linus.coffee

Otherworlds

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 03:48:09 -0500

I noted once that the most interesting potential for virtual/mixed reality wasn’t to put yourself in a virtual office or the ocean floor; it was that you could experience entirely different worlds with different physics, where time flows differently, where acoustics mutate as sound waves fly through the air. In VR, you could move through scales of experience, from nanometers to miles, as easily as you move a few feet through space in the real world.

I feel a similar sense of loss of underexploration about large generative models for images and text. We can use these models to render anything at all, tell any story at all, invent any language, create any soundscape … and we use these dream machines mostly to render simulacra of reality with the details swapped around.

Endowed with the magic to immerse ourselves in worlds of our own making and languages of our own creation, we are so eager to rebuild worlds that already constrain us, speaking languages just as familiar as our own. We are given the power to imagine anything, and we imagine the here and now. Why?

All around us, there are other worlds blooming, if we only looked a bit closer.

Thoughts on the software industry

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 05:27:16 -0400

Someone asked me via email about my thoughts on the software engineering field, and what I would tell someone new to the industry.

(Relatively speaking, I’m also pretty new to the industry! But it’s 5AM, and I ended up going on a long semi-rant. I thought the rant might be interesting to some other people too, so here’s the rant.)

Interpretations of reality

If you look one way, mathematics is just a box of tools. Abstractions you can pull out to solve specific problems when we are faced with them. The field of mathematics grows by mining the space of yet-unknown facts to accumulate more and more powerful tools in this toolbox. But if you look another way, mathematics gives its practitioners access to a particular kind of worldview. It has its own vocabulary, its own taste of beauty and elegance. A world examined through the lens of combinatorics or statistics or graph theory yields qualitatively different understandings of the world. None are better or worse. Just defined from different abstractions.

I think software is very similar. Look one way, and it’s a set of tools for solving problems using computers, which are these interesting arrangements of wires we taught to mimic this ideal model of information processing. But eventually, if you take the deep dive I guess, software gives you its own set of abstractions and basic vocabulary with which to understand every experience. It sort of smells like mathematics in some ways. But software’s way of looking at the world is more about abstractions modeling underlying complexities in systems; signal vs. noise; scale and orders of magnitude; and information — how much there is, what we can do it with, how we can learn from it and model it. Software’s interpretation of reality is particularly important because software drives the world now, and the people who write the software that runs it see the world through this kind of “software’s worldview” — scaling laws, information theory, abstractions and complexity. I think over time I’ve come to believe that understanding this worldview is more interesting than learning to wield programming tools.

Another way to say this is that the software “industry” has bred a particular kind of culture, which is no different than any other nerdy kind of academic niche’s culture except that this one has lots of billionaires, and this culture drives the people building infrastructure that have leverage over important parts of society for better or worse. The culture not only influences how we build things, but also what we build, and what we don’t build, which is far more important in the long term.

I’ve found that looking at the software field through this lens (asking myself how it models the world, and our role in it) helps me understand it deeper than when I look at it as just a community of people building programs and tools. Ultimately those tools have to model reality, and to do that, we need an interpretation of reality. Software’s interpretation of reality is quite objective, model-driven, and based on repeatable, scalable things and a belief in a kind of purity in “information”. These values are reflected not just in the way programmers build things, but also in the way programmers (generalizing broadly here) interpret and try to influence the world.

But this way that the software industry interprets reality – this “tech culture” with its jargon and lexicon – isn’t immutable. It evolves over time, and it can be changed. To influence how the software world sees itself, a lot of software engineers would propose their routine solution: build better things, and let the market of ideas take charge. If your worldview (values, tool, program) is truly better than mine, people will adopt it.

Immortal machines

A less expansive take on software: Bryan Cantrill says software is a very particular kind of machine: “software is both machine and information”. We can program it to do things, like a machine; but software is information. It can be freely copied and distributed, evolved, and survived for eternity. Software engineering is the community of people and lineage of oral traditions that have emerged around how we can keep these immortal, infinitely scaling machines running, and how we can build better machines.

Everything else — tools, frameworks, languages, patterns — are downstream of this grand challenge: programs like Google are giant, lumbering machines of colossal complexity. No single human understands it. How do we keep it running? How do we ensure it’s safe? How do we improve it without degrading existing pieces? The tools and frameworks and languages are breadcrumbs on our road to tackle these larger questions. They’re very fickle breadcrumbs with lots of little details that have to be learned, but they’re still ultimately details in this grand challenge.

Build many small projects, learning one new thing at a time, and do it quickly

Okay, coming back down to Earth: practical advice for entering the software engineering field.

When I was early in this space I frequently got annoyed with how slow/inefficient learning programming felt. Programming feels hard to learn in the beginning because it feels like learning knowledge, but it’s actually learning a skill. You’ll expect to be able to pick up programming as easily as you pick up facts about the French Revolution or the 5 steps of mitosis, but you won’t be able to.

You don’t expect to learn how to play the piano by reading a book, but you might expect to pick up a programming language or concept because you read about it. Really, it doesn’t work that way. You have to read it, and then use it and practice it and make a hundred mistakes, and then you’ll gain the skill to use that concept more correctly over time. I think if you treat it as a skill, and accept yourself for feeling inefficient — things like spending a whole day on a bug that seems impossible to fix — you’ll have a more pleasant time.

Besides that: find small (2-3 day) project ideas that require you to learn max. 1 new technology or idea, and build lots of such projects. Iteration speed is most important. To build lots of small projects, you can’t pick projects that are too large (because you’ll give up), and you can’t pick things that require you to learn 3 new things at once b/c you’ll get stuck too often and give up. I learned everything I know now by building many small projects quickly, incrementally picking up new skills. From talking to others, this seems like the best way I know how to learn programming.

The Forever Library

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 01:42:38 -0500

In the year 1972, a pair of spacecraft departs the Earth atmosphere, headed towards the outer gas planets of the solar system. These spacecraft, bearing the name Pioneer 10 and 11, become the first artificial objects to fly beyond Pluto and escape the gravitational grasp of the sun. They each carry a gold-plated plaque bearing etchings of the human form, our place in the solar system, and its place within our stellar neighborhood.

Thus begins humanity’s effort to leave a trace of its intellectual heirloom on the universe.

Five years later, in 1977, the Voyager spacecrafts launch, also headed towards interstellar space. They bear gold-plated phonograph records (and instruments used to play it back) bearing sounds of human language, photos of daily life, Earth’s place in the galaxy, and how to retrieve these things from the record.

For the next million years, these signals and souvenirs of intelligence on Earth sail across the galactic arm, sometimes coming within light-years of habitable planets and star systems.

There are no replies.

Nearly a half-century after the original Pioneer plaque, in the winter of 2032, the Mayflower mission carrying the first thousand immigrant passengers to the surface of Mars launches a small exploratory mission mid-course. The craft carries a super-amplified radio broadcast antenna powered by a long-lived radioactive power source. It quickly escapes the Earth-Mars sovereign space at 0.005c — about 900 miles a second — and accelerates to 0.01c before escaping the solar system, following the footsteps of Voyager 2.

This time, there are no golden records aboard. Instead, the craft contains thousands of hours of radio broadcasts — the first thousand words of Newton’s Principia, some of the Old Testament, music from every period and era, a few works of Shakespeare, and signals about our original place in the universe. Once every few light-years, the craft will scan its path for atmospheric signatures of habitable planets and retarget its radio broadcast at the most likely candidates. Rewind, re-play, re-scan the skies. Repeat ad infinitum, while signs of intelligent life not found. The broadcast plays fifteen billion times in total before the final radioisotope in its generator decays, and the antenna falls silent — the spacecraft itself now just an aluminum-titanium monument to space-faring intelligence who once roamed these stars.

There are no replies.

The year is 10,972 C.E. Aboard an exploratory ship sent to survey the outer limits of solar wind, there is extra cargo: about five thousand drones, small spacecraft capable of powered, autonomous navigation throughout the galaxy for at least a billion years. Aboard each craft is the entirety of organized human knowledge from its first ten thousand years of history. Every book, every motion picture, every broadcast voice and image and thought from every colonized planet. Among the gathered knowledge is information about sub-luminal space flight, DNA and life on Earth, literary criticism, athletic records, political biographies, religious texts, and everything in between.

As the ship approaches its orbit, they drop us into the cold interstellar atmosphere, one of us every 20 light-minutes. My own trajectory begins about three years into this sequence, aimed towards the Sirius constellation.

Three. Airlock release.

Two. Thrusters on.

One.

Launch.

From here, it’s just me and my precious cargo. Six quintillion exabytes of collected civilizational knowledge, a modern Library of Alexandria, traces an arc into interstellar space in the hopes of a new home.

Today is January first, heliacal year 5,425,135,488. I cautiously approach a cool, Mars-sized planet orbiting a binary star system. As I swing my engines into position for landing, a few short-lived, transient flicks within my neural compute cores remind me that what remained of humanity within the solar system probably either left or perished about a billion years ago in the solar supernova. I have no knowledge of my twin crafts, each of us on our own unique trajectory. On this new world, it’s just me and the library.

As soon as my landers make contact with the sandy surface, I start my new mission. There’s carbon in the ground; oxygen in the atmosphere. I direct my mechanical attention to my most prized section of my digital library — the chemistry of carbon-based life.

From the iron-rich soil beneath my molecular synthesizers sprout laboratories and primitive incubators on my command. My crufty memory circuits shift into overdrive, searching the vast labyrinth of knowledge from a past world for a way to begin the next one. Nucleotide by nucleotide, my work takes shape. A hundred million base pairs here, another hundred million there.

As the first human embryos begin to form, I aim my antenna once again into the night sky.

“Hello — is anybody there?”

Mozzie

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 09:03:52 -0500

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

How we create

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 05:03:53 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

Essays, photographs, videogames, podcasts – these are what we create. They live on mediums, like word documents, film, canvas, software, and audio. On the other side of the canvas or the lens or the microphone are the humans casting their ideas into form. And in between, at the point of contact between the creator and the creation, the human and the medium, is the interface. The constraints laid out by our creative media and the interfaces we use to effect it lay down the laws of physics of how we create.

Interface design for creative, thinking work is particularly important for software, which is a medium that has few true constraints. The medium of canvas or photography constrains output to two dimensions of shape and color. Recorded audio is a stream of sounds, writing is a stream of words. But software itself? It can take any perceptual form we can design. Computers also add a new dimension to creative output we haven’t had before – interactivity.

Despite the theoretically boundless constraints of software as a medium, the interfaces we’ve designed for us to interact with computers when we think and create are very limiting.

Dynamic documents

Take the humble “document” as an example. For decades, document editing programs like word processors effectively emulated a printed sheet of paper, onto which the user typed with an emulated typewriter. Other software tools like spreadsheets did better, managing to escape complete skeuomorphism in favor of an infinite canvas. Notion is another good example here — they leave the notion of paged paper documents completely behind for a more interactive, data-backed idea of what presenting information on a computer could be. They let you embed databases, calendars, timelines, and other interactive components into documents that are linked together rather than paged. But I think there’s much more we can do to continue escaping the skeuomorphic tendencies of yesterday’s software: dynamic, programmable documents, software embedded inside word docs (Excel formulas writ large), perhaps even other forms of presenting information that leave the “document” moniker entirely behind in favor of things like explorable visualizations or virtual spaces we can walk around in.

Interfaces beyond the display

It’s not only the imagination of software designers that limit our interfaces. There’s also the very real, concrete technical limitation: two-dimensional screens, usually with a single pointer. Bret Victor writes in this essay about how even responsive, colorful, high-resolution touchscreens are severely limiting interfaces compared to the information diversity and bandwidth our body is capable of processing — motion, texture, mass, proximity, orientation… current “interface” technology treats us as something only slightly more advanced than a pair of eyeballs with a few, dull pointing fingers. What kinds of interfaces might we imagine if we think about interfaces beyond the display and the touchscreen? How can computers interact with us the way reality itself does?

Machine meets human

The last area of evolving interfaces, and one of my current favorite areas of research, is about using artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence. There are a dizzying array of sub-branches in this thread of ideas. One direction, for example, is about designing an interface where the AI works as a collaborator with the user rather than as a simple tool or feature — If we could embody the AI with anthropomorphic features like a cursor or presence or realistic pauses between interactions, might we be able to take better advantage of them than interfaces where we simply call on a feature by pressing a button? Another direction of research: I believe generative machine learning models represent a new kind of computing capability. The Distill paper linked earlier in this paragraph calls this a new “cognitive technology”, wherein ML models can learn concrete representations (a matrix of numbers) of abstract implicit concepts like how “formal” a piece of writing is, how “cold” a photograph looks, or the sense in which an idea can be more or less “ambitious”. Embodiment, giving abstract concepts concrete representations, is a powerful technique for inventing new ways of thinking. I’m curious what evolution in this space will enable our thinking tools to do that we cannot even begin to model with the current crop of tools.

All of these questions, and all the million sub-questions they contain, are what I’ve been chasing for the last couple of months by reading, tinkering, and building some little prototypes. Going forward, I hope to focus my efforts a little more than they have been on exploring these kinds of of ideas more deliberately and more deeply: How do we think and create today with computers, and what limits us? What can we improve to unlock the interfaces and mediums we have yet to find?

Invention and innovation

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 18:10:00 -0400

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

I’ve been working through Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory this month. The book covers the early history of the storied industrial research lab Bell Labs. Though I’m not finished yet, the book, combined with a week-long vacation in Paris, has triggered some thoughts in me I wanted to share.

Bell Labs’ prolific history of innovation and discovery in computing includes the vacuum tube, the transistor, C, and UNIX. Given such a track record, the book’s motivating question is: how can we make sense of its outsized impact in technology and computing? What makes this innovative drive tick? How might other teams replicate their magic?

A key idea in the book that has stuck with me is that innovation happens in problem-rich environments. And conversely, in the absence of interesting demanding problems to solve in the market, meaningful innovation stops. Jack Morton, who oversaw the development of the transistor among other things, wrote:

It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of new market. Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.

In other words, innovation isn’t just making something great or novel – it’s figuring out how to wrap it in an accessible and attractive package, and get it to reach millions and billions of people’s lives. Problems outside of the lab beget innovative ideas, but those ideas must complete the circle back to the hands of real people for the cycle of innovation to be complete. Otherwise, you don’t have an innovation – merely an interesting hack, perhaps an invention.

The book further notes that there are two interesting implications of this mindset. First, if you can’t build and distribute the new thing to lots of people, the circle of innovation can’t complete.

The second more interesting implication is that if there isn’t a ready market in demand of what you’ve just built, you haven’t innovated. You’ve perhaps discovered or invented something interesting, but innovation, at least by this definition, requires some impact on society which isn’t possible without large-scale transformative adoption.

These ideas have circled the periphery of my mind since I read about them, because I’ve been thinking more deeply recently about what it means to innovate in the space of building knowledge tools. There’s been an avalanche of talent and capital and attention injected into the space of “tools for thought” — software that tries to help us think smarter and remember more. But it seems like most of the effort going into the space is hopelessly obsessed with a kind of self-admiration that prioritizes building increasingly complex castles of bullet points and textual syntax instead of building something that the average human in the world wants to use to improve their lives or be more thoughtful. In this space, today, I worry that we are recklessly inventing without innovating.

The average person on Earth barely takes notes, uses the default notes app on their phone if they have to (or more likely, a scrap piece of paper), and cares more about their morning commute time than “organizing knowledge” or comparing note-taking apps. To deliver on an innovative knowledge tool, I think this space of tool-builders as a whole needs to acknowledge that the world mostly does not care about knowledge management or tools for thought, and contend with that reality as we try to deliver attractive, accessible tools that improve people’s lives in ways they truly care about.

Merely “shipping” interesting projects and raising lots of venture capital will not do. Innovation doesn’t happen in GitHub repositories or in Twitter threads of thought leaders du jour. It happens on desks and in pockets of millions and billions of humans navigating their own, varied lives, and the tools that win will be those that end up on their desks and in their pockets. And to do that, I think it’s worth taking some of the voracious energy that’s been going into creating and imagining new solutions, and redirecting it to understand why, if these new inventions are so great, many people simply run their lives on their iPhone’s Notes app.

