exile myself to some remote island.

The issue would later be solved, of course. And it was bewildering for good reason: it had something to do with the timing of the new iPhone release, where people started getting new phones and restoring them from iCloud. Well, it turns out restoring your phone from iCloud will restore your data, but not your keychain. This confused my poor little app. And since I discovered that, the rest is history.

I felt great after fixing this bug that had come to define my life. I was in the best mood I've been in all month. I had big plans now that I was a free man: go on vacation, treat myself to exquisite delicacies, maybe leave the house for the first time and rediscover the sun—oh the heavenly thoughts! After releasing a bunch of new updates and crossing off my todos, I felt so extremely accomplished.

But the next day, nothing happened.

Sure, less support emails regarding this issue. That should be more peaceful right? But it was a business as usual sort of day. My traffic was the same. Sales were the same. No interesting activity on Twitter. And, I was so exhausted from that week of hell that I just wanted to take one small day off from coding.

And that became a new sort of hell. And surprisingly, this hell of nothingness was 100x worse than the hell of a software issue you don’t know the cause of. All that to say, be grateful you have problems. Because boredom is the worst problem of all. I can confirm this sentiment dating back to all the many software development jobs I had—being a cog in a wheel sucks, but what sucks more is being a useless cog in a wheel. It sucks the most.

Luckily for wanderers, boredom will only ever be a small window of reprieve from the constant storm. The next day, it was back to the stress of work. And I’m grateful for it.

Save yourself from Daylight Saving

Mo — Tue, 07 Nov 2017 13:45:51 +0000

I’ve been waking up at exactly 7:00am ever since Sunday. Before that, I would wake up around 8-8:30am. Of course, 7:00am Sunday, accounting for Daylight Saving Time, is really 8:00am, so “physically”, nothing has changed. However, overnight, your daily routine is pushed back or up by one hour, and we make no big deal of it. Our artificial world clocks are adjusted, but our internal clocks are stuck trying to figure out what the hell just happened. But life goes on. By Monday, we’ve forgotten all about it.

I wonder what role DST has in the difficulty of winters. It’s sort of like stumbling your way through the front door, and never quite stopping stumbling until you exit from the other side. If you get off to a bad start, you have the potential to ruin your mood for the next few months of your life.

Essentially, you’re trying to run on two different systems that haven’t synced up yet. And if you don’t sync up within the next few days, you might be screwed. Your sleep schedule is altered, which we know to be supremely important. This then alters the way you wake up, which we also know to be important to the mood of your remaining day. The mood of your day then spirals into the mood of your week, then your month, and ultimately, a whole winter.

All this to say, be careful you didn’t trip your way into DST, and that you’re not currently stumbling. If you are, catch yourself now and recompose. If you feel your routine has changed or been altered, make sure you’re ok with it. Left undetected, you may have a sour couple weeks or months without even realizing the original cause was DST. You’ll end up blaming yourself instead, and trying to fix an internal problem that probably doesn’t even exist.

I think all it takes is a sort of “Do you agree with this new flow?” If so, you’re good to go. If not, feel out what’s changed and try to readjust.

Do Everyday

Mo — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 14:04:18 +0000

I'm trying to write every single day. And it's really hard. It's the first thing I do when I wake up every morning. Why? It's good therapy. And it instantly gives meaning to an otherwise blank canvas of a day. But I don't always have things to say. Or worse, I don't always feel like talking. I might learn a life lesson here and there, and be inclined to share it. But every single day?

Close to giving up, I visited Seth Godin's blog, and without fail, he writes a new post every single day. It goes back years and years. Not a single day missed. And it's good content, too.

Ok Seth Godin. If you could do it, surely it's within the realm of possibility for mere mortals like me. I just needed to know it was possible.

And, interestingly enough, his post today is about writing everyday:

The secret to writing a daily blog is to write every day. And to queue it up and blog it. There is no other secret.

I haven't missed a day in many, many years--the discipline of sharing something daily is priceless. Sometimes there are typos. I hope that they're rare and I try to fix them.

Over time, the blog adds up. People remember a blog post a year after I wrote it. Or they begin a practice, take an action, make a connection, something that grows over time. The blog resonates with people in so many fields, it's thrilling to see how it can provoke positive action.

What's your equivalent of writing every day? I enjoy writing, but maybe you enjoy making podcasts? or videos, or music, or apps, or comics, or yoga, or cooking—whatever you enjoy, try to do it every day. That's a meaningful life.

P.S. If you're wanting to blog every day, you can use the same tool I use (this site). You can publish directly from your notes, and readers can subscribe to updates via email or RSS. Go to the home page to get started.

I'm glad I'm not doing hardware

Mo — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 14:20:31 +0000

Anyone who builds software knows how hard it is. I'm referring not to the initial building of software—that's the easy part. What's hard is actually keeping software afloat and healthy for long periods of time, while making it work for millions of people with thousands of different environments.

I've recently been trying to debug a certain race condition that has been driving me absolutely mad. Doing so has lead me into a mysterious world which I thought I knew like my own name; after all, it made perfect sense while I was building it. In trying to track down this issue, I've encountered areas of code that question my sanity. But, this is code, and we constantly transcend ourselves with every passing look-over. It's how we get better. And—not to worry; just fix and deploy with seamless OTA updates.

Hardware, on the other hand? Now that looks tough. I know very little of the hardware world. Here it seems you battle constantly not with a user's machine environment, but with non-negotiable physics. And if, after spending millions or billions of dollars, you find there's a defect, you can't just deploy a hotfix. You now have millions of complicated devices that will need human servicing in order to repair.

However hard software is, I can only imagine hardware is 100x more difficult.

And if you're like Apple who builds some of the most complex pieces of hardware and software, then god speed. Your date with entropy awaits.

Post-Human

Mo — Sat, 04 Nov 2017 15:58:50 +0000

Humans today are pathetically ephemeral. It’s what defines our existence. Death lingers in the back of our minds like an unpaid bill (a huge scary bill). Tragically, we may be some of the last ephemeral beings the world sees before this problem is solved. Technology and medicine are moving fast. Within decades, or no more than a century, aging will be cured or delayed, or better yet, electron-emitting devices will be manufactured that can create anything.

I try telling my friends about my wild theory that sometime in the (near) future, humans will be able to make nightly backups of their 3D electron sequence. If the next day you get run over by a bus, your at-home particle emitter will be notified, and respawn you from your most recent backup.

You’ll be able to make backups of your entire family, every night, automatically as they sleep. If gods-forbid something fatal should happen to your daughter, no worries—just restore her from the last backup. Her entire electron sequence would be reconstructed into 3D space. After her restore, she’ll be the same person she “was”. If during the backup process she was in the middle of a sentence, she’ll continue this sentence the moment her respawn is complete.

This is of course assuming that consciousness is made of matter, which I, and science for that matter, believe to be the case. Some people I tell this to ask, “But what about the soul??”

The what?

This may all seem far-fetched, but consider the electron-capturing and electron-emitting devices already in existence today. A microphone captures physical air patterns and re-distorts reality to play it back. Speakers literally change the air (and thus the electron sequence) in their vicinity.

A camera captures light information and re-distorts reality to play it back on your screen. Your iPhone screen is a 2D particle emitter. And let’s not forget about our huge 60-inch particle-emitting flat-screen TVs right in our living rooms. These mega machines reenact reality by distorting a 2D electron space to mimic captured data.

So, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched after all to say that in the future, a similar device can exist that can be pointed at an object to scan its 3D particle sequence, and can later re-emit this sequence in another 3D space. Essentially, a hi-tech camera and a hi-tech 3D printer. Easy.

The implications are of course troubling, if not fascinating. With death no longer being the constant nag it is to us today, humans will transition from a human to a post-human existence. Fear for us today has its roots in our aboriginal fear of death. Without this defining characteristic, our consciousness will shift. And given of course that you can 3D print a being from backup, you could print any object just as well. Theft, jealousy, lust, greed—these will all be things of the past. Why would one steal or be jealous of anything when they could have what others have in an instant? War, famine, poverty—all things of the petty human past.

No—with this technology, we will transcend our petty human existence into that of immortal gods. And that’s really where my imagination ends. What does a universe of a billion gods look like? Well, either we’ll find out soon enough, or, the universe is recursive in nature, and we’re already living in such a world: Our gods have gotten a hold of a similar device and have used it to create our universe.

The Secret Life of Software Bugs

Mo — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 14:41:48 +0000

Bugs simply do not reveal themselves to me when using my own product. They cower in fear, knowing somehow their all-powerful, all-punishing creator is watching, ready to descend upon them in wrath and eliminate their existence. No, my creations hide from me. Instead, they are attracted to my users. Poor, helpless users who do not have the tools to squash these creepy crawlers.

Some bugs are bewildering. A user will have found some way to place his app in an impossibly invalid state. My goal is to replicate his world using the clues I am provided. Tragically, the solution always lies not in what the user tells me, but in what they don’t tell me. The missing link is always some small, insignificant detail no one thinks is important enough to bring up.

A special few bugs are long term mysteries that can be solved only through divine intervention. Every day I’ll collect clues and pin new suspects on my investigation board. I have to be getting close.

Other bugs seemingly discover ways to transcend their given abilities. They do things that are just not supposed to be possible. This bug might set some text to a red color, but you search your code and find no where at all where the color red is used. How can this possibly be? You begin questioning your own sanity. And no doubt, your sanity does not escape these experiences unscathed.

You never do find what made the text go red. You’re in your late eighties now, sitting by a warm fire on a snowy day. You’ve long retired from the treacherous craft of bug-hunting—that was of another life. Snowflakes play through your window like a screensaver. The sound of hissing heat from your stovetop fills the room, and your teapot begins to whistle softly. Here and now, as you come to terms with the end of your life, somewhere atop a remote snowcapped mountain on the edge of the world, it hits you—the hex code for red is #F00. F00 was the default color value in case the input was null. You thought it said “FOO”, so you ignored it. In that moment, your heart accelerates. You fall to the ground with hands held against your chest. The camera switches to an aerial view, and lingers briefly on your face, then begins receding slowly.

You lived a good life. But alas,—your bugs did too.

I'm not entirely sure you exist.

Mo — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 17:10:16 +0000

My brain has many bugs and limitations. But by far the most limiting is my inability to comprehend the existence of other people. I mean, I know you’re there. And I know that your world, to you, is as big as mine is to me. But I am completely incapable of ascribing “realness” to your life. I am incapable of fathoming that inside your mind is a universe bigger than my own.

Because one universe is large enough. I have an already difficult time fathoming my own existence, to even begin trying to fathom yours. This may all sound like useless metaphysical nonsense, but one of the most important ways this issue manifests itself is in my inability to comprehend the busy-ness of other people.

When I send an email to you and don’t get a response, or get a very delayed response, it is almost certain that you were extremely busy and could not get to my email in a timely manner. But small-mind me takes it personally. Small-mind me asks, how busy could you possibly be?

The maximum value of my own busy-ness is the maximum value I am capable of ascribing to your busy-ness. You could very well be 10x busier than me, but I cannot fathom it. Small-mind me insists that if I can manage it, so should you.

I discovered this was a problem when I noticed my own busy-ness increasing over the past few months as I’ve had to deal with more support emails and bug fixes. And every time my busy-ness level increased, my level of empathy towards other people’s busy-ness increased. Better-mind me says, ah ok, now I see that people can in fact be a lot busier than I imagined. But small-mind me limits this empathy once again to a value no higher than my own.

I have a much easier time fathoming the existence of people close to me, but there is still a concrete wall in between, with pores that allow me to see through to you. For random strangers, it’s a lost cause.

Sometimes, I’ll be driving and stopped at a red light, and a human pedestrian will be walking by. I’ll look at them in bewilderment and think, inside that person is another universe larger than my own. To that person, that universe is as important as mine is to me. Inside that person, there are hopes, and dreams, and grief, and happiness, and complications. Inside that person are religions, philosophy, knowledge, and wisdom. That person is as real as me.

But I can’t fathom it. It’s just an abstract thought, like a universe that is infinite—how can something be infinite?

Your existence boggles my mind just as well.

Stop changing your homepage

Mo — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 15:12:28 +0000

I’ll be honest. I hate data. Parsing it, collecting it, strategizing around it—I just want to build things the way I feel like building things. Instinct has gotten me up to here, hasn’t it? And while I haven’t fully made the switch to a hard-core data kind of mindset, I have realized its importance in some areas, especially if you’re a new company.

One of the most dangerous things you can do starting out on a new app or product is changing it too much, especially when you’re not sure where your product stands. The most creeping temptation will always be “I should change the homepage.” Or screenshots, or description, or tags, etc. Essentially, your first instinct will be to think, “this is not going as I expected. Perhaps I should change something about the first thing users see?”

This is a devilish temptation that I’ll address in another post. But assuming you’ve decided to make a drastic change, please take this warning: gather as much data as you possibly can before doing so. You’ll hate yourself if you don’t.

Anyone who’s created an app or project of their own knows the feeling of changing something as one last final act of hope, only for absolutely nothing to happen. In fact, changing something because you’re not sure what else to do is the quickest way to murder your project. Because if you put all your hopes in a homepage redesign, spend a month doing the work, and launch to crickets, you’re going to be left saying, “Well shit. Now what?” You’ll be so discouraged that you’ll most likely quit. This was the fate of several of my past projects.

Instinct can help you come up with ideas and goals, but it will leave you stranded when it comes to validating your changes. Ugh that word. Validating. Makes me uncomfortable just thinking about it. But it can be important, especially if you’re long-term serious about your project.

This sort of advice is extremely obvious to anyone that operates a wildly successful company. But if like me you’re just someone who’s passionate about creating useful products, and are still hopelessly optimistic about the “if you build it, they will come” mindset, it can be difficult to adopt.

If you’re wanting to change your homepage design, make sure you collect as much data as possible about current homepage metrics. Visits, time on page, drop off points, heat maps, and whatever fancy new landing page analytics exist today. After you make the change, you’re going to want to monitor these metrics as closely as possible to look for any improvements or deteriorations. If you don’t collect these metrics before hand, and launch a redesign based on instinct, your morale will quickly suffer if the changes have no apparent effect. And to be honest, a homepage redesign is hardly ever the real culprit for the problem you’re having. Having data can help you realize this.

Most importantly, give your product some quality alone time without bothering it. If you make a change, let it sit for a couple months before being tempted to change something again.

And in general, don’t change things too often. You’ll confuse yourself and find yourself spinning. It’s very rare that a single change will dramatically alter your results. If you depend on changing surface elements of your product or company to improve your results, you’ll be left completely deprived of will and motivation to try other things. And odds are, the fix to the problem you’re having is somewhere in the pile of “other things” which you’ll tragically never get to.

Don't build features you can't afford to maintain

Mo — Tue, 31 Oct 2017 16:53:45 +0000

It’s fun and pleasurable to make children. In fact, it’s orgasmic. But, there tends to be an upper bound on the number of children a couple could bear. At some point, the couple presumably understands that another mouth siphoning scarce resources would be detrimental to the entire family, and cannot possibly be sustainable. I’m sure you see where I’m headed with this.

Building new features is highly fun and entertaining. In fact, you might even call it the orgasm of the technical world. You’ve brought forth new life that had not been present before. With a few lines of code, a few third-party libraries here and there, your app is now capable of new things, and you couldn’t be prouder.

But there is a high cost to these violent delights. Adding features is a weapon that should be used sparingly. Here's why:

Once you add a feature, you won’t be able to remove it without causing mass upset.

Really think about this one. It’s kind of scary. Consider every feature you add absolutely permanent. You will have to maintain this feature for the rest of your application’s life, which for your customers' sake, I hope to be many decades. The more technically impressive your feature is, the higher the cost to maintain it. And if your feature relies on a third-party library for its core functionality, you are in for a world of pain. On top of your pile of daily incoming bug reports regarding just core app functionality, you’ll have a new pile just for this impressive feature, with bugs you can’t begin to fathom, existing somewhere inside the 20,000 line third-party library.

Really really consider how much you care about your product before adding features as quick as customers request them. You’ll be doing your company and your customers a disservice if you don't.
If your new feature is not perfect, your reviews will suffer.

You could have a 5-star product, with unmatched stability and performance. But the moment you add a minor feature somewhere very deep inside the app, that only 1% of your users will ever even get to, and that feature doesn’t work as intended, your reviews will suffer. Five star reviews will turn into one star reviews detailing the upset you’ve brought users to their day. You cry No fair! What about all the other great parts of the app? But thus is human nature. You could win the lottery one moment and be filled with joy, but stubbing your toe a moment later will instantly ruin your mood. The feeling a user has towards your product will, for the most part, be relative to their most recent experience. You want to try to minimize the number of places things can go wrong. This is why I call my product Standard Notes. It minimizes features so you never have to worry about stubbing your toe.
Your product won’t survive as long.

I’d like to posit that a business that adds features recklessly will survive for a shorter period of time than it otherwise would have. Features means lines of code, and lines of code means maintenance and bugs. And there’s a sort of concurrency problem with labor. You could have a trillion dollar corporation with infinite resources, but there’s still a limit to how many engineers you can hire and manage, and can work concurrently on a given project. Thus, adding features and maintaining them is not something that can be hacked to your advantage with capital and resources.

Most importantly, adding features is probably not the solution to the problem you’re having. For me at least, adding features is a sort of defense mechanism I employ when I’m not sure what else to do to grow. Sometimes, adding features could be exactly what your app is missing, but this is rare. In most cases, your sales are low not because your app is missing some shiny feature, but because of other fundamental issues in another department, like marketing or customer service.

Recently, a somewhat-competitor of Standard Notes added a new feature to their app: an Apple Watch companion application. It was actually really nicely done, which means they spent some time on it. This was good news to me. I don’t believe a watch app is necessary for a notes app, and those scarce resources could have been directed to much more important problems. Instead, they chose to use their resources to build a complicated feature with little ROI. At this rate, all I have to do is continue pacing myself, and I have the potential to outlast them on stamina alone.

Finally, heed this warning from a guy who will be perpetually enslaved to a feature that all his users could have probably lived without:

Build a Business, not an App

Mo — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 15:03:25 +0000

During the 2008-2010 App Store gold rush, all you needed were a pick, ax, and laptop to strike it rich. Forget a business plan and forget being original: Just make an app, any app, and your chances of making some profit were better than none.

Times have changed, and the single-app mindset can be catastrophic today, if you’re still chasing it.

App vs. Business

“Apps”, compared to a business providing an app, were novelty items during the emergence of the iPhone and Android. There were so little of them, that your best shot at success was just to be present. Today, there are so many apps, with more being released every day, that Apple has even begun deleting inactive ones due to the overwhelming supply (which sounds like a search problem over a quantity problem, but search isn’t really Apple’s strong suit).

My experience with apps and the App Store is probably similar to many developers’. I got in casually around 2008-2009, and built dumb apps because I was curious. I had no intention of making any money. But, I was around the raging waterfall of app demand, and got a little wet. This natural spectacle began getting too crowded around 2012 however, with hundreds of thousands of developers trying to get a sprinkle of all that flowing app money. And if during that time you put all your hopes and dreams into a single app, you were a dead man walking. You just didn’t know it yet.

It took me several years to begin adjusting. Even until 2016, I had not yet shed the single-app mindset. I kept producing single-utility apps without a story, hoping one would catch on. And some did, for the first few weeks. But an app cannot survive by itself in the jungle. It needs loving and caring parents to raise it to maturity. That’s what a “business” is. An app is this beautiful, newly-born creation, offering hopes of redemption for all of humanity. But it needs support. It needs guidance. You can’t just throw your new-born on a modeling stage (like Product Hunt) and hope for the best. At best, you could use that as a testing ground, but it’s important to realize the long game.

The Long Game

If you’re building an app and not a business, you’re playing the short game. Your chances of success will be much lower. And that’s just based off the definition of long vs. short: when you’re in it for the long run, you’ll have more time and gain more wisdom, which will allow you to nurture and care for your product in ways customers can begin to appreciate. But, when your mindset is that of “I’m going to hack together an app over a couple weeks, slap a 99 cent price tag on it, and post it around,” you’re setting yourself up for failure. Not that it’s not a great exercise and learning experience. But if you keep doing the same thing expecting different results…

That’s the loop I found myself in. I was releasing relatively useful app after app. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t driving a Tesla yet. It’s not until last year that I decided, or finally learned, that one needs to manifest their own existence into a product. That sounds intense, but let me explain.

An app is a reflection of the creative abilities of its creator. An app usually consists of a small ecosystem of software and customer reviews. A business on the other hand involves so much more. Marketing, customer support, branding, sustainability, long term strategy, finances, scheduled releases, and community fostering. With all these attributes, a business begins taking on a personality of its own, and creates survivability momentum not found with single-launch apps.

Now what?

So, let’s say you’re sold. Let’s say you now want to start a business as opposed to an app. Where do you start? Well, the distinction is admittedly subtle, but important. Here are a few things you can do to grow your app into a business, and increase your likelihood for survivability and success.

1 | Tell a story. Build a brand.

An app has a function. “Use this app to do this task.” Not much of a story there. Not much reason for a customer to stick around once they’ve used your app to accomplish their task. A business on the other hand has a story, and a byproduct of that story is an app. For example, Standard Notes, which is the product I am presently building, came into existence because I believed this:

Software should be built to last. In today’s fast-moving, growth-over-everything mindset, software bloats while companies grow faster than they can keep up, resulting in bugs, poor usability, and eventually, the death of the product. This treats the customer as a means to an end, and is insulting and deceitful.

Thus was born the app of my dreams: a safe and simple place to store your notes. It promises to remain simple for ever, so that it doesn’t grow beyond what we are capable of managing. It promises to pursue longevity over growth, so you can count on your notes being there for you decades from now when you need them.

The story resulted in the creation of the app. And while an app’s lifetime may be numbered, a story is timeless, and can remain important for centuries to come. When you build a product around a story, rather than a function, you increase your likelihood for survival and sustainability, while also better communicating why one should use your product.

2 | Foster a community

Community-building sounds like a difficult chore. But by this I mean, just have a place where people who like your product can hang out and ask questions. For me, this was as simple as a public Slack group and a discussion forum on GitHub. At worst, it makes the whole ordeal a lot less lonely. And at best, you’ve created a vibrant, self-sustaining community that can continue to exist even when you perish.

3 | Invest in the ecosystem surrounding your app.

An app is hard enough to build on its own. So to put work around the container of the app sounds again like an unpleasant chore. But you want to build a comfortable and safe environment for your app to grow in. You wouldn’t just drop your beautiful new-born at a Baby Gap runway and pick them up a few years later. Instead, you’d want to create a safe and nurturing environment where your model-to-be can come home to and rest, learn, and grow. It can take years, so you need to be ready to provide support to your new-born at any time. (I don’t know how I ended up with a baby modeling analogy. Just work with me here.)

More directly, the ecosystem around an app could include a full website (not a landing page) that describes your philosophy, your goals, and allows customers to get in touch with you or other members of the community. An ecosystem could also include consistent public communication with customers, like blog posts, tweets, videos, and other forms of social media (sorry, that term stresses me out too). Most importantly, a vibrant ecosystem must include unparalleled customer support. Remember, you’re in this for the long run.

The Final Ingredient

If you’ve done all these steps correctly, you might still find yourself struggling. The last and final ingredient? It takes time. A commitment to a business over an app means you’re not measuring yesterday’s download numbers as an indication of whether you should give up. A commitment to a business means you’ll do whatever it takes to grow this thing, even if it takes several long painstaking years.

And really, that’s the most important distinction between an app and a business: it’s your mindset. You wouldn’t chase after a failing app for more than a few months. A business with your name written all over it? Well, that sort of becomes you. You’d feed it to grow with the same ravenous energy you have towards feeding your own body and soul. And, if you ask me, that’s a good recipe for success.

Stop Waiting

Mo — Sun, 29 Oct 2017 15:14:41 +0000

I have a really bad habit. After I release something, be it a project, an update, or even an article, I wait. I wait for something magical to happen. I wait for the universe to finally give me what’s due. Because one of these days, one of these updates or features or emails I send—one of these is going to make it. And it’s going to be huge.

Right?

Wrong.

I just learned this lesson myself only a few days ago. For the last decade of shipping projects, my ritual and plan was always to 1. Develop the project, and 2. Perform a one-time marketing session of posting it around, emailing people, etc. Then I would wait.

And when nothing happened, I got upset. I got disappointed. I grew discouraged. Every new release, I told myself, this is it. This is the [project, idea, article, email] that’s just going to take off by itself. But it never did.

This was troubling, mostly in part because I also didn’t believe in the opposite. I believed in patience and luck, and I also believed that hard work payed off, but I believed it was cumulative. Meaning, I thought the work I put in yesterday counted for overall effort, and after a certain point, I was off the hook to do any more work, until I received some positive reinforcement.

But I’m starting to realize that effort is not cumulative in that sense. What I did yesterday to increase my chances of success is quickly forgotten if I don’t follow up on it today. I could reach out to ten tech bloggers today, but if I don’t continue reaching out every single day, it will be a lost cause. I could release a great new update with the best new features, but if I don’t continue delivering updates and quality control, the app will quickly be forgotten. You can release the most popular article mankind has ever seen, but if it’s not done frequently, it won’t matter.

It’s not about what you’ve done—it’s about what you’re doing.

I think a good litmus test would be to ask yourself, what am I doing? If your answers contain past verbs, like “updated”, “wrote”, “emailed”, “reached out to”, you’re waiting. Don’t do that.

Instead, you might say, “I’m updating the app every week with quality releases” and “I’m writing an article every two days on software development” or “I’m finding one new blog or journalist to reach out to every day.”

Present tense work is great not only because you’re constantly producing, and thus constantly increasing your luck, but also because it forces you to do really good work that you otherwise wouldn’t have done. A software project that you do work on every single day, after one year, has got to be damn good, compared to a project that you push to once every month. A blog that you write to once every other day will be far more interesting and engaging than one you write to every month.

Apart from the increase in quality of work, present tense work is also great for the mind. I’ve long discovered that happiness is actually quite simple, at least for me: I’m happy when I’m working. Not working? Not happy. I don’t mean this in an instantaneous sense, just in an overall sense. Did I do good work today? I’m happy. When you commit to working over waiting, you’ll not only gain a healthier state of mind, but great momentum.

Momentum is one of the most important deciding factors in my productivity. The hardest part of releasing something is the abrupt halt in momentum. Building up to a release is a lot of work. Towards the end, you’ll be running on pure adrenaline, working long hours to finish that final never-ending 1%. After you release, waiting absolutely demolishes your momentum. So instead of waiting, keep working. Keep advancing your project. Time is still passing, so the effect will still be that of “waiting”. The difference is a sort of “active waiting” vs “idle waiting”. With idle waiting, a month will have passed while your project collects dust and eventually stops being interesting. With active waiting, your project grows more interesting by day. If perhaps after thirty days you hear nothing back from what you were waiting on, then by now your project has completely changed and is many times better, allowing you to restart your cycle and begin reaching out again.

I can’t emphasize enough the destructive behavior waiting has had on the fate of my projects. And it’s a shame it took so long for me to understand this. The next time you find yourself refreshing your email, refreshing your sales dashboard, refreshing your analytics suite, expecting something new, you’re waiting. Get back to work.

You could be anything

Mo — Sat, 28 Oct 2017 15:25:41 +0000

The first half hour of every day are the most difficult. I sort of have to remind myself who I am and what I’m doing. It’s a lot of work when you think about it. Every day, you choose to renew your commitment to be yourself. You choose to live a day similar to the one you lived yesterday. Really, there are no days. Yesterday is separated only by sleep and the eerie parallel universe of dreams.

For the first 30 seconds after I awake, I am completely dumbfounded.

But it starts coming back to me. I see my bed, and I remember my home. I see my wife, and I remember my love. I see my room and walls, and remember where I am. This process happens so seamlessly, it’s as if nothing happened in between. But I’m on to you world. I know I’m loaded up every morning.

We choose to live the same life we lived yesterday. If there is no free will, there is most certainly the decision to abide by our definition of reality. Because it could very easily be different. You could very easily go off-track, on an adventure that might instantly change your life. You could awake and decide that instead of going to the office today, you’re going to drive hours away from home without a destination. You could decide to walk out of your house and not stop walking until the sun sets. You could decide to travel to another state or country. You could change your entire life, if you wanted to. But you won’t. Fear holds you back.

I’m mostly convinced that fear is an illusion. I’m often reminded of Emerson’s observation that fear and grief are only terrifying in thought:

In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity: it does not touch me: some thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.

I think thinking about something scary is is scarier than actually experiencing that scary thing. You decide who you are every morning, but fearful thoughts keep you in check.

“I can’t just not show up to work—that’s madness!” Perhaps it is. But, what’s the worst that could happen? An awkward conversation with your boss? Or maybe you get fired from a job you probably hate and end up finding one you love? Scary.

Inconvenience is adventure misinterpreted.

I’m no thrill-seeker. But I retrospectively love where inconvenience or rash decisions place me. If every morning you choose to live the same life you lived yesterday, then sameness will be all you ever know. Switch it up. Decide on something new. You are defined by your adventures and the challenges you’ve faced. I like sprinkling a touch of uncertainty on life. It really brings out the flavor.

Every morning, you decide to be you, thinking that’s who you really are. But there is no you. There’s just a body of consciousness deciding to do the same things and feel the same way they felt the day before. You is just a really bad habit.

Don’t mistake repetition for permanence. You could be anything.

I don't know, a million times

Mo — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 14:41:46 +0000

I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

I repeated these words frantically to myself as I was taking a walk, trying to figure out not only what my problems were, but what the answers were as well.

How do I get more traffic to my website? Should I be getting more traffic to my website? Should I be improving the product? Am I charging the right price? Maybe it’s too expensive? Maybe it’s too cheap?

I don’t know.

Should I be going out and meeting people? Networking? Connecting? Maybe someone else will know?

I don’t know.

I’ve gotten help along the way, but everyone sort of says the same thing. Jason Fried is a really nice guy, and he’s responded to a few of my emails when I asked him for help starting out. In the beginning of Standard Notes, the main question I had was, should I begin charging right away, or keep everything free to attract as many users as possible, then after gaining a stable user base, begin working out a revenue model?

It sounds obvious now (for a bootstrapped company, start charging yesterday), but at the time, I lost several weeks of sleep to this question. I was so carefully afraid of moving in the wrong direction and accidentally killing my project. I asked Jason if he had any insight, not realizing that I’d be putting him in a difficult situation. And he gave the best answer anyone in his situation could possibly give.

He quoted a part of my email and said “You answered your question right there.”

If I forego revenue right now, I might be able to attract more people to the platform because of the cool benefits of the subscription package. But I’ll miss out on building a sustainable business, and also delay my goal of making enough to do this full time.

Indeed I did.

I bring up Jason because he tweeted this some time ago, and it made me feel better about my cluelessness:

Seek fewer mentors. Seek more self-confidence. Too many people are stuck waiting for someone wiser to show them the way. There is no way.

All this time, I had went about my lack of knowledge of building up a company as a sort of education that I was lacking. That there were answers that others knew, that I just did not have the access to. So I searched the internet, I searched books, and I searched people, looking for answers to my incessant questions. But I never found them.

That’s because they didn’t exist.

I don’t have children, but I imagine building a company is like raising a child—each one will be infinitely unique and different from the other. There are generic answers available everywhere, but ultimately, it will be instinct, love, and care that will set it apart from the others and create the best possible environment for success.

Today, "I don’t know" is still a staple of my vocabulary. And as much as I hate not knowing, in a sick sort of way, I kind of like it too. The unknown is scary to death, but it’s so damn exciting.

You’ll figure it out. Just keep going.

You should quit your job.

Mo — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 14:28:33 +0000

Sounds reckless right? But I want to make the case for why quitting your job can be a great way to advance your project, even when it may sound like a scary idea.

You see, I had always thought that, during times I was employed, the extent to which my side projects would reach was inherent in the nature of the project. That is, the reason all my side projects tended to be single-use and single-launch was because they were designed for that.

I was lying to myself.

The truth was, my side projects never took off because they were missing the most important fuel a project needs: time. I would launch every project on the basis of “If I build it and launch on Product Hunt, they will come, and my moment will come.” It never came.

I tried various ways to optimize success during employment. I tried waking up at 4am every day, and working on my own projects until 7am before heading to work, but that didn’t last very long. Three hours is time, but what’s needed is capital-t Time.

I tried rationalizing working during work hours, but it always felt shitty doing so. It’s no way to live. You start feeling extremely guilty and paranoid, and you begin to hate your job even more. I even tried taking long vacations exclusively to work on side projects. That one worked pretty well actually. But you can only take so many vacations.

I bounced from job to job, looking for the one that would make me happy and cure my need for wanting to work on my own projects. “I just need to find a company that works on a product interesting enough to make my own.” I found two such companies, and worked at them for some time, but in the end, the whispers came back. You have to do your own thing.

There’s never a perfect time to quit your job. I had only a few months worth of savings, and the project I was quitting my job to pursue didn’t yet have a revenue model. But enough was enough.

Today, quitting my job was the best decision I’ve ever made. I only wish I had done it sooner.

Here are a few reasons you should quit your job:

It will cure your shitty mood.

After the excitement of starting a new job and joining a new team wore off (about 2-3 months), the feelings of emptiness and lack of purpose would come screaming back. There’s an inherent sort of degradation involved in employment, especially if you’re cursed to be ambitious. You sit behind a desk contributing labor to executives that profit more than you ever could. No matter what salary I was paid, no matter what my stock options were, I couldn’t escape from the inherent shittiness of feeling that I could be doing all this work for my own product rather than someone else’s. And that created an inherent depression.

After quitting many jobs in my career chasing the perfect one, but never finding happiness, I learned that it’s not any particular job or company that I hated working for. It was employment in general.
It will allow you to grow your project in ways you could never have imagined.

You know the feeling: you’re at your day job, and you just can’t wait to get home so you can get hacking on your side project. You plan to be home no later than 5:45 p.m. 5 o’clock hits, and your build fails to compile. So you stick around for another 10 minutes. On your way out, you catch your boss in the hallway and you make small talk for a few minutes. You run to catch the bus, but it’s delayed by 12 minutes. You make it home by 6:30, and you are absolutely exhausted and defeated. You have half an hour before you need to start thinking about dinner. You open your computer and start trying to work on your project, but you’ve been staring at a damned computer screen all day, and it’s the last thing you want to do right now. Maybe after dinner? After dinner, you crash, and grow even more tired. You call it a day, and repeat the same thing tomorrow.

That was my average daily experience. It’s no wonder I could never make meaningful progress on a project. Imagine if instead you awoke every morning at 8am, and immediately began working on your own project without limit. Imagine the progress you’d make. The things you’d learn. Quitting my job to focus on developing my own product has been the single biggest investment in my skills I’ve ever made.
Multi-tasking is a myth.

I have never been able to do two things at the same time. Or, at least, I’ve never been able to do two things well at the same time. My best work has been when I’ve had a single-minded focus on one project or task for a long period of time. Switching contexts is something that I've never really been good at. Once I start something, and build up momentum towards it, it’s really difficult for me to switch to something else. When you start your day doing work for your employer, and do it for the next 8-10 hours, you gain momentum in the direction of your employer, and opposite from your own work. Switching becomes as chaotic as doing a u-turn driving 100mph.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that quitting your job will be filled with sugar, candy, and all that is sweet. Building my own product without a stable income has been the hardest thing I have ever done. And it only gets harder.

Here are a few reasons you shouldn’t quit your job.

Working on your own product will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do.

Quitting your job takes only 1 day, and the euphoria wears off after a week. After that, you’re left with the cold hard reality that you need to make something happen, and soon. The best part? Nothing will go your way. Every day brings a new challenge, and most times, you'll just want to quit and go back to the “comforts” of employment, where you only have to pseudo-worry about anything. Self-employment is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Most days I find myself asking, what on earth am I doing? What do I do next? Answers never come easy. I only have one rule for myself: keep going, and don’t give up. I’ve been able to make great progress on that mindset. (And trust me, giving up is a second instinct to me. I’m so good at it. Doing this has taught me not only the value of not giving up, but also that I am surprisingly capable of persevering.).
Creating a product people use is rewarding, but equally punishing.

All I ever wanted and dreamt of when I was laboring over someone else’s dream was to create a product that people would enjoy using. I told myself that if only a handful of people found my product useful and I made very little money from it, I’d be supremely happy. In some part, that was true. Having people use and depend on Standard Notes today has been the most rewarding experience of my life. But with every new user comes the opportunity for new bugs and issues. This is software after all, and there is no escaping from those dreary creepy-crawlers. Bug reports instantly ruin my day. I hate letting down users and inconveniencing them with bugs. The worst part is, they will never ever go away. Just think: you will have to live the rest of your life fixing bugs. Bugs that can make users very upset. It’s rewarding that people use your product, but it’s equally punishing.
You will have no idea what you’re doing.

You better hope that all your jobs have prepared you for this moment. If you’re venturing solo, be sure you’re ready to handle everything, from development to marketing to sales. As a developer, coding is the easy part, and I’m tempted to always do it because of how instantly gratifying it is. Marketing and sales? I might have an easier time understanding quantum mechanics. Be sure you really want this, and be sure you’re ready to work harder than you’ve ever worked before.

What should you do?

I can’t speak for your situation. Every one of us will have infinitely varying circumstances. But if all day you dream about quitting, and all you can ever think about is how much happier you’d be working on your own stuff, then what are you waiting for? Signs hardly come this clear. The world is scary, but I promise you this: you’ll live. You won’t starve. And worst-case scenario, you’ll learn a valuable lesson or two about life and entrepreneurship, and hop your way back into another job.

I don’t have kids, so I can’t offer any advice in that direction. Quitting a job becomes a whole different monster in that situation. Talk to your family and see if quitting your job is right for you.

Finally, keep in mind that I’m just some stranger on the internet you probably know nothing about. You probably shouldn’t listen to me. Ultimately, this decision is yours to make. I thought I would share my experience and what I’ve learned, in case it helps someone trapped in a situation similar to the one I was in.

Quitting your job won’t solve all your problems, but it will definitely bring on a new set of more interesting problems. The kind of problems that, if they don’t kill you, have the potential to change your life.

How To Destroy A Company

Mo — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:25:03 +0000

It’s fun to hate on things we love. Humans tend to have a sort of fetish for violence when things are too easy. Utopia will never exist because Marco Arment won’t like a minor detail, and will ruin it for everyone. I love and respect Marco, and use his name only as the most common example of behavior that, when inspected, really doesn’t seem to be in our favor.

I get frustrated by usability bugs as much as anyone. And as someone who like Marco runs a company, I understand what it feels like when someone criticizes your product. It is by far one of the worst feelings of this strange existence. I can only imagine Apple, made up of humans just like us, has the capacity to feel the same.

Now, this isn’t some Apple-apoligist party. But I would like to plea with our natural desire to complain when we are frustrated. I’m just the same. I draft so many tweets that are complaints, but try not posting any of them. My only rule when tweeting is not to complain, since no one really benefits from it, other than to see how many other people I can get to agree with me.

But, Apple sucks, right? They’ve lost their way. They’ve lost sight of the big picture. Marco is wont to say, “who’s the product manager now that Jobs is gone?”

And, Google sucks too, right? The Pixel 2 XL has major screen issues. They’ve lost control of their hardware.

The behavior I find most strange is that we tend to root for these disasters. While we want the nicest new products every year, a sick little part of us wants Apple to slip up. Wants Google to ship a failing product. So that they can learn, and get their shit together. And the natural extent of this behavior, whether we realize it or not, is destruction. We have the power to bring down these companies. There’s no question that consumers have the power to destroy consumer companies. But why are we constantly utilizing this power against companies we love?

Can you imagine a world without Apple? No new iPhones every year. No new super-slim laptops (I for one am a fan of thinner laptops. Portability is what they're made for.) No new Apple TV, which has completely changed the way I watch television.

Can you imagine a world without Google? As far as I can tell, Google is the internet. They may not have invented it, but they definitely define it.

Call me insane, but I think we should root for companies we love. Understand that at large scale, things only get more difficult, and that if we want more nice things, it takes not just monetarily supporting a company, but emotionally supporting it too. You might say, I don’t want any more new products. I just want my existing ones to work better. And that’s fair. It’s ok to question if a company is moving too fast. But when they slip up, I think we ought to allow room for apology, and not immediately take it to its most destructive end.

I was asking a friend the other day if he had any issues with his new MacBook Pro keyboard. He asked me what I was talking about. “You didn’t see all the rage over Apple’s sticky keyboard issues?” He had no idea what I was talking about. He loved the new keyboard. I filled him in on what was being said, and ever-wise he said, “Sure, when you compare Apple to objective-utopia, they suck. They're pathetically imperfect. But compared to almost anything else in 2017, they are the best thing in existence. They are the best part of my life. And overall, they've made my life drastically better.”

I thought that was worth reflecting on. Next time I find myself wanting to say, Apple sucks, or Google sucks, it’s helpful to add “compared to…”. I think that makes things more fair. Apple sells the image of perfection, so when there are obvious bugs, like the calculator bug in iOS 11, it’s sort of embarrassing. And I think rather than taking that as a sign of “Apple has lost their way,” we ought to allow room for forgiveness, if we want to see Apple and similar companies continue to push new products that we, overall, love.

