Bricoleur at large. In pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of. 🇺🇸🎻🇹🇼🥋🌉
San Francisco
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most trajectories are not orbits
most functions are not differentiable
most programs do nothing
the universe is a desolate wilderness. we just live in the interesting/useful/meaningful parts of it.
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A famous Silicon Valley founder once told me he dropped out of NYU when he realized that he "was only there to be in New York, not to go to school. And I realized this was also true of the other students. And the professors."
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In retrospect, every successful startup engineering story can be summed up with “Holy shit, I can’t believe you got away with that for so long”
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Most of the world was made by people no smarter than you. But most of the world was designed after thinking about it for more than five minutes.
Corollaries: yes, you can work hard and improve the world. No, the first idea you think of probably isn't revolutionary.
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When you apply to anything — schools, jobs, apartments — having just a small experience of being on the other side dramatically improves your ability to produce a good application.
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- anticipation journal
- observe your own revealed preference
- aggressively act on curiosity
- shrink the quantum of experience
- recognize genres of conversation
- model social needs like nutrition
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CA DMV: Lane changes in intersections are illegal
SFMTA: what if we forced bicyclists to do it tho
I’m a proud SF cyclist. Always will be.
But this new diagonal bike lane on 23rd & Valencia is a failure and dangerous.
I was recording because I have a genuine question for @sfmta: what do you expect to happen when the light turns green?
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Reminds me of prayer wheels in Tibet: a thing the old/sick/paralyzed can do that (they believe) is righteous and good for the world
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shrink the quantum of experience: instead of reading a book, read a wikipedia article. Instead of eating a cup of ice cream, eat a spoonful. Decreases turnaround time, which both reduces procrastination and also allows me to decide whether I want to go deeper.
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“Kids need to get answers from humans who love them.” —Neal Stephenson clarifying what's important in the Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age
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had a similar experience with Italian — I think social norms around racism make us hesitant to embrace stereotype but when it comes to language they're not wrong
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A friend of mine was interviewing at Palantir. He asked what Fourth Amendment protections they built into their software. After that session ended, they walked him out of the building 😂
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genres of conversation: sometimes people want to spitball ideas and wildly speculate. Sometimes they want harsh criticism/validation. Sometimes they just want affirmation. Recognizing this allows me to respond accordingly.
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The randomized controlled trial was invented to refute homeopathy in 1835. jameslindlibrary.org/article…
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Okay, I put together the comparison shot. The same camerawork at beginning and end of Into the Spider-Verse bookends the movie as the story of Miles' transition from his old life and school to his new life as Spider-Man.
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“cryptographic authentication for photos/video” has been an idea floating around for at least a decade (starting with photoshop concerns), predating the blockchain boom, and yet no such thing has gained traction
Not sure what I don’t understand about the world here
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Places I wish I'd visited sooner
— Hong Kong pre-2014 (before the CCP moved in)
— Istanbul pre-2020 (when the Byzantine churches were still museums, not mosques)
— Great Barrier Reef when it was more colorful
With this in mind, where should I visit next before it's too late?
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anticipation journal: analogous to a gratitude journal, write down n things you're excited about. Keeps me motivated on rough days.
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Idea: thermostat controlled by body temperature of room occupants, rather than a thermometer at a random spot on the wall.
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In 1778, while other young men were making a name for themselves in the Revolution, Noah Webster fell into depression and did nothing for a year. The publication of his famous dictionary was still eighteen years in his future.
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social needs like nutrition (kind of the inverse of previous): sometimes I need to meet people at a party, sometimes I need a small group of friends, sometimes I need one-on-one. Recognizing this enables me to better fulfill my social needs.
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my favorite theory, which I saw on WeChat:
Every modern country gets a buff they can apply only once, which dramatically increases infrastructure and construction for 30 years. USA applied it from 40s-60s; China applied it from 90s-2010s.
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There should be a name for the pre-scientific stage of a field (like alchemy, astrology, and macroeconomics).
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I used to think that Edison’s “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” meant “execution is important”. But now I read it as: “finishing things is hard”.
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I'm surprised by the subtle yet pervasive attitude difference between friends at startups vs big companies. "Anything/Nothing is possible!"
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At a bar everyone pretends to be friends.
At a cocktail party everyone pretends to be an expert.
At work everyone pretends to be professional.
On vacation everyone pretends to be happy.
The real world isn’t so different.
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Also: every D&D player knows to prefer 2d6 over 1d12
(The statistical intuition these games build is underrated!)
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IIRC galileo spends two pages of prose explaining the relationship between time, distance, and speed. In algebra, those two pages can be written as:
v = d/t
d = v*t
t = d/v
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I used to think this was unique to business, but hanging out with artists taught me it's universal: the ambitious never stop working.
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It occurs to me that designing and manufacturing face masks in the style of “tactical, rugged gear” might be one of the highest-expected-value things anyone could do for America right now.
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Starfleet Academy is in the Presidio, ie, on federal land. Even in the ridiculously optimistic future of Star Trek, the only way to build something in San Francisco is to bypass city planning.
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I dunno, I’ve been in cities designed around cars and cities not designed around cars, and I know which one I like better
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What’s a good example of a tool, ideally physical, that encodes knowledge? Like: a good ergonomic chair doesn’t tell you how to sit, but when you sit in it you sit up straight
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Today was my last day at Twitter. It was the perfect job for the time I spent there, but life has summoned me to a new endeavor. Onward!
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I don't know, there has been a ton of amateur gender studies writing on Tumblr and Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet, so empirically it seems like that work still happens even without pay
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When I’m not following social conventions, I tend to eat two meals a day, around 10am and 5pm. Apparently Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II did the same.
