Subscribe via Email·RSS

Father's Day 2021

It's natural that learning to do something yourself gives you a greater appreciation for those that have already done it. Building your own bookshelf makes you realize all the non-obvious challenges of carpentry and gives you respect for everyone else that has undertaken the same challenge before you. In parallel, one of the surprising things I've learned becoming a father is realizing how very much it is a choice, at least in the modern era. Going through the process of deciding when to start … (Continued)

Project Log: Reloading Bench Drawers

Problem to be solved The reloading workbench is 24 inches deep, but I have just been using 12" milk crates to store things, and lost track of anything that got pushed behind them. The crates slide surprisingly poorly on the concrete, and don't hold that much stuff. The Solution Use the full depth, width, and height of the space under this shelf, and build two "drawers" that are just platforms on non-swiveling casters. The scrap wood pile had a good piece of 3/4" plywood to form the b … (Continued)

Contempt

Replace contempt with condolence. If they knew better, they would do better.

Discomfort

When you experience discomfort, your natural response will be to ask "How can I stop this most quickly?" Instead, challenge yourself. "What would it take for me to reach my limit of this? Am I already at it? Can I go five minutes without showing a sign of weakness? Five minutes after that?"

Never pass up a chance to admit being wrong

I spent the better part of an hour today in a Slack discussion with coworkers about how to implement a feature ticket. We went back and forth, and fundamentally saw the issue two different ways. I didn't really see any way we could reconcile the two views. Either one of us or the other would have to just accept the opposite perspective to move forward. We kept drilling down into examples and use cases, and each of us found more reasons to justify our position. Eventually someone asked a questi … (Continued)

The Power and Danger of Identities

Part 1 I was talking to a friend recently, and discussing the fact that he's managed to stick with one hobby (learning Japanese) while having another hobby that used to consume much of his time go untouched for years (recording music). What I realized as we talked, and what I said to him, was that we don't really do things because we want to, or because we have goals. We do things because we want to be consistent with the identity that have of ourselves and we put out into the world. In hi … (Continued)

Avoid Digital Ketchup

In 2004, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article which, among other things, explores why there are hundreds of varieties of mustard, but only one type of ketchup. (I first encountered it in the printed collection "What The Dog Saw" which is, I think, Gladwell at his finest. Freed from the burden of an overarching narrative, he can tell interesting stories 30 pages at a time.) Part of the story is a meditation on the soul of ketchup: what it is, how it functions, and so on. The basic idea he lays out … (Continued)

Gratitude

Today is my birthday. I've had a few of them before, but for some reason this one feels different. Of course, this is the first birthday I've had since becoming a father, but this feeling, I think, is larger than that. The best way I can describe it is synchrony. Things feel to be happening at approximately the right time in various areas of my life. I don't feel like I've waited too long to start anything, in part by charging headlong into each phase: getting married, paying off debt, buying a … (Continued)

Healthy Societies Are Built on Competiton

Eric Hoffer's The True Believer was published in 1951, six years after the end of World War II and two years before Stalin's death. Yet it presaged the current moment of identitarian tribalism (both on the woke left and the MAGA right) better than anything else I've read. Pardon the extensive quotes, but properly setting the stage of the problem to be solved is necessary to understand the solution below (emphasis mine): For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they mus … (Continued)

Folding Your Hand

Re-reading the notes I wrote while reading Skin In The Game a few years I came across this, in response to something in the first chapter: Roman emperor charging into battle to face certain death is meaningful only in a setting of honor and institutions. It is folding your current hand so that the next guy that takes your seat will have a fresh start and a strong hand. It only works if your sacrifice, transmitted via the public, transfers to your successor. Without that the incentives are to … (Continued)

Thoughts on "A Bright Shining Lie"

After finishing About Face by David Hackworth, my friend Gary renewed his recommendation of A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan. (I ended up with a copy that appears to be the first paperback edition, printed in 1989, with a sticker in the front declaring it withdrawn from Bowdoin College Library. When I got the book it showed no signs of ever being read.) It was a very good book, and I both enjoyed reading it and learned quite a bit from its 790 pages. T … (Continued)

Is Facebook More Like Cigarettes or Alcohol?

It's becoming increasingly clear that infinite-scroll, algorithmic social media in its current incarnation is harmful to both the users that over-indulge, as well as countries filled with obsessive users. For an overview of some evidence, here's a snippet fron Jonathan Haidt's interview with Joe Rogan. If that piques your interest, his full interview with Rogan is worth a listen, as well as his 2019 article in the Atlantic about how social media is corroding our republic, or his 2015 article wit … (Continued)

Living through decline

There's an idea--I don't know who to properly credit it to--that even living in the declining days of the Roman Empire wasn't so bad. Sure things seemed a little worse each year, and your parents complained about how things were better in their day, but didn't every generation say that? You were still Romans and you still had roads and government and taxes. But maybe an acqueduct broke and nobody could fix it so it just stayed broken. And you improvised a fix around it and felt clever. What if … (Continued)

Durable Connections

Listening to Moxie Marlinspike on JRE, around 1h39m: "In a sense, I'm glad those things [social media] exist, because they're sort of what we wanted, but I think we underestimated how important the medium is, like the medium is the message kinda thing. What we were doing at the time, of writing zines and sharing information, I don't think we understood how much that was predicated on actually building community, and actually building relationships with each other, and that just... what we didn' … (Continued)

Limitations and Humility

There is a type of humility, an admission of limitations, that is as rare as it's ever been on the internet. But for some reason, I'm finding it standing out to me more and more. It sounds something like, "Here's what I think I know, and here's how I know it, but if that turns out to be wrong, I stand corrected." Here's a real world example: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place. The core argument of the article is thus: InstaHide (a recent method that … (Continued)