I've seen heaven. And it's written in JavaScript.

Mo — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 15:34:52 +0000

Why React Native is the Future

I have a weird way of describing software. And you’ll either know what I mean, or you won’t. It’s sort of strange, but software interfaces feel like they have a weight. When I use an interface, it can feel heavy, or it can feel light. Neither is better than the other. It just sort of depends. Chrome is very light. Safari feels heavier. And Firefox feels the heaviest. It’s probably bullshit, but that’s the feeling I get.

One of the heaviest feeling experiences in my software development career has been using Swift in Xcode. Oh the pain. The delay. The Kanye-West compiler that never lets you finish. I’ve lived in this unwieldy world for the last several years, building applications the only way I knew how: raw, manual, single-platform code. Go native! Right?

When I learned about React Native, I was skeptic. Write code in JavaScript once and deploy native apps on both iOS and Android?—this has to suck. So I ignored it. And instead ended up writing two separate native apps, one in Swift for iOS, and the other in Java/Kotlin for Android. This was in addition to a web app written in JavaScript, and an Electron-based desktop app. (The app is an encrypted cross-platform notes app, so availability on every platform was key.)

This worked well enough for some time, but had its difficulties. I could manage writing the web app and iOS app, but I had no experience with Android whatsoever. In fact, I had never used an Android device my entire life for more than an hour. Luckily, a community contributor was happy to help in building the fundamentals, which allowed me to forego writing an app from scratch, and instead just maintaining it with incremental changes.

Any time a change needed to be made, or a feature added, I would need to journey into three separate code bases and write the same code, in three different languages. Being one person, this wasn’t always very efficient. It could take a week to make even the simplest cross-platform change. The result were apps that could never have nice things. For example, several users were asking for the ability to add a passcode and fingerprint lock to the application—a very reasonable request for a security-minded notes app. But the implementation of this was no triviality: first, a passcode setup interface in addition to an input interface was required. Then, encrypting offline user data with the passcode. Then, on mobile, specifying when the passcode or fingerprint should be requested (immediately or on app quit). The thought of writing all of that code in Swift, then Java, then JavaScript, was a nightmare. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

There has to be a better way.

Enter React Native

I had to describe the context and emotion behind what it felt to have to maintain separate codebases for an application, so that you know the elation I felt when I began using React Native. For the first week of writing native applications in Atom (!), my mouth was agape. I could not believe how easy it was. No Xcode, no Swift, instant reloading of changes, writing in the ever-easy to use JavaScript—I was in heaven. I would put the iOS simulator and Android emulator side-by-side as I was writing code, and spent half the time in utter disbelief that everything just worked. I never had to wonder, well, this looks good on iOS, I wonder if it’ll work well on Android? For the most part, if it works on one platform, it’ll work on both, with little adjustment.

The most beautiful part? I WAS REUSING ENTIRE CLASSES FROM MY WEB APP! I was able to copy complex classes involving models, controllers, and encryption logic wholesale with very little change. The entire sync engine of the app? Copied right from the web app. Encryption and decryption? From the web app. Models and relationships? From the web app.

I was so, so happy not to be writing all this stuff from scratch. Sync is hard, and encrypted sync is no easier. The web/desktop codebase was our flagship, tested product, and the confidence of being able to reuse those components was magnificent.

One of the hardest parts of building native applications using native IDEs is the user interface. On iOS, it is so painstakingly time-consuming to develop interfaces. You can do it through code, but it will involve a lot of code. And managing dynamic layout constraints with code is more hellish than most tasks. You could use the interface builder, but, you lose the fine-grained control and flexibility code gives you. And good luck committing and collaborating on Interface Builder changes in git.

In React Native, dynamic interfaces are a breeze. You use CSS-like syntax to build the the design of your dreams:

let containerStyles = {
    backgroundColor: “red”,
    display: “flex”,
    alignItems: “center”,
    width: “100%"
}

let childStyles = {
    fontSize: 14,
    color: “black”,
    fontWeight: “bold"
}

<View style={containerStyles}>
     <Text style={childStyles}>Hello, future.</Text>
</View>

This is the basis for building all interfaces in React Native. And it’s really as simple as it looks. And the bast part?

THEMING.

Essentially, your entire interface is a bunch of JSON properties. You’ve probably already noticed it wouldn’t be very hard to pull a JSON style blob from a server or file and completely change the appearance of the app. So that’s exactly what I did:

Do you know how hard this would have been in native code? My mind aches just thinking about it.

What's the catch?

During my journey through heaven, as I looked in every direction in utter amazement and wonder, I kept thinking, what’s the catch? It can’t be this easy to build native applications. It felt almost sinful.

Now, this is software, and a software development tool at that, so there is no such thing as perfect. React Native is still under active development, so you’ll experience some gotchas. My first few gotchas felt existential. “Shit! This is the end! I knew it. I knew it was too good to be true. This issue is going to completely blow up my project.” Luckily, there was no issue that couldn’t be solved.

For example, one of the more annoying issues I experienced was that the TextInput component of React Native just didn’t work well enough on Android for a notes app. The scrolling was laggy, and anytime you scrolled to read the note, it would automatically bring up the keyboard. Extremely frustrating. I tried for several days to hack my way around the issue by somehow manipulating the JavaScript code to prevent both issues. But absolutely nothing worked. I learned however that this is not the end of your project. It is the beginning.

React Native allows you to easily build native components for anything your heart desires. A native component or module means you can write interface and business logic using native Swift/Objective-C or Java/Kotlin and easily create a JavaScript interface for controlling those modules. In my case, I wrote a custom textview module in Java that made scrolling much smoother, and wouldn’t focus the input on scroll. This was straight up Java written in Android Studio. I imported it in JavaScript, added it to the view hierarchy, and boom, a beautifully scrolling text input in React Native. Problem solved.

I used native modules for other things too, including the encryption module (separate modules for iOS and Android) and the fingerprint authentication module.

Should you use React Native?

Yes, yes, 100% yes. Even if you’re building a single-platform app, I would use React Native. It just feels like the better way to write apps. As new as Swift is, it feels ridiculously outdated and heavy compared to the nimbleness of writing apps in JavaScript. I really wish Apple focused on making it more accessible to write great applications, rather than introducing the most esoteric programming language I’ve encountered in some time. Xcode was built around Objective-C, and Swift still feels out of place inside.

I was able to re-use about 70-80% of the code from our web app in building the native mobile app. The rest is interface code that could not be re-used. I was even able to target lower versions of iOS and Android. Our original Swift Standard Notes app used the newest implementation of Core Data, so iOS 10 was required. The new React Native implementation works out of the box on iOS 8 and Android 5.

Want to see how a React Native app feels? You can download the finished product for iOS and Android. You can also check out the entire source code. If you have any questions on the React Native development process, please don’t hesitate to reach out on Twitter.

If doing something wags your tail, keep doing it

Mo — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 17:25:01 +0000

To whom it may concern,

I’ve always wanted to start a letter like that. During the 90s, my dad owned a fast-food restaurant in what was then not-River North. I remember he would receive letters addressed like that. Thus began my mild infatuation with TWIMC.

Last night I attempted to continue reading Biocentrism, a book I’ve been spending some time with every night. I only ever read when I get into bed, for as long as I can keep my eyes open. Sometimes I’ll last twenty minutes. Other times, just a few. But yesterday, as I read a few sentences, I felt a strange resistance.

It had happened again: I grew bored. I could not separate myself any further from it. All of these last two weeks I had spent lost in the world of quantum mechanics and the conditions of our probabilistic existence. And just like that, I was totally over it. Reading the words off those pages felt like reading through bricks. I knew it was only a matter of time. You didn’t think I’d be into this stuff forever, did you? Na. Two weeks tops. That applies as much to quantum mechanics as it does to ping-pong (that one lasted three weeks).

I find myself now searching for something new to get lost in. It is so impossibly difficult for me to start a new book. I’m never impressed enough by book descriptions. I have the same problem with TV shows and video games. I just don’t know if it’ll be worth my time. I ended up going with The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, a book suggested by Ryan Holiday in his email list about the last few stands of the Roman Empire.

I’ve had phases where I’m particularly interested in history. But today’s times are too strange to have an interest in politics. 2016 ruined politics for me (and The West Wing). It burst my bubble of the idea of a progressive world, and morphed it instead into a world where no one has any idea of what's going on. Is 2016-2017 bad for modern politics? It seems like it. But is it bad for politics of the year 2050? It’s impossible to say. History has shown time and time again good can come from bad. Pity that we have to pay the price. Blood is delicious nutrition for our ever-carnivorous Mother Nature.

I have little interesting to write about today, and I still need to learn to open up more. I’ve done a month long marathon of writing daily before, but I wouldn’t publish them, so it was easy to be myself and talk freely. The moment I know I am being observed, I spin. My preferred party size is 2, then 3, and a maximum of 4 people. More than that, and I forget how to act.

I’ve been fighting my social behavior for the last decade to try to be more present and outgoing. But this might be the first year where I’m sort of just accepting my behavior as-is. I don’t make a lot of new friends. But I do write a lot of code. And that’s what makes me happy. Should I fight it?

If there’s anything I’ve learned during my brief and petty bout with existence, it’s never fight what makes you happy. Life doesn’t always give you signs so clearly. But happiness from doing something? That’s a break from the universe’s reluctance to show any emotion. She’s wagging her tail for you. All you have to do is fetch.

A falling tree doesn't make a sound

Mo — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 17:05:48 +0000

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a sound? I’ve always thought the answer to this was yes, of course it makes a sound, even when no one is present. I posted this question to Twitter and the answers were the same: of course it makes a sound! I was surprised to learn this is the wrong answer.

After I heard the case for why it does not in fact make a sound, I was dumbfounded. Why had I been conditioned to see it otherwise? It was kind of earth-shattering. Let me explain why a falling tree only makes a sound when someone is present.

“Sound” is made when our ears pick up vibrations or pulsations in the air and converts them into what we perceive as auditory sensations. But without ears, all you have are pulsations in the air. Pulsations in the air do not have an “inherent” sound. It only becomes sound when our ears convert that air into sound. You wouldn’t say a binary encoded audio file has an intrinsic sound, would you? It’s just ones and zeros. Only when you open the file with an audio player, and the audio player routes the data to your computer’s speakers, is sound actually made. But if you open that same file in a text editor, it won't make a sound.

Once I saw it like this, I couldn’t understand why I had ever seen it any other way. Unfortunately, once you unlock this understanding, you’ll be taken on a wild ride where you question the objective vs. subjective nature of everything. If sound is made only when we perceive it, where do we draw the line with our other senses?

Images of the world are made when light is converted by our retinas into meaningful symbols. Without a retina to perceive light, what does the world actually, “intrinsically” look like? Again, it’s sort of just illegible data until our mind parses it and turns it into something meaningful. Without eye technology, the world cannot really be said to have a visual interface.

Without our sense of touch, the world cannot be said to have a tactile interface.

And really, given what we know about electrons being wishy-washy about the details of their existence, without humans, or other conscious beings, the world cannot be said to exist, period.

The universe is lazy-loaded

Mo — Sat, 21 Oct 2017 17:03:12 +0000

I’ve recently been entangled in the world of quantum physics, where absolutely nothing makes sense. I dance this confused ballad every so often, and always wind up at the same place: what on earth is going on here? The universe is as suspicious as ever.

I’m reading a book called Biocentrism, which argues that without conscious observers, the universe quite simply does not exist. That is, the universe as we know does not exist “physically”, but we create it with our minds. How is this done?

Well, I’m only a hobbyist, and quantum mechanics is still far above my pay-grade. But here’s my understanding:

An electron can have a spin. Assume for simplicity that the spin can either be up or down. At any given instant, an electron’s spin is said to be indeterminate. You can’t say, nor can it be said, that it will have this particular spin at this particular time, like you can do with most areas of classical physics. And this is not some sort of weakness in our observation or measuring techniques: it inherently does not have a spin.

That is, until you measure it. The instant you observe it, it collapses to a rigid state and then can be determined to be up or down.

It’s not currently very clear what the nature of the “observer” needs to be. Some argue that an observer need to be conscious, such as a human or an insect, for electrons to modify their behavior. Other interpretations do not require consciousness.

As the name implies, Biocentrism is about how biological life brings about the universe, and not the other way around. The book breaks down quantum mechanics in delicious and easy to understand bits, but parts of it still evade my tiny brain.

Essentially, the book argues that in a room with conscious observers (us), electrons will commit to a certain state. When a formation of these particles all commit to a state, we see it as the very persistent reality we know and love. However, when the observers exit the room, the room contents cannot be definitely said to exist anymore. The room now exists in a probabilistic state. The electrons making up the room can no longer be said to be in the same state you remembered them being in.

In a sense, the universe is "lazy-loaded”. It doesn’t “render” until it needs to. And this isn’t some wacky theory. It’s what the deepest and most fundamental understanding of physics is pointing to. A very, very “advanced” universe. And I think advanced is a very fair word to use.

Science, which is really good at producing endless technological miracles and advancements, is not so good at attribution. I don’t necessarily mean “god”, since that’s a concept that’s being deprecated quickly. Nor can I actually say what it is, but it is very clear what it’s not. The words “random” and “infinite” are words we’ve accepted to describe the universe, but neither of those words hold any actual meaning, other than being convenient concepts. To me, it’s as simple as:

A universe that created animals with consciousness cannot be dumb.

That’s probably as far as I’m willing to take it. I won’t say it’s intelligent, or sentient, or omniscient. But it’s most certainly not dumb. Random? Infinite? I don’t know what either of those words mean.

I hate marketing

Mo — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 17:58:32 +0000

I hate marketing. There, I said it. I hate hate hate marketing. Reaching out to people, forming new “connections”, networking—I cannot stand even the thought of imagining myself at a tech conference. I hate the thought of approaching strangers and trying to somehow mention or convince them of me or my product. Apart from my wife and a few long-standing friends, I am notoriously bad at up-keeping relationships.

Marketing for me is something I haven’t been able to learn like other things. If you want to learn to program, well, that’s easy: just follow the tutorials. If you want to learn to write, well, that’s easy-ish: read a lot and be observant. But there are no “tutorials” for marketing. You might say it’s an art form, but if it were, it would be some cursed, wicked form of art.

Marketing is the only field I know where once a new strategy has been tried and is found to work, it completely stops working. Meaning, if someone discovers a new way of clever marketing, it’s immediately copied by all, and is thus rendered useless. Marketing seems to be “the art of sticking out”, and when everyone does the same thing, well, that’s the opposite of marketing.

As for me, I just want to code. That’s all I ever think about doing. But coding, at least in my current stage, is a guilty pleasure. I know I shouldn’t be doing it. I should be marketing. Getting more people attracted to my project. Reaching out. Ekh.

At first, I tried to embrace my hatred towards marketing as a learning opportunity. “Hey, here’s something challenging and rewarding, can’t wait to learn all about it!” But I haven’t really made any progress, other than blind luck. And that’s just it: it seems there’s a huge luck factor involved in marketing, especially (or actually, particularly) when you’re working with a zero marketing budget. And when my fate hangs by a wire, “luck” is not something I want to be toying with.

I need consistency. Reproducibility. Calculability. Marketing and networking offer none of those. I know people who are so good at networking that it upsets me and boggles my mind at the same time. There’s a pretty great Netflix show called Atypical about an autistic teenager named Sam who functions almost “normally” except for the fact that he struggles to understand normal social cues and interactions. But in a sense, you don’t have to be on the spectrum to struggle with making sense of all the kinds of relationships and their subtleties.

When a friend explains networking to me, I am utterly baffled. “Wait, so you’re saying you reach out to random people you don’t know if you’ll like or not, sit through an hour lunch with them while you try not to talk with your mouth full, and call it a wrap until you do it again a few months later? And then you have to email them every month or so to keep the relationship ‘active’? And you have to go out of your way to do something for them in hopes that 20 years from now they might do something for you? And that on top of all that, you shouldn’t have a cynical or “reciprocal" outlook about it, but instead it’s about sincerely getting to meet new people? What in the actual fuck?”

Yeah. No thanks. I’m gonna go back to coding where things actually make sense.

Niceness happens in pockets

Mo — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 16:12:51 +0000

This is my attempted (re)beginning of writing three pages every day in the morning. It's a sort of therapy for me. A lot of stuff finds itself circulating in my mind, then lingers and pollutes it. It's become exhausting to think, I should write this down, and expand on it to learn more about it, then never following through.

Writing three pages every day is something I learned from The Artist’s Way. At first I thought it would be impossible, that I couldn’t possibly find something to write about every single day. But several months ago, I did this same exercise and found that not only was it possible, it was also extremely easy.

The trick is to write without thought. The cogs of your mind are spinning and producing thoughts whether you want them to or not. This exercise then is about transcribing this free flow of thought on to paper, without judgement. Seth Godin described it as something like:

One never gets talker’s block. Because you just say what you think. Similarly writer's block is a myth, because you just write what you think.

That really changed the way I look at writing daily, taking it from this grand impossible to a plain plausibility.

I write on actual paper when I do these exercises, since it’s more conducive to free flow. On computer, I might be tempted to hit the backspace key all too often. Paper allows room for imperfection. Computer underlines everything with red. It’s not its fault. It doesn’t know any better.

I try to write about things that might be useful to me in the future. Yesterday—ok wow. I don’t know if it’s the coffee, or it’s this book I’ve been reading on time and quantum theory, but I wrote the word “yesterday” and experienced a mental crash. What is yesterday? What is the physical yesterday? I guess I meant to say, “the continuous stream of consciousness I experienced before it was interrupted by a long sleep”—yesterday, I was thinking about niceness.

I’ve been recently captivated by why we become different people on the internet. On large scale websites like Twitter and Reddit, people (we) act different than they would in a small physical community. And this behavior tends to be more extreme on the mean-ness scale. Twitter is a meaner place than your grocery store. But why? We tend to blame the product design of sites like Twitter and Facebook for not being conducive enough to niceness and amiability, but I’m starting to think it might instead be the product design of human beings.

Several years ago I lived in a 52-story building in the heart of Chicago’s West Loop. There were so many residents that I would hardly see the same face twice. So, you wouldn’t really make conversation in the hallways or elevator. Most people would just look down as they walked. I lived in that building for six months and did not learn the name of a single “co-resident”.

The next building I move into, on the edge of River North, was a little smaller—7 stories, with about 10-15 units on each floor. This time, I found myself conversing at relatively greater lengths, perhaps more than a minute, with immediate neighbors. But it was still sort of abstract.

The last place, where I now live, is only a 3-story building with a single unit on each floor. I know all my neighbors’ names, occupations, hobbies, kids names, favorite restaurants, what time they usually head to work and return—I’ve made lengthy and meaningful conversation with all of them. If I run into one of them in the hallway, I’ll make a real effort to have a real conversation, and not just a “hi-bye”.

All that to say, I think niceness occurs in pockets. You start with the intimacy of two people having a private conversation, where I think niceness has the greatest chance of being found. Then scale that up to a group of friends, a team, a family, a small apartment building, a yoga class, your university. Niceness is present in all these places but diminishes with size. You’re more likely to say hi! to a passing person in a quiet suburb than in a crowded street in the middle of Chicago.

And if a tight-knit community is the best place to find niceness, then Twitter is neither tightly knit nor a community. It’s instead one of the largest, most crowded cities you’ll ever find yourself in.

I think the lasting solution to “how can we make the internet a nicer place” is to simply find intimate pockets that you can be a part of—the online equivalent of a 3-story building, or warm yoga class. But when you enter a mega metropolis like Twitter, with hundreds of millions of people, it sort of just becomes a matter of statistics, probability, and the strange (and ultimately shocking) distribution of human behavior.

Tethered

Mo — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 04:07:59 +0000

Sans opened his eyes, his face smothered with ash and dust. His ears were ringing painfully, his arms and legs bruised and paralyzed. Around him were bodies—dead—decapitated, amputated. The explosion had killed everyone but him. It was night out, and he could hear sirens in the distance. He tried moving, but could not summon it. Even if he could, there was nowhere for him to go—everything had collapsed around him, and there was no open path. He managed to free his arm from under the body of a woman—a woman that he would otherwise have found attractive. A wooden plank protruded through her neck, her necklace shimmering through the smoke and hanging on her exposed breast. Even though hell had formed spontaneously around him, his eyes could not help but gaze. But he felt nothing.

He reached into his pocket and could feel the matte texture of his phone. He wanted to pull it out, almost instinctively, but could not summon the physics—his thigh was weighed down from pain. He shuffled his hand around and managed to break the phone loose. It was an iPhone, one of the newer models. He hugged it with his hand and brought it up to his face, as if to kiss it. Here, in a room of just minutes ago living people, he was not alone. He put his thumb to the button on the bottom of the device, and the phone vibrated. His thumb was bleeding, and the device could not trust his fingerprint. He tried a couple more times before the phone prompted him for a pin instead.

8–5–1–8

The device unlocked. He gazed at his home screen, confused as to why he had thought to take out his phone in the first place. To call 911? No—he could not speak now, nor did he wish to spend what seemed his last moments speaking to a remote worker in a call center. He stared blankly at the phone, until the screen had dimmed. He tapped his nose to the screen to bring it back to life. Ash from his hair fell onto the screen, and he puffed with what little breath he had to disperse it. Droplets of blood spat onto the screen, and he studied them with an empty gaze. Behind the surface, icons began dancing. He thought he was hallucinating, until he realized his finger had been resting on one of the icons. He traveled his thumb back to the button on the bottom, and the frenzy ceased.

There on the home screen were the applications that had come to define his life. Every morning, he would awaken and perform perhaps the same ceremony he is attending to now. He’d travel from world to world, app to app, seeking news, in the literal sense—the plural form of something new. He’d start with email, checking to see if some friendly solicitation he had sent some days ago had gotten a response. Typically, such responses never came, and he had grown accustomed to it, though still remained somewhat bitter. “How hard is it to reply to an email? Assholes.” He would attempt to talk himself down: “They’re busy people, Sans. You should understand.” But that never helped. He always took it personally.

He might then open his Twitter app, with all his 300 followers, which he had worked, not very hard mind you, eight years to acquire. His followers were not very loyal, and he often spited them for their lack of engagement with him. He very rarely had real interactions on the platform.

“This is the tweet,” he’d often say. “This is the one that’s going to go viral.” It never did of course, and that’s a reality he’s well accustomed to as well. His prized tweet, the one destined to go viral, is deleted no sooner than it’s posted, like it never happened.

He would then open Facebook, if he had it. Years ago, he had begun exploring different ideas of spirituality and religion, and all his old friends were devout. Alienated, he deactivated his account and never went back. Hundreds of friends were reduced to just one or two that he kept in touch with manually. Sad, it sometimes seemed, since he saw the connectedness it seemed to bring to other people.

At this point in the routine, after not receiving much love from the outside world, he’d drop his phone onto his chest, force his eyes shut with his thumb and index finger, and pity his life. Not depressingly, but almost instantaneously, like a flash flood that blankets the city but recedes back into the deepest depths of its sewers within seconds.

He didn’t give much love to others, so it was strange that he would be inclined to think that he should receive it back. But he had seen others who could tweet out a punctuation mark and receive thousands of likes. And his tweets were better, much better, than punctuation marks, he thought. He remained naively optimistic though. Which in many cases meant laziness.

Blood began streaming from his forehead and trickled down his nose, until it reached his lips, where he could taste its bitterness. He sputtered and attempted to cough, but his lungs were weak, and his breaths short. He knew he was going to die, although he had never experienced anything remotely close to death before. And, as someone who was morbidly fearful of airplane travel due to fear of airplane malfunction from turbulence, he was surprisingly calm now. Perhaps once you know for sure, the anxiety of it leaves the equation, and you’re left with just reality, and as barren as reality sometimes is, it’s bearable. Enough to sleep off at least, and make it to the next day.

Even now, when it counted most, Sans could not believe in the concept of an afterlife, and liked it better that way. Heaven to him was lack of consciousness, for all consciousness ever brought was worry, ambition, and pain. What could be more heavenly than eternal rest from consciousness?

His phone dimmed once again, and he carried it back up to his nose to bring it back to life. In the gray, smoke-filled room, the vibrant light emitting from his phone screen seemed to make him feel alive, and distracted him from his overwhelming desire to sleep. He scanned the screen, and found his way to the top—full signal. He shifted his gaze to the other side of the screen—the battery icon was bleeding red. Typically this would have brought him anxiety, but he did not have a reaction. Nor did he have any reaction to the constant stream of blood that dripped from his head.

He was in pain—more pain than he had ever felt before. It emanated from every part of his body, and so he could not focus on any particular pain point. His pain was blurry.

The siren sounds grew louder, but the building inside remained quiet, except for the occasional sparkle, or the crumbling of a wall. He closed his eyes and tried to draw a long breath, but could only manage a small heap of air. He felt his phone vibrate, and in the microseconds before his instinctual response to open his eyes would emerge, a spark of impulse and opportunity zipped by, like an electron beaming through a wire at the speed of light.

He had spent his whole life working with computers and on the internet, and his phone vibrating was a symbol of news and of the new. In the last several years of his life, his phone may have vibrated tens of thousands of times, and of those, only a handful were of the nature that he had hoped for: a reply to an email he had sent to some big shot entrepreneur, or a notification that someone had admired his work. The other notifications were always useless, and no matter how many times he’d unsubscribe from this or that newsletter, new ones to fill their place would always find their way through.

He opened his eyes and drew his gaze to the top of the screen, where a banner was announcing the arrival of a new message. On the left of the banner was a vibrant, multi-colored plaid icon with an S in the middle, and adjacent to that was a message that he could not make out. Not that he couldn’t read it—it was clearly in English, and he could read the individual words. He just couldn’t connect the words into a sentence. It didn’t help that blood was dripping from his brain and onto his eyes, and smudges of faint crimson streaked through the surface of the screen. No sooner does the banner arrive does it vanish, and once again, Sans is left looking at his home screen.

Even under excruciating physical pain, it hurt him more that while he lay in a pile of his own blood, life went on somewhere else. And just then he realized the insignificance of his own. Not in a dreary, nihilistic way, but in a profound, enlightening way. He need not have attributed so much significance to his goals, dreams, and desires. His purpose, it is now clear, was to live, and that he did poorly, always too fixated on what he can do today for a better tomorrow.

On any other day, epiphanies were reason to celebrate. They were checkpoints in his life, where the previous several years were validated to be not all for naught. While the passing of seconds were signified by a constant heartbeat, the passing of years were signified by epiphanies and sudden bursts of wisdom, and he was always grateful to receive them, no matter how delayed they can sometimes be.

His phone dimmed once again. He stared at it intently, but did not have any impulse to bring it back to life. He could hear shouting from the hallway on the floor below. Near the window, he could see billows of smoke animated by flashes of red and blue.

Pangs of pain shot through his neck as he looked back towards his phone, and as it could never save him before, it could not now. He gripped it firmly, and followed his index finger through the edges, traveling to the top, where a beveled button protruded subtly. He rest his finger on it for a few seconds before pressing it firmly.

Seconds later, the curtains drew, and a message appeared.

slide to power off

He looked puzzled, as if he had never seen this screen before. And perhaps he never had. He brought the dying screen to his face, and dragged his nose across it from left to right. The screen went black, and a spinner appeared on the screen. Sans’ mind ceased to function just then. And, seconds later, when the spinner went, so too did his body.

A Hundred Redwood Trees

Mo — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 04:07:00 +0000

A friend texted me today asking if I was busy. How to answer such a question? No, and it may be "I need help installing Word on my impossibly slow and unresponsive computer." Yes, and I'm an asshole.

"No what's up?" Please don't be a tech issue. Please don't be a tech issue.

"I feel lost. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I don't seem to be motivated by anything anymore. I don't know where my passion has gone."

I double check the sender to make sure it wasn't me.

Sigh, — how to help you dear friend when it is I that needs help?

I've always had the luxury of giving up. That is, giving up on any present endeavor would not have harmed me in any significant way. Rather, it was more that I would with some probability miss out on something good, but, ah well.

Time and time again, a new hobby or passion would enthrall me — one wildly more exciting than the last. And when it got hard or uncomfortable, giving up began flirting with me, and I could not resist her advances.

I have this time around however carved so deep into one single direction that I cannot see any other way I look. Of course, my mistress still comes to visit, even on this long and winding path — give up and let go, and let us explore a new freedom together. I close my eyes and get closer. I can feel her breathe against mine. At the height of anticipation, my heart a second away from beating out my chest, I pull back. I can't do this. I'm so sorry.

She leaves embarrassed. But she'll be back.

In the morning, I check the map. I look up and straight ahead. Then back from where I came. Is today the day we turn back? It's like the joke about the man who swam half way across the ocean before turning back from fatigue. Amusingly, I'm at a point where going back would probably be more work.

So further I walk into the canyon I've carved for myself. When I reach the edge, I'll sit and rest for a few days. Then I'll awake on one day, tired and wary, and begin carving languidly from the edge. The dust from the falling stones blankets my eyes until I have no choice but to call it a day. I'll rest another week, sometimes sleepwalking in the middle of the night towards the wall with my chisel in my hand. I fall back to the ground before I ever make it.

Often, I'll look at the stone wall in my way and ask myself, "how bad do I want to chisel today?" The wall increases in opacity each day, and now I see only black. I cannot see even a centimeter beyond it. I may chisel for weeks and weeks without seeing anything but black.

And so it is everyday the same confrontation. On what fuel am I running? Imagine you were in the woods and everyday saw a bear clawing away at a huge rock while making very little progress in erosion. Without fail, you arrive bright and early in the morning, and there he is, that poor bastard just clawing away at the rock. Doesn't he know it's just more rock?

So too does it seem insane of me to continue. Can't you see? It is absolute insanity for me to march straight even though I cannot see ahead of me. Is it not mental? Put him down. Shoot that poor bear and rid him of his misery!

This is the madness we operate under today. To carve and carve even though we may not even be sure what's on the other side — this is obsessive madness and borderline insanity.

And it would explain why I seem to be losing my mind.

These days I carve out just a little each day. I've nestled in to this new canyon and have made myself a nice home. The other day I lit a fire under the moonlight. There was a nice wind, and the mint of the trees danced with the crackle of the fire — I inhaled it slowly. I looked around my new settlement in contentment. I noticed new types of trees that I had not noticed before, and unknown animals rustling in the distance. I've discovered new elements and materials, and have devised plans for new tools to chisel with, on some future day. I look back towards the path from which I came. But where there was once a worn path, there are now a hundred redwood trees.

The Meantime

Mo — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

That's what gets left out. In stories about fame, success, and glory, we don't get a sense of time. We only learn of the checkpoints in someone's journey, events which may have numbered just a hundred in the story of one person. The meantime are all the long endless seconds in between.

The meantime is eternity. It is time at a pace beyond your control. It is days that never end, constant doubt and questioning, incessant fear and irrational paranoia. It is chores and work and labor and illness and theft and hunger and life. The meantime is when it's easiest for us to give up. It is the time we are off stage, and in it we constantly question our previous performances. The meantime is, by every definition I know, hell.

The meantime is growth. It is navigation. It is when we form new ideas in our minds, or understand something old in a new way. It is growth that cannot be seen or measured. But growth, by its very definition, is agony. Because growth outgrows itself, continuously.

Not everyone makes it through the meantime. In here I've discovered the most ravenous monsters that one can imagine. Fighting them each day fatigues even a warrior. But I've heard stamina is something we have going for us.

How to cope with the meantime? By it's very definition, you can't. The meantime is unavoidable, because whatever merry distraction you summon to hasten an interval of meantime, it is no longer meantime, and the shortened segment now stretches to fill the vacancy — the same mental space is always occupied by the meantime.

The meantime is silent struggle. It is the pain of new memories being formed, of immeasurable growth, and of death. The meantime can not be measured, observed, or written about. It is the invisible shadows that follow us everywhere we go.

The meantime is when it is decided if it will kill you, or make you stronger.

Taking Risks Accelerates Progress

Mo — Sun, 11 Dec 2016 04:07:59 +0000

How much sooner do you think you’d arrive at what success is to you if there were no consequences on you or your family for your actions? Not having to worry about providing, about health, about anything – how much sooner would you arrive at success? Maybe you’d say in 3-6 months, compared to the several years otherwise. Your reluctance to behave in that sort of “reckless” fashion is what’s called fear. Thus conquering fear allows you to accelerate your progress. The act of conquering your fears as applied to daily life is called “taking risks”. Taking risks accelerates your progress by orders of magnitude. Being totally reckless, or turning off the fear factor completely, is probably dangerous in the long run. But those who find success, as they themselves have told us, have had to turn up that dial to just above uncomfortable. And watching other species fight for their survival in unimaginably uncomfortable ways has also confirmed this theory for me.

Watching Planet Earth (the original, II, and Life Story) has gotten me to see this clearly. It’s the story of us that we’ve forgotten. The moral of every episode is that life is tough and those who hide in comfort die and starve, while those who make the perilous journey towards where opportunity abides are the ones that prosper. There’s a game to life. A trick. The trick is, those who conquer their fears win. Those who do what is difficult win. And this is not some metaphysical philosophical musing. This is the reality of the nature of existence for biological beings. It’s cut throat competition. Every species fights for their survival. We’ve advanced mostly beyond individual violent fights for survival. But make no mistake about it — we are still on stage. This stage is less physical, but no less real. And the moral of our story, the way a distant documentary might comment, is that those who took the largest risks, who conquered fear, reaped the largest benefits.

Standing

Mo — Sat, 09 Apr 2016 04:07:59 +0000

Look at that mountain, I just want to stand on it.

But you’re on a mountain now—
How does it feel?

The Myth of Healthy Foods

Mo — Sat, 02 Apr 2016 04:07:59 +0000

It’s liberating to realize that there’s no such thing as any one specific “healthy” or superfood, but rather that your best odds at living a healthy life is to eat as many diverse not unhealthy things as possible, and hope you did it right ten years from now.

This isn’t a great solution, and it would be great if we received more timely feedback and positive/negative reinforcement from our bodies (then again, maybe our bodies don’t plan very far ahead anyway). But until we figure out a better solution, there’s no sense in obsessing over making sure you take your daily dose of goji berries or spirulina because they’re touted as healthy. Just eat different things that are generally well known to not be bad for you.

Anything else, such as obsessing over one type of food (my mom likes to drink a homemade mixture of roasted cumin seeds, lemon and water every day because she says it’s “healthy”), is really just marketing and/or misinformation.

Variety is healthy.

Monotony is not.

Which probably explains why we sometimes get sick of the same food if we eat it every single day: our body wants us to change it up. This way it increases the chances of getting different nutrients that your conscious self might not even be aware your body needed.

Invisible Probability Forces

Mo — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 04:07:59 +0000

In recently attempting to understand the intuition behind basic probability theory, I found myself unable to think past the tangible reality of what it all meant. You flip a coin a couple times, and you see mixed results. You try to guess its next move, but it always outwits you. You’ve flipped the coin twenty times now, and you don’t see a pattern. You get heads a couple times, followed by tails five times, then heads three times and tails six more times. There just doesn’t seem to be a pattern here.

But probability theory says that over a large enough number of coin flips, eventually, the number of resulting heads will approximately equal the number of tails.

Now, this seems like basic probability, the kind we learn in grade school: there are two possibilities, and one result per flip. That means there’s a one in two chance of getting heads, and a one in two chance of getting tails, or a 1/2 probability, or 50/50.

What troubled me was, given that the outcome of every individual coin toss is random, how is it possible that over the long run, they begin to conform to certain outcomes, as predicted by our equations? In other words, what is this invisible force that makes coin outcomes converge to predefined ratios, and if this force wasn’t acting on the individual coin flips, then at what point does this force actually begin affecting the results?

You can see by my use of words like “invisible force” that I didn’t quite understand the concept.

There was an invisible force, however, that helped make this concept click for me.

An excerpt from a short book I was reading described the solution to my confusion elegantly. Carlo Rovelli, in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, writes:

“Teaspoon [heating] and balloon [popping] behave as they must, following the laws of physics in complete independence from what we know or don’t know about them. The predictability or unpredictability of their behavior does not pertain to their precise condition; it pertains to the limited set of their properties with which we interact. This set of properties depends on our specific way of interacting with the teaspoon or the balloon. Probability does not refer to the evolution of matter in itself. It relates to the evolution of those specific quantities we interact with. Once again, the profoundly relational nature of the concepts we use to organize the world emerges. The cold teaspoon heats up in hot tea because tea and spoon interact with us through a limited number of variables among the innumerable variables that characterize their microstate. The value of these variables is not sufficient to predict future behavior exactly (witness the balloon) but is sufficient to predict with optimum probability that the spoon will heat up.”

This made sense to me. Statistics isn’t, “hey look at these equations we came up with, and look how in real life, reality conforms to these equations. We’re so smart.” It’s more like “hey look at this weird behavior of this real life object. We don’t fully understand how it behaves, but check this out: we can still plot its behavior in the long run. It’s pretty frustrating that we don’t understand its behavior exactly, but at least we can still express that behavior in a language that we can understand and also manipulate, i.e equations.”

So I think probability theory is a temporary language. I think it’s our way of building up to a better language that can more accurately point to and describe real life phenomena. There’s no way in hell science or mathematics is going to see a certain phenomena and not attempt to find a way, anyway, to put it on paper. We have to. And probability theory is really the best we can do at this point.

So it’s not, “we have these equations that the laws of the universe oblige to” (“over large numbers“), but rather, “look at this strange behavior in the universe: here’s a way we can express that in a way that works fine for now and allows us to make predictions on that data in a way that’s somewhat reliable.”

Take this plot of the results of an experiment involving random results. See that wavy pattern? We have a name for it. It’s called the Normal Distribution.

The details are irrelevant: just know that we’re now using charts, graphs, and equations to describe random behavior. If I asked you a thousand years ago, “hey mate, I’m gonna flip this coin 5 times, tell me some math about it.” you’d say “mate are you crazy? There’s no math to describe that shit.” But now look: we have a language to describe it. We’re making progress.

Entangled

Mo — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 04:07:59 +0000

Update: I have since learned that the conclusion I make in this post is incorrect, and as a science hobbyist, quantum mechanics is still far too difficult for me to understand. I leave this article published as a thumbtack in the history of my foolishness, and also as a way to hopefully instill curiosity of the subject in the reader. (See footnote for brief explanation.)

Several weeks ago, a friend of mine called me with some troubling news: the world of physics is in total disarray. “The best definition we have for how things work, at the quantum level, is magic,” he explained. There was panic in his voice.

“Jeff, what the hell are you talking about?”

He pauses to catch his breath. “Science right now,” he continues, “is stumped.”

“Sure, we understand how life-size things work, how planetary-size things work, and even how cell-size work. But go even deeper, to a subatomic level, and we are absolutely clueless,” he explained. It turns out, my distressed friend was not alone in harboring this eerie sentiment towards the laws of physics which I had until that point assumed we had a pretty good understanding of — it troubled many smart people, including Einstein, as well.

“Slow down Jeff – what the hell do you mean it’s ‘magic’?” He began explaining his late night obsession with a branch of physics called quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is mind-bendingly difficult to wrap your head around, and human language falls short in properly explaining it. He began his explanation thus: “Imagine there is a table in front of you. This table has a coordinate in 3D space, and you know that if you closed your eyes, or turned your back to this table, that it would still be there with 100% certainty. You would know that its color, position, and size has not changed just because you’re no longer observing it.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, at the quantum level, you can no longer be so certain.”

Quantum mechanics, amongst other things, says that you cannot make any assertions about certain attributes of a particle until you measure those attributes. For example, a particle has a spin. For simplicity’s sake, a particle’s spin can take on a negative or positive value. However, this particle does not have an “inherent” spin, and only takes on a value when you (an observer) measures it.

“What about before it’s measured? It still has a spin value right? We just don’t know its value because we haven’t measured it, but it still has a definite, inherent value, whether or not we are looking at it. Right?”

Wrong.

He continues his explanation, half in disbelief himself. “Before we measure it, its spin is ‘random’. Indeterminate. And not due to human ignorance; just literally random. It could be anything. Only when you measure it does it become something.”

At this point, my eyes are squinting and my fingers are anxiously brushing through my hair. “But— what if— how does— doesn’t it—it’s because—what.”

I was stumped.

“What the hell do you mean its spin is ‘random’ before you measure it? What does that even mean?”

That wasn’t even the spookiest part.

“Have you heard of quantum entanglement before?” he asks.

“Sounds familiar, but no not really.”

“Well,” he laughs, “you might want to sit down for this.”

I sit.

“Ok, so, you know how I just told you that we don’t know a particle’s spin for sure until we measure it?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, Quantum Entanglement says that once two particles become entangled [through interaction], that if you were to separate these two particles a million miles apart, and measure one of the particle’s spin and find it to be positive, you then immediately know the other particle’s spin is negative.”

“But I thought the spin of a particle is random until you measure it? Why does measuring one particle’s spin immediately cause another particle, millions of miles away, to all of a sudden be non-random and definite?”

