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Let’s represent a day as an array of events. As the day progresses in infinite fashion, events are piled on: (Of course, this isn’t a singleton. Everyone has their own day. But let's keep it simple.) There are too many events in a day. Publications found an excellent market opportunity by culling events, chaining them together, and adding some makeup to tell a story. This story is called a piece. A piece is not truth. It is not fact. It is not journalism. The resulting curation is not by any means a pure reflection of some objective, inherent reality. It is a curation performed manually…

In the modern winter, you just can’t compete with the indoors. From a touch on your phone, warmed streams of air trickle from the low heavens and dance with the tiny hairs on your ear. A particle-reenactor presents you with a dizzying supply of drama, comedy, and commentary. And why not pick up a game controller, and manipulate the glowing particles to your will, while delivering the reverberations of your larynx through thin air to fellow waking meat bags thousands of miles away? Perhaps you care to join in the frenzy of the global bazaar and instantly soak in the lives and opinions of…

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

It’s been an eerie calm before the storm. Just like beautiful summer days that turn stormy with a flash of lightening, my mood unexpectedly turns long-term solemn in an instant. My days have been filled with resounding purpose and determination doing work on the new update, and I fear uncertainty follows. There was a moment in Silicon Valley when the team was about to hit the “Launch” button on their platform. Seconds after launch, they erupt in spontaneous success. It’s been my experience that the “Launch” button on products behaves more like the “Close Door” button on elevators—namely,…

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

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

Or, it’s an interesting proposition. “Fake news” is a complicated problem, and yet I think rather than setting both human and automated criteria for what constitutes truth, overproducing fiction can have a similar but self-selecting effect. Namely, skepticism. A little of it wouldn’t hurt right now. I think there are two differing options for reality, or a blend in between: Truth is curated by a handful of entities. Which in turn teaches reliance and trust on these entities. Which in turn creates inevitable tension and harvests an environment ripe for abuse of power. There is such a large…

I’ve had a broken experience with employment. And these experiences have led me to believe that employment as is traditionally done today is broken. Others may have different experiences, and some others might even swear by their job. I don’t doubt it. Yet I know a lot of others who have succumbed to the slow rotting of what I could only describe as profoundly subtle misery. I think employment can be made to work. But in the interest of squeezing every last oozing drop of utility from an employee, companies have made the entire arrangement utterly inhospitable. But assuming you manage to get…

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

Part of the reason I like to challenge myself to write everyday is to get over, as my friend calls it, the sacredness of art. When we believe the work we put out is the most important thing the world will ever see, it creates too much ceremony around something that should be casual. Case in point: In the beginning of Standard Notes, there was a lot of development work to do, but I still needed to echo out signals of existence from this corner of the world. So I would write some piece on some relevant topic, maybe once or twice a month, and put it out into the world with great hope and…

I came across a tweet on John Deere’s practice of encrypting software on their machines to limit what repairs farmers can do themselves, and on the emergence of a nascent network of farmers trading encryption keys online. On the one hand—beautifully done. This is a magnificent display of capitalism, and is awe worthy just in that regard. On the other hand—what about the farmers? Pure Capitalism and its consequences is a topic of endless fascination, but I am no economist, and have no fresh output on the topic. So I asked the all knowing ai8ball on twitter what it thought about this…

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

I’m feeling a little delirious today, after having fully exhausted myself the past two days hunting down a dreadful bug. The most dreadful of all bugs: mobile crashes that occur on launch. Fortunately, this was just a beta build, and it was detected quickly by early testers. But, I was absolutely bewildered. What could it possibly be? The crash reports showed nothing. The changes I made in all were inconsequential. So unaffecting, in fact, that I pushed them straight to master. What could possibly go wrong? I spent the next few days agonizingly trying to reproduce this bug, but no matter…

I get mad at myself when I forget something that would have been very much of help to remember. I’ll be tracking down one bug, and find myself traveling through forgotten worlds whose functioning seems totally alien. What are you? What do you do? Sure, they’ll be some comments here and there, but almost mindless in nature. As if it were a chore. If only I had written it down. If only I left clues for my forgetful future self. I could be such a more evolved, intelligent being. But instead I say, it’s not important. Or, I’ll remember. Or, surely this doesn’t need to be written down? I am…

I read something at about 11pm last night that dramatically altered my mood. I went to sleep like that, and now my waking is the manifestation of that seed. It’s the type of thing you can’t shake, because it hits you right where it hurts. And my overall consciousness is diminished by it. I’m writing about it to evict it from my mind. It’s gotten me in the worst mood, and the sooner I let it out of me, the quicker I can move from it. There were two small incidents, one which happened last night, and then another small grievance that occurred today that definitely did not help. Last night, I…