Between getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (creating my poster) and getting ready for Kubecon EU, 2026 (dealing with all the travel sutff), March was a busy month.
Did get quite a bit of reading done. Did not have enough time to listen to my favourite history podcasts though :)

The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson

This is a pattern that I now see everywhere when I now read a trilogy (or series).
The first book sets up the world, the rest of them then just tell a very good story set in that world. Millennium (this series) is a very good example of this trope. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I read last month) sets up the bleak, colourless, cold, misogynistic world. And now Fire and Hornet’s Nest tell a single long story in that world. These should have been one book.

This time the focus is on Salander and her life. Something’s happened in the past, which leaves her broken. In the meanwhile, there are old men dying in hospitals, gang members getting beat up and stuff happening at the highest levels of government. How do all of these events tie together?
It’s immersive and wonderfully told. Lisbeth Salander is fire, like the title suggests!
I hope some other similar heroine catches my attention soon!

The Looking Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy, John le Carré

More greedy old men trying to hang on to power.
MI6 is compromised, by the wily and smart, anti-Smiley, Karla. Who is the mole leaking British secrets to Russia?
An empathetic gangster, and an honourable schoolboy have a standoff at an island outside Hong Kong.

Le Carré was the one who saw and taught me how British influence waned on the world stage when all the while, the system still hung on to dreams of their “glory” days. He also taught me how to see in shades of grey.

The Bear and the Nightingale, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch (Winternight trilogy), Katherine Arden

I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen.
Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”

Here is a clearing on the border between winter and spring. Once Vasya would have said that the cusp of spring was a moment.
But now she knew that it was also a place, at the edge of the lands of winter.

I read these in two weeks in the bracing cold of Europe.
And once again, this felt like a duology rather than a set of three. The Bear and the Nightingale sets up the world while the Girl in the Tower and the Winter of the Witch feel like a long and beautiful story set in that world.
I had read a big book of Russian folk tales as a child, and they still linger in my heart and soul to this day. I don’t remember what it was called or who wrote it, save for the fact that it was a big grey hardback with a wolf head embossed on the cover. But I read about phoenixes and big grey wolves and Tsars and Baba Yaga and Vasilisa and so many wonderful characