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...
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...
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...
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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...
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...
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...
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...
우리의 얘기를 쓰겠소 (Writing Our Stories) by SG Wannabe, from the drama 시카고 타자기 (Chicago Typewriter).
Something reaches escape velocity when it moves fast enough to “keep falling forever” – when it moves quickly enough that even the gravity that pulls it back to the ground can’t bring it back to the ground. Once you reach escape velocity in space flight, for example, you are guaranteed escape from Earth’s gravitational grips. I think the metaphor...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
Hold, fast, to the things that hold you in this world. Hold on. Hug back. Run towards.
One really alluring way for me to think about music (or art, more generally) is that it’s a holographic projection of everything that isn’t music that fills up life. Music isn’t a medium — life is a medium through which we learn to be better musicians and artists and filmmakers, and what we learn in life, all the emotion and the harmonies and the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Don’t Hold Me by Dean Lewis, covered acoustically on the guitar.
Can’t Help Falling In Love by Elvis Presley, a cappella arrangement (if you can call it that) by me.
I Won’t Give Up, by Jason Mraz, plus some improvisations and ad-libs as I felt so compelled. A vocal + piano cover, me on both.
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter. By a studio, I mean a space for creative work that has grown and accreted the right tools in the right places over time. It’s a larger version of the “desktop” analogy. Looking at someone’s studio can tell you a lot about the work they do, their sources of inspiration, the kinds of...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Pushing Daisies, by Loote. A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar.
I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how I manage to get so much done – side projects, essays and blog posts, music production, so on, so forth. I think people expect me to have some rigorous and productivity-boosting tactic they can employ to be more prolific, but that’s not really true. I don’t really have great tactical advice to...
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...
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...
LAUV never gets old~ A vocal cover, with me also on the guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.
People ask me how I get so many ideas for interesting side projects and blog posts. I think the best way to describe my growth as a writer/maker over time is that I’ve become more efficient at discovering and refining my own ideas. There are always ideas floating around in your brain. Sometimes, it comes to you out of the blue in the shower....
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...
A vocal cover, with me also on the acoustic guitar. There’s some other tracks mixed in there from me playing around with GarageBand.
On two assumptions: As long as humans exist, we will want to live longer. This seems like a natural consequence of neo-Darwinist understanding of evolution. Perhaps there’s a way for genes to replicate without human longevity, but I doubt it. Given indefinite time, technology will tend to improve in the long term. This prediction does not hold up...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
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...
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...
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
Staying together, apart. tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer
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...
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...
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...
Illustration for gratitude. tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
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....
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...
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.
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,...
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...
Life after midnight, in quarantine, physically apart, virtually connected. tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
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...
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process
tools iPad Pro (2018, 11-inch) & Apple Pencil Paper by WeTransfer process