I’d love to hear about cultures that did this though
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In Shanghai I went to a market full of custom clothiers. They mostly do suits, but they also take requests & can copy designs from photos.
I paid $115 to copy a cape I found on Pinterest from Ferragamo’s 2013 collection & I’m pleased with the result!
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Sleuth, which features a young poor guy vs an old rich guy. Remarkably, the 1972 version casts Michael Caine as the young guy (opposite Laurence Olivier), while the 2007 version casts Michael Caine as the old guy (opposite Jude Law)
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An old friend of mine once said his open source projects were not applications to be used, but arguments and theses for how software could be built
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from a grad student at columbia: nitter.app/Dervine7/status/178474…
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I learned the word “promiscuous” from a Linux manual: putting your network card in “promiscuous mode” makes it listen to all packets on the network.
I inferred that “promiscuous” meant “eavesdropping”. Fortunately my dad caught that one before I used it in public.
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Everyone tries to defend their life choices by trying to convince you to make the same choices
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Related: monkeys don’t seem to do this (they can steer a car but can’t apply control planning to the car the way they do with their bodies)
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Those who claim to speak on behalf of a group of people don't want you to know that not everyone in the group agrees with them.
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When teaching younger aikido students how to swing a sword, I open with:
"There is a force that pervades the universe; it surrounds us, flows over us and through us; it brings together everything on the Earth… that force is called gravity, and we are going to use it."
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Failure modes of "rationalism":
— believing that thinking about stuff is enough to find the truth. (as opposed to experience, or listening.)
— mistaking the articulate for the thoughtful
— being surprised that reasonable people can disagree
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does "Student" count as a name, or do pseudonyms not qualify since they are by definition fake names?
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You’re fighting against the competing optimization, that is, to make more money. (My favorite stat: average walking speed in a city is correlated with GDP)
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common nerd failure mode: make this observation & extrapolate until you overestimate the importance of f''''''(x), eg "I need to have the right process for determining the right values to create the right environment to discover the right problems to work on the right problem"
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I once prototyped a roguelike where using the #pray command sent me a text message, and I would manually pick what blessing to grant their character
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@moxie remarked that he almost died because "the act of giving up feels so similar to the sensation of success" moxie.org/stories/brink-of-d…
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Shoutout to the engineers on call today as millions of people power on their shiny new gadgets.
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I don’t want to presume that you are unaware of it, but just in case (since you are surprised by Christopher Walken) you should enjoy the Weapon of Choice music video
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On the other hand, while I enjoy TAL I think my immediate reaction to hearing Ira Glass the first time was “this guy is deeply unhinged” (and I think the podcast is better for it!)
I fully support artists’ self-destructive lifestyles if it makes better art
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Wait but those two examples are not Escher sentences, just tautologies.
(My favorite tautology is: “Of all the ideas we’ve heard today, that certainly was one of them.”)
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A home in San Francisco costs about a million dollars. There are about 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco. So this is baldly untrue.
A billion dollars sounds like infinite money, in practice the anti-housing policies of supervisors like you make quick work of it.
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Man, a basic PM interview question should be: "Since software is better with everything integrated, why don't we just build an Integrated Everything App and dominate the market?"
Or, more succinctly: "Why do different apps exist?"
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Rogue One’s villain isn’t an evil Sith, it’s just a director of engineering (Krennic) whose project (the Death Star) is being taken over by a VP (Tarkin), so the director schedules a 1-on-1 with his skip level (Darth Vader) to make sure he gets credit.
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When you make jokes like this, it makes me feel like you don’t approve of the way I communicate. I have a need to feel that NVC is the perfect way to communicate; so I’m asking you to please not make fun of it ever again
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In Revolt of the Public, @mgurri observes that modern leaders increasingly speak in the helpless language of protestors rather than the traditional decisive, assuring language of leaders.
An example for the textbooks from Governor Newsom:
Tom’s 93 & lives in a mobile home park in American Canyon.
PG&E told him his power would be shut off today with a mere few hours notice.
He bought this backup generator, but missed his grandson’s wedding—too worried to leave his home.
He shouldn’t have to live like this, PG&E.
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Fun Feynman-esque riddle: why do lines of longitude converge at the poles, while lines of lattitude never converge?
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Today I learned there are sea anenomes that attach themselves to hermet crabs. (Stills from the #OctoOdyssey dive with @SchmidtOcean)
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I'm sorry to hear that this traumatic experience had such a profoundly negative impact on your life
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In this AI-outpainted Descartes portrait, the model was trying to solve for something I had always wondered about too, namely: why are René’s front and back at such a weird angle? Dude is a triangle!
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I once tried hosting a "contrarian dinner" with my most contrarian tech friends. But they were all contrarian in the same way, and generally agreed with each other. The most contrarian person was one of their girlfriends, who didn't like capitalism and was suspicious of power.
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This summer's Rigoletto at @SFOpera and the Playstation game Ico were both inspired by the work of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico:
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I’d rather read an old book marked up by a person whose opinions I hold in low regard, than read a Kindle book with “popular highlights”.
The former is a distinct person. The latter is just the mush of the average.
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when Google analyzed their hiring practices, the only predictor of an excellent hire was if one person on the panel rated the candidate "strong no hire" but they were hired anyways.
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I have a general health checklist: 8hrs sleep, exercise (usually running), drink water, socialize, journal. Most days I do ~3 without thinking, but when I'm feeling down I force myself to do all of them.
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They copied all they could follow
but they couldn't copy my mind
so I left them sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.
—Kipling
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Whatever anyone says about SF, it’s still a place where I randomly run into friends on the street, in the park, etc something like twice a week
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