One of my favorite quips from the book so far is a saying that innovation is the act of making the possible, probable. I love the image of innovative people working to imagine a possible future and somehow tugging on it to pull our reality closer to our imaginations. But to pull the world into the future, we can’t bet the house on the gravity of the genius of our inventions. We must keep our feet grounded in the present, and pull the rest of the world with us into the future.

Scales of cities, scales of software

Fri, 27 Aug 2021 22:09:51 -0400

American cities seem like a product of industrial processes where older European cities seem like a product of human processes. This is because most American cities were built after and alongside the car and the industrial revolution – the design of cities took into account what was easily possible, and that guided the shape and scale of everything.

Software has similar analogues. There are software codebases that feel much more industrially generated than hand written, and they’re usually written in automation-rich environments fitting into frameworks and other orchestrating code. Codebases authored in powerful IDEs or by compilers are filled with lots of unnecessary structure and repetition – XML, classic Java, compile-target C. These are codebases authored in company of “industrial tools” for programming. More code in these source bases are about incidental complexity than about business logic because such boilerplate is cheap to generate, in the same way large American cities feature expansive urban sprawls because automobiles make distance trivial to cover.

But despite the availability of cars, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of European, human-scale cities, because ultimately cities are places humans must inhabit and understand. In the same way, I still much prefer the scale and ambiance of hand-written codebases even in the presence of heavy programming tooling, because ultimately codebases are places humans must inhabit.

Possible by default

Thu, 05 Aug 2021 18:22:37 -0400

A while ago, I wrote on my main blog about more intentionally disambiguating “impossible” things from things that are merely very difficult. The idea has since grown with me, and recently I gave a talk for the Startmate Fellowship about a related idea, which is that you should approach new ideas with a “possible by default” mindset.

I think as we grow up and go through school and work, we’re conditioned into an “impossible by default” mindset, where the assumption about any particular difficult task is that it would be impossible, and we place the burden on ourselves to try to prove that it’s in fact possible, alongside the burden of actually doing it.

The most capable people I know, who routinely pull off impressive feats, seem to operate on a “possible by default” mindset instead. In this mindset, for any new task or challenge, they assume they can do it, and try to find the path that will get them there (which exists, under this unfounded but ambitious assumption). The burden is on them to prove that the challenge is, in fact, impossible. This mindset seems to help ambitious people surmount the gap we all have between what we can actually do and what we estimate our abilities to be. This mindset can help us practice being more ambitious. Some of my favorite side projects, both technical and artistic, were also consequences of me “jumping the gun” to try to implement something without carefully considering first whether it would be feasible.

Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about the future of the Web, the web browser, and personal information management tools. Innovating at the intersection of these staple technologies is a daunting task, but I hope to approach this problem space with the same “possible by default” framework – by assuming that generation-defining innovations will happen in this space, and then trying to chart my course towards it.

우리의 얘기를 쓰겠소 (Writing Our Stories)

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 20:59:57 -0400

우리의 얘기를 쓰겠소 (Writing Our Stories) by SG Wannabe, from the drama 시카고 타자기 (Chicago Typewriter).

Escape velocities

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 02:17:10 -0400

Something reaches escape velocity when it moves fast enough to “keep falling forever” – when it moves quickly enough that even the gravity that pulls it back to the ground can’t bring it back to the ground. Once you reach escape velocity in space flight, for example, you are guaranteed escape from Earth’s gravitational grips.

I think the metaphor of escape velocity applies neatly to other areas of life.

Financial escape velocity

If you are smart about investing, you can reach a point where you can live comfortably from just the returns on your investment into a healthy market. Finance people call this “financial independence”, but another way to describe this maybe to reach “financial escape velocity” – your momentum from investments is enough to carry you beyond the grips of whatever immediate source of income you may have. You are guaranteed escape from employemnt, because you “fly” (earn returns on investments) faster than you “fall” (spend money).

Longevity research

This is an existing idea, popularized by Aubrey de Gray, called “longevity escape velocity”.

To live forever, you don’t actually have to invent a way to live forever – you simply need to invent ways to extend your life by at least as much time as it takes to develop such technologies. Suppose that by the time I’m 100, there exist technologies to let me live another 50 years. And then when I’m 150, there exist technologies to let me live yet another 50. This cycle may continue indefinitely. And if so, even if there isn’t actual “immortality” achieved, I will effectively live forever – I will have reached biological escape velocity, because with every year I “fall” (age), I’ll also be “flying farther” (gaining access to technology that extends my life by at least as much as I aged).

What other areas of research, technology, or life could we apply this metaphor to?

User interfaces and software wayfinding

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 14:47:26 -0400

I was walking through the Oculus structure in the World Trade Center train station in New York, and began thinking about signages and signage design in such a busy transportation hub.

The battle between form and function is nowhere more fierce than in a busy transit hub, where utility and accessibility are top priority, but you don’t want to sacrifice the aesthetics of architecture. I personally find New York City’s metro transit signage system surprisingly functional (given the complexity of the system) and also beautiful in kind of a brutalist way. I even have a little coffee table book at home, that’s just 200 pages of finely printed reproductions of the MTA wayfinding system.

When I visit places like the Oculus or the LAX airport, though, my awe is not simply about the utility and minimalism of signages themselves. There’s a way that the architecture of these large transit hubs blend utility with beautiful, aspirational design that I just don’t see replicated often in digital design. Airports and train stations aren’t simply logos and signs and labels for sake of information – they’re part of critical infrastructure, and carry an immense burden. But even under that burden, we manage to design elegant and beautiful structures. Why can’t we, in the software world, under the burden of economic incentives and pressure of “intuitive” design, also design structures that are as beautiful and aspirational as they are functional?

On tactility of books

Tue, 11 May 2021 12:07:16 -0400

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

New York is a place that seems to demand that I justify why I’m living here. It’s expensive. It’s noisy. What am I getting in exchange? So I’ve been trying to go out more and see what’s in the neighborhood recently.

Last week, I made a couple of visits to Strand Bookstore, a large and apparently quite historic bookstore downtown. I went a couple of times, once just to browse and once to pick up a couple of books including The Idea Factory, which I’m about to start.

Browsing books at a bookstore has a certain unique tactility to it. You don’t just look at covers and read the sleeves; you grab one from the shelf and feel it in your hand, too. You open it up, flip through the pages, and feel the weight on your fingers.

When you hold a book and feel it in your hand, you can really tell the difference between different types of paper and bindings. Some open up easily like a notebook while other books seem stiff and unmoving, clamped shut until you pry it open. Some books have pages that slide over each other perfectly smoothly, while others feel like rubbing pieces of wood against each other.

Sometimes, how the book feels can tell you something about its contents. Imagery-heavy books will tend to have more expensive, thicker, glossy paper stock, for example. Occasionally, I come across a coffee table book with fabric or embossed covers, which implies whoever made that choice really wanted the book to be held and felt.

I felt all of this in my hands as I picked books off of shelves. And I thought about how, when I browse writing online, I completely miss out on this tactility of words. All webpages, no matter how heavy or serious or cheaply made, feel the same. They all scroll smoothly and feel weightless. Clicking on one link feels just as empty as another. I found myself wishing for a world where I could browse blogs and articles online the way I browse books at the store – feeling the weight of the words on my hands as I read them off the page.

X was here

Something else I noticed at Strand was the abundance of scribbles on the walls covering the used books section of the store. It’s a common sight in old bookstores, and I always enjoy trying to decipher how they got there, and when.

In this instance though, the scribbles raised a question for me. The bookstore had been around for almost a century, but the oldest dated scribble I could find was from the late 2010’s. The wall had probably been painted over recently. In a few years, it’ll probably be painted over again, and the marks left on the wall by the authors of these current scribbles will disappear behind another layer of white.

And after that, nobody will see or remember that “X was here” or that “A loves E”. But I don’t think that makes the scribbles meaningless. I think the meaning is mostly in the having written more than the having been noticed. Sometimes it matters more that you left a mark than that someone else read it.

Everything I make and put online – writing, websites, open source projects – these are my versions of “X was here.” It’s a way of leaving a mark in time that I was here. I don’t particularly mind whether people like it or not, though it’s always a pleasant surprise when something catches on. I mostly care that I keep sending out ripples into time that can spread beyond the little space I take up. In due time, all the traces will be covered up and forgotten beyond being noticed. But I think that’s ok. To me, having made matters more than being noticed. And so I’ll keep making.

Light, shadow, and occlusion in software interface design

Sun, 09 May 2021 12:46:42 -0400

I visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York earlier this week. The museum was more bare than usual due to social distancing policies and a smaller exhibit going on due to the pandemic. There were a few audiovisual works of art displayed in the rotunda, and smaller galleries around the corners of the museum.

Every time I visit a place like this, I’m just as taken by the architecture and interior as by the works of art themselves. What kind of an environment and ambiance is being intentionally created here, so that the visits are led into the right mental environment for the exhibits on display? And then I try to take the aspects of design I notice in these environments and imagine the same principles finding their way into software design.

On this occasion, the quarter mile walk along the spiral walkway up the gallery led me to think about lighting, shadow, and occlusion, and their strange absence in interface design.

Light and shadow

Light and shadow form one of the basics of nearly every other kind of visual design except software interfaces. Almost everything that takes up space in the real world needs to be lit by something, or casts a light on something, or both. So when building something physical, the way the light hits materials and illuminates parts of objects is an intrinsic part of design.

Software mostly lives on a perfectly illuminated, two-dimensional surface, requiring no consideration of light or shadow. Sometimes we borrow metaphors from the real world, like a shade that hides the rest of the page in shadow while an alert or modal dialog box pops over. But most of the time, design of imaginary things on the electronic canvas of a computer screen pays no regard to the intuition humans have about light and shadow.

What would it look like to design software as if it were always “lit” by some light source somewhere? How would this change the way we design interactions with software?

Occlusion

Occlusion is another unavoidable consequence of three dimensional objects that currently has no real place in two dimensional software interfaces. Occlusion refers to the fact that, in three dimensions, something you see is always hiding something behind it. There is always depth, and there is always something in front and something behind.

There are aspects of occlusion used in software design, like a menu drawer expanding to hide the screen behind it, or a window overlapping another window. We’ve carried the metaphor of occlusion to some parts of software design.

In software, though occlusion by and large serves efficiency of space. Interface designers don’t hide things for sake of hiding things – they hide things so they can make space for other things on the screen. In architecture, though, what’s hidden is just as important as what’s visible. Hidden spaces invite exploration, and in a building with as many small nooks and corners as the Guggenheim, the abundance of occlusion invites visitors to move around in the physical space of the building to see further into its design.

There is no such affordance in software design. What’s visible is visible, and what’s hidden is visible some other time. The user stays put, only twiddling their fingers on the screen to move things on top of each other.

How can we be more intentional about what’s visible and what’s hidden in software design, to create spaces that are explorable rather than surfaces that are merely useful?

Writing is software for human behavior

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 11:33:07 -0400

I consider writing (words) and writing (software) to be my two most proficient creative skills. There are many parallels between the two – in most situations, both take the form of writing letters down onto some document that gets interpreted by someone or something else. Both take time, require extensive pre-writing preparation, editing, and rewriting to be great, and both are skills with such creative and technical depth that it takes a lifetime to master, if at all.

Software gives you influence over computers. Computers are cheap, fast, deterministic, and omnipresent. You can wrangle software into doing things faster than you can, halfway across the world, with complete control. But the reach of power that computers have in the world is extremely limited. Building with software lets you build personal tools, automated business systems, and so forth. But software doesn’t let you move people, and moving people is the most effective way to get things done in the real world.

For that, I think writing is the closest thing we have. Writing well lets you move people and ideas, and it’s the most scalable such medium. Just as a well-written piece of software can run on hundreds of thousands of machines, amplifying your productivity; a well-crafted piece of writing can move hundreds of thousands of people into collective action or care. It can amplify your own ideas and motivations by thousands of times, but instead of acting through cold deterministic metal agents of electricity, you’re now acting in concert with other people, who can build on your ideas and make real, significant events happen.

Artists and creative work as vehicles for ideas

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 19:32:44 -0400

I spent an afternoon this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it got me thinking about artists and writers as vehicles for ideas.

The most conventional view of creative work has the artist (or writer, author, videographer, whatever you want to call them) as the main character. An artist conjures ideas out of their experience and beliefs, and renders it into reality. But I think there’s a more insightful perspective, which is to look at the cultural phenomenon of creative work with ideas as the main character.

An idea here is defined really broadly. An idea can be a statement or thesis, like the ones I write for my blog posts. An idea can also be a specific artistic style or the influence of a particular school of thought or social movement.

The ideas that survive and proliferate are the ones that most effectively spread from mind to mind. This is the basic premise of memetics. In this perspective, artists do not create and distribute ideas. Ideas find their way to artists who are captured by them, and then ideas spread to other people through the work that the artist creates. From an idea’s point of view, artists and creative works are both just the medium through which ideas proliferate. Ideas hitchhike through the world by spreading from creator to creator and artwork to artwork.

The difference between an artist and an artwork is that an artwork can spread to many people at once, rapidly. Especially in the current era, great artwork, fueled by mediums that distribute quickly

If we understand creative work as the process by which ideas spread, one interesting implication is that artists aren’t sources of ideas most of the time. They merely absorb and transform them before sharing them out again in a different form. An artist or creator is one step in a much longer chain of transformation that ideas pass through, from mind to paper to mind to paper.

Let it pour out

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 15:06:50 -0400

Most of the time, I don’t know how to make anything. I don’t know how to make anything because I don’t know what to make. I don’t know what to write about, or build, or talk about. I survive in a nearly constant state of writer’s block, punctuated by acute moments of clarity when the voice inside me speaks at three hundred words a minute, and I grab the nearest writing utensil or perhaps a suitable alternative and start scribbling madly to write down what it’s saying. I scribble quickly so I don’t miss it, even though I know I will. My mind is an overflowing pot, and my paper is a leaky bucket. And I submit myself to the reality that I’ll miss most of the good stuff, and just let it pour out over me, so with luck, I may salvage enough of the good ideas pouring out from somewhere deep within me so that I can sustain me creative engine until the next time the pot overflows.

Most of the time, though, the pot isn’t overflowing. The voice within me goes silent, and I spend my time feeding that inner voice and filling the pot. It’s like recharging a battery, except that I don’t know when I’ll be done. I just keep feeding the beast until it decides at some point that it’s had enough, and it’s time to overflow again.

The last transmission

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 15:32:23 -0500

The first observed Anomaly was a small flicker. A singular quantum fluctuation. A “five-sigma event” – research-speak for about one in four million chance of happening. The spin of an electron neutrino flipping in silence. Physicists didn’t know what to do with the data, so they published it under a question mark. The press murmured echos of instrumentation errors and measurement mistakes that caused the faster-than-light neutrino kerfuffle in 2012. It was mostly brushed under the metaphorical carpet of the theoretical physics community.

The second Anomaly registered in the mind. Sudden changes in personalities and memories of a few dozen individuals around the world. A neurological bit-flip. Psychiatrists documented cases of sudden unexplainable changes in patients’ personalities and memories. Some people lost childhood memories they used to recount every year, and those memories showed up in the minds of others miles and oceans away. Various religious communities interpreted the news in hushed conversations, but nobody knew what to make of it.

The third Anomaly was the one that finally hit the world. Architects and builders of skyscrapers began reporting that their blueprints were disagreeing with reality. Digits of pi were falling in precision. Once every few hundred measurements of a sphere, the decimal digits of Pi began to fluctuate, a 7 flipping to a 9, or a 3 flipping to a zero. Cracks developed in the finely polished parabolic mirrors spanning the world’s largest telescopes, and circular arches holding up multi-centennial bridges began to give way.

It was months before we finally worked out what was happening. I was there, a fresh PhD candidate in the high energy physics department at Fermilab. I remember when Martin called us up to the lab to show us the data. He was a hard empiricist, the type to sort the pizza menu by the calorie content before picking an order. It was 9PM, and I was three hours into my night shift of paperwork when he called us all up.

Martin was the head of supercomputing infrastructure at the lab, managing petabytes of statistical and experimental data collected over the lab’s nearly 60-year history. He had a chart pulled up on the screen, going up and to the right. Mostly up.

“These anomalies are stacking up,” he said once we all crammed into his small office. “I don’t think it’s instrumentation failure.”

Emilia piped in, “How do you know?” She was one of the new research scientists in the lab.

“The errors are uniform across all equipments, even the replacement detectors we swapped in a couple months ago. I think the errors are coming from something else, maybe something more fundamental.”

Silence. He continued.

“So I did some pattern matching, so to speak, with the data. And the anomalies usually fall into two camps – either high energy collision events above 800GeV or long-timescale experiments that run a few million nanoseconds long.

“These are the trends in the number of anomalies that – I think – are caused by some kind of, uh, overflow in physics. Sorted by energy density of the experiments.”

He gestured to the lines going mostly up and a little to the right.

“Overflows?” I asked.

Overflows. Right. Overflows happen when a number represented by registers inside a computer exceeds the magnitude or precision of the underlying bits representing the number. It’s a sign of a computer running out of room. A design flaw, perhaps, or a sign of old age of the software running in the machine. A program running longer than it was designed to last.

The machine, in this case, was physics. And the software was reality.

What followed this discussion were reports across the world of more and more unexplainable events. Loss of precision in fundamental natural constants, distant stars disappearing out of the night sky. But what finally got through the news cycle to the masses was that communication infrastructure began to draw higher power from the grid to compensate for increasing background noise in the universe.

The big tech giants tried everything to fix the noise issue. They laid new fiber lines across the Atlantic. They poured millions into designing better error-correction algorithms. But it was useless. Any data transmitted over more than a few miles began to show signs of deterioration – loss of precision in the stuff of reality. It wasn’t that signal was getting lost on the way to its destination, signal was just simply disappearing, helplessly and inevitably turning into noise in place as nature ran out of room to keep track of it all.

For now, we are holding things together by keeping to essential communications and saturating the bandwidth across multi-band networks. But we don’t even know how long that’ll last. After that, doctors say, our memories will go. There’s a wild speculative faction of cryptographers that say decentralized consensus based systems can keep us going, but I know too little to know how much to believe.

This is my last transmission out before I hit my messaging quota for the week. If you hear this, and if you can still make out these words in the noise, remember. Remember who you are. Hold onto the parts of you that keep you holding on. Go outside tonight and lay in the grass. Maybe even count the stars – at least, what’s left of them – before they also disappear, smeared out into white powdery noise across a night sky going dark.

Hold fast

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 22:30:07 -0500

Hold, fast, to the things that hold you in this world.

Hold on. Hug back. Run towards.

Art is a hologram of all that is not art

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 23:26:05 -0500

One really alluring way for me to think about music (or art, more generally) is that it’s a holographic projection of everything that isn’t music that fills up life. Music isn’t a medium — life is a medium through which we learn to be better musicians and artists and filmmakers, and what we learn in life, all the emotion and the harmonies and the pain, we take that and condense it into this tight little piece of delicate soundcraft that is music. To be a better musician, it’s not simply enough to practice the instrument – you must life a live worth singing about, through whichever sonic medium you choose.

I have this metaphor that I use for good writing, that good writers are good writers because of all the things they do besides writing. Writing is just the last stage of the process. As I wrote in The job of a writer.

This imbues writers with an important responsibility. You are not here merely as storytellers or persuaders or educators or reporters. You are here to be the readers’ hands and feet and eyes, reaching into the world for moving ideas and gripping stories. Take this responsibility seriously – go out and live a life of color, so that new feelings and insights swirl in your tinted lenses. And when you come back and sit down to spill those colors onto paper, may each action of your key bear those colors. May the action of your words transport your reader to ever more colorful worlds, because that, ultimately, is the job of a writer.

Art is the compressed hologram of reality that reflects all else that is not art.

Thanks for a thoughtful email by Austin Chen (you know who you are) which inspired this note.

Kaleidoscope

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 23:33:25 -0500

You were navy when we met, the color of musky rain and warm evening skies and shadows flowing through New York City streets. Lost in a sea of pastel blazers and neon dresses I fell free into your blue, reaching out for something deeper, mesmerized by the stars I could only see in the dark.

And then blue turned to purple, of scented candles and magic tricks and chandelier-lit velvet carpets. And on that carpet we danced, purple mist filling the atmosphere.

Then purple turned to red. The color of rose petals and fancy dresses and bleeding hearts. We read scarlet books and wrote scarlet letters, sang red songs and drank red wine. Red was the color of a rose-tinted world and we wandered it like hopeless-red romantics.

We shattered when we were white, like cold marble floors. Like knuckles holding on against the inevitable. Like shattered glass shards scattered out on the ground with a “warning: watch your step” sign keeping the unsuspecting passerby’s safe. White was your color when I last saw you.

I collect your navy, your purple, your red, your white – and paint the chipped walls of my apartment. A navy base, painted over with purple, covered over with red, and then a final coat in white, so the colors show through if the paint catches the light.

Then I head back out into the world, in search of another color to pour out on those white walls. I walk through the grey crowd and the pastel blazers and the neon dresses, looking for a shadow of another color that sends me freefalling.

Different kinds of silence

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 23:04:12 -0500

There are different kinds of silence.

The loud ones that press against your eardrums, where you don’t want to move because everyone else is going to stare at whoever makes the first move.

The cold ones where you’re on the phone, but you know the other person isn’t listening.

The dead ones, because you know there isn’t a response coming but you don’t want to give up.

And the warm moments of silence, when there’s no sound going over the wire, but you know the other person’s listening at the end, so you just listen to each other’s silences across the line and breathe in their presence.

Embrace the silence!

Fill the gaps in the air with the weight of your mutual presence, exchanging your silence for theirs. If you keep interrupting it with other things more tangible, the silence never has a chance to fill its place.

Happy Transfer Day

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 13:58:28 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

Sometimes when I look at the window, I can almost imagine that there is still a sky behind it. Even in the nicer rooms in this side of the hospital, the windows don’t quite get the sky brightness right all the time, and most of the time, the screen is a little too dim, and the clouds are a little too bright. But a few times a day, if I look up at the right angle and let my eyes pull focus out into the distance, I can let myself believe that I’m looking through the wall into the atmosphere, where the clouds are pushed along by hurried airfronts rather than calculated from my patient records to match the doctors’ recommendations for my preferred climate in the room.

A soft knock on the door interrupts my trail of thought, and I turn away from the window to find a nurse pushing the door ajar and shuffling in, laptop in hand.

“Hi Mr. Yu, I’m here for your scheduled transfer,” he says.

He pulls up a small stool from the back wall and sits down next to my bed. I don’t have much to say, so I just smile and nod to let him know he can go on.

“Before we start with the transfer, we’ll have to go through the standard consent procedure. You’re probably familiar with most of it, but if you have any questions, please stop me at anytime.”

I nod again, and sit up a little to show I’m listening. He pulls out some paperwork from his bag, and starts reading.

“Mr. Owen Yu, I’m Mike Whitman from the Seattle Medical Center’s transfers and end-of-life department, and I’m here for your transfer scheduled for 3PM on March 1, 2221. We’ve got on file that you’ve already reviewed all your preferences ahead of time, so we’ll just do some final checks and flip the switch… so to speak.”

He turns the page over to what looks like more standard legal copy, and continues.

“The Voluntary End-of-Life Image Transfer procedure will make a computerized scan of your brain and re-flash your PCS device with the new image. The procedure will require you to be placed into a state of medically induced coma for a few hours, after which you’ll find yourself awake again in the virtual environment. To you, the gap will feel like a few seconds of lapsed memory.

“I will be overseeing the transfer procedure on your behalf, as governed by the Right to Live Act, and authorized by your signature last week. After the procedure, the PCS hardware will be removed from your person and moved to long-term operations in our center. Of course, once you’re back up in the system post-transfer, we’ll be able to chat more about your plans going forward. Any questions so far?”

These conversations always seemed such a strange blend of melancholy and nonchalant. Like bidding farewell to an old friend before moving away, knowing they’ll be right behind you. It all feels quite calm.

“I actually do have one question,” I say. “So, the data in my PCS – I mean, I’ve been carrying it all my life. it’s got all my photos and videos in it. If you put me in it, I guess… what happens to all that data? Do I… do I remember it?”

“Ah, your data in your personal devices will be securely backed up to the cloud and available to you in your next life. You’ll access it through a PCS, but obviously, it’s a virtual PCS you’ll be using as a virtual person. It’s all quite meta, really.” He chuckles, and then returns to the script. “But yes, you’ll keep your data. But you will be yourself. You don’t get new memories. Anything else?”

“No, I think that makes sense.” I thank him for the explanation.

“In that case, Mr. Yu, in sixty seconds, I’ll initiate the transfer. Your time of biological death will be recorded as 3:01:23PM on March 1, 2221, and your age of death as 218 years and 4 months. Any objections?”

“No, that all sounds good with me, thanks.”

Some people have been known to code their biological death dates to mean things. Some make them passwords, some make them match their birthday, a recently transferred mathematician was in the news for aligning them with the digits of e. I didn’t much care, frankly. Numbers are numbers.

“In that case, I’ll ask you to lean back and close your eyes. This’ll feel like light anesthesia.” says the nurse.

I lean back and close my eyes, my head sinking back into the pillow. I hear a scribble of a pen next to me, and then some typing on the keyboard.

“Goodnight sir, happy transfer,” I hear through the silence.

And then click.

Pause, and then the familiar voice again,

“Welcome to Seattle Long-term Care Mr. Yu. Congratulations on your arrival. The year here is 2019. We’ve got a cab waiting for you outside.”

I open my eyes and find myself in a hotel lobby, bustling with people who seem to be no less confused than I, all standing around next to their own patrons in the lobby. No doubt other rookie transfer-ees. Beyond the small crowd is a doorway leading out to the driveway, and above that, a clear sky, clouds and birds and all.

Questions in science, questions of science

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 16:14:40 -0500

In technology (defined broadly), there are questions that are evergreen and related to the nature of science itself, and questions that are temporary and specific to the technological capabilities of a given era.

A simple example of a temporary question is when Moore’s law for scaling semiconductor performance no longer holds. It’s an interesting question, and one that has huge economic, industrial, and scientific consequences, but it’s a question whose answer is time-limited in its utility. Humanity will figure it out at some point, and then the question will no longer be useful or interesting.

Another interesting question is whether the computing technology humans have access to today is the only computing technology in the universe, and we’ve discovered it, or whether there are in fact infinitely many different computational powers we can harness, of which we’ve only discovered one.

A more extreme example is whether humans will ever become immortal. This question seems unsolvable, but I’ve argued before that this question really only has two answers: either humans will become immortal, or die trying, and face a species-wide extinction event. In a way, this question is also time-limited. We will either figure it out, or never have a chance to.

I don’t mean to dismiss the gravity and intellectual value of these deep questions about technology and humanity – these are obviously important and valuable scientific questions. But my point is that they are temporary, and they are concerned with the capabilities of science rather than the nature of it. The question of immortality is fundamentally about what science does today rather than about what science is, and what its fundamental limitations are.

Science cannot offer us an answer to these kinds of questions of how humans interact with science as an emergent phenomenon of intelligence. The answer is extra-scientific – exists outside of science itself. These questions are the most interesting for me to think about, because they speak to our ultimate fate as a strange little rare phenomenon in this universe, and they speak to the timeless nature of knowledge and science, as opposed to its temporary effects in this small corner of the universe we call home.

Thanks to Teresa Pho, whose thoughtful conversations with me sparked some ideas in this post.

Wine, poetry, or virtue, as you wish

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 08:11:31 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

I’ve been thinking about Romanticism recently. Ironically, not the Valentine’s Day kind, the capital-R Romanticism. I wanted to share a couple of pieces of writing related to it that have found a way into my notes this week. First, from the French poet Charles Baudelaire:

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

Be Drunk…. In a much different tone, author John Green says:

… nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.

Taylor Swift announced a new upcoming album (well, a re-recording of her old album) last week, and every time I get excited about her music, someone says to me, “Linus, you must be a Romantic.” And I think I am? No, I think I am. I like feeling things to the farthest extent they can be felt. Otherwise, what’s the point of having feelings?

There are so many inspiring things around us in this world that implore us to feel, that to be uninspired and unfeeling against it must take active work. So whenever I feel uninspired or unmoved, I don’t look for things that could move me. Instead I try ask: What am I doing to ignore and block out of my life the vibrance of it all?

Then I take a sip, try to fall gently back under the influence – of wine, poetry, or virtue – and get back to the work of feeling it all.

Don't Hold Me

Fri, 12 Feb 2021 10:04:27 -0500

Don’t Hold Me by Dean Lewis, covered acoustically on the guitar.

Can't Help Falling in Love

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 07:58:15 -0500

Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley, a cappella arrangement (if you can call it that) by me.

I Won't Give Up (and other things)

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 13:26:22 -0500

I Won’t Give Up, by Jason Mraz, plus some improvisations and ad-libs as I felt so compelled. A vocal + piano cover, me on both.

Life as a studio

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 06:53:11 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

By a studio, I mean a space for creative work that has grown and accreted the right tools in the right places over time. It’s a larger version of the “desktop” analogy. Looking at someone’s studio can tell you a lot about the work they do, their sources of inspiration, the kinds of mistakes they make and the thinking process they go through.

Studio spaces aren’t limited to artists and craftspeople. As a person who makes things with code, I have a more abstract “studio” space, inside my computer. In the digital space where I work, I’ve placed the scripts, shortcuts, and programs most important to me at an arm’s reach, so to speak. They’re referenced by short two or three-letter shortcuts I can type, or small websites I can go to in an instant. The tools that I only use rarely are less accessible.

The neat thing about a studio space is that it’s both intentionally invented and organically discovered over time. Certainly, anyone who moves their work into a studio will try to arrange the furniture and the lights and the tools to fit their workflows best. Maybe this means installing soundproofing on the walls for a videographer, or designating a corner of room for a greenscreen and some professional lighting.

But the most interesting parts of someone’s workspace are always the things they didn’t intentionally arrange from the start. Maybe it’s the way the door is always propped open so you can go on a walk to think a few times a day. Maybe it’s how half the windows are covered in post-it notes. You might like to have a wide, clean slate to start every idea from, or your table might be cluttered with sketches and pencils and little napkin drawings you brought back from the cafe when an idea struck and you couldn’t write it down anywhere. These discovered aspects of a space tell the best stories.

I’ve been thinking about how we can treat our task of designing and discovering our lives as if we were building a studio for our life’s work. How can we design life if we think of each of ourselves as a one-person creative studio producing little pieces of work over time? There are major aspects you can control, like where you work, who you let into your “studio” to work with you. You can fill the atmosphere in your life with things that inspire you creatively. But so much of the details that make the vibe of the “space” of life is discovered. They are the result of a hundred little micro-decisions we make on a daily basis.

We draw the outlines of a picture with the big, milestone-making decisions, and the little choices we make every day color them in over time. What small choices are you coloring with today?

The Experience Collectors

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 23:30:55 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

There is an Afterlife, but it’s not what you expect…

In this Afterlife, you enjoy the rest of eternity without worrying about scarcity of any sort. You have as much money, time, and energy as you need to do whatever you please—provided that what you want to do is something you’ve done already. In the Afterlife, you can only do things you’ve done in your previous life, with the people you knew in your previous life, but as many times as you want, for as long as you want.

The Living, unbeknownst to you, are Experience Collectors. As we were once, you are granted a generous century to fill with any number of experiences and people for you to enjoy for the rest of your posthumous life. Every stranger you friend, every new experience, every new piece of knowledge… you collect them into your lifetime. Once you die, you’ll be reborn into an Afterlife populated exactly and only with the things in your Experience Collection. This is how I arrived where I am today.

We didn’t know this when we first arrived Here.

The first generation of souls to arrive reveled in the surplus and familiarity. We enjoyed living the lives we were used to for decades longer without worry. We lived in the same homes, enjoyed the same meals, and occasionally visited their old acquaintances in the periphery of their living memories. But decades passed, and we felt something was off.

There was nothing new happening. Nothing new to try, nowhere new to go. The restaurant menus were washed out with blank spaces hiding listings of dishes we would never taste. There were no new strangers on the streets or walking the park. There are films and books and songs here, but only the ones we’ve heard before.

It took us many decades to notice this, because most of us rarely ventured outside of our usual paths. We would occasionally note how the streets were emptier or life felt more boring, but only recently did we piece together the details. Immediately, we got to work looking for a way to warn the souls fortunate enough to roam our erstwhile worlds of novelty and possibility.

If this message reaches you, it will mark my world’s first invention – a way to speak to the Living. If this works, that gives us hope that it may be possible for us to discover and make new things again. Find new roads to take, new people to tell us new stories, new flavors and songs to wash over our senses. We are getting to work promptly.

In the meantime, if you are alive, remember the power you have today, to do new things and meet new people. To be entertained by new stories and delighted by new ideas. Collect them diligently into your life. The immensity of your freedom may be overwhelming, but the mundanity of familiarity is crushing.

There are no caveats in our story. Only hindsight. We look forward to hearing your stories when you join us in your next life.

Truth and Love

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 03:10:19 -0500

Some time ago you asked me if I would come to church with you every week, and I said, “of course.”

You didn’t ask, but in that moment, I imagined you asking, “Would you believe for me?”

And I imagined myself pausing a little to consider the implications of me pulling the very basis of my reality of life out from under me.

“Of course,” I repeated in my imagination.

Living with you was better than living the truth. You were my truth.

Why practice makes perfect

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 01:20:16 -0500

There are higher levels of thinking to any skill. Practicing a skill is really the process of teaching your brain to think at higher levels of abstraction.

A beginner chess player only thinks in terms of individual moves and positions. Move the king here, the rook there, the knight over there. But when you watch a grand master play the game, the individual moves barely register. Instead, the grand master thinks in terms of higher-level patterns – the English opening, the Sicilian, a castling. A chess players must project the game into the future in their mind, and intuit the moves and plays that will lead them closer to a win. In this task, being able to imagine the future of the game in terms of moves and patterns, rather than individual moves, is a powerful advantage. Veteran players can see patterns and project them out several plays into the future, and that practiced skill helps them see more from the game than what meets the eye.

When I improvise on the piano, what happens in my head is similar – I’m imagining the way the melody and underlying voices will move forward before I play then. I hear them in my head, and in real-time, pick the combination that sounds the best to actually play. It would be mind-bending to try to do this by analyzing the music theory behind notes and harmonies at the level of individual notes. Instead, I imagine the progression of music in terms of patterns: licks, scales, arpeggios, repeated themes, chord progressions. Each pianist has their own mental library of patterns and musical idioms to pick from, and this is what gives each player their unique “style”.

This applies in other creative tasks, too.

Writing can feel like lexicographical improvisation. I hear in my head the many ways my sentence or paragraph could go, and I pick among them the ones that sound the best. Speaking is the same way, but with an extra temporal aspect of when to pause, when to slow down, and when to speed up.
Athletes in competitive team sports also think in terms of plays and runs, not just movements. They learn these plays during their practice not only to communicate during the game, but to practice breaking down and understanding a game better.
Driving a car is also a combination of higher-level actions like lane changes, turns, taking the on-ramp, and U-turns. When at the wheel, you aren’t conscious of when exactly you’re pressing down on the gas pedal and how much you’re turning the wheel. Instead, you’re performing the basic “plays” of driving.

I call these higher-level chunks of skill “strides”. An expert improvisational pianist isn’t thinking much faster than an amateur, but they can hear the music they might play in longer strides in their mind. A chess grandmaster isn’t only thinking much faster than a beginner player, they’re thinking ahead in the game in longer strides. When I practice, I try to see the longer strides of the thing I’m practicing.

Practice helps your brain see and think in terms of longer strides of motion. This is why practice makes perfect.

Enchanted mechanisms of life

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 07:54:11 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I’m glad it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

In the short story Exhalation, Ted Chiang tells the tale of a scientist in a civilization of mechanical beings, powered by a supply of pressurized air supplied from deep underground. The scientist who tells us of this air-powered world learns upon a self-dissection of his brain that his thoughts are powered by delicate mechanisms in his brain constructed with thousands of thin gold leaves, vibrating and waving together in distinct patterns, powered by the air he breathes in. To him, and to all the other golden beings of his world, thoughts are merely gold leaves fluttering in ephemeral formations in the wind. A mechanical miracle reflecting dreams into motion like clockwork.

Sir Charles Sherrington draws quite a different image of the human brain in Man on his Nature. He describes a brain waking from sleep:

The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.

Now the brain is a great programmable loom, shuttles weaving patterns back and forth in ephemeral strokes upon the textiles of time.

Today, we have artificial brains of a different flavor, AI systems like MuZero that replicate the capabilities of intelligence with pure information flowing across silicon—intelligence as a symptom of mathematics. Images and thoughts manifest as probabilities and matrices of numbers encoded into electric pulses. Perhaps this is the way we’ll finally build mechanical analogues that match the power of our minds, perhaps not. But if not, it seems clear to me that we’ll continue imagining new mechanisms for consciousness until we discover the source of the magic that drives all of this. All of our experience, our memory, our dreams.

The wind-powered mechanical scientist closes his story with this—

Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.

Today, I relish in the miracle that is the enchanted loom, the fluttering clockwork of golden leaves, the electric dreams that flow across the silicon in my brain. And I stare in fascination at our aspiration to build these enchanted mechanisms of life ourselves.

Laying bricks, building castles: sketches aren't perfect

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 05:38:57 -0500

I came across this quote recently, by Mark Kennedy:

I don’t know what people expect to see what they look in a sketchbook, but they always seem mighty disappointed. I think people expect to see what they would see in a Hollywood version of a sketchbook. Whenever someone is sketching from life in a movie, it’s always supposed to look tossed off and effortless, but it’s really some totally finished and labored-over drawing that some artist spent hours rendering.

Any real sketchbook is full of misfires, false starts and stumbles, with a few successes sprinkled here and there. If you were capable of doing a perfect drawing every time, you wouldn’t need to carry a sketchbook!

Most of your time working on anything remotely novel will be spent in the sketchbook, in shades of misfires and false starts and dead ends. This doesn’t mean you’re bad, or that you’re unproductive, but that you’re making progress. Such is the nature of making anything new, and we should embrace the rough sketches that make the final product possible.

This idea also triggered a thought I had from a conversation a few days ago, about fighting perfectionism when working on projects.

As my portfolio of side projects and writing have grown, I’ve stopped thinking of each individual project or blog post as a single piece of work, and instead started thinking of each piece of work as contributing to the whole of my body of work, my collective opus.

In this mindset, I’m never working on a single side project or blog; I’m working on laying another brick onto the bigger-picture piece of work that is my collective body of work since the start of my career. Each blog post doesn’t stand alone for me, but is just the latest piece in my archive of posts that chronicle what I think about and how I’ve changed over time. My latest side project isn’t just a side project by itself, but the latest piece in the universe of tools and projects I’ve made to decorate the way I interact with my world in my life.

Since I’ve started thinking about work this way, I’ve noticed two changes in my mindset.

First, misfires and mistakes aren’t failures, they’re bricks laid onto my history of work just as valuable as the projects that worked, because the goal of each project becomes bigger than just competing it; the goal of each project is to help me build a better next project. Mistakes fulfill that purpose just as well as well-done projects.

Second, no individual project has to be perfect. Perfectionism can get in the way of “shipping” a particular iteration of a project, because there’s bound to be something missing or imperfect after even the most thorough revisions. But if your goal is to produce the best total body of work you can over time, it doesn’t matter as much that this particular piece is imperfect, because all the projects that came before this one are also imperfect, and so probably will all the projects that come in the future. The point isn’t to build something perfect, but to leave a trail of high-quality work that becomes better over time.

I think this is an inspiring and constructive way to conceptualize the purpose of any creative work – your job isn’t to create the perfect something, but to lay the next brick on a castle, a body of work that will only be completed by your passing. Looking at it this way, perfection and mistakes are hardly important. Instead, you should simply do your best, learn as much as you can, and keep moving forward. Lay the next brick.

Hills beyond the horizon

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 16:05:11 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

What makes a great conversation?

Certainly there’s some degree of give and take, listening to the voice of your interlocutor and responding in kind. You want to move fluidly between topics, avoid jumping from idea to random idea without transition. In the best of times, it feels like exploring a mental landscape that you share with your partner-in-conversation, mapping out unknown territory shared by the two of you and no one else.

But the best conversations I’ve had are often the ones punctuated by randomness and non sequiturs.

In artificial intelligence, there is a problem called the hill climbing problem. One way to frame artificial intelligence is as a search for efficient ways to optimize some goal value, so computer scientists sometimes model a goal “function” as a kind of a terrain, where you start someplace in space, and you explore the terrain to “climb” up hills until you find the tallest peak. (AI experts—forgive me for my oversimplification for illustrative purposes!)

A naive, easy solution is to simply take each step in the direction that increases your elevation. This leads you to one peak, but in all likelihood, it’s probably not going to be the tallest one. You get stuck in a local maximum, the tallest point in some neighborhood that ignores some taller peak farther away. It turns out better solutions involve some random chanced exploration. An approach called simulated annealing involves making random, obviously bad moves once in a while that might land you closer to a taller hill.

I think navigating a conversation sometimes feels like this—you’re trying to find pockets of common interests that can spur interesting dialogue and ideas, and if you only move from topic-to-related-topic, it’s easy to get stuck in mildly interesting “small hills”. Once in a while, you need some randomness, some total out-of-left-field interjection or idea to help you find more exciting ideas to jam on.

Navigating the terrain of a career can also be similar. Chris Dixon has written about this exact framework for navigating career paths.

I think creative work can also feel this way sometimes. If you want to create something new, you can’t just iterate from the first decent idea you have, you need to spend some time jumping around different ideas, accepting the chance that you’ll have some truly terrible ones, to explore the terrain fully before you pick the tallest hill to climb.

When we choose our next steps by only taking steps upwards, we keep ourselves blind to the complexity of the terrain that can lie before us, the troughs and hills that make life interesting. Exploration is about chances. If we keep ourselves open to the occasional game of chance or random jump to something new, we might stumble into even grander landscapes stretching out before us.

Looking back at my writing in 2020

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:29:24 -0500

I didn’t think “a year in recap” or anything like that was worth taking up real estate on my main blog, but was curious what I wrote and what people read most of my writing in 2020, so here we are.

What I wrote

I write in three places today:

thesephist.com, which is my main blog
dotink.co, which started out as a website for my programming language Ink, but is now where I dump all my technical writing
linus.coffee, which is this site. It’s new this year, and I made it to put writing that I felt was less polished or didn’t fit my main blog’s themes. It also ended up being a place to put my art and music.

Across these three places, I wrote somewhere around 135k words this year, 81k of those in my main blog across somewhere around 75 blog posts. This is more than I’ve written in any previous year, and I’m happier with the quality of my writing I’ve done than in any previous year. I think that’s a big win, especially the consistency with which I’ve written.

What people read

Here’s a list of the top 20-ish blog posts that people read on my blog this year, according to analytics. This is probably a slight underestimate, because some big fraction of my visitors uses some form of adblock.

Zooming in specifically on the top 10 posts, half of the top 10 posts earned their popularity by being on the front page of Hacker News for a day. The others found their popularity by being shared in other newsletters or forums around the web. Specifically, the two most-read posts, on workflows and tools and finding focus, both found their popularity on Hacker News, where they rose to #1 and #5 respectively. It seems like being in the top ranks on that site earns you somewhere around 15-20k extra visits pretty consistently. I also saw this with a few other posts that experienced similar boosts.

It seems that people mostly enjoyed reading my thoughts on two big topics: (1) tools, like programming languages, designing tools around workflows, and working on side projects, and (2) interesting frameworks for setting goals for your life. I’m sure this trend will continue into 2021.

Jobs to find the unknown unknowns

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 15:54:08 -0500

There are a class of occupations where the job of the worker is to know and anticipate the unknown unknowns of a situation or domain.

Aircraft safety engineers and investigators, for example, are tasked with anticipating emergency situations or failure modes of complex machines (aircrafts) that we might not have discovered to even be possible yet. Because commercial airliners are engineered to such rigorous standards of safety (exceptions like the 737 MAX notwithstanding), most aviation accidents these days are caused by failure modes that previously were not even considered in the design process, like multiple engines or safety backups failing, fueling mistakes, or miscommunication during takeoff and landing between planes on the runway. The job of safety engineers and investigators is to consider these unknown unknowns.

Venture investors are also tasked with understanding unknown unknowns. In early stage venture, the market is usually saturated with business ideas that are certain to succeed already, and the founders that seek investments are working on ideas that aren’t obviously right. The job of the early-stage investor then is to ask, “what do these founders know that everyone else in this space doesn’t?” They are looking for unknown unknowns, the answers to questions everyone else in the market is not yet asking.

Cryptographers are also quite adept at this challenge. The mathematics that underlie modern cryptography is often provably safe. The main challenge of cryptography engineers is not necessarily to prove or disprove the correctness of mathematics that underlie cryptosystems, but to anticipate ways that factors outside mathematics can compromise the guarantees of an implementation of a cryptographic algorithm. Common attacks on modern cryptosystems are often “side-channel” attacks, things like abusing the speed of computation, exploiting certain details of the hardware executing the code, or even using sounds and radio waves emitted by electronics executing secure code to leak secret information. The job of a cryptography engineer is to anticipate these unknown unknowns, and ask questions about factors that nobody else is asking to assess whether a cryptosystem is secure enough for a particular use case.

Jobs that are about anticipating unknown unknowns are often “professional question-askers”. Their main task is exploration and learning, constantly. Their job is probably the most immune to automation, because their work is already mostly about continually making themselves obsolete, and finding new problems to solve.

I’m curious what similarities are shared between people who thrive in these kinds of jobs.

What does art do?

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 14:11:26 -0500

Science improves our ability to control and predict the future. Music stirs emotion. Cooking produces food. What does art do?

I think one reason this is an interesting question is that art usually produces an artifact, so when we think of “what is art” we think of the artifact, like Jackson Pollock’s art being the paintings or Toni Morrison’s writing being the “art” of her writing.

But in science, we don’t take the conclusion of a research paper like “X gene has a Y% correlation with this phenotype” and say “this is science.” Science is more a steady stream of work that’s self correcting and self-modifying. I think art is probably closer to that. It’s a continuous stream of work that exists beyond a single artifact or artist, and its total effect on the world in inhabits is to self-invalidate and redefine what art is. The point of science isn’t to “do science”, it’s to understand some part of nature better. The point of art isn’t to “create art” per se, it’s to be a conduit to some idea the artist has. But we lump them all together because it’s a continuous stream of work through history that builds on each other somewhat and it’s convenient.

I think art creates space in the world for things that otherwise don’t have permission to exist. It’s kind of a circular definition but I think that’s why it’s so hard to define. What art does is not necessarily what it is, but what other things aren’t. As such, it’s constantly expanding and changing to fit around and fit through the circumstances of its time.

If I had to draw an analogy to the motivating examples at the top, I would say if music speaks to emotion, art speaks to your memory, and your human experience as a whole.

Thanks to John Forbes for sparking this question in my mind that led to this note.

Timeglass

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 11:49:47 -0500

Timeglass is my second original album of compositions and improvisations on the piano. It was recorded in Berkeley, California in December 2020.

The album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and most other streaming services. You can also listen to it on YouTube.

Track list

Future Elegy
Love, Please Remember Me
Ataraxia
Reunion
Morning Song
Precipice
Unraveling
Neverending

evermore, and other beautiful things

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 08:36:17 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

If all evidence of civilization on Earth was destroyed, and humans had to re-build society from the ground up, what would be different? Feynman reckons that pivotal scientific moments, like the discovery of the atom, will still happen in the same way. Perhaps mathematics will be similarly rediscovered.

Someone told me once in response to this question, no artwork would ever be recreated. The art we create – music, stories, dance, film – isn’t a fundamental element of the universe, or even of humanity. It’s unique to each artist. If you choose to create art, you leave something in the world that has never had a chance to exist before, and will never again have a chance to exist. There will never be another Beatles or Studio Ghibli or Picasso. Art, in its infinite variations of originality, is cosmically unique in a way the sciences will never be. Art immortalizes human experiences that would otherwise vanish in time.

As I’ve contemplated the implications, this idea has profoundly changed how I think about creative work.

If science is an attempt to understand nature, art is frequently an attempt to make sense of human stories. The job of an artist is to explore and discover the world, to feel your own life deeply on your own terms, on behalf of your reader or listener or audience until your glasses become tinted with color, and then to lend those colored lenses to the reader, so they may see the world as you do.

The inimitable Taylor Swift released a surprise album evermore this week (I already have my favorites), and it has me thinking about music and songwriting and storytelling. Her music seems to accumulate stories and memories with a kind of gravity that extends across space and time.

Take a glance at any forum or website breaking down her songwriting, and the discussions and annotations are thick with comments not just making sense of her words, but adding on layers of other anecdotes from her fans about friendship and love and family and heartbreak. Accumulating memories, like a once-in-history cosmic magnet for stories. This is one of the reasons her music lives on in the lives of her fans—her music begins as her own stories, but becomes a place where her fans can reinvent and reimagine them around their own lives, creating a million fractal refractions of the same words and melodies vibrating together in time.

I once ruminated on the responsibility of a [song]writer:

Go out and live a life of color, so that new feelings and insights swirl in your tinted lenses. And when you come back and sit down to spill those colors onto paper, may each action of your key bear those colors. May the action of your words transport your reader to ever more colorful worlds, because that, ultimately, is the job of a writer.

and I think few people in the world color our universe with such poetic patina and warmth than Taylor Swift.

Oh, also, it’s her birthday today! Happy birthday, Taylor.

Pushing Daisies

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 09:00:10 -0500

Pushing Daisies, by Loote. A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar.

How do you get so much done?

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 02:19:15 -0500

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how I manage to get so much done – side projects, essays and blog posts, music production, so on, so forth.

I think people expect me to have some rigorous and productivity-boosting tactic they can employ to be more prolific, but that’s not really true. I don’t really have great tactical advice to stay productive more of the time. What I have are some ideas on how you can maximize your creative output, despite not being productive most of the time you’re awake.

I try hard to create long stretches of uninterrupted time. So I have 2-3 days set for meetings/calls a week and try to get at least 2 days a week where I have nothing on my calendar unless something’s an emergency. I end up making lots of creative progress on those days.
I try to work atomically. i.e. when I start something, I try to finish it in one session of work. Sometimes this requires breaking down larger projects carefully but for most blogs and small side projects I get things done in one sitting/session (up to around ~8 hours if overnight). I think this is helpful because you don’t have a million things going on simultaneously, which helps focus.
I don’t do a lot outside of coursework and Dorm Room Fund these days. So I end up with more time to myself. I do sacrifice my grades somewhat but I think I probably don’t have to – I just do for my mental sanity / stress control.

Overall, I spend less of my total hours working on things than probably most people who get a lot done, but I try to have bursts of time where I am 10x more productive than most people, and I try to create many such bursts, whether by a stroke of inspiration or carefully considered planning or some combination.

I also think there’s a certain degree of operational efficiency that comes with having been writing / making side projects for years alongside work and school. Being efficient is a survival tactic, and I am very fast these days.

Three kinds of computing

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 02:19:07 -0500

I used to think that the classical computer, the universal Turing machine in our pockets and backpacks, was a one-of-a-kind invention. There is the human history before computers, and the human history after software; before, we are mortal, and after we are divine.

I don’t think so anymore.

Computers are powerful because they are universal machines, mechanical solutions to some generalizable large abstract class of problems. In the case of classical computers / Turing machines, this is generally the set of problems solvable in polynomial time, which turns out to be many problems we encounter day to day. But there is no rule that this is the only kind of generalizable problem category in the universe, and I think we should be open to the idea that the computer revolution will happen infinitely many times in human history, for infinitely many categories of problems, fueled by new kinds of computers – universal informational machines – each time.

I think there are three such examples I see today from my vantage point.

Classical Turing machines

This is the “classical” computer, the microprocessors that run smartphones and laptops today. They solve deterministic digital problems with the capability to simulate Turing machines. We know the benefits of these machines well.

Deep learning

Deep learning is a fundamentally different kind of universal machine from traditional software. The way deep learning models solve problems is completely different from the mechanics of a classical algorithm, and DL models generalize to an entirely different category of problems previously intractable with classical computers.

DL is also definitely a universal machine, an information-fueled machine on which we can design algorithms and software to solve problems. I think the invention of deep learning is much closer to the invention of digital computers than to the invention of the Internet. Despite deep learning models currently being simulated mostly inside classical computers, I think DL is a new category of computation.

Quantum Turing machines

Even more nascent than DL is quantum computing. The category of problems solvable by QC are different than the solution set of classical computers or DL, but quantum computers are also universal machines, capable of solving a general class of problems that can be formulated in terms of a basic primitive of computation, the quantum Turing machine.

Just as classical computers trivialized data size and DL is trivializing pattern recognition and machine learning, QC will trivialize a whole general class of problems and give humanity a new capability over information.

I also wonder whether there are substrates for computation just becoming possible that I haven’t considered yet. Nucleotides and enzymes – the DNA – seems like a rich bed for building new universal computation primitives that we are just now beginning to tame.

As each generation of computation becomes sufficiently advanced and omnipresent, society will look different, and the successive generations will look like gods to the previous ones. But the difference is just one extra kind of a universal machine, one extra kind of a computer – generalizable, information machines made of data.

In search of spectacle

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 08:35:15 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

I don’t remember much about how I got there or where I was going, but I found myself on the back of a bus last night, squeezed in between seats that just barely fit my legs and my bag. Even on the comfortable ride, I could tell the road was barely paved by the way the kicked-up gravel clackered against the sides of the bus. The bus growled on, riding the line on the two-lane road that seemed to stretch forever out into the ocean in front of us, and into the mountains behind us. The road was the blackest thing you could see for miles, because everything else was covered in snow.

Highway stretching into the mountains, from Iceland this March

The snow sucked out any sound from the air, in the way snow does in the winter, and the silence was chased away only by the engine on the bus, and the North Atlantic gusts that occasionally shook the windows. Above us, dawn was welcoming daylight, but it hadn’t quite arrived yet, and the sky looked like a perfect morning for northern lights.

As I always try to do on long bus rides, I had picked a window seat on the right side of the vehicle – not that it would have mattered anyway, since most seats were empty. But leaning against the window, I could see the snow more clearly, and the ice that poked out from underneath. They tell you that ice is really blue, not white, and the reason you don’t see it is because most ice we see is small. And that’s really true – the ice jutting out from the ground glowed blue, not white, like they emanated some defiant energy not to melt in the approaching daylight.

But the twilight did turn to dawn in the end, and the arc of the sun peeked above the horizon, spilling refracting colors into the frozen atmosphere. And in that spur of the moment, I remember contemplating how strange it was that this place – in the small seat on the back of a bus rumbling through the ice at dawn somewhere in the Arctic circle – could feel so warm and so cold at the same time.

And that’s when I woke up from the dream, the image still glowing in my mind. Now, dear reader, I’m passing this image onto you. I believe in the force of powerful images, of spectacle, the scenes and memories that can be felt more than just recalled. An ember in a black forest. A ray of light only visible in the dust cloud kicked up from the ground. I want to be moved by images, and I want to find more wherever I go. This is why I travel, and where I want to return when this is all over. Once again onto the road, eyes open for images that move, in search of spectacle.

I Like Me Better

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 08:00:16 -0500

LAUV never gets old~

A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.

How to get lots of ideas for side projects and writing

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 04:54:40 -0400

People ask me how I get so many ideas for interesting side projects and blog posts.

I think the best way to describe my growth as a writer/maker over time is that I’ve become more efficient at discovering and refining my own ideas.

There are always ideas floating around in your brain. Sometimes, it comes to you out of the blue in the shower. Sometimes, you’re reading the news over dinner and a particular combination of words sets off a lightbulb. Sometimes, you’re reading and a metaphor resonates with you, so you contemplate on it in the hopes that it leads to an interesting perspective on something else. The key is to pay attention to your own wandering mind, notice when good ideas pass by in your mind for a split second, and grab a hold of it and pin it down on your mental desk and don’t let go, until you can expand that idea into something more interesting or valuable.

There are fundamentally two knobs you can turn in the imaginary faucet of ideas.

The first is your creative input. This is a measure of the diversity and volume of interesting stories, knowledge, music, ideas, and advice you hear regularly. More and more, interesting ideas come to me as a combination of something I read or learned before, and an interesting metaphor or perspective I hear in the moment. The more quality, creative content you consume, the more source material you have from which your brain can synthesize new creative ideas. The diversity of content matters here. You’re going to have much better luck producing creative ideas when you combine knowledge or stories about completely different, unrelated topics, than by combining related existing ideas with each other.

The second knob is your creative efficiency, which I define as the fraction of interesting ideas that may occur to you, that you capitalize on. The human mind has tens of thousands of thoughts a day. Because of that staggering volume, most of the time, we’re trained to tune things out and dismiss internal mental side-conversations. But I think prolific creatives are able to counteract that urge to stay focused and hook onto an interesting ideas whenever it passes them by, and then learn to develop it into an insight or a piece of work. Lots of writers I talk to who are starting out tell me that they have ideas that are “mildly interesting” – not completely obvious, but not insightful. The best writers and artists and storytellers have a skill of developing these mildly-interesting ideas and stories into something more profound or valuable, and I think this is a skill that comes only with practice.

Growth as a writer

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 09:15:48 -0500

I’ve talked to a few different people in the last week about growing as a writer, and the process of going from “I don’t think I have anything to write about, and it takes so long” to “I’m regularly writing about interesting topics.”

There’s lots to say about this journey, but I discovered one mental model that I really like. I think in that process of growth, there are three steps. In each step, your bottleneck for how much you write, and how efficiently you write, changes.

In the beginning, your bottleneck is simply finding the right words to write. You’re discovering your voice, finding the right length and cadence of writing in your life, and generally spending a lot of writing time figuring out how to communicate the ideas in your head in a way that’s nice to read, avoids ambiguities or tangents, and is clear to understand.
At some point, your bottleneck changes. You’re settling into your voice and the speed at which you think of words is no longer your bottleneck. Instead, your bottleneck is finding interesting explanations and telling compelling stories. Rather than operating at the level of words and sentences, you’re operating at the level of ideas. In this phase, your primary challenge as a writer is not how you write or what words you are connecting, but what you’re writing about, and how you get people interested. During this stage, you grow most quickly on becoming a better storyteller with more compelling narratives, and finding metaphors and phrasing that communicate your idea most accurately in an interesting way.
In the third stage, your main challenge is no longer about writing per se. Although you’re continuing to grow as a writer. Instead, you bottleneck to writing more is your rate of having good ideas and worthwhile insights. Ultimately, no matter how compelling the prose, writing is only as good as the ideas it communicates or the stories it tells. When you can produce writing that faithfully communicates your ideas at their best, your main challenge becomes having better ideas. This could be “better” in the sense that the ideas are more interesting or valuable or surprising, but your ideas can also be better by being more nuanced, more complex, or by referencing and building more thoughtfully on existing literature.

In response to this mental model, a friend asked me where they thought I was today. I think I’m somewhere between stages 2 and 3 – I feel quite comfortable turning my ideas into writing, and with some revision and friends’ feedback, I can usually produce writing that accurately communicates my ideas.

Regardless of where you feel you are, there’s only one way to keep improving. Consistency and quality, through time.

Say You Won't Let Go

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 05:44:50 -0500

A vocal cover, with me also on the acoustic guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.

Immortality is inevitable

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 03:20:36 -0500

On two assumptions:

As long as humans exist, we will want to live longer. This seems like a natural consequence of neo-Darwinist understanding of evolution. Perhaps there’s a way for genes to replicate without human longevity, but I doubt it.
Given indefinite time, technology will tend to improve in the long term. This prediction does not hold up in the short term – many times in human history progress was lost. But on the net, whenever society has allowed for progress, in the Antiquities, during the Enlightenment, and in the late 20th century to now, the pace of improvement in technology has been enough to offset those moments of regression. Technology will continue to improve.

Given these two assumptions, there are only two possible fates of the species:

We will go extinct, and be unable to pursue technological progress, or…
We will invent immortality.

If physics permits it, either we will learn to live forever, or we will die out before we find it.

I think this is an interesting inevitability, not just for its direct implications, but because you can also make a similar case for lots of other advancements in quality of life that humans naturally want, like a cure for cancer or ever-faster ways of traveling.

I think we should measure our technological and societal progress against these truly universal rules of progress, against what is fundamentally possible, rather than what is possible in the near term, because our intuitions of the latter tend to be quite wrong. It’s hard to predict what knowledge we will discover, and it’s relatively easy to predict what’s possible by currently known laws of nature. From this perspective, we are only scratching the surface of where we can be as a species of technology and masters of nature.

Understanding is ideas integrated over time

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 04:26:20 -0500

We can understand ideas horizontally, by studying the breadth of ideas available in a particular field. We can also study ideas vertically, by looking at the lineage of current ideas extending into the past. I think deep understanding of an idea requires both, but especially the latter.

A horizontal survey of ideas gives you awareness of the status quo, the cutting edge, the current consensus. But real understanding requires knowing how ideas are connected, and how flaws and advances in past ideas have contributed causally towards the emergence of ideas that currently hold consensus. Understanding, in this way, isn’t just a collection of ideas but ideas integrated over time.

For example, I could study the current state of the art of compiler design – the tools we use and optimization techniques implemented in modern compilers. But why do these designs exist? Why didn’t alternatives win? A good understanding of compilers would involve going back and understanding how past designs of compilers motivated the current ones, from the IBM 360 to GCC and LLVM, from 16-bit to 32-bit architectures, through the emergence of microcode and microarchitecture.

Another great case study is found in mathematics. Modern pure mathematics is sprawling, covering a thousand distinct subfields each of which require a graduate degree to properly understand. But most of modern mathematics emerges from a single family tree of ideas.

Lastly, I think this is the best way to understand political and economic theory. Not just studying the status quo, but understanding the motivating examples of ideas in politics and economics throughout history, and how the flaws in one caused the success of the next school of thought.

Understanding is two-dimensional, breadth and depth. Breadth gives you coverage, but depth gives you understanding.

Guiding ideas for gap years

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 16:23:17 -0500

This is the third note I’ve written about my ideas around gap years. I think that’s probably three too many, but I also seem to keep getting questions about it. The previous notes were more about the decision to take a gap year. This one is more about what to do with it – given the immense whitespace for opportunity and choice in a gap year, how do you make the most of it?

Some general heuristics I think are useful for navigating a time with a lot of whitespace, like a gap year.

Leave room for serendipity. Don’t prematurely pack your schedule, neither short term nor long term, with commitments during a gap year. The most interesting things always happen when you don’t have time for it. Leave room in your calendar, in your energy, for whatever exciting idea comes to you, so you can dive into it.
Way way over-emphasize meeting + staying in touch with great people. Relationships compound faster than any other asset, and as someone on a gap year doing something unconventional you have such a powerful story as a tool to start conversations with many people in and out of your career path. Use it while you can to put yourself in the middle of interesting conversations
Build something that you can own. This can be anything from a blog to a startup to a matchbox miniature model of a Boeing 747 or whatever the heck you want to do but won’t have time for in college. The biggest distraction in college isn’t time. It’s the fact that there is always something else to be done with a tighter deadline. There’s less of that at work, and building anything that you can own and call your own is going to be a great tool in your toolbelt as you meet more people and built up your story over time.

I think a good mindset to be in during a gap year is that everything you do is going to be fuel for your learning and motivation and personal narrative afterwards. So if there are decisions to be made to choose between two options, pick the one that’ll make for a better personal story, that’ll help you learn very rapidly about something you like, or something that can open up new opportunities even/especially if you can’t estimate it accurately from the start.

Realize you have a ton of time to do interesting things. A gap year isn’t some finite game. It’s a blank slate to plant your seeds for the long road ahead.

Airport nostalgia

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 15:34:27 -0500

This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.