“Magic.”

Being the modern homosapien that I am, I wasn’t going to take “magic” for an answer.

I struggled with this concept for several weeks after that bizarre phone call. I read article upon article, watched hours of YouTube videos, and struggled with dozens of analogies and metaphors that try to explain the concept at a five year old level. I still could not make sense of it. How can something be random? What does it mean for a physical attribute to be random? To be nothing? To be uncertain?

I found an answer to this question in the most unlikely of places.

I took a strange trip this Sunday with my wife to Target. She said we needed matching towels for the bathroom.

“What’s wrong with our current towels?” I asked.

“They’re gross. They’re like old hand-me-downs from your parents.”

The aisles of Target were brightly-lit and vibrant as ever. I never liked Target much, since every time I went only looking for a toothbrush, I would leave with $120 worth of goods I never knew I needed. This time around, I was less interested in comparing towels and more so with my continued preoccupation with quantum entanglement. I paced the wide aisles with hands behind my back and gaze straight towards the ground, anxiously pondering what it meant for something to be random; what entanglement can possibly mean.

“…doesn’t have a spin…observe through arbitrary distance…random…,” I mutter to myself like a mad-man.

“Do you think this purple would go nice with our shower curtain?” my wife asks.

“Yes.”

“…observe one…other constricts to same reality…”

“What about the color of this blue hand towel?”

“Yes.”

“…perspective…alternate version of reality…relative to observer…”

“Are you just saying yes to anything?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, honey.”

She smiles. I buy myself some time.

In that moment, through my pacing back and forth, I was utterly unaware of myself. I was nothing more than a brain floating through space and time without a body. I wasn’t six feet tall, nor was I 170 pounds, and I didn’t have black hair. I was nothing but thought and motion.

Deep in perplexed and spaghetti thought, I glance to my right and am instantly taken aback by what I see.

A mirror.

I was spooked. There I was, meat and everything. Before then, I was infinite. The moment I looked in the mirror, I instantly became six feet tall, 170 pounds, and sure enough, with black hair.

And it clicked. Before I measured myself in the mirror, I could have been anything. I didn’t feel like I had black hair or hazel eyes. Heck, I could never know what color my eyes were for certain unless I “measured” their color (with a mirror). It’s not until I observe myself that I can make accurate assertions about my attributes.

Now, that might seem like a far-removed example, but riddle me this: what color are you?

You can’t say yellow, or black, or white, because the question is not what color is your skin, but rather what color are you. The answer to this question is obviously that there is no answer since this question is nonsense.

Now, let’s say you have a mole on your face — what color is this mole?

“Easy,” you say, “brown!”

Fine, good. What color is the mole to itself?

“Uhm, brown?”

Wrong, since this question is similar to me asking you what color you are — nonsense. Going even further, what color is the mole to your nose? Well, our nose doesn’t perceive of color, so this question is again nonsense.

So, the question of “what color is this mole” can best be answered not by “brown”, but by “depends on who you ask”, or, “depends on how you measure it.”

To a human perceiver, it depends on the lighting conditions, the mole’s angle to the light source, the fogginess of the mirror, or the quality of your eye sight. To a non-human perceiver, this question cannot even be posed in the first place.

So, does a mole have an inherent color? The answer is no. It is only when you decide upon the rules of how you will measure its color and perform the measurement does it actually take on a color.

Let’s go over some more fun, but not necessarily literal, examples.

Imagine you’ve woken up to a magnificent sunrise, and you have not yet checked the time.

What time is it?

You don’t know.

Therefore, the time could be anything. Your world is as of yet infinite. The instant you measure the time however, you constrict your version of reality to a very specific interpretation: 8:30am. This time carries with it real world implications and obligations: you now have 30 minutes to take a shower, make coffee, walk the dog, and drive to work. Simply by measuring time have you altered your reality and constricted it to a specific interpretation.

Here’s another example, in true Schrodinger fashion: you send a heart-felt text message to your hopeful-to-be special someone, then immediately hop in the shower. You sing and bust moves while you lather your hair with fruity shampoo, all while images of love and romance conjure in your mind. You dry yourself off and head to check your phone for a response. As of yet, your version of reality is infinite. You don’t know for sure whether you have gotten a response, so you could be anything, happy or sad. The instant you check your phone, however, you’ve constricted your version of reality to a very specific interpretation: you haven’t gotten a response yet, and are instantly saddened. Simply by measuring your environment (checking your phone) have you altered your version of reality.

(You might even see from the above examples the dangers of constantly checking your phone – every time you pull your phone out of your pocket and “measure” your notifications, you constrict your version of reality to a specific interpretation that was before unbiased and infinite.)

Take even mind-altering substances (for example, that is). When you ingest marijuana, you might say that it makes you feel more spiritual, and that it connects you with nature, and it just feels right. The effects of marijuana however are not pre-divined and “deep”, but just a very specific (and ultimately random) interpretation of reality. The fact that smoking weed makes you feel whole is coincidental and not in any way pre-destined. Replace “smoke weed” with “drink alcohol”, “ingest psilocybin” or “take LSD”, and you’ll see the same pattern: every substance provides its own very specific perspective and interpretation of reality. The fact that magic mushrooms connect you to some sort of divine nature is a very specific, and random, interpretation. This implies that there is an infinite number of realities that could exist, each with its own perspective, and thus that there can exist an infinite number of new and novel drugs that will come about in the future that will let you experience a different version of reality. Perhaps one will make you feel like wind, or allow you to conspire with plants, or make you feel transparent, or see clouds as bits and bytes – the possibilities are literally endless, since all reality is perspective. Humanity’s current culture and mode of living? All one very specific interpretation of reality.

So, with this mindset, quantum entanglement is not so mind-bending after all. We’ve known since Newton that the universe tends to balance itself (i.e for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), and since Einstein that energy is neither created nor destroyed. So the fact that if one object is positive the other must be negative is not a very troubling concept. Now, combine that with what we know about measuring reality, and we see that when we define the rules by which we will measure the spin of a particle (i.e on what axis), then simply by performing that measurement on that axis have we constricted our version of reality to a specific interpretation, i.e positive, and since the universe must always remain in balance, measuring that particle’s respective entangled particle by that same interpretation of reality (i.e on the same axis) will lead to an opposite spin (i.e negative).

Magic? Not so much. Troubling? No. But that every attribute of you and I is not absolute, but only dependent on and relative to who the observer is, has given me some pause. “Black” as an answer to “what color is my hair?” is no longer a valid response, since “relative to x” must be appended to the question.

And really, it seems, “relative to x” must be appended to every physical and metaphysical question that any human has ever posed for there to be a real shot at a valid answer.

Update: My conclusion doesn’t hold up. It turns out that if you measure the spin of a particle several times on the same axis (“same version of reality”), you won’t get the same results every time. This is what makes QE spooky: if you measure the first time and the first particle’s spin is up, then the entangled particle’s spin will be down. If you measure again on the same axis, the first particle’s spin can now be down, and the entangled particle’s spin will automatically be up. Mind = more blown. Looks like I have more reading to do.

Do the right thing.

Mo — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 04:07:59 +0000

In the course of a week, there may be at most one or two events in which we don’t know the self-morally correct decision for a given situation. In most cases, the difference between right and wrong is clear. The difficulty lies not in recognizing which of the two is is better aligned with our values and goals, but in choosing the right path.

I struggle with a certain lack of discipline in various areas of my life, and in an attempt to control and mold myself into the kind of ideal person I wish to be, I try to set up rules for myself that would take place in a future setting: when faced in the future with this exact predicament P, with presently defined right option R and presently defined wrong option W, you MUST choose R, or face the consequences. This molding and forced discipline places pressure on me to perform in a certain way in the future, but future me always overrides past or present me, and so it is unlikely that any rule I create for myself will be taken seriously at a future point. Over time, this erodes the trust I have in my self-discipline, such that it becomes pointless for me to even attempt to create boundaries for myself. What results is a sort of anarchy — a lifestyle without governance or any system of checks and balances.

I think a better way to approach self-governance is not through creating countless arbitrary rules that are hazily defined and unable to withstand the test of time, but rather through entrusting one’s self to make the obviously right decision at any given time and place. To be an “adult” in any given situation, which is to say, do the right thing at all times, and not just according to the impossibly-finite rules you’ve set for yourself. If you struggle with an ice cream addiction, this system would suggest that you not say “I will only eat ice cream once a week,” a rule that you are likely to break, but rather that you entrust yourself to only eat ice cream at times and intervals that go towards the basis and principle of why you know you shouldn’t be eating so much ice cream in the first place.

I have a friend who doesn’t smoke cigarettes habitually, but might have one late in the evening after a long day’s work. To prevent himself from getting addicted, he doesn’t try to control himself with strict limits like “I will ONLY smoke ONE cigarette a day, in the evening, only if I’ve had a hard day’s work.” This type of rhetoric is that of a pending addict. Instead, he doesn’t have any definite limitations on tobacco usage, and trusts himself to smoke at intervals that are not addicting and at times when it’s necessary and useful. This might mean that on one day, he might have two cigarettes, but on another, none. This is sane self-control. The less-sane alternative is strict rules that apply constant pressure and force you into an endless struggle with yourself, resulting in frequent disappointment when the rule is eventually broken.

Most of the petty forks in the road we encounter on a frequent basis have a clear answer to what is the right thing to do for our situation, and what is the counter-productive thing to do. For me, rather than attempting to define and control my behavior to model my ideal vision of myself, I’m going to try and give up on attempting to control everything, and instead entrust myself to behave like a well functioning adult, and do the obviously right thing for my situation at that point in time.

The right answer will always be clear. It’s just up to me to choose it.

And for those rare situations where right and wrong are not obviously clear, then we can be a little more forgiving of ourselves for making the “wrong” decision, and add it to our morality table so that the next look up is easier.

To update your software, take a vacation

Mo — Sun, 31 May 2015 04:07:59 +0000

When you begin to ask questions like “why”, crazy things happen. When it comes to our daily routine, however, “why” is the least asked question of all. We figure that we must have arrived at our current routine by gradual evolution; by tinkering and tweaking until we’ve found something agreeable. We then live on by this standard flow for as long as possible, sometimes years. And yet while we sit here judging and questioning articles, people, and events, our daily flow slips by undetected and unquestioned, as if it were an immediately trusted and familiar face. Our daily flow dictates our productivity and progress — should this not be the most scrutinized and closely observed aspect of our life?

Now, before you start feeling guilty that you ought to have been more critical of your daily routine, let’s first acknowledge this isn’t your fault. The fact is, modifying your daily routine frequently and routinely would be exhausting and counter productive. Our mind automates and routines tasks for a reason. It would be tiresome to be constantly inundated with meta analysis. If you find yourself sitting in a comfortable home with comfortable clothes and modern technology, perhaps your morning routine has done you some good to get you where you are today. But it, like all great things, must come to an end and make room for the new. And the new has potential to be even greater.

The problem is, you don’t typically wake up one day and say, “well, time to completely kill off my routine and design a new one from scratch.” That’s just not how it works. And truthfully, I sometimes get too comfortable in my own routine and would find change inconvenient. But let’s look through a broader scope in the eyes of the most change-savvy process of all: evolution. In the perspective of the subjects of evolution, change is scary because it leads to risk which could lead to death. In the perspective of evolution, however, change is diversification and therefore a must — as is death. And so the universe with all its reckless abandon sends asteroids crashing on our planet, destroying everything our planet has worked so hard for so that something new could arise from the ashes. The Earth continues this violent need for change with storms and hurricanes, earthquakes and erosion, wildfires and tornados. This is brute-force change, and it’s immediately effective.

How do you brute-force change in your daily flow? Interrupt it.

What’s a good excuse to interrupt your beloved daily routine that you have come to cherish and depend on for the last several months and years? A vacation.

Travel somewhere, whether domestically or abroad, and embed yourself in that foreign culture and geography such that you forget about home. Being far from home and away from the things that have enabled your previous daily routine will force upon you a new temporary routine, one that consists of a varied mix of whatever is necessary to be done at a given point as well some spontaneity and creative planning.

When you come back home from your intoxicating vacation, you’ll stumble and slip on every step of your previous routine. It won’t feel quite as natural anymore. Your brain has awoken from the deep and hypnotic slumber that encapsulated and automated what your daily routine was, and you now find yourself in the driver’s seat of a manual vehicle. You won’t feel right for the first few days. You’ll regret ever taking a vacation for the inconvenience it has caused in your life. Your vacation has bored you of your previous routine and you are now pressed to find a new one, and for that you curse your decision. Change is inconvenient.

Wired In

Mo — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 04:07:00 +0000

Is it possible to hit deadlines while remaining friendly?

If you’re like me, you always choose shipping over chatting. The result is hit deadlines and finished products; the price, neglected relationships and unfinished interactions.

I often find myself asking, am I a mean person? Is it unreasonable that I ask not to be interrupted so that I can be more productive? Am I mean for being abrupt and pithy with my statements, when my intention is understandable and perhaps even noble? To accomplish more work and be more productive: is this not the embodiment of the modern human being?

Even after long sessions of rationalizing my questionable social behavior, I still feel guilty. Why aren’t you nicer sometimes? Couldn’t you get work done and be nice at the same time?

I spent a good two years working from my bedroom in my parents house on various projects and apps a few years ago. One project in particular took a full year to complete, and I only left my room to eat, if that. I lost 30 pounds to drinking coffee and eating 1 meal a day; I just didn’t (mentally) have the time. I don’t need to explain to you the grip and wrath a bug has on you: nothing in the world matters but solving that bug, and when you battle these creatures everyday, you emerge with a dreary countenance and hopeless disposition. Nothing matters but solving the problem at hand: it’s defeating you every second you’re not thinking about it.

Sometimes, during moments of brief self consciousness, I think back to times in my life when I was spontaneous and outgoing. I remember being places, so I must have been outgoing, right? That time is so long past that I can’t recall if I was born this way or just evolved to be this way by necessity.

I was once asked why I say so little, almost as if my silence were an elephant, which is odd since I choose silence to remain camouflaged and unnoticed. I say, oh you know, long day when in truth I want to say, let me work, and my work will speak for me. If I do good work, then we have had a good conversation, and you have gotten to know me a little better. My words can only point; they are not sufficient nor important enough to describe what I am or what I am thinking about.

I speak the fatiguing language of work, and with those that don’t speak that same language, I have a hard time communicating. Not that I cannot spontaneously converse with you, but rather, what is there to be said? Life is ephemeral, and I wish to spend it with my hands occupied. When you ask the question, would you rather speak to hundreds of thousands through a theoretically successful app, or speak to one person of the weather and current events, the answer is dispassionately obvious.

If you don’t create, how will anyone know you exist?

This thought whispers through my body like a cold breeze. I am not a man, nor human — I am a binary slave; a slave to that phrase. It dictates my every action and interaction; it is the force behind my every moment of optimism and simultaneous despair.

During times of great pressure and tight deadlines, several weeks will have passed where little will have been said by me and little joy will you have seen visible on my face, while you and I wonder, what darkness does this man harbor that he cannot summon the joy of a couple words every so often?

To my parents, to my friends, I am a vague representation of a human being. To my wife, I am my best self — someone no one else sees but her. My wife and I once joked how sorry my parents must feel for her, that she (my wife) got stuck with such a stern and emotionless man. I am in fact the opposite, but during the times I lived with my parents, all I did was work, and this is all they ever saw of me. My rare ups and frequent downs. The glimpses of despair when I was being overcome by a bug or technical problem.

I search both extrema for the balance of this delicate act. There are times when I tell myself, it is ok to live for a bit. Take some time off from your incessant swirling, of thoughts and deliberations, of life analysis and social paralysis.

And so I do. And I do it well.

I live. I go out. I call my mom. I watch TV. I experiment. I learn to cook. I read. I socialize.

This is fun, I think to myself; I ought to be this jolly more often.

Until, during the midst of a conversation, an idea comes.

An idea too good to pass up.

You look at me. My face is glowing. I am ecstatic. You haven’t seen me this happy in a while.

I run to my computer. I open Photoshop. Click. Click. Clack. Click. I create a new Xcode project. Click click clack clack clack.

I turn around, and you look at me again. My eyes are red. I look like death. The smile is gone. It’s time.

Time to work.

One Week in Peru

Mo — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 04:07:59 +0000

On Friday, June 13th of 2014, I quit my job without an idea of what to do next. Two days later, I found myself on a plane to Peru. The thought of going to South America came to me only the day before, and I booked my flight that same night. I wanted to explore culture: to figure out what part of me was human, and what part American. The only way to do that was through contrast.

I didn’t book a hotel beforehand, nor did I plan out what I would do for the week that I was there. I decided it would be funner to figure it out as I go. I traveled light, with only a book bag, so that I wasn’t tied down to any particular location by heavy luggage.

Cusco is a high city in southeastern Peru with a population of just under half a million. The Peruvian sun gleamed deceptively, burning my face but not creating any warmth; you needed a sweater to traverse the days and a jacket at night.

The streets were narrow and the people nice. I felt welcome and human.

Cusco is situated near the Andes, the longest continental mountain range in the world, and elevated well above what I was used to: 11,200 ft above sea level. I had difficulty breathing the first couple days, and I always felt out of breath, even when I wasn’t moving. The natives recommended cocoa leaves to help with altitude sickness.

I happened to arrive during a time of the year when week-long celebrations took place, with colorful and golden parades and marching alpacas.

They love me.

Ladies man.

A Peruvian girl looking beyond the parade.

A boy sitting behind his mother as she sells fruits and vegetables on her market stand.

For the first day, not knowing what else to do, and flustered by altitude sickness and jetlag, I decided I would just go museum and landmark touring.

The all-seeing Eye. Peruvian art.

That lasted about 20 minutes until I grew bored, and decided I would rather soak myself into present culture than look at artifacts of the past.

Aww, baby alpaca.

As the night fell, so did the cold. The streets became navigable with less people, and I headed in the direction of food.

Peruvian nights were chilly but refreshing.

I had bad luck with restaurants in Cusco — lots of them run by people who have no idea what good food is. I found a shawerma joint that was really good, almost better than the authentic ones back home.

Shop workers waiting for the night to end.

As the sun rose to a bright start the next morning, so did I, and decided I would venture off towards the mountains and see where that takes me.

I walked upwards and upwards, until I happened upon a young man that asked me if I wanted to ride a horse into the mountains.

“Follow me.”

The views were breathtaking, both literally and metaphorically.

The man guiding me looked young but old. Probably 34. He spoke little english, but enough for us to communicate. I spent the entirety of the morning with him as he took us up treacherous mountains. We rested near a stream of water that ran all the way down from the mountains and through the plains, of which seemingly ownerless horses drank from. I sat in beautiful repose for half an hour, soaking in the tranquility of the scene. I was desire-less, and did not wish to disturb the moment with a photo. That image lives in my memories in its most noble form.

A lot more dangerous than it looks. Beneath him was death.

The mountains were extremely steep, and I was amazed that our horse was able to ascend it with me on its back. I felt bad for the horse, but my friendly guide told me not to worry, that they’re built for this terrain.

The steepness of the mountains.

The horse that took us up.

On our way back, we encountered a stone-smith that crafted pipes and other memorabilia from stone, by hand. His talent and attention to detail was amazing and inspiring.

A stonesmith in the mountains carving objects from stone.

Alpacas grazed the fields all through out the mountain sides.

Boys returning home from school.

Steep mountains are no match for human ingenuity.

Beautiful dogs roamed the streets of Cusco, seemingly without an owner.

An alley going towards the city square, Plaza del Armas.

More parading in the city streets. The Peruvian color palette is both vibrant and psychedelic, probably owing to their ancestral and holy drug, Ayahuasca. The substance is a potent mix of plants, one of which contains DMT. It is legal for certain organizations in Peru to provide Ayahuasca for those seeking it.

Dusk on the mountain top.

I spent the next few days on a lone home in the mountain tops, almost 30 minutes away from downtown Cusco.

The only cat I saw during my entire visit. This was dog country.

The reason for my stay in this home, and its impact on my life is, however, a story best told another day.

The room of a thousand stars.

A Well-Disciplined Machine

Mo — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 04:07:59 +0000

There are days, such as today, when I have absolutely nothing to write about, but in want of expressing myself or feeling productive, I sit at my computer and stare at an empty page and a blinking cursor. “What can I possibly write about?” I ask myself pessimistically. I scan my mind for possible ideas, things which might have happened today, notes I may have written down that might lead to a potential post. Nothing. I sit staring at the document for a few more minutes, reluctant to give up, when finally I accept the fate of the situation: there is nothing to be written. I close the document and am now left staring at my desktop. No! I fight the urge to give up. I will write about anything, I tell myself — just write. I reopen the document and begin writing about whatever spills through my hands.