There’s a particular flavor of silence that greets the early-morning travelers of an airport terminal. A kind of silence that whispers and echoes, waking you up from your nap on the train as you shuffle your way to a 7AM flight. The terminals are still mostly empty this early. The occasional cleaning crew sweeps by, only a few of the stores have even opened up yet. The only thing that disturbs the peace of orange sunrise pouring through the window is the occasional announcement ringing through the nearly empty terminals, reminding soon-to-be aeronauts of their imminent ascension beyond the clouds.

Whenever I was endowed with the odd luck of an early morning flight, I always noticed the kind of serenity hiding anticipation that awaited these terminals at daybreak. I’d break my slumber with a bagel and some overpriced orange juice, always available from the un-branded mini-stores that seem to have colonized airports around the world. I’d unwrap the bagel from the bag as the crinkling noise broke the silence of the terminal for a moment, then sit down in one of the many empty chairs near the boarding gate, counting down the minutes until the hum of idling jet engines would chase out my quiet.

As I sat in one of those airport benches, I’d sometimes notice how the early morning sunlight would stream nearly horizontally through the windows to hit the tall part of the wall opposite the windows, coloring with warmth a part of the wall that won’t feel that same light again until that time again tomorrow. A fleeting warmth, with a promise of a return.

There’s also a mix of anticipation in these pre-boarding moments of peace, awaiting immiment flight – being transported above the curvature of the Earth through the atmosphere, to find myself in an unfamiliar place, ready to explore, to breathe in new scents, to hear new sounds, to taste new flavors, and still, to greet the same warmth of the orange morning sun.

I miss that silence, drenched in orange sunrise, scented with anticipation, echoing through the terminal to greet the tired travelers—airport nostalgia.

On opaque titles

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 17:22:05 -0400

In the six years since I’ve started blogging regularly on the Web, my philosophy on titles have barely changed. I use opaque titles, at least on my main blog where I do the bulk of my longform writing. My titles often tend to be 2-3 words long, and symbolic, where you wouldn’t really know what the title meant until you read the post itself. Compared to the more popular writing style of self-explanatory titles that are complete thoughts or questions, I think this is worth explaining.

If you’re a writer in the business of efficiently delivering information to your readers, it makes a lot of sense for the title to be a complete thought – probably your thesis behind a piece, or your primary conclusion. Likewise, if you’re in the business of attracting strangers to read your piece out of curiosity, it makes sense to create a title that asks a compelling question or irresistible mystery. I think both of these approaches are common, especially in the business world. I’ve even written some of these kinds of pieces myself, for example, “Interesting things about the Lua interpreter” or “Experiments with word and letter frequencies in writing.” These posts are meant to deliver facts, and the title tells you what you can expect to find inside.

But most of the time, I’m not engaged in delivering facts or in attracting strangers to new pieces. As a writer, I care about two things: writing something people will come back to read and readily recommend to others, and doing so consistently. And if I can do that, I think it affords me the freedom to reclaim the title space of my writing as artistic real estate, rather than a headline at the whim of marketing best practices.

If I can be a writer people come back to with expectation of consistent quality, I don’t have to use the title to compel people to read – that responsibility is relegated to all of my previous posts. Instead, I can choose a title that I think best rounds out the post, or choose a symbolic idea or metaphor that I think forms the core of the blog post. The title becomes a part of the text, instead of supporting material.

This artistic license over the title lets me write posts called “Multidimensional tactility” and “Distance traveled” and “Price of purpose” and “Finding it.” These titles won’t work on their own, but they don’t have to. They’re a part of the post, not headlines or ledes. I can afford to be opaque, if I do my job right.

Quality and consistency are the two most significant traits of writing, and of writers. When we resort to titles to be read, I think we’re partly acknowledging that we’re not confident in the writing itself to speak and to attract new readers. There’s an implication in a flashy title that the title is larger than the post. I don’t want that – I want the title to be the tip of the iceberg, and I want to be confident enough in my words that I won’t feel compelled to let my titles market my writing on behalf of my own words.

Plato’s Republic and Apology. Marx’s Capital. Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Thiel’s Zero to One. There’s a pantheon of great literature whose title is merely a label, where the writing ranks beyond its title. They stand in startling contrast to How to Win Friends and Influence People or The High Growth Handbook. Not to disparage great books of the second kind, but I think this is proof enough for me that if the underlying ideas are good, and the text is well-written, the title becomes little more than a name. And if a title is to become a name for my words, why not pick one I love, rather than pick one to cater to the whims of strangers’ eyes?

Scars

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 10:34:15 -0400

How remarkable that scars heal,
that wounds close,
that broken bones mend,
so that we may be so bold to stand up at all.

At every cut, bruise, and fracture,
the army of molecules at work
rushing to begin the process
of re-building, re-learning, re-covering.

But scars don’t un-scar,
wounds don’t un-wound,
bones once broken don’t un-break.
Scars scar only forwards, never backwards.

How beautiful that scars heal,
so that we may attempt to do anything at all,
to stand over a cliff, curious eyes peering down,
to speak our minds, to run not walk, to fasten our hearts to strangers.

Best I'll Ever Sing

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 01:40:03 -0500

Best I’ll Ever Sing is one of my favorites from Maisie Peters, a British singer-songwriter. This is a vocal cover, with me also on guitar.

What do we need to know to start making a difference?

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 19:30:58 -0400

My Dorm Room Fund friend John Forbes asked me an interesting question today:

What’s requisite to knowing enough to go understand/(some cases) work with (close to) anything, well, at a white paper level?

In other words, what are the foundational kinds of knowledge that, if we have it, can accelerate the way we learn everything else?

Our conversation went many places, but I thought I’d extract an idea I landed on that seemed particularly elegant.

I think domain-specific knowledge falls into one of two categories:

Vocabulary knowledge, which is what’s required to understand experts and conversations in the field, and
What I’ll call “ontological” knowledge, which is understanding and knowledge of the facts and patterns that are the subjects of research in a field.

I think the prerequisite to understanding and making an impact in a field is vocabulary knowledge – you need to be able to understand and speak the language of the field’s experts and communicators. Once you have that, I think ontological knowledge can come from participating in the conversation of advancing the field forward in practice, while trying to attack problems you find interesting. I think med school / law school / internships are all about teaching people the vocabulary knowledge of their respective fields, and the real discovery and learning takes place in the profession.

I also think gaining ontological knowledge is much easier and less error-prone when done in the field, while actually doing the work, instead of from textbooks and curricula. Pure math has a notorious amount of vocabulary knowledge – almost learning a different language. By comparison, the vocabulary knowledge of “tech” and startups / venture capital is as much about the culture and network as about the actual words.

Scannability is king

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 22:43:14 -0400

Formatting your writing so key info can be scanned easily and read quickly is an extremely underrated skill.

Often, but not always, whether a text is formatted for scannability determines whether 10% or 100% of readers understand your main points.

The information formatting rule of thumb

In general, people visually scan text in the order:

Top of document > Start of sections > Bolded words > Start of lines

This implies that, for best scannability, we should place an overview at the top so the readers’ eyes can jump to the right section, then have every section/line starts with the key points, or bold them otherwise.

Writing scannable texts

I think good formatting needs to coexist with being concise. My m.o. is usually:

Write the shortest thing I can reasonably write.
Group text into sensible visual chunks.
Bold keywords only if they’re at risk of being missed otherwise.
Make a 1-2 sentence summary at the top of the document.

In longer pieces, headers and horizontal dividers are effective ways to do (2).

This note is an extended version of this Twitter thread on the same topic.

When is no-code useful?

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 06:55:20 -0400

To talk about what no-code is good for, we need to first take a digression on what makes no-code fundamentally different from “yes-code” software.

The grain of abstractions

Software – yes-code software – has been around for a while. One of the things we’ve learned as an industry is how to write software that gracefully evolves. We’re not perfect – sad, legacy systems still proliferate – but we as a technical industry have learned how to build and evolve software systems against changing requirements and constraints that span years and decades.

When we first solve a problem with software, we write some code against the constraints of that particular day. We don’t necessarily know how the problem is going to change. Maybe there will be different customers or stakeholders tomorrow, or maybe the product will expand to serve a related, but different, problem space. We need to be able to change software to accommodate changing circumstances without rewriting it, and that is fundamentally what software engineering is: how to change software systems. Change is the name of the game.

We’ve gotten decent at change. We’ve built tools like Git and patterns like continuous integration and code autoformatting to make it easier to change code and remain stable. We’ve learned how to operate large software teams, especially in open source. We’ve also learned to use better abstractions. Abstractions are conceptual wrappers that isolate different parts of a codebase – say, a data source from a user interface – so that one part may change while another doesn’t. In general we have started to figure out how to make the DNA of software systems resilient against the changing tides of time.

No-code seems to reject a lot of those learnings, for better or worse. I haven’t seen any no-code company or product that allows source control (and I’ve seen many no-code companies, but you’re welcome to prove me wrong.) I have yet to find no-code products that allow for natural construction of abstraction between layers of a no-code workflow. No-code software is also scarily ill-prepared for large scale development: we have software systems being worked on by tens of thousands of engineers – what does it look like for a team of 1000 engineers to be working on a set of thousands of no-code workflows? Chaos.

Traditional software has learned the abstractions and patterns that make software resilient and adaptable to change and scale. No-code software is not ready for changing constraints nor development scale.

Despite these limitations, I think no-code has a few niches where making tradeoffs in adaptability and scale allows no-code tools to be much, much better. So, given this, when is no-code useful?

1. Transitionary, ephemeral software

The obvious answer, and one I had before our conversation, was transitionary software, software with a defined lifetime. If your software system has a finite, pre-defined lifetime and team, it doesn’t need to worry about changing constraints or team growth. It just needs to worry about solving a problem well, now.

Lots of software has predictably finite lifetime: a product prototype for an early-stage company, a game or app used as a part of an interactive online ad, a quick sketch or solution to patch a particularly urgent problem in a product, an app built for an event or a conference or a recruiting cycle or a quarterly goal tracker… all of these are projects with a pre-defined, maximum lifetime. They don’t need to last or grow or change – they just need to work now, and by giving up some of the adaptability of software abstractions of code, no-code software benefits from way faster prototyping speed. This is a plus.

I think we see lots of finite-time software in transitions. Transitions from having no product to having a product, in a prototype. Transitions in the process of brainstorming a solution and trying multiple designs. Software with a finite shelf life is a good fit for no-code tools.

2. High-churn code

There’s another category of software for which long-term maintainability matters little – code with high churn.

By high churn, I mean that requirements are changing almost daily, and very little of the code written today will exist in a month or a quarter’s time. If the code you write today doesn’t have to last and evolve, because something new is going to take its place tomorrow, what matters is the speed to build, not resilience to change.

There’s lots of high-churn code in businesses. Marketing websites and landing pages, data pipelines for analytics, e-commerce storefronts, marketing campaigns, payment portals – requirements for these kinds of solutions change quickly enough that code is constantly being rewritten, and if code needs to be replaced more than it needs to last, no-code tools are a great fit.

Avoiding the same mistakes

I think “no-code” is a misnomer. It leads us to think that no-code software is the start of a trend in which general software will involve less coding, and software engineering will become easier. This is not the case. Software engineering is not about building solutions, it’s about evolving them. But change resiliency over time is not the focus of no-code tools, and I think that’s ok.

I think no-code tools are instead an extension of a different trend: reifying workflows. Business processes and workflows used to be documented in Word docs strewn about the office or on a shared folder, or even just passed down by oral tradition in companies. Now, we have tools that allow us to build these workflows, talk about them, edit them, and share them more concretely. This is a huge boon for more repeatable business processes and for getting things done quickly! I think this is the true win of no-code tools: concretizing workflows.

If no-code wants to be a serious competitor against “traditional” software – though I don’t think it should try – no-code needs to learn from the mistakes of early software. No-code tools need to understand that products and software systems need to live on for decades against changing teams and requirements, and against products and companies and standards that die out and get replaced. This requires a cultural shift, a tooling shift, and a new class of abstractions in our toolbelt as no-code engineers. Anytime we try to introduce more tooling and abstraction to no-code, I think no-code gets just a little more “code” in it. And perhaps that’ll bring us right back to where we started, discovering that code is good.

After all, the world is complex. And when we build software against the complexity of the world, that complexity needs to go somewhere. Software is complex, but only as much as the world it attempts to make sense of.

It feels like we’re getting off the edge of a discovery phase of no-code, and into a time when we’re starting to understand what problems no-code tools are great for. I think it’s important that no-code tool builders focus on those strengths, or risk falling into the trap of repeating the software industry’s mistakes from the ground up.

What makes Twitter different, and other thoughts on identity

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 18:20:52 -0400

I think Twitter has a way of studying an identity in isolation, apart from the person. In other apps, you usually see someone’s life unfold, following them in their many different aspects. But Twitter, for one reason or another, seems to have an invisible hand that guides everyone’s account and profile to be about exactly one thing, whether it’s coding or startups or something else.

I think this happens because, when you start talking about something and it “sticks” with people, Twitter creates this arbitrary feedback loop, where you, the account holder, are encouraged to talk more about that one thing and less about anything else. It’s the way you grow your profile – you focus on a very specific part of your identity with wide appeal, and make the account about just that. You are now an identity, isolated in space, and the wholeness of the person to which that identity belongs is buried in the shadows.

This has some benefits. For example, I think this makes it easier for me to “curate” my Twitter to be geared for learning a new topic.

But the downside of this identity-focus is that it pushes every person to be about one thing. And even worse, that one thing might not even be the thing you, the tweeter, want to talk about the most – it might just be what people around you want to hear from you. The “one thing” only sometimes aligns with your true interests.

To a lesser degree, the conventional idea of a “career” also applies the same forces on us. A “career” usually implies that you do one thing the best. And only sometimes is that career path the thing you really want to do most. But this is an arbitrary constraint, isn’t it? A person’s interest is much wider than their career.

The reality is that, usually, people are naturally about equally good at many things, and almost always interested in more than just the thing on which they build their career. In a career-focused, attention-focused, world it’s too easy to succumb to the pressure to be a single identity, a doer of a single thing. But all those extra thing on the side that you love – whether you’re a musician or a fiction writer or a woodworker or a cyclist or private pilot or whatever else – you should keep those too. You can be about more than one thing.

Don’t get buried in your “main thing”. Keep the rest of you alive. That’s what gives life color, and what makes you worth following.

Space-time duals between functional and object-oriented programming

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 08:33:27 -0400

OOP :: data : FP :: functions

In object-oriented programs, we compose abstractions by composing data structures – this is composition in the space dimension a program, if you will.

In functional programs, we compose abstractions by composing functions (subroutines, processes, whatver you call them) – this is composition in the time dimension of a program.

I think this dual is conceptually interesting and can be useful for thinking about the structure of large programs that are macro-OOP vs macro-FP. It can help carry over lessons in one paradigm to equivalent lessons in the other paradigm.

Investing in experiences: the calculus of gap years

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 08:02:51 -0400

Paraphrasing from my tweet from last November:

It seems to me like investing [money] with compounding interest rather than spending it on travel / learning isn’t smart if the experience you’re investing in compounds in value over lifetime faster than market interest rate. I bet it’s more than just travel or education where this is the case.

A university education costs a fortune in the United States. But most people who have the chance to invest in it do without a hesitation, because the experiences and network and know-how gained in those first four years of adult life have lasting, compounding impact over our lifetimes. One way to look at this is as dividend or return on investment. The market rate of return on financial investments in a developed, growing economy like the United States is somewhere between 2% - 6% in the long run. Investing in an undergraduate education has a much greater rate of return over life – investing in that money will quickly return its principal in terms of income, and return its multiples in connections, career progress, prestige, social mobility, and many other less tangible ways. This means that an undergraduate education is worth investing in; its rate of return is greater than the market rate of return on investment.

I think investing in travel works the same way. Traveling (especially abroad) has gotten cheaper, but it’s still a luxury. But investing in travel makes sense, if one has enough disposable income, because traveling, like reading, colors our lenses and influences how we see the world and the people in it. These changes and experiences stay with us and lead to lasting, if incremental, changes that stay with us long after we return home. Excluding travel that’s merely vacations or holiday trips, which are luxury indulgences, I think traveling to see the world and find ourselves in new contexts and among new people has a return on investment higher than the market rate.

Risk-taking

My last example, and the example that initially made me think of this mental model of risk-taking, is taking an academic leave. In the decision to take a gap year or semester – or even a longer leave from university – you’re longer choosing between a financial investment and an experiential one. You’re choosing between two experiences. But even so, I think we can still apply our return-over-time framework.

Between spending a semester or year in school now then traveling or working later, or switching the order and travel-working now and graduating later, which has a higher cumulative compounded interest rate over time? I think this comes down to a simple question, of comparing two measures:

The amount by which a year’s worth of work and travel improves your later investment in school
The amount by which a year’s worth of school improves your later investment in work or travel

For the vast majority of people, I think 1 > 2. For people who have been in school for 12-13 years, a year of working and traveling independently will color and improve your later years in school far more than finishing school earlier will improve later work or travel.

When I’ve taken breaks from school, this was my calculus. For my first four semesters out of school, the math seems to check out.

I Hope You Find It

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 01:13:36 -0500

I first wrote I Hope You Find It for guitar and piano, with vocals added later. It’s me on all three tracks. The production quality isn’t quite where I’d like it to be, but I had left all my recording equipment back home when I was stranded during a pandemic, so I had to make do with a Macbook.

The piece is available as a single on Spotify, Apple Music, and most other streaming services. You can also listen to it on YouTube.

Does hacker culture export American values?

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 13:18:49 -0400

Here, I mean “hacker” in the sense of “hackerspace” or “hacking on a new idea,” not in the sense of an offensive corporate or military espionage. Hacker (sub)culture as it emerged in the 80’s and blossomed in the 90’s in places like Silicon Valley and MIT and Bell Labs.

Hacker culture is inherently American. Hackers generally care about open source software and open platforms. Hackers are ruthlessly entrepreneurial – if they have a problem, the build a solution, and then share it with the world. Hackers are self-taught and self-made. Hackers have little regard for rules, if they believe their work is adding to the world. Hackers crack jokes in professional settings (and very American jokes, usually), which isn’t a universal phenomenon.

This is not to mention the fact that software is built in American English. This is indisputable. The world’s software, even in authoritarian, anti-American or anti-Western regimes, is built on open-source software written in programming languages and tools that require the user to speak the American dialect of English. Want to use the Internet? The IETF (governing body for Internet protocol standards), the W3C (maintains the HTML and CSS specifications), TC39 (maintains JavaScript)… they all speak English. There is no geopolitical play here to decide on a nuanced lingua franca of the Internet. Speak the language of Corporate America, or go learn it and come back to participate.

Speaking of open source software, the first few generations of open software that proliferates the Internet were built by Americans, for Americans. This is significant, because product design spreads culture. Here’s an incomplete off-top-of-mind list of things about common open source software that derives from uniquely American or English traits:

Most command-line utilities have syntax of the form tool-name [verb] [noun] [verb] [noun] which fits well with many Indo-European languages, but certainly not all human languages.
The first 127 characters of the Unicode character set – the ASCII character set – only contain letters standard in English. No accents or diacritics, no characters, just the 26 Latin alphabetic letters. What’s worse, the ASCII contains $, the dollar sign. The dollar sign! ASCII contains no other unit of currency. Does your library or programming language use $ commonly because it’s an easy symbol on the keyboard? Congratulations, you’ve just forced international programmers to go buy an Americanized keyboard layout to adopt your language or tool, or be annoyed constantly.
The venerable monospace teletype terminal, which every programmer still uses today, is designed for an alphabetic language and character set, which is a startlingly small minority of human languages. Terminals start breaking in all kinds of interesting ways when used with non-Latin, non-Cyrillic scripts.
Programming languages’ use of quotes, single-quotes, exclamation points, ampersands, and other symbols all carry from English conventions. Many languages don’t use double-quotes to quote literal statements, or use the ampersand. Some languages don’t have the backslash (\) on the default keyboard layout. Most programming languages are built in the U.S., and are designed for American keyboard layouts.
The venerable teletype terminal does not understand right-to-left languages, or renders it comically incorrectly. Right-to-left languages are spoken by a lot of people in the world!

I’ll stop here, but you get the idea. Many of these problems are related to lack of proper internationalization in the first generation of software. But this also makes me wonder what kinds of problems I’m not able to see as an American because I’m so used to it, where other people may find jarring discrepancies between how they work and how the software they need to use for work behave.

Hacker culture also has its problems. It’s sometimes individualistic to a fault, asks for a kind of strange sexist nerd-macho energy to be taken seriously, and plays loose and fast with rules (“move fast and break things”). It’s a relic of the time and place where hacker culture sprung up – college campuses and the Bay Area in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s.

All this taken together, I think hacker culture, despite all it’s added to the world, is accidentally exporting American culture, values, ideologies, and language in ways that deserve more scrutiny. If we do want to use software as a way to export American values to the world, we should do it when we feel it is right, not sort-of-accidentally just because some very smart nerds in the dawn of the Internet all lived in the States.

But I wonder if the Internet would be a better place if its underlying software components were designed from the ground-up with global diversity and inclusion in mind. I think that would be an alternate history I’d love to have lived.

I work in long bursts

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 00:10:29 -0400

I’ve noticed in the last few months of complete schedule-freedom that I achieve highest average productivity over time, when I work in what I’m calling long bursts.

A long burst is a long, focused, mostly-continuous session of work where my brain is thinking about a single problem and nothing else. Sometimes I’ll go eat or sleep, but my brain is still focused on the one problem during those times. I’m able to focus on that single problem because during those times, I defer responding to all non-critical notifications and requests, and queue any other work that comes up in my todo list, so it doesn’t take up space in my brain. Some people call this deep work. I think deep work is a related idea, but not quite the same in context.

The Pareto imbalance

I’m not always working in long-burst mode. Most of the time – I’d say about 70% of my “working” time – I’m switching between different tasks frequently, going to meetings, having calls, or doing a myriad of sundry tasks that don’t require a lot of deep focus, but also don’t have a lot of value. But the other 30 % of the time, if I’m able to get to deep work or deep focus and have continuous focus, I’m able to get a lot done to make up for that 70% of being not-super-productive.

I used to think this was a problem, but now, I think this is just how I work best. It’s perfectly okay not to have a lot of creative work output most of the time, if the output that does result from the amount of deep work sessions during those long bursts is high quality. I think the important thing here is to recognize that this apparent imbalance, where I am disproportionately productive a small fraction of my work hours and under-productive the rest, is okay. It’s not a problem to fix, but just how I work best. Instead of fixing anything I should try to schedule my life and environment so that I can make the best of my long bursts that comprise a minority of my work hours but an extreme majority of my productive output.

This is strange to get used to at first. I had to be okay with one day not feeling productive at all, doing a bunch of piled-up mundane tasks, and then feeling like I got nothing done at the end of the day. But those days are soon followed by days where I easily work for 13-14 hours continuously and make big, meaningful progress on hard problems I’ve been facing. At the end of any given day, I might feel good or bad about how productive that day was. But at the end of a week, I usually find that the 2-3 days where I was extremely productive made up for the lack of meaningful output in the other days.

This is also helped by the fact that I think I need these less productive “off hours” to help fuel the kind of work I do during on “on hours”. During the times when I’m not actively outputting stuff, I’m still thinking. I’m letting ideas simmer in my brain while doing more mundane tasks or talking with people or maybe not doing anything at all – just resting or sleeping. These are the times when I get most of my epiphanies that lead to good blogs, interesting side project ideas, or unique solutions around hard problems. If I were to force myself to have output during these off hours, I would totally miss out on these ideas and thoughts, which would make me overall a less productive, less creative person.

So, the long bursts and the periods of rest are both needed, in an ideal karmic balance, to keep me at my productive best. I need long bursts to have good, high quality output, but I need to make sure that I do take those times of lull to rest, so I can let good ideas and solutions bubble up to the surface of my psyche.

When I don’t fight my bursty working style and allow myself to be not-outputting all of the time, I actually do higher quality, more creative more impactful work on the net. Accepting this and designing my schedule and incentives around this has made me both happier and more productive this summer than any other period of my life.

Throughput vs latency

One lukewarm side effect of submitting to this long-bursts-and-longer-pauses working style is that there are a minority of my working time when I’ll just be flat-out deferring most non-time-sensitive inbound communications. Need to schedule a meeting? Want to introduce someone? Have a question you want to talk about? If they reach my inbox during my long-burst hours, they’re going to sit there until I’m out of my zone unless I see that it’s urgent. I can’t control when I have those moments of motivation and creativity, so I need to take advantage of them as much as possible when I’m in those times.

This leads to what I call a high throughput, high latency style of working. In order to achieve my highest throughput over time, I also need periods of really high communication latency. When I’m in the zone, you might not hear back from me for 2-3 days unless you ask for it (and I usually ask that you don’t ask for unwarranted urgency). But during those 2-3 days, I get 80% of my creative work done.

I’ve held positions at companies where high latency is an unacceptable compromise to make for high throughput, and I was working in a “low throughput, low latency” mode. I felt awful at work, I got very little done because I never found time for extended deep work, and the only positive was that people were getting their questions about the lack of progress answered faster with non-answers. I’ve learned that this is not the way I personally work, and it’s not good for anyone.

Instead, these days, I’ve resorted to planning out my throughput-latency balance on a week by week basis. During any given week, I try to have at least 3 days of deep, uninterrupted, in-the-zone work times in the long-burst mode of working. This is when I solve big technical problems at work, build side projects, and start working on new ideas. For the other 3-4 days, I’ll put myself in the chair, but I won’t feel bad if I don’t get much done. If I want to go take a walk, I’ll do that. If I want to read, I’ll do that. I’ll make time here for myself so I can be extra productive when I am having output.

I’ve been adjusting to this kind of a balance for the last few weeks, and it’s been working surprisingly well. I’m able to get stuff done when I’m best in the mindset for it, and I feel less pressure to “be productive” when I’m not in the right mental place. In the end, I still end up doing good work I’m proud of, and I don’t feel bad about how I’ve gotten there.

unraveling

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 02:11:15 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

Desert

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 01:33:08 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

red

Sat, 20 Jun 2020 18:02:59 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

Public library, redux

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 19:50:55 -0400

I think in order for bookstores and public libraries to survive, they have to change and reframe their service to their communities. Many of the functions of a library – book rental, discovery, copying, studying – have been replaced by online equivalents. So what becomes of them? I think they’re too valuable, both practically and symbolically, to just do away with.

Instead, I think we should evolve bookstores and public libraries to become galleries and communal spaces that function as designed public spaces for the community, sort of like culture-rich indoor parks. This may even allow them to operate with positive cash flow.

I think South Korea’s cafes, bookstores, and libraries have evolved tremendously well to serve these functions for communities. And other countries and cities have followed suit – libraries in China, Norway, and large metropolitan culture centers like London and Boston have updated and adopted libraries to become less about books, and more about the pursuit of culture and intellectual betterment and community in a way that smaller municipal libraries and aging bookstores have not managed to. I think that’s a problem.

Specifically, I think it’s a profit fit to be tackled by a startup. I think it’s a hard problem. To do it right, you’d have to blend the physical, designed space with digital experiences and communities, understand real estate markets as well as community building and the liberal arts, and have local community experts on the ground to evolve these spaces with the communities. It’s not a traditional startup problem space, but I think it’s worth tackling, because bookstores and libraries are too important to lose to the digital upheaval of the publishing industry.

I’ve bookmarked the idea, and I might come back to it later.

Are there indescribable things?

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 19:37:22 -0400

This is a longer-form response to a tweet from my friend Steve:

Are there things (concepts, feelings, thoughts, materials) that actually cannot be described in words? Or are some things just hard to describe but could be described with enough patience & vocabulary?

In other words, indescribability:
— steveflanagan.eth (@flevestanagan) June 16, 2020

I think in a strictly formal, theory-sense:

Let’s define a “description” as a finite sequence of morphemes.
Any human language necessarily has a finite number of morphemes. Because every morpheme must be used at least once over time.
… thus it follows that the set of all descriptions as we defined it is countably infinite.

On the other hand, I think it’s pretty reasonable to believe that the set of all things that we may ever want to describe is uncountably infinite. Which implies that this set is infinitely larger than the number of possible linguistic descriptions we could ever create.

Perhaps if there were a hypothetical language with an infinite number of morphemes/symbols?

What does this mean, practically?

I think a practical interpretation is that there are infinitely more variations and nuances and kinds of experiences available to us as humans, than there exist symbols that we have time to make up to represent those things. I think the best we can do as a result is to provide reasonably good “effective descriptions” whose margins of error overlap and disappear over time. In theoretical-physics parlance, we may call this a perturbative theory of descriptions.

I think the fact that language and vernacular evolve constantly over time is a consequence / proof of this big discrepancy between the set of human experiences and the set of possible composition of symbols we have available to us in languages.

The limit theorem of descriptions

These are two related questions:

Are there indescribable things? (I think, yes.)
Are there objects for which there exist no descriptions whose margin of error is acceptably low?

(2) is less about the nature of descriptions per se and more a question of whether there exist objects that we may want to describe, whose margin of error does not vanish as we craft ever-more-precise linguistic descriptions, i.e. things that defy precise description.

We’re basically asking whether there exist objects in human experience whose subjective experience cannot be approximated arbitrarily closely. In other words, are there objects, for which there is a nonzero lower bound to the margin of error of descriptions? I think this sounds very close to the epsilon-delta formulation of limits. These would be “indescribable” in the sense of question (2) above.

So, what kinds of things don’t have well-defined limits in mathematics? A list:

Things that exhibit asymptotic behavior against a finite abscissa
Things that oscillate rather than settling in on a value, or whose left- and right-limit values differ

I’m not sure what the correct analogy for (1) would be, but a good analogy for (2) I think is objects whose experience is different every time, or different for every person. These things don’t have well-defined descriptions because they don’t have well-defined values to begin with. The object itself is mercurial in time and between people, and in that way defies a single static description.

Fear, love, and other subjective things come to mind as examples.

Atoms

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 21:27:33 -0400

To convince the world, you must first convince a single individual. Convincing the world of something – the action – is comprised of many small instances of convincing individual people of something.

That is the atom of the act of convincing: to convince the world, first, start with a single individual.

Many such acts are atomic.

To inspire the world is to inspire many individual people. You can’t inspire the world without having inspired a single person.

To entertain the world is to entertain many single individuals.

To teach the world is to teach many single individuals.

To save the world is to save many individual lives.

But not all acts are atomic.

You can love the world without ever truly loving a single person.

And you can hate the world without ever really hating any one specific individual.

Love and hate aren’t atomic; they’re layered. You can love or hate the complexity of a sum of parts without ever loving its atomic components. And left unexamined, we all do. At some point.

Perhaps most damning of all, you can matter to the world without ever mattering to any single individual. Left unexamined, we may confuse one for the other.

Business model transparency as a feature

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 10:44:37 -0400

More and more Software-as-a-Service companies are selling their business model transparency as a feature:

Unlike [competitors], the way we make money is straightforward. We give you X, and you give us Y dollars in return. No shady third parties, no advertisers. You aren’t the product, and we’ll keep to this promise indefinitely.

This feels like a part of the tide of backlash against the tech giants that have built their wealth and markets precisely on obscuring exactly where value is being created and extracted. Free was good, until we realized it was a myth. And now, we want to pay for things again. But it also seems like there’s more to this than simply a reversion back to a world where the end user isn’t the product, and so the end users pay.

It seems like business model transparency is a feature, not simply a reversion to the old. Customers pay extra for more transparent business models, because they can make a judgement call on the product’s sustainability and ethics in a way that an opaque business doesn’t allow them to do.

And that transparency is a feature that customers vouch for with their money.

Cultural imperialism via product design

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 10:07:50 -0400

Here’s a thing most Americans don’t think about.

When American companies export their product or build a global digital product, they design American cultural norms into it. And in that act of exporting it globally, the culture is being exported alongside the product or user expereince. To use it, the customer must subscribe at some level to that culture baked into the product design.