Who is it, at this point, that is writing, my hands or my mind? — the sound of ice dropping from my ice maker sounds like gunshots, which never ceases to scare me. It is my mind that writes, because at this moment, I was at a loss for words, and I looked to my hands for guidance, but they lay dumbfounded on the keyboard, waiting for a command. My fingers only obey. But what if my hands refused to cooperate? What if I had told them to type, but they rejected my command? Impossible! I think. My hands do not have free will — they merely react to my thoughts! And so how is it, that at times, our mind instructs our body to do certain things, but our body refuses? Get up out of bad you lazy fool, my mind instructs my body. But my body buries itself deeper in bed and cries “NO!”. Who is it that is in control at that moment? Am I insincere in my wanting to get out of bed, and recognizing this, my body seizes the chance for more rest? Is my body by default wanting of more rest, or more activity? Or perhaps it is just indifferent towards change, and would rather remain in its current position to conserve energy? But who is my body to dictate what is better for it, when my mind knows of all the current factors behind my decision: it is time to wake up, go to work, and earn a living so that I may feed my body, so that it may be sustained. Has my body, after all these years, not understood this simple concept? Could we not work together to attain a goal that would be beneficial for the both of us?

Who is it, I ask, that refuses to cooperate with our current commands? “Don’t eat that cookie!” my mind commands my hands and mouth, but they refuse to cooperate. “Go for a walk, so that you may be healthier,” my mind commands my legs, but they sullenly refuse. Objects at rest remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, says physics, and perhaps my physical components only wish to obey the laws by which they are defined. Perhaps then, that the commands of my mind are the outside forces, but that these forces must be so strong and resolute as to be unquestionable. The wind is an outside force capable of uprooting trees from their homes, but it requires a certain amount of vigor and wilfulness to achieve this goal. Leaves will dance to a gentle breeze, but will be forcefully detached by the autumn wind. And so we can say that not every thought is equal in weight and force; that for our legs and hands and mouth to cooperate and execute our relatively difficult commands, they require not just our default command level, but a roaring and upheaving command filled with such energy and force that it is undeniable. It is not enough to command your legs “walk” or your body “move” or your mouth “do not open to chocolate”, — no, you must become god-like in your force, and summon all the power and authority within you to prepare a command so powerful and grandiose, that you may only have the mental resources to execute that same breed of command once or twice in a day. Your commands must be so powerful, that you are out of breath the moment they are uttered. Breathe in all the air around you so that your chest puffs out and your hands extend rigidly behind you, and blow into the trumpet of your body a reverberating “WALKKKKKKKK!” that shakes the floor beneath you, such that your legs begin to tremble from fear of your authority. And then go for that walk.

Your will is a depletable resource that regenerates every night in your sleep, and a sign of a successful day is going to sleep absolutely exhausted and empty, or “ego-depleted“. Every morning, you have a full tank of “ego” that you may use to execute sudo-level commands: use it all, whether wisely or unwisely, just use it all. Anything leftover doesn’t rollover to the next day — everyone starts fresh in the morning. Eventually, your body begins to respect your authority, and requires less and less effort to cooperate with your commands. At this point, you become a well-disciplined machine, capable at a moment’s notice to execute any command your mind desires.

Friends with Boredom

Mo — Sat, 10 Jan 2015 04:07:59 +0000

Boredom is that overwhelming state of emotion one feels when faced with so many possible things to do coupled with the lack of desire to do any of them. More than anything, it’s a lack of discipline. I sometimes wonder whether it was possible, perhaps thousands of years ago, for one to have felt bored. The fact of the time was that you could either work, read, socialize, or sleep, and faced with this ultimatum of no choices, I could not imagine that one could have gotten bored, but rather accepted the fate that the activities of the day had come to an end. The paradox of choice, as it has come to be called, is the root of boredom, and when faced with zero choices, boredom ceases to exit. In our modern day, with the infinite options of things to do, we become paralyzed and entangled, not knowing where our time would best be spent, and rather than make a choice and do something, we sit idly and pity ourselves and our lack of initiative, and begin to feel the worst emotion that a human can encounter: the feeling of boredom.

Paulo Coelho talks about a day where it just so happened that there was nothing for him to do — he’d written articles that were due, he’d updated his webpage already, he’d went to the doctor and got his stomach checked out, his plane tickets that he’d been waiting for had arrived in the mail.

I have things to do tomorrow and things which I finished yesterday, but today …

Today I have absolutely nothing that requires my attention.

Uneasiness, or boredom-incipient, began to creep into his soul:

I feel uneasy. Shouldn’t I be doing something? Well, if I wanted to invent work, that wouldn’t take much effort. We all have projects to develop, light bulbs to change, leaves to sweep, books to put away, computer files to organize.

I encounter a revealing thought at these lines:

I sit down on the wet grass and start making a mental list of what is going through my head:

(a) I’m useless. Everyone else at that moment is busy, working hard.

Answer: I work hard too, sometimes twelve hours a day. Today I just happen to have nothing to do.

I too feel guilty when I’m bored, because I know there is so much that can be done, so many projects that can be developed, so many thoughts that could be transmuted to words, so many articles that I could read and learn from, but here I am, doing absolutely nothing. I feel useless and a waste of human space, while others are working hard and making something happen. But that’s just it. I work hard too. Really hard. And like Coelho says, today, I just happen to have nothing to do.

And I begin to feel less guilty at my occasional bursts of boredom. In fact, I’ve found a way to welcome it. I’ve begun to treat “having nothing to do” as an activity of its own, where I accept it wholly, and sit down and just meditate. And I don’t mean esoteric meditation, — I just sit down imperfectly, whether on a couch or in a bath, close my eyes, and empty my thoughts. I would have been doing the same thing reluctantly anyway were I to accept being drowned with boredom. This way, however, I regain control and discipline, as if to smite life and say “Ha, you can’t get to me! You throw boredom at me, but I accept it and turn it into an opportunity for peace and silence.”

The Importance of Looking

Mo — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 04:07:59 +0000

Paulo Coelho (author of The Alchemist) writes:

At first, Theo Wierema was merely a very persistent individual. For five years, he kept sending letters to my office in Barcelona, inviting me to give a talk in The Hague, in Holland.

For five years, my office replied that my diary was full. My diary was not, in fact, always full, but a writer is not necessarily someone who speaks well in public. Besides, everything I need to say is in the books and articles I write, which is why I always try to avoid giving lectures.

Theo found out that I was going to record a programme for a Dutch television channel. When I went downstairs to start filming, he was waiting for me in the hotel lobby. He introduced himself and asked if he could go with me, saying: ‘I’m not one of those people who simply won’t take “No” for an answer; I think I may just be going the wrong way about achieving my goal.’

We must struggle for our dreams, but we must also know that, when certain paths prove impossible, it would be best to save our energies in order to travel other roads. I could have simply said ‘No’ (I have said and heard this word many times), but I decided to adopt a more diplomatic approach: I would impose conditions that would be impossible for him to meet.

I said that I would give the lecture for free, but the entrance fee must not exceed two euros, and the hall must contain no more than two hundred people.

Theo agreed.

‘You’re going to spend more than you’re going to earn,’ I warned him. ‘By my calculation, the cost of the air ticket and hotel alone will cost three times what you will earn if you manage to fill the hall. Then there’s the advertising and the hire of the hall…’

Theo interrupted me, saying that none of this mattered. He was doing this because of what he could see happening in his work.

‘I organize events like this because I need to keep believing that human beings are still in search of a better world. I need to contribute to making this possible.’

What was his work?

‘I sell churches.’

And, to my amazement, he went on: ‘I’m employed by the Vatican to select buyers, because there are more churches than there are church-goers in Holland. And since we’ve had some terrible experiences in the past, with sacred places being turned into nightclubs, condominiums, boutiques, and even sex-shops, the system of selling churches has changed. The project has to be approved by the community, and the buyer has to say what he or she is going to do with the building. We normally only accept proposals that include a cultural centre, a charitable institution, or a museum. And what has this to do with the lecture, and with the other events I’m trying to organize? People don’t really meet together any more, and if they don’t meet, they won’t grow.”

Looking at me hard, he concluded: ‘Meetings. That was the mistake I made with you. Instead of just sending e-mails, I should have shown you that I’m made of flesh and blood. Once, when I failed to get a reply from a particular politician, I went and knocked on his door, and he said to me: “If you want something, you need to look the other person in the eye.” Ever since then, that’s what I’ve done, and I’ve had nothing but good results. You can have at your disposal all the means of communication in the world, but nothing, absolutely nothing, can replace looking someone in the eye.’

Needless to say, I accepted his proposal.

— excerpt from “Like the Flowing River”

Beginner's Luck

Mo — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 04:07:59 +0000

My first app to the App Store back in 2010 made it to the number one position in the US Productivity category. How, I do not know. I did not advertise it nor did I really make a big deal of it publicly. It was more of an experiment than anything else. I hadn’t even known it was top in its category until I was randomly browsing the productivity category to see what else was on there, and lo and behold, my app sat gloriously on its lucky throne. Since that day, I have been on a wild goose chase to recreate this success, with all but little luck.

On Christmas of 2013, I wrote and submitted an article titled “4 apps, 1 weekend” to HN. I thought very little of this post, nor did I care if it did particularly well. In fact, after I submitted it, I hopped in the shower and totally forgot about it. I came out and seen that I had several new emails, many from Twitter about several new followers, as well as miscellaneous email inquiries, all starting with something like “Loved your article on HN!” Since that initial taste of sweet and ephemeral success, I have been on yet another wild chase to write a post that might somehow get me to the top of the list, with all but little luck.

The high that has come with such fleeting success has been toxic and dangerous. Since these two early successes, nothing else has quite mattered to me more than recreating them: by somehow making another product or writing another post that might be recognized. I spent months and years crafting and perfecting new products, thinking it would be as easy and prosperous as my first. This, obviously, was not the case. And since 2010, almost five years now, I have been unable to recreate an app as successful as my first, and also unable to recreate an article as popular as my first. This has created within me an insatiable restlessness, where an inner inclination lingers within that urges me to continue working and creating until I can consistently recreate these successes.

Since then, my faith in myself and my abilities has decreased with every new app or article I publish. It has even gotten to the point where I fear spending too much time on a single product, fearing that it might (and most likely will) fail, and all that time will have been lost. I tell myself, “the less time I spend on this, the less heart-broken I will be after it fails.”

Nothing has quite changed in this self-pitiful saga, save for one glimmering strand of hope that I have found recently: that I am not alone.

I happened upon a book that you might have read called The Alchemist, a book so divine that it has been translated to more than 56 languages. It tells of a fictional boy who leaves all behind on a journey to find a treasure that he dreamt about. In the beginning of his journey, the sun shines bright, and everything miraculously works in his favor.

“That’s the way it always is,” said the old man. “It’s called the principle of favorability. When you play cards the first time, you are almost sure to win. Beginner’s luck.”

“Why is that?”

“Because there is a force that wants you to realize your destiny; it whets your appetite with a taste of success.”

As he progresses on his journey and towards his treasure, however, life becomes increasingly more difficult.

Meanwhile, the boy thought about his treasure. The closer he got to the realization of his dream, the more difficult things became. It seemed as if what the old king had called “beginner’s luck” were no longer functioning. In his pursuit of the dream, he was being constantly subjected to tests of his persistence and courage. So he could not be hasty, nor impatient. If he pushed forward impulsively, he would fail to see the signs and omens left by God along his path.

What has given my agnostic sensibilities hope here is that I now have something to believe in: that life doesn’t hate me and wishes for me to fail. No, — I was played by Beginner’s Luck, and to reach your treasure, you must play back.

The Amazing Echo

Mo — Sun, 09 Nov 2014 04:07:59 +0000

I recently read Dustin Curtis’ rant on the new Amazon Echo, how Amazon has no idea what they’re doing and how their new product is misguided and “sucks”. My reaction was a bit different. When I first saw the commercial for Echo, I was in tears. It was so beautifully done and natural that you felt the family was real and lively. Let’s set aside branding for now and focus on the meat: the actual product. I think the Echo is wonderful.

I just recently purchased my own home, and I couldn’t be more excited to move in. Having only rented in the past, I never had the comfort nor peace of mind in making any rented place feel like home, since I knew I would be moving out soon. So I wouldn’t invest in things like a Nest or Phillips Hue, since the place wasn’t mine to tinker with. But now that I’m moving into something I own, I’ve gone as far as making a list of all the home electronics I want to purchase and furnish my place with. The (short) list currently looks something like this:

Nest
Phillips Hue
August house lock
Roomba vacuum

Any time a new product comes out, I add it to the list. Home automation products excite me unlike anything else. We spend so much of our time at home, and up until very recently, our homes were very disconnected. And think about the promise of these products, and how valuable they are:

Save money on your heating bill with the self-learning Nest
Control the mood and lighting environment of your entire place from your phone with Phillips Hue
Come home to a clean house with Roomba

As a homeowner, these things should excite you the way a laundry machine first excited the hard working people that washed by hand. I, like many others, am actively hunting and seeking new smart products for my home, whatever they may be. It doesn’t have to be revolutionary – it just has to provide even a semblance of utility. We understand this product category is still in its incipient phases. We don’t expect one product to change the way we use our entire home – just for your product to be good at what it’s for. It’s not unlikely that in a few years we’ll have hundreds of smart products in our home that focus on doing small tasks well.

Enter the Echo.

What does Amazon have that arguably no other company has? Purchase data from millions of customers around the world. What they purchase, where they purchase, how much they spend, their spending habits, trends amongst populations, and just general product trends.

I don’t have the insight to guarantee this, but more than likely, the Echo was born out of data. They looked at what people were purchasing and what they were likely to purchase, and observed a trend where users who don’t generally purchase high cost items spend hundreds on smart home products. And what they did was something that no one expected them to do – they created a new, original product.

I would have expected much less from Amazon, perhaps creating a Nest look alike or a Phillips Hue competitor. Instead they created something no one else quite thought about. Yes, Amazon.

The Product

Yes, the Echo is Siri in a box. And we all know how often we use Siri and how that works out. But this is different. With Siri, you’re out and about, and not usually in a place where it’s ok to yell at your phone. I’m not going to bust out my phone at work or at a library to talk to Siri. The only time I really ever actually need Siri is when I’m driving, and that’s a hit or miss. At home, it’s different. At home, you’re you. You walk around in your boxers, yell at the TV, play with the dog, sing with your kids. You’re allowed to be loud at home. The Echo is a welcome and befitting lifestyle product that has the potential to fit right in.

The problem with every connected technology product thus far is that I need my phone to control them. This means having to take out or find my phone while my hands are oily from cooking, unlocking it, pressing and holding to activate Siri, and just hoping she understands you.

Or you can simply just yell “Echo, set a timer real quick for 5 minutes”. Perhaps Echo’s functionality is currently limited, but let’s look at the bigger picture here, since we all know tech products are a work in progress. The very reasonably near future:

“Echo, call my mom”

“Echo, turn on the heat; it’s a bit cold”

“Echo, dim the lights a bit would you?”

“Echo, can you call my Roomba over here. I made a mess.”

“Echo, I can’t find my phone. Ping it, would you?”

“Echo, my friends are here – can you unlock the door?”

“Echo, make yourself useful and order an Uber.”

“Echo, order a pizza from Papa Johns – cheese, chicken, pineapple, and jalapeño. DO NOT forget the jalapeño.”

Better yet, once it learns your habits, maybe she’ll recommend things:

“Mo, time for work. Should I order an Uber now or in 5 minutes?”

“Mo, it’s Friday night and you’ve been sitting on your ass for the last 4 hours. Interstellar is playing and I heard it was pretty good. Should I order 2 tickets for the 8:30 show?

Now that’s a smart home. And Amazon of all people thought of the first product that can connect all these things in a way simpler than by fiddling with apps on a phone.

The Branding

Call this a matter of opinion, but I thought the Echo commercial was beautifully done, especially coming from Amazon. The family felt so genuine and nice that you envied their life. When his wife yells loudly at the Echo, the sweet and likable character that is the dad enthusiastically explains that you don’t have to yell at the Echo: it uses this new technology that lets it hear you better. Think of how a less original advertising company would have done that same commercial: “THE ECHO USES PATENTED FAR FIELD TECHNOLOGY TO HEAR YOU FROM WHEREVER YOU ARE IN THE ROOM. AND THERE’S MORE!”

Instead we see a lovely family go about their regular lives using the product naturally. What I love most about it was there was no dramatization, no Apple-like cinematography. It was just…real, and honest. And it sold me. Maybe that’s Amazon’s brand, their touch? Just down to earth products for down to earth people. Sure, we don’t have Jony Ive designing our products, their commercial tends to say, but we’re a real company, and we want to create products that are actually helpful. We, just like every single tech company on this planet, are still experimenting and finding what works best for you and us. Yes, we fucked up with the Fire phone, but here, look at what we’re doing now. The Echo.

I’d imagine that’s where their heart is at. It’s not farfetched to say that sometime in the near future, Amazon’s largest income share will come from their own in house products rather than their online retail sales.

The chance success of startups in a wildly volatile marketplace

Mo — Fri, 16 May 2014 04:07:59 +0000

There is an illusion of science in the success of tech companies, and those who have made large exits wear the white coats. Most people believe in luck when it comes to failure, as in, “I was unlucky to have failed”, but believe that success is the product of strategy; of science. But give a successful entrepreneur enough time to launch his next product, and you’ll see that even he will choke on the baffling currents of fashion and time. It is no coincidence that some of the most successful startups have come from nobodies – naive teens tinkering ignorantly with the tools they have before them. If the success of a product were diagnosable and predictable, then business analysts would be rich beyond measure.

Your first successful product is always by luck. Baffled by your chance success, you attempt to study and recreate every retrospectively ingenious move that was made during your first launch. Armed with the elixir of product success, you spend countless months perfecting your next product. If you’re a developer yourself, you’re lucky – you won’t spend much money on hiring engineers. If you’re a business man, you will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars crafting your dream recipe.

In either case, you launch your second product, and without fail, you fail. You are completely bewildered. I thought I did everything right, you question yourself. Everything I did for product #1 I did for product #2. If you’re a developer, you shrug off the failure as a failed project, and move on after a week. If you’re a business man, you shrug of the failure as a failed investment, and move on after a couple bottles.

Product #3 time comes around, and you are not really sure what to bake in this time. You are still convinced that there must have been something you did right with baby #1, and are convinced that you now see what you did wrong with baby #2. Foolishly, you still believe there is a science with your successes and failures. So, you attempt to craft now a balanced product, that takes the lessons learned from the previous two, and even mix in some bold new spices. In terms of craftsmanship and utility, your new product is more mature than any you’ve ever built. A fine piece of work, you don’t mind admitting yourself.

You launch ecstatically, yet you fail again.

It is safe to assume that the lighthearted will not dare risk their time or money at yet another project. They defeatedly tell themselves, there is a science to success, and I do not possess the knowledge. I ought to go to school, get a degree in business, or marketing, or strategy, or design. And that’s the last we’ll see from them.

But there are a few that continue past this point. These few don’t believe in the science of success. Nay, they believe in experimentation. After one success and two failed products, they notice a pattern: there is no pattern. Therefore, they continue on, knowing that yes, the next four products might fail miserably, but maybe the fifth one won’t?

If you create a product hoping to succeed, odds are, you will fail. If you create a product expecting that you will fail, and it fails, then you’ve, in a sense, succeeded. And if it succeeds, well, you’ve still succeeded. A heart can tolerate only so many let downs, and in this age of wildly fierce startup competition, in an industry that has become so mainstream that there now exists a comedy TV show about it, if you keep expecting success, you will cry and feel little and dumb every time you release a failing product. Rather, you should feel solace in the fact that perhaps no one really knows what they’re doing. Carry on, work with and expect failure, and continue evolving yourself and your products till one day they succeed. Or maybe they don’t, and you’ll die without a successful product? Well, by that point you’ll be too dead to care. It’s a win-win.

Do not disturb

Mo — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 04:07:59 +0000

You check your phone on two occasions: when it interrupts you, and when you manually check it yourself in hopes that the outside world has communicated with you. Let us say that the distribution between the two is equal, that you check your phone as much as it checks you. Is it a true statement then that the less time you spend on your phone, the more time you can allocate to being productive and healthy? I think so. So what if you were able to cut your phone usage by 50%? Imagine the sanity you’d gain back.

For the last two weeks, my phone has been on Do Not Disturb, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back. My phone doesn’t dictate my actions now. Think of all your sparks of genius that a text message interrupted. Think of all the never-to-be-found-again moments of intense focus you’ve had that a phone call interrupted. The mental algorithm you were devising that spanned a mental flow tree spanning thousands of generations – destroyed by an urgent Snapchat.