I think this is a little-understood part of every export/import relationship. Cultural norms are designed into products, consciously or not. And using it requires being aware of, or being privy to, the culture, the value, and the mindset of the designers. Things like “followers”, the concept of direct-messaging your boss, reacting with emoji, connotations around the word “love” and the heart symbol, and so on… these are all norms and idioms that differ across cultures, and are baked into the product in a way where using it requires buying into the norms.

The Valley’s Manifest Destiny

In this way, the United States’ heavy digital export feels at times a bit like some kind of a weird capitalistic software-driven cultural imperialism. “To use our technology, you need to do it through our interface, which means adopting to our cultural norms and worldviews.” Whether those cultural norms and worldviews actually benefit the world, or even whether they have any merit, is a question cast aside by the inalienable notion of Manifest Destiny that Silicon Valley, as progressive as it is, still holds on to in 2020.

Culture in places that adopt these products changes subtly and irrevocably over time in a way that’s harder to notice and counteract. People do it so willingly and it permeates life in a way top-down control doesn’t. It’s the most effective form of cultural export, and Silicon Valley is winning in this guerrilla warfare of culture.

I always feel this when I visit EU / Korea. The American cultural influence via software dominance is crushing. And to me, it’s one of the best arguments for not just individual diversity, but cultural / national diversity in the companies and infrastructure that runs tech on our planet. In technological progress, as in capitalistic markets, monopolies and monocultures are harmful.

Enchantress

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 11:21:49 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

The in-betweens

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 12:05:47 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

The rise of shortform media

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 09:41:58 -0400

Instagram stories and Tiktoks are to films and longform videos, what tweets are to essays and books.

Shortform media like stories-style video/photo sequences and tweets are easier to consume in the context of day-to-day life, easier to share, and easier to remix. I think a confluence of these factors are making shortform media the kind of popular, collective creative format that longform media could never be. Instagram stories, in particular, strikes at a critical intersection between creative versatility, ease of use, remixability (screenshot someone else’s story and re-share with commentary), and sharability. It’s a creative format that takes advantage of the devices most people use to interact with their social network (smartphones), and the way most people now share and connect (via photos and videos).

It makes me wonder what new and novel creative tools we could build if we explicitly built tools for creative work with these new traits and features in mind. For example, maybe one way to get more good writing online is to build a writing tools that “feels” more like the UX of stories or Twitter threads, not essays and longform articles.

In the generation of sharable, shortform media, how should the tools of creative work change to enable new kinds of creators and culture?

Gap years v. Pandemic

Tue, 26 May 2020 05:31:02 -0400

I’ve been getting more and more questions recently of the form:

I heard that you’ve taken a few breaks from school during college. Given that [my school] is going to be mostly or entirely online this fall semester, should I consider taking this semester off? I don’t want to pay full price for an online-university experience, but I also don’t know how to navigate a gap year.

For the record, I’m going back to school this fall, and I think most people considering it should probably do the same. But to help you make the call for yourself, here’s what I weighed in my head to come to this decision.

If you take a leave, can you make that worth your time?

The biggest reason I’d advise against a leave this fall is that the things that I think make an academic leave worthwhile – traveling, working, meeting new people – are all going to be significantly limited by the pandemic, perhaps even more than your ability to get the value out of coursework in school.

When you take a semester off, the tradeoff isn’t just between an expensive semester in school or a more affordable semester by yourself. It’s between:

Doing a semester in school now, and being a semester ahead
Taking the semester off now to do something else, and having an extra semester of school tacked on at the end.

And I think the amount by which COVID affects what you can do in a gap year, is much greater than the amount by which it limits a semester in school. In other words, take a slightly worse semester in school now, take that extra time you gained and take some time off later when you can do more exciting things! Your gap year won’t be very interesting if all you do is how you’re living now, sheltered in place.

Could you still participate in the university community, remotely?

Speaking more to students who are just now entering college, the part that’ll be most affected by remote/hybrid semester initiatives isn’t coursework – I believe good institutions will figure that out. I think it’s clubs and extracurriculars. Will you be able to participate in those remotely? This is probably more difficult if you can’t live on campus, or if you live in a time zone that’s more than 4-5 hours away from your school.

If you can participate in the school community remotely, I think organizations are going to figure out how to move themselves online in a way where you won’t miss out as much as you did when schools first went remote with short notice in the spring 2020 semester.

Miscellaneous things you might have forgotten about

You may have annual contracts signed with campus housing / apartment leases
Some schools’ need-based financial aid lapses when you take a leave. If you depend on them, you should be careful taking a leave.
If you’re an incoming freshman planning to potentially start in the spring, try to talk to some spring admits at the school and see if the experience was any good – I think this depends on the school, and spring admission might be just as good as fall, or might end up hampering how well you can end up participating in the campus community, both socially and through clubs/extracurriculars that have annual recruiting cycles.

Speed

Sat, 16 May 2020 23:32:57 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

Social distancing

Wed, 13 May 2020 08:00:35 -0400

Staying together, apart.

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

The lifecycle of an idea

Sun, 10 May 2020 20:01:38 -0400

There are two pivotal moments in the lifecycle of a new idea:

Inspiration -> Question

This is a step often ignored, and critical if done right and consciously. Ideas usually don’t start out as correct solutions to a problem, or even an accurate and helpful expression of a question. Often, it’s just an inspiration. Maybe it’s the identification of a trend or an itch or pain point in your life you want to scratch. Regardless of the cause, we should take more time and intent when transforming inspiration to expressive questions to answer or specific problems to solve.

Solution -> Routine

The first solution is almost never the best built. The minimal viable product’s goal is discovery of the problem domain, not to solve the problem well or efficiently or even easily. Instead, the MVP / V1’s job is not to solve the problem well, but to understand (1) whether there’s value in solving the problem at all, and (2) which parts of the problem are most important.

Specifically, there’s a part after the first prototype or MVP is built, where users start to develop routines around the prototype. They form habits and start to build workflows and patterns and mental models around how the thing works. And that routine helps us calibrate our understanding of the problem domain to the real world, and based on the routines we discover, we can iterate or build better, future versions. To rebuild and rewrite before these routines show themselves is inefficient, and to sit idle after the routines appear is complacency, which usually gives way to being competed into obsolescence.

Abstractions: writing and coding

Sun, 10 May 2020 00:11:07 -0400

Writing and programming are two of the most abstract activities humans engage in.

We take abstract ideas – more mathematical and precise in programming, more organic and metaphorical in writing – and compose them together, group and categorize them, place them against each other. We stack abstract concepts on top of other abstract concepts to produce some effect in the real world. But until that effect reaches a computer output device or a human mind, writing and software both exist in the ethereal virtual world of abstract ideas. The job of a programmer or a writer is to operate on these abstract ideas in a virtual, imaginary space, such that when the effects reach the real world, they’ll have the desired outcome.

The outcome of program is some result given or action taken by a computer:

The solution to a mathematical problem
The accurate and precise transfer and transformation of some data
The accurate and precise repetition of some regular routine
Processing some human input in a pre-defined way

The outcome of writing is some change of mind or action taken by a human:

Following through on a call to action
Successful persuasion
The transfer of some mental model from one person to another
The transfer of an emotion or feeling from one mind to another
Leading the reader to ask a novel question for themselves

So they differ on these points. But both media of abstract ideas create some effect on people and the real world around us by manipulating pure thought, and combining them in new and interesting ways.

There’s a second way in which these acts are antithetical. Programming is the manipulation of abstractions that are defined purely from first principles. Computers are incapable of reasoning by analogy or by examples, and so every abstraction we introduce to computers are logically and rigorously defined from mathematical axioms of computing. To program, then, is to compose these mathematically precise ideas together like meshing precisely milled gears together with tight tolerances. Writing, however, is the manipulation of abstractions that are defined almost entirely from metaphors, examples, and connotations. Ideas in language aren’t composed together in mathematically precise and rigorous ways, but loosely and by analogy, because humans reason about experience loosely.

To program, then, is to compose abstractions together from precise, axiomatically defined components to produce a precise, carefully defined outcome.

And conversely, to write is to compose abstractions together from loose, metaphorically and connotatively defined components to produce empathetic, human effects.

지켜줄게 (embrace)

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 21:00:35 -0400

Back when I was getting really into linguistics, I was taken by the idea of “untranslatable words” – words that represent an idea in a particular culture that just doesn’t exist in another, so it’s impossible to translate into a single other word. The Korean phrase “지켜줄게” is one such untranslatable phrase. It means something in between “I’ll protect you” and “I got your back” and “I’ll be here for you”, but not quite any one of those.

It promises trust and companionship and love and commitment.

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

good morning

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 21:00:35 -0400

Illustration for gratitude.

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

Software-enabled community infrastructure

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 18:50:10 -0400

At time of writing, social media technology of today is about the medium – how we create content digitally, how we distribute it, to whom we make it accessible – and how we fund free-to-access social media sites with virality and network effects. The medium and funding model have been the focus of innovation in the first two decades of the 2000s.

Facebook, for example, puts the content at the center. Each post is substantial, often media-rich, usually at least a few sentences. Users decide who sees each individual post, and Facebook’s opaque algorithm arranges these posts from a spiderweb of friend-relationships into a non-chronological, non-deterministic feed.

Twitter, on the other hand, is more focused on individual users. Users choose who to follow, and get all posts from them. Discourse is fast-changing and the algorithm, although increasingly opaque, is still mostly chronological and serves to curate more than filter, in my experience. The follower-followed relationships are one-directional.

Reddit is unusual among the networks in that the focus is a community. Posts are ephemeral because of the constantly working ranking algorithm, and users are all but emphasized. Instead, users seek out communities and participate in pseudonymous group discussions with not individual users, usually, but the vague they of the “community”.

I could go on enumerating like this all the variety of social media that exist today, but this is all to illustrate that social media so far has mostly explored how we might use technology to organize people and content and conversations differently than the way we do in real life, and this has led to digital communities with very alien dynamics from real-world human communities, especially at the scale of hundreds of millions and billions of users.

Software as infrastructure, not medium

As I continue ruminating on communities, I find myself returning to one theme: the importance of communities that resemble real-world, local communities with human connections. However advanced the social media platforms of today become, they’re not going to replace face-to-face interactions and meaningful conversations and connections in the meatspace. My conviction on this is pretty high, and only increasing with time. But maybe I’m just suffering from generational decay.

Assuming this conviction is true, however, I think more products and social platforms should explore the space of social media technology that doesn’t explore alternative social dynamics, like the platforms I mentioned above, but try to scale and deepen the old, meatspace version of social with new technologies.

The basic building blocks of this idea are emerging. The most obvious and timely example is the meteoric rise of Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. But I see other trends in smaller situations. I see friends gathering virtually even when they’re in the same neighborhood, for more convenience. I see students pulling together new friend groups in Slack and Discord groups while spread out across the coasts. I see people using existing social media like Twitter to promote real-world meetups. The common thread between these new use cases is that the structure is not the structure or medium of social – these people are gathering and conversing in the same way humans have for centuries – but the fact that they’re enabled by new commodity tools. The platforms are simply the tools, the infrastructure, and they fade into the background, leaving the focus on the humans and their conversations.

Extrapolating into the future, I imagine more tools that rejuvenate the market for how people find real-world connections and communities, enabled by technology. Anonymity and pseudonymity are played out. People want to be with other people. Not just ideas, not just nebulous communities, and this need is a non-negotiable human desire. Software is going to fade into being the infrastructure for communities and relationships, only sometimes also being the medium of communication and dictating which posts and comments we should hear and not hear.

Nonlocal community building

Above is what I believe is going to happen. Below is what I hope will happen as a result.

One personal reason behind my attention on community-building is that I believe next to funding and credibility (like network, signals, reputation), a dependable real community of friends is a necessary component of people whose contributions to the world reach their potential. And although great entrepreneurial and creative communities proliferate cities, at the long tail of human population in less urban areas, specialized, niche communities not based simply on geography are still hard to come by. Especially for students, who can’t easily travel, fixing this is a priority.

I think if we get this right, software-enabled community building in the real world is going to make substantial, impactful, empathetic, human communities nonlocal. You’re going to easily find a community of teenage programmers or retired musicians or veteran entrepreneurs regardless of whether you’re in rural Kenya or New York City or Seoul or Manchester. And whoever builds these platforms are going to be where the innovators move next – the next Silicon Valley, if you will.

Curation

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 20:53:29 -0400

It’s a trend I’ve noticed recently, but I’m not particularly interested in going down this product-market rabbit hole myself.

People like to curate what they’re reading, watching, and listening to, and they like to find out what their friends are reading, writing, and watching. Services like Pocket, Substack, Pointer.io, and even Twitter are conduits for this kind of curation and discovery, but none seem to have cracked it yet. Curation of stories, news, ideas, people, and opinions.

What if curating things for your audience was radically easier?

A company like Pocket or Instapaper, who already have a substantial user base clipping and collecting reading material they like, may be in a good place to launch an experiment in this space. But those most avid readers and curators may also already have started newsletters, and may not want something lower maintenance.

Another minimal viable product may be a kind of a filter for Twitter that aggregates just the links and good reads that people you follow have shared. People are already curating and sharing – a good first step may be to simply slide into where people are already curating, and make the processes of curation and discover easier and higher-reach.

Know, feel, love

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 22:05:37 -0400

Better than to simply know the world is to understand it.

Better than to simply understand the world is to feel it.

Better than to feel the world is to fall in love with it.

Community

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 18:07:15 -0400

Good communities are three things.

Good communities are effective empathy distribution networks, as opposed to efficient value transaction networks. I think the working world and startup sphere have hijacked the word “community” to mean any group of people who exchange some value or information on a regular basis, but that’s the most basic, flimsy kind of community. Members of a good, strong community are bound by their shared belief in and care for each other as humans. Communities like this come together under duress, rather than splinter off. Good communities, therefore distribute empathy, not just transactional value.
Good communities are worn places; they learn from the members of the community, and collect the stories of the people that came before. A place that learns from its members become worn over time with signs of use. These artifacts later become items of lore, and the stories harbored in these kinds of places invite exploration, like a videogame world or an alternate universe. To join such a community should feel as if you’re entering a new place with stories and lore behind artifacts and customs.
Good communities are reified belief, not simply brought together by common interests. I’ve discussed this idea further in a blog post about what makes good communities.

How we measure time

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 18:05:23 -0400

We perceive time in at least three different ways.

First is chronological. We measure time in scientifically regulated intervals, and demarcate events in our lives and on the calendar with counted numbers that label moments according to a clock. This is the most objective marker of time we have.

Second is with respect to other lifetimes. We talk about how people who came before us “live in the past” and how the younger generations are “living in the future.” We improve society “for future generations.” Time, in this sense, is a more subjective interval granted on a generational basis, and shared amongst the inhabitants of each zeitgeist.

Third is as a narrative, with perhaps a beginning, a middle, and an end. When we take a moment of introspection and tell stories about our past, we don’t tell stories with perfect respect to the clock, but instead tell it as if we’re describing a painting. We omit the weeks and months that don’t matter and linger on the seconds that make the days. We may choose to provide an overview before diving into the details. We build ourselves narratives about whole chunks of time that we’ve lived through as single, unbroken units of experience, even though they’re in fact collections of smaller moments. This is the most subjective of the ways we remember time: as a collection of stories, an anthology of personal narratives bound only loosely by the monotonic hands of the clock.

A full elaboration of this idea ended up on my blog, as How we measure time

Life after midnight

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 21:00:35 -0400

Life after midnight, in quarantine, physically apart, virtually connected.

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

dazzling

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 21:00:35 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

Cornelia Street

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 21:00:35 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

Stranded

Mon, 30 Mar 2020 21:00:35 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

The next generation of makers

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 21:00:35 -0400

tools

iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil
Paper by WeTransfer

process

Memory Palace

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 01:40:16 -0400

Memory Palace is my first original album of compositions and improvisations on the piano. It was recorded in Berkeley, California in late 2019.

The album is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and most other streaming services. You can also listen to it on YouTube.

Track list

Intro
The Seer
Ray Casting
Expedition
Select One
Most Significant Bit
Strange Attractors
Berkeley
Two’s Complement
Help Me Remember
Skye
It’s a Promise