Consider the following scenario: you’ve just found the solution to a bug that’s been nagging on you all day. You start implementing the solution like an excited school boy, anxious in anticipation of your work coming to life. Then, during your most intense moment of focus, hands rapping fervently on the keyboard, your phone begins to ring and vibrate obnoxiously. Someone just now decided that they need your attention.

I don’t need to describe this feeling to anyone.

You end up now treating the person you speak with poorly, anxious to hang up and get back to work. This, over time, eventually deteriorates the relationship you have with this person.

Now consider the alternative. The call comes, and you miss it ignorantly. It takes you a few more minutes to finish coding your masterful solution. Build, run…works! Oh the joy! You exhale with deep relief, and now reward yourself by taking a quick phone break. Oh look, missed call. You call back, and are now at ease and give the listener 100% of your glorious attention.

Try it. Turn on Do Not Disturb for a little while. You’ll miss a few phone calls. So what? It’s really not as bad as it sounds. It actually feels good.

To enable Do Not Disturb mode on your iPhone, pull up the control center by swiping up from the bottom of your screen, and tap the moon icon. Welcome to freedom.

Mobile phone batteries are not ready for 2014

Mo — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 04:07:59 +0000

Throughout a typical day, the average 2014 human being will consume on their mobile devices a couple of YouTube videos, listen to a few songs, send and receive dozens of Snapchats, upload and browse several photos on Instagram, tag a few songs in Shazam, check their Facebook notifications more often than not, use GPS to find out where they are and where they need to be, hail a cab with Uber, check the weather, make a few phone calls, send out hundreds of text messages, compose and read lengthy emails, play some system and graphic intensive games, open and close dozens of various apps, and often browse the web when apps alone don’t suffice.

After 3 hours on the go, your battery is suffering with 35% remaining, and you begin to fear using your phone anymore, in case an emergency strikes where you actually really need to use your phone.

Mobile phone batteries were not designed with today’s intensive usage patterns in mind. A few years ago, you wouldn’t share so many videos and pictures throughout the day. A couple years ago, only map based applications used GPS. Today, it is not uncommon that an app require access to your location, camera, microphone, accelerometer, network connection, and bluetooth all at the same time. And it’s only getting more intense from here.

Two years from now at this rate, your battery won’t last you more than an hour. Let’s make 2014 the year of the battery, not the year of a 20% thinner device.

Meditation without the frustration

Mo — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 04:07:59 +0000

Many of the most inspired and successful people in history have praised meditation as a keystone in their journey, that without they would not have been so fortunate. And indeed, many that practice meditation today claim levels of peace and happiness not achievable by any other means.

I begin to feel guilty at this thought, and wonder whether I may be missing out on something potentially life changing. Sadly, all my attempts at meditation have ended in failure.

My frustrations with the topic have made me approach it cautiously, and as much as I may sometimes wish to dismiss meditation as an optional and esoteric ritual, I cannot seem to flee from it. Something always comes back and whispers to me “if it works for them, why wouldn’t it work for you?” And so I begin my semi-annual “I should start meditating!” phase:

Become inspired to meditate.
Look up books and articles on how to meditate.
Become skeptical of the advice given by said books, but think “if it works for them, why wouldn’t it work for me?”
Doesn’t work for me.
Cry at my failure.

This phase has come and gone often in my life, but is not something I get any better at with every attempt. Somehow, I always end up at step five.

Every resource I’ve read on the matter tends to recommend some greatly original tip that I awkwardly try to incorporate in my ritual, thus making my experience even more difficult.

If you Google meditation, some of the first few tips you’ll find are:

“Stretch first”

“Feel your body parts”

“Pick a specific room in your home to meditate.“

“Read a book (or two) on meditation.”

“Listen to instructional tapes and CDs.”

“Generate moments of awareness during the day”

“Use a candle.”

“Meditate early in the morning.”

Sure enough, these are standard and commonplace techniques in the meditation world.

It always confused me why such a deliberate and exacting ritual would be the secret to happiness and inspiration, as if the universe had inserted some kind of cheat code in life — that if you were to press these certain buttons and do these specific steps in this specific order, you will magically unlock great bounties and treasures.

If it is in your nature to be overly analytical and always thinking, then why go against that, and defy your individuality for the sake of resembling that of someone else’s? And what about those who will have never heard of this ritual? Will they be doomed to live a life devoid of the exclusive happiness that meditation is said to bring?

No, there must be a way for them.

There must be a way for everyone.

As for me, attempting to free my mind of thought is torturous and maddening. It’s just not natural for me to be thoughtless. And why would it be? Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have made sure our minds are never free nor empty, and now, in this perplexing twist, to achieve happiness you must do the exact opposite of what is in your nature to do? You have to not think? Who would have thought.

But perhaps we over complicate meditation.

A few days ago, I came home from work exhausted and frenzied. My mind was cloudy, full of stale and left-over energy, but I insisted that I get back to work on my neglected passion project. No sooner did I sit down at my desk than I collapsed entirely. I can’t do this, I thought, I need a minute. I am exhausted.

I crossed my arms languidly on my desk and let my head fall on top of them. I was so depleted that I could not even garner the energy to think.

Half an hour had passed, and I was still in the same position, motionless and for the most part free of forced thought.

After I felt like I had been sitting long enough, I opened my eyes and stood up.

Woah.

I took a deep breath, and exhaled all the murky vapor that had been steaming in my mind and body throughout the day.

I felt great.

My mind was clear. I was calm and refreshed. My energy felt clean and organic. I was ready for anything.

Without even realizing it, I had just meditated.

I didn’t need a candle. I didn’t need to stretch. I didn’t need to imagine green light coming out of my nose. I didn’t need to focus on my breath.

I just took the time to consciously slow down. I did what came natural to me. And I never felt better.

—

So why does “meditation” work, and why does freeing up your thoughts have a positive side effect on your well being?

Our mind is very similar to a computer. When too many programs (or thoughts) are open on a computer, it becomes laggy and unstable. To get things back under control, we need to close down some programs and free up some resources. Mentally, we need to unload all the stale thoughts and programs that have been lurking in our minds from the beginning of the day or the day before and shut down programs that may be running in the background and needlessly consuming resources.

This process of managing mental resources is what we call meditation, and there are a million and one ways to achieve this same result.

Some people take a walk.

Some people go out for a jog.

Some people walk their dog.

And some people just so happen to sit in a dark room with their legs crossed on a medicine ball while a candle burns with inspirational music playing in the background, all while consciously trying to free their mind and focus on their breath. Exhale.

What comes naturally to one may not come naturally to another.

Stop overcomplicating it. Don’t torture yourself to do something that doesn’t feel right to you.

Sit, stand, or lay however you want, at whatever time of day you want, wherever you are, and just take the time to slow down.

Congratulations, you’ve just meditated.

How to maximize the number of email responses you get

Mo — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 04:07:59 +0000

Few things make me as frustrated as an email of mine that goes ignored. For one reason or another, I take this overly personal. It’s especially demoralizing when blog posts I’ve read have encouraged readers to reach out and say hello, and when I’d take them up on that offer, they wouldn’t respond.

It turned me bitter. “How dare you encourage me to email you and then go on to ignore it!”

I have in time gotten over any bitter feelings I may have had over an email, but I vowed that if I were ever in their position, in a position of mild fame or popularity, that I would reply to and recognize every one of the poor souls who took the time to reach out to me. “Oh I’ll show them! I’ll reply to every email, every tweet, every letter! I’ll never forget where I came from!”

Ha.

A couple weeks ago on Christmas day, a post of mine made it to the front page of Hacker News, and I began to receive an influx of emails and tweets. Awesome, I thought, my chance to prove that it’s possible to respond to everyone and be happy!

But after receiving about five emails, I just wanted it to stop.

It became overwhelming. My mind was constantly “buzzing” with excitement. I couldn’t focus, and for that and the next two days, I couldn’t get any work done. I was grateful for all the attention, but those few days were the least productive days I’ve had in recent memory.

As it turns out, responding to emails is not only difficult, but also distracting. I ended up responding to every email and tweet that I received, and by the time it was all over, I exhaled a heavy deep breath. If I couldn’t handle ten or so emails and a handful of tweets, I can’t imagine how actual “famous” people are able to manage hundreds of emails a day. That’s insanity.

Of the emails I received, my favorite were ones that were short and had inserted a hook that allowed for an easy response:

“Great article, how did you make the apps so fast?”

That’s easy:

“Thanks! Practice practice practice!”

Then there were the difficult ones:

“Great article. I too find it difficult to balance between personal work and a full time job.

{writes three more paragraphs about personal life experience}

Looking forward to your response!”

Ah crap. What do I say here? Crafting a response for vague emails can be difficult, since you’ll have to get creative with a polite response. These types of emails demanded a lot of time and resources, and I on my mission to respond to everyone did not leave them hanging, but I can imagine why someone with a busier schedule might just ignore it.

And then there was the occasional

“I’m working on this idea, would you like to join me?”

from someone half way around the world. These were the most difficult to respond to. I was already involved in my own enterprise and could not be distracted by someone else’s. Giving a plain “no” would be impertinent of me, so it took time to craft an amiable response.

After being on both the receiving and sending ends, I now see the importance of sending clear and concise emails. If we are to email people who, unlike myself, are extremely busy and “important”, there are a few things we should attempt to keep in mind:

Keep them short.
Make them easy to respond to.
Insert a hook in the email so that the recipient can easily find a way to respond.
Don’t make ridiculous requests.
If you’re writing to give a compliment, do just that and nothing else so that you can make it easy for the recipient to be polite and just say “thanks!”
The longer the email, the less likely it is to receive a response.
Don’t ask questions that are too generic and have likely been asked many times before. If you want to engage in a conversation with the recipient, challenge them with a unique question that can be fun and easy to respond to.
If you intend to show them your product, keep in mind there are likely a hundred other people emailing that person with the same intent. Eventually the reader learns to ignore those kinds of emails due to all the noise. Good luck with this route. You will be ignored. Get used to it.

And if you still don’t get a response, don’t take it personally. You might be the 150th person to send them an email that day, and it would literally be impossible for them to respond to everyone. Persevere.

Entrepreneurship is not ideation

Mo — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 04:07:59 +0000

I have, all my life, been of the thought that an entrepreneur is one who comes up with ideas that might make large amounts of money. And by that definition, then I am perhaps a great entrepreneur. But I am not a great entrepreneur. I have, in my mental cellar, hundreds of ideas waiting to be manifested, but none so. What is the difference then between me and a real entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur makes things happen.

An entrepreneur is not one who generates great business ideas nor one who feels that he will someday execute on one of those ideas. An entrepreneur is one who executes, immediately and without hesitant and pessimistic contemplation. An entrepreneur is one who learns by launching and failing than by reading and seeking. You don’t need to be a millionaire to be an entrepreneur, and you don’t need a large social network to be an entrepreneur. No, you need to launch to be an entrepreneur. You need to execute. You need to manifest. An entrepreneur is one who does not allow an idea to nestle in his mind, but immediately starts asking, how can I make this happen, today.

What to ask yourself when creating a startup

Mo — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 04:07:59 +0000

Update like 2 years later: I must have been down when I wrote this, because the age of invention will never dwindle.

The golden age of invention is dwindling. Look closely, and you’ll see that the most successful products and startups today are not original ideas, but iterations on previous ideas. Very little is new; most just an upgrade of the old. Every new generation of people refuse to live by the rules and ideas of previous generations, and are therefore always in an effort to replace what they did not have any say-so in. The “old generations”, whether of people or products, have not been brought up to the standards of today, and when the new steps in and shows them how it should be done, we call this disrupting.

Uber disrupted the taxi industry.

Chipotle disrupted the fast food industry

Tesla disrupted the automobile industry

Nest disrupted the thermostat industry

Simple disrupted the banking industry

iPhone disrupted the mobile phone industry

Tuft & Needle is disrupting the mattress industry

Robinhood.io is disrupting the stock trade industry

Most entrepreneurs today futilely ask themselves the difficult question of “what can I create that doesn’t already exist and can make life easier?” While both questions may lead to the same result, it is easier and more practical to start with the question “what already exists but can be done better?” What industry is in desperate need of disruption?

Three Brands of Water

Mo — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 04:07:59 +0000

To a Saharan desert inhabitant, the display right before my eyes would have been no short of the promised land, the seventh of all heavens. Organized before me were rows, columns, and grids of bottles of ice cold water. One could imagine, had they never been accustomed to the lifestyle of the so called westerners, that these bottles would be in clear plastic containers, without any labels or colors of any kind. It is only water after all – what more needs to be said? What purpose would any labels or packaging serve?

Enter Capitalism.

Each row of bottles had their own unique label stickered on to them, with varying tones and colors, shapes and sizes, prices and appeal. Some seemed fancier than the others, and more expensive, and others seemed they were priced to sell. Surprisingly, not a single bottle was devoid of a label. Not a single one of these clear, water inhabited bottles could speak for themselves.

And it only gets worse. My friends and I were on a road trip to the great Michigan Dunes, when we were all dying of thirst and decided to make a pit stop at one of those supersize tourist gas stations. It was the Mecca of our short two hour air conditioned pilgrimage. We spared none as we violently made our way to the back, reaching the sacred refrigerators just two seconds before we died from absolute dehydration. (Did I mention how comfortable the car ride over was?). Now, one would think, being in the dire situation we were in, that we would all violently topple over each other and blindly reach for the closest bottle of water available. One, who might not be too familiar with the Western way, might imagine that after grabbing the closest and cheapest non-labeled bottle of water, that we impetuously tore open the bottle and consumed it’s replenishing contents without a second to spare. This is not what happened.

We reached the refrigerators, and all three of us stood and paused. We placed our palm in our chins and our index finger across our cheek as we began to think about which of these water bottles best suited our personality.

After a long and grueling analytical shakedown, we reconvened and by chance formed a triangle where we were all holding our water bottles in hand. We had all unanimously chosen the cheapest and only unlabeled water bottles in the store. No just kidding I chose Smart Water, my friend chose Fiji, and my other friend chose Dasani. Neither of these were the least expensive of the variety. I broke out in laughter. My god. How pathetic and brainwashed we have become. It was the epitome of our slavery to brands and their brainwashing marketing.

This whole time, I thought I was aware and infallible to the cunning tactics used by marketers. This whole time I thought that I was myself a marketer, and that I always knew when I was being conned and sold to. But I had subconsciously fell for the dirtiest of all marketing ploys: the branding of water. I had chosen the most expensive brand of water, simply because I truly thought Smart Water was smart, that it had something to it. How ridiculously pathetic of me. I felt ashamed and dirty. I was the “average consumer” that marketing studies would always refer to. I was a statistic.

I would not let that be my fate. I went back and got the cheapest water bottle there was. It still had a label, but it was a step in the right direction.

Sometimes, we’re not educated enough about a product to make a clear and unbiased purchasing decision. So we go for the one with the best and most colorful packaging. But water? Come on. If we fall for water marketing, we’ll fall for anything. Let’s start here.

The dangers of willful blindness

Mo — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 04:07:59 +0000

A while back, I wrote a post praising the benefits of willful blindness. In it, I argued that being willfully blind and neglecting negative and pressing issues can help you attain more optimism and positivity in your life. I compared willful blindness to a strong chemical drug that disrupts the normal flow of thoughts in your mind. And now, just a few months later, I have realized that I have overdosed on this cancerous drug. Little did I know that what I had extolled and worshipped as a hack to life was just another form of denial; denying that bad is present or oncoming. Every negative thought that I had shelved and ignored was stored away in my mental cellar which I thought had no limit, until I began to realize that none of these buried thoughts just vanish. No, they pile up and across, until they begin to extrude out of your eyes and ears, your heart and soul. The better solution, rather than neglect your problems and pretend they don’t exist, is to befriend them. It is to know that bad and ugly happens around you and all across the world, and that this is perfectly normal. While the thought of something may be terrifying, the actual manifestation of that fear is tamable. The shadow is scarier than its caster.

Every negative thought I’ve stashed away has in time become an abrupt reality, and although it may sadden or harm me at, reality is always manageable. I came upon this realization just recently. I became increasingly interested in the history of the Middle East after watching a film called Zero Dark Thirty, and I spent days reading every Wikipedia article on the matter. The stories of the Middle East were more intense and twisted than any novel I’d ever read. It is the tale of an ever unstable region with fields laced of golden oil, where as a politician you are more likely to be assassinated than not. It is the story of a million people who have been mercilessly killed or displaced, with not a soul to ask about their dreams and ambitions. It made me realize that all this,— everything around us and the governments by which we stand—is but a work in progress; an effort to try and do things right, as hard and evasive as that may be. I thought that politics and foreign relations were opaque and esoteric topics beyond my understanding, but it is much simpler than that: it is a handful of human beings making trades and deals for the better good of the country they represent, and since every government represents a different country, there will always be conflicts and conflicts of interest. And that’s ok; this is normal, default behavior.

You see, even before you and I were born, wars and other grueling events had been omnipresent and ongoing. It is no use to think that we — we precious products of western civilization — will be some special exception to the way things work on this planet. Your life is as safe as geography and circumstances permit. Loss of wealth, disease, and death are all commonplace here. The thought of one or more of those things occurring is horrifying, but a human adapts at all costs. This is precisely why no event can leave us better or worse. We are strange living organisms living on a fragile planet, with odd protrusions coming out from our bodies in every which way. We have evolved, through millions of years, no—through nine months, from non intelligent life forms, to upright and impossibly intelligent beings. None of this is normal. Life is a program in beta — there are bugs and malware, deformities and oddities. Things will break and shatter; hearts will palpitate and implode; blood will seep out of your veins, perhaps one day uncontrollably; seas will dry and wither, taking with it the people of nearby lands— all is orderly and expected on this dear and mean planet Earth.

Bring your fears to life. Chase after the thing you fear most and manifest it; only then will you know that you are better than it. A fearful thought can only exist and nestle in your mind, but once manifested into the physical, it can no longer live in the same environment as we; for these heavy thoughts require the sweet glucose of your brain to survive; require you to tend to them and acknowledge them, for they are nothing without you, and you all the better without them.

The Human Class

Mo — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 04:07:59 +0000

If a garbage truck picked up your garbage, delivered your mail, and sold you ice cream, it would be extremely inefficient at doing all 3. But by focusing on just one thing, it is able to do its job well. This is the same with code: if an object or class knows too much, and is too tightly coupled with other classes, it becomes confused, difficult to change, and in most cases ineffective. This is also true in economics: if a country is efficient at producing a certain export and inefficient at producing another, it would be in its best interest to trade with another country that is more equipped to produce that other product. Let us not be fooled to think that humans are some special exception to this rule. We are all classes; objects in a program, and all of us are subclasses of the Human class. We have certain methods, certain properties, and know how to interact with other Human objects, but know very little on how to interact with other classes.

Software design patterns are no coincidence; are not some random discoveries of the best arrangement and structure of code. Nay, they are, inadvertently (as with everything), modeled after nature. Everything we create will always somehow behave according to some universal laws, as everything that exists or we create inherits from the base class PhysicalObject. This world follows excellent design patterns, namely that for the efficient execution of a program, each object should only know what it needs to know and nothing more. Looks like the Human class was just endowed with deep and wonderful introspection abilities. So don’t be disheartened that we are stranded on a lonely planet with vague and iridescent traces of our origin,— the less you know, the more effective you are, and the better you serve the overall program.

10,000 Years Ago

Mo — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 04:07:59 +0000

Somebody, 10,000 years ago, a human just like you and me, going through exactly what we go through, looking for a way to be happy and make the best out of the days, gave birth to a child, who then went on to live a life of his own, and gave birth to another child, and this cycle continued, till you, I, was finally born. The blood that runs through our veins is no stranger to these lands, and nature is well acquainted with the families and ancestors of its current inhabitants. Someone 10,000 years ago just wanted to make it through the day, but his existence made way for mine.

The Adverse Effects of Mental Profanity

Mo — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 04:07:59 +0000

My thoughts of late have comprised of bitter negativity and reluctant pessimism. I could not help but see the worst of every situation. The origins of this cancerous attitude, I did not know, but its existence was more evident than the morning sun. I began to simply dislike most things for no reason. And it wasn’t that I actually disliked the thing in question. My mental consciousness would just blurt out disinterest in things by default, before they were even given the chance. It seemed more like an automatic habit than an inherent dislike towards things.

Several days ago, my long time friend and I watched a movie with biased political views which he happened to disagree with. He expressed his discontent and anger the way a child would to get the attention and pity of his parents. “Fuck this, fuck them, sons of bitches assholes. I fucking hate the politics of [country name redacted].” It was more emotional than informed. He went on nagging incessantly. It bothered me. His negativity made me upset. What a miserable life one must have, I thought, when first reactions are of hostile resentment.

Later that night after he left, I was preparing a sandwich when I happened upon a most unfortunate realization. “There’s no fucking mayo!,” I shouted. “Fuckin’ a, how’m I supposed to eat a fucking sandwich without mayo?!” I began swearing to myself as if those were the only words I knew, before I abruptly realized that I sounded familiar. I sounded just like my bitter friend. What a tragedy, that I, the same man that was lamenting and pitying another soul just hours ago, am just a reflection of that which I resented. I saw myself in him. The state of my consciousness had been manifested in his performance just hours ago, and I for the first time saw it in physical form. My story cannot end in that same fate, I thought. This man is knee deep in the swamp of bitterness and hostility, and I have been given the rope by which to escape. Could this be the reason for my constant pessimism and negativity? Could swearing be the reason I was so often closed minded and angry?

So I thought I would try an experiment. Would my attitude change if I were to refrain from mental swearing? Would I regain my optimism and stop being resentful towards things by default? “No more swearing, no more fucking swearing!” I declared. This was going to be harder than I thought.

Over the next couple days, I would catch and stop myself whenever I used profane words. And not only when I used them negatively. The goal was to not use them at all, even if it were positive like “that video was funny as fuck.” I began to realize just how pervasive swearing was in my vocabulary. Almost every other sentence I uttered used swears as adjectives, nouns, verbs,— you name it. And don’t get me wrong: I never swore out loud. My friends and coworkers have only ever heard me swear on a few occasions. It is not a foul mouth that plagues me, but a foul mind. I place no restrictions on my thoughts.

It hasn’t been easy, and the frequency at which I mentally swore was appalling, but now, after just a few days, catching and preventing swears has become second nature. And this has translated into a new found sense of optimism. To see just how strong and effective these words are at affecting your mood, allow me to demonstrate.

(I will not censor swears here for the sake of science)

Say these two negative statements aloud in your normal tone:

“I hate dark chocolate”

“I fucking hate dark chocolate”

How did you do? The first sentence probably sounded very plain and default. It didn’t stir too much negativity within. You’re still calm and cool. The second sentence however probably got you riled up a bit. You probably unconsciously put a lot of emphasis on the word “hate”, and your face and mouth made all sorts of distorted and disgusted shapes. Heck your blood pressure might have even increased a little.

Swear words are not just harmless little words that carry no weight. They are powerful. They cause chemicals within your body to mix and boil. They can make you angry without your realizing it.

I’m happy to say that over the past few days, I have realized a dramatic improvement in my attitude. I’m forced to see things positively since I can’t swear at them. I can’t say “I fu**ing hate this show” anymore, and this keeps me calm and collected. I try to avoid all negative thoughts now, but if I must let one rip, I’ll try to say “I dislike this show, but here are some things which I do like about it”. I try to avoid the easy task of criticizing that which I don’t like, and find things that I do like, which is much harder.

Try it. Go on a swear fast. You’ll notice just how often you swear mentally and verbally, and just how much control these words exert on your mood. After trying this experiment, I can never go back to swearing again. It just doesn’t feel right.

The benefits of willful blindness

Mo — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 04:07:59 +0000

Update: I have since followed up with another post describing the dangers of willful blindness. The post below is officially deprecated.

There was a video on TED called “The Dangers of Willful Blindness”. I didn’t watch it. I have a condition called willful blindness. It is a mental disorder that alters the prioritization algorithm in my mind, and overrides the default priority weight given to thoughts and events. If for example there be 10 thoughts to be considered, 4 of them being murky attention grabbing whores, I would rather my mind be focused on the 6 other good-hearted, less pressing issues that are perhaps not so much in weight. If you take the absolute value of the weight of a positive or negative thought, you’ll find that most times, negative thoughts are heavier. A happy thought is as light as a hummingbird, fluttering nimbly and beautifully before you, and no sooner does it appear than it’s already gone. A negative thought, however, is a riotous rhinoceros which stampedes your mind, hitting the edges and causing sharp pain. To be willfully blind then, changes the chemical reactions that occur in your brain, similar to a drug.

Focusing on the rhinoceros in your mind makes life feel heavy. You are constantly worried and stressed, and every time you try to be happy, you think of all the reasons you shouldn’t be. But the willfully blind man takes no such treatment from his very own mind. He has stood up against the incessant thudding and stomping in his brain. He has realized that in either and every way, his death is as certain as his birth, and if he must go at it either way, that he would rather traverse his time with giddy and delight, than to go limping about the days until a day he falls in a grave. And so the willfully blind man has made a most daring compromise with the gods; that you shall trade perhaps a longer life for that of an invariably lengthed life, but where all the days can be as warm as an August pool. The model blindful man, having a cancerous disease, would rather be ignorant of his condition, than to be involved in a life long fight pregnant with the worries of his state and surviving only on numbing medications and tiring hospital trips. This blindful man would rather go about his days, though considerably numbered, with frolly and joy, than to live a longer life of trolly and foy.

Willful blindness is not only used for recreation. All who create, whether it be through the form of cooking, writing, sketching, constructing; all who create know that their best work is done when they are wholly infatuated with the task at hand, whence not any thought could take them away. To be in the zone. And to be in that zone, you must be nearsighted, and shut out all of the external. Only then will your work have 100% of you. The willfully blind man uses this productivity enhancing drug when he wishes to filter, if only temporarily, the ever-pressing issues that constantly froggle his mind and prevent him from being engulfed by his work.

Like any other chemical, willful blindness should not be dependent on, but should rather be another tool in your survival kit. If ever you find yourself outnumbered and outpoured by sad and dulling thoughts, then drink the tea of willful blindness, and regain your enthusiasm and soul by raging in this age of worry. Regain your creativity by installing your own reality distortion field. Regain what makes you human by choosing.

A Lonely Age

Mo — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:07:59 +0000

What a man is and all that flows through his mind with the lapsing of clouds and ticking of time, is infinite. But what a man manifests, what he says and who he appears to be, is finite. To fall in love with another being then would be not to fall in love with that person and their infinitely varying selves, but to fall in love with the one face of an innumerably sided polygon. So it is not too difficult to believe that a man of young ambition fell in love with a woman that did not exist but as a sequence of numbers, of ones and zeros, the same way a real being exists as a sequence of peptides and heliotides. Yes, for this man fell in love with a finite woman; a very finite woman.

Even very early in the history of man, this dominant and burly being has been forever in search of a woman so perfect and lustrous as to satisfy the deepest bowels of his desire. A man was shallow, and his eyes alighted from bosom to bosom, in reconciliation of his wildest fantasies. Perfect, as one might eventually learn, is a conception which cannot be represented by the physical, but only by the iridescent mental. Perfect, one could not find, but custom, well, is perfection enough. A woman, if you will, designed specifically for you, from feet upwards, with as precise specifications as a man could dream. Yes, for it was possible in this time and age, where technology had clambered to peaks which words had not yet the ability to climb, that a man could design his mate in any way he so chose; where numbers had coagulated in a way that might finally arouse a man. For in this day, infants were born not in nine months, but in days, and the ambitious cell was incubated artificially in a way more efficient than nature could have ever conjured.

You see, a man who had never experienced human love knew not what it was, but what it seemed. Love, the same way light could not be described to a blind man, could not be delineated by mere mortals as words and sights, but must be felt; must make the vermillion blood within palpitate aloud. To an unworthy eye, love seemed a transaction; a mutual compromise of individual vicinity for the better satisfying of both party’s needs. By this scanty definition, it seemed a promising alternative for a wealthy man to not have to trouble himself with the pains and gnawing of seeking and sheltering a mate. No, for this was an age where money could finally buy love; where love was finally within the purview of technology. This was an age where no man would suffer the choice between the work that so dearly occupied his time, and the nipping cold that often crept into the hearts of those who lacked companionship. It was a time where a balance would not be required between family and enterprise, where the relationship between hours spent and money earned was directly proportional to the love a man could acquire. This was a lonely and desolate age.

Misunderstood

Mo — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 04:07:59 +0000

We must learn not to take things personally. No one ever intends to hurt us. Every one is busy living their own life, waging a war within, and focusing on accomplishing their own dreams, that they hardly put any effort into their communication, or pay no special consideration to what they say. It is no wonder that every other song we hear on the radio mentions the concept of “haters”. Haters are fictional characters perceived by every human. We are so overwhelmed, so captivated by our own lives, that we think the world conspires to make our life miserable when things aren’t going our way. We hate society because we think it hates us. But it cannot be that people are as cruel as our minds make them to be, that it must be just us mistaking what is a lack of attention on the other person’s part as bitterness and meanness. It is all a matter of misunderstanding, that had the other person known how their words made you feel, they would be sincerely apologetic, and swear that they meant no harm. But we cannot run to every person who we feel has offended us and try to settle our debts. This is a matter that must be settled within. We must learn to see society’s bitterness as not personal at all, but one huge misunderstanding.

Communication between two humans is by far the most complex task for a human brain, and misunderstandings and errors arise often. Conversation is a game of fast chess. Once one makes his move, it is up to the other to cleverly asses the right response, and since a spontaneous response must be generated within milliseconds, it is no wonder that people say such silly things during small talk. There is no time to consider if the statement is harmful or not, it must be orated lest we be conceived awkward. But, with practice and experience, we can learn what to and not to say. This we call manners, but we cannot expect everyone to carry this same experience and practice, that if we encounter someone without these traits, we should recognize it as a matter of inexperience, and not take it personally. Alas the world is one large sphere of confusion, a perpetual misunderstanding of words between people, a struggle for every man to be understood and accepted.

Ones and Zeros

Mo — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 04:07:59 +0000

The human has two states: happiness and sadness, or in other words, 1 and 0. Using ones and zeros, humans are able to create infinitely complex and super powerful computers. And where else do we get our design inspirations from other than nature? You see, with these two simple emotions, these two states, nature is able to dictate your every move and direction. 1 implies energy flow, happiness, a signal of affirmation, to usher you to continue doing what you’re doing. Zero is an off state, where there is no flow of electricity, felt by us as bleak and bitter sadness, telling us to change our direction, to do something different. Enough of these combinations, of these 1s and 0s, these sequences of episodes of happiness and sadness, and we are somehow magically led to a place we couldn’t have imagined, to a level of thought we could not have foreseen. Our ship is steered little by us, but by the raging waves and heavy winds of nature, which leave us with but one path to travel on.

Voices

Mo — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 04:07:59 +0000

every one is made of two
some days red and others the blue
long suspected were multiple voices
each of which offers its choices
pick and choose
either way you lose
’tis not such a bad thing

The Ideal Self

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

No one can truly practice what they preach. What one preaches is ideal, is well thought out, is romantic and poetic, but what one does, is spontaneous and partial, is a flawed and incomplete manifestation of the ideal. What one preaches is not who he is, but the best of who he is. It is what each man strives for and wishes to become. Our ideals are goal posts, and must always— can only be — on a higher platform than their physical counterpart. We must aim for the stars, so that if our escape velocity falls short, that we might at least nestle in the clouds.

No thought can be translated to its physical equivalent without some loss of detail and aim, without a loss of the luster it had when it was suckling on the sweet glucose of the cerebral sugar well. The mind is a catalyst for thoughts; must house them and pamper them so that there be some desire to make them real. The thought is always sweeter than reality, and must needs be this way, for had the thought been barren and horrid, the being would not be incented to act, but would rather remain indolent. The thought will always be a better place than the present, or else we would be eternally complacent. So forgive the man who does not practice what he preaches, for that is by law impossible, but credit and praise him for that whom he aims to be.

The New & Old

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

Life is a war between the old and the new. The old becomes history, the new becomes old, the two combine and reproduce to make the new new, and ever onwards. Every generation out does the other, and while it may seem unlikely, our minds will one day shut, its views will freeze, and what we believe will be our truth until death, with no capacity for new. Our children will see us as old and traditional, just as we see our ancestors today. What the next generation sees cannot be seen or understood by previous generations, for they dwell in the land of the old, where the ministers of new dare not enter lest they be victims of dogma and antiprogress. Thus life is subject to the same rules as numbers, namely that you can always add 1. The worn out horses must choose their number and retire, but the energetic young stallions aim for numbers which the elders imagined impossible to fathom, and this cycle has created the ever progressing world around us.

The Wave

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

It starts out like any other
the mornings light as feather
but a weight lingers within
dragging you till it begins

find your way out of this rhyme
not using what you used last time
make it out the other end
waiting will be a new friend

one tunnel out and into the next
with every step more perplexed
every other harder than the other
with you all along is the earth mother

take every step though shoeless
with every step more clueless
remember it is all a wave
up and down till your grave.

Fate

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

The men that we call great,
had all to thank to fate.
The passing of time,
makes men sublime,
the lyrical divine,
and days align.
Day by day,
say and nay,
do all you may,
speculation at bay,
and time finds a way,
to make your name stay.
For the men we call great,
had only eaten off their plate.

Every time

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

‘Twas a tired night, like many before
away from my home I began to explore
and I found something I hadn’t before
a new thought I could not ignore
so I followed it like times before
not knowing what else to look for
but it lead me to the same place as ever before
"beyond you is a sea but you remain at shore"
And so I took sail like never before
and once I arrived I asked what for?
I could not bear to think it anymore,
happiness will find me like each time before.

Sadly

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

Bitterness takes the best of me
Watching flowers bloom and begging it to me
Your time will come, it says to me
Now now! I try to plea.
No! no! it cannot be!
To every seed an intricacy!
So longer I wait, till the day I see.

The Coldest Winter

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

Dear love,

I write this to speak to you. To tell you who I am and which parts of me have been missing. I have become a monster. Life has robbed me of my sanity. I used to be normal, and normal in the good sense, not the conformative sense. The kind of normal crazy people wish they could be. I find myself on a very dark planet, lost beyond recognition. I know very little of what is happening in my life. Everything seems to be happening all at once and nothing at all. The worst part about being selfish, rather, the punishment that all selfish people must suffer, is that they are blind to their selfish ways. I don’t remember how I became so selfish. It happened so innocently, through harsh and long days. I guess I’ve always been a little selfish; maybe it has to do with the path I grew up on. But in the last couple rememberable winters, I have been a monster; a man consumed by the mysteries and darkness of his consciousness. The road I have been on has had curves, potholes, and bridges that cut short. I guess you can say I’m swimming in dark waters now, a whaling whale lost in the middle of a dark moonless sea. The howls of emptiness are all I hear. Every flying carpet I stood on was pulled from beneath my feet while in air. I think, during all this, that men before me too have sailed these dark waters, and they all return from their journey with treasures. But even the thought of treasure cannot please me now. A treasure is a cycle, not an object. It is a process. And this saddens me; that I know I cannot fool myself. I long to believe in paradise island, to believe in something more than myself. How I wish I could unload the burdens atop my shoulder unto something else. But I know no one can carry it but I. Many a people, seeing your shoulders sunk below your waist, will sympathize and wish to help, to carry some of your burden. But it is only you that can incubate your misfortunes into fortunes. And by the nature of cause and effect, this has made me selfish.

It is February, in what now seems the second year of this long and brutal winter. It is as coldest a winter I’ve ever seen. I am desolate; a damaged machine searching this barren planet for a tool that might fix the sorrows and malfunctions; for a tool which I do not know the shape nor sight of. A computer is a machine that repeats processes. By this definition, a living man, full of soul and bliss, can become a matter of ones and zeros without his consent nor awareness. What was to be gained, I thought, in my conquest to maximize the amount of hours to myself by forcefully abrupting any time given to others, was happiness. Our mathematically lustered minds are keen to believe that more yields more. But I have gained less, and have lost all. To what end I say, has all this gone to? I have stolen all the time to myself as one man could possibly bear, but I have not been the wiser. No, something has been off. This is where I look back to the moral laws I have been taught, and understand their significance. They were right, I say now. To be selfish is to be cruel not to others, but to yourself. Our written code is modeled after our instinctual morals and behavior, not the other way around. I realize this now. It all makes sense. Not that it really matters. Making sense of one thing has never in the end helped make sense of anything.

There was a time when I believed I was on the golden path. To fortune and fame, and great status. I exerted myself to capacities I had not yet discovered I possessed. The harder I push and pedal, the more I’ll coast, went thought. But behind that door was failure, a door that no man wants to see open. It seemed to me, that most of the great things that had happened to me up until that point had happened without my conscious impediments and will; have happened by chance. So I decided to let go, and let life take control. And that is the path I have been on until just recently. This path may work, but its processes are painstakingly slow; unbearably slow. I felt as though I’d given up. I could not bear it any longer. I decided to change that, to regain control. But a mere decision was no match to physical circumstance. No, for I was snowed in, with no way out. From where I stand, I still do not see a path by which I can flee my current state. I shall have to accept my place as it is now, and wait for the day that my path mystically expands into previously nonexistent nodes.

And this is where I am today; waiting. It seems the wrong move. I feel I ought to do more. But what more can I do? What is it in my power to do? I’ll do whatever I can and more at every given chance. I am watering my seed of life, but this winter has produced little sunlight; has caused the snow to pile high atop my inconspicuous grain. Perhaps when the ice melts, I shall be able to see once again the green surface of this light-forsaken land; to see opportunity in each of the cardinal directions. I look forward to that day with great hope, that time may change my circumstance. It is a lie I tell myself to get through the numbingly cold days, but it is my god; a belief in something, anything, that gives me hope.

The War Within

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

Nature constantly taunts us. Every human is fighting a war within. But had it not been for this perpetual inner war, then humans would not be what they are today. This system constantly challenges us, forcing us to despise the actions of today for the promise of tomorrow; forces us to be discontent. It challenges us — you’re not working hard enough, not eating well enough, your new design not genius enough, you’re too fat, too skinny, you need to study harder; it’s a master trash talker. But imagine had it not been for this system. Imagine had nature spoiled us with lavish compliments for every of our actions. Then what need for improvement would there be? The chimps and primates are perfectly happy with the one tool they’ve managed to create. Nature pampers them with wonderful compliments about their ingenious designs, yet alas the chimp has not been able to progress like the man has. Our every tool becomes outdated the second it is completed; that wonderful thought we had yesterday that seemed to make life instantly ethereal has deserted us today, and we are left looking for another promise of joy, and this forever onward. It is curious that the man has so much,— the airplanes and telepathic communication devices, electricity and inner climate control, refrigerators and fire at the press of a button; but yet we are not content. It this system alone, however, that is responsible for our continual progression.

The man will never be content. This is by design, not coincidence. That thing, that one thing on our minds today, that if we acquire we believe will result in a perfect life, shall tomorrow arrive, but our eyes will be focused on a new task by then. It seems not to carry that same luster that it carried in our minds yesterday. Alas Emerson, it is the thought that is much sweeter than reality. The thought is our fuel, the thought is wonderful and creative. We are creative beings after all. The man is a masterful story teller. Our mind draws a complete canvas and fills in any pieces, even ones that are missing. The mind personifies this world, for the world is rather empty and dull. If humanity can be characterized by one thing, it would their ability to tell stories. Everything has come from stories.

There is an algorithm at play here. We believe the only difficulty in life is finding a way to achieve the relatively trivial task on our minds, but behind the scenes, our bodies are working tirelessly to make us interact with the earth around us. Blood is pumping, lungs contracting, heart beating endlessly, a war of cells erupting within, billions of neural networks connecting to make sense of the world around us. And all without a single conscious effort from us. Our emotions are chemicals mixing. The rewards we earn, the feeling we get when we accomplish something: those are controlled chemicals in our body. The algorithm controls when those chemicals are released. Everything is precise and calculated.

The system is the computer, and the humans are the hackers, the engineers. Take a round pill manufactured in a lab and the substances within are altered. Dopamine is the chemical that our body releases to give us a sense of accomplishment, to reward and give us positive reinforcement. Take a small dosage of a certain white powder, and the chemicals are released instantly, and a sudden sense of accomplishment rushes within. Whatever designed this system wants us to keep going; has put in place systems to motivate us to keep going; has put in place systems to challenge us, to stimulate us; to practically control us. Alas we have little to do with the flow of this algorithm. No man has been able to penetrate its secret. We are looking from within; we will always be a part of this algorithm, and for us to fully comprehend it would mean we were above this algorithm, looking from without rather than from within,— and that’s just undefined.

Trouble

Mo — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 04:07:59 +0000

What is the reason for your worry, troubles and pain?
It is the mere thought of them that makes one go insane.
How scary things appear in thought,
but your whole life the future has cometh and harmed you not.
So fear not the mystery of days to come,
for all your actions are part of one,
– we are only but a part of nature’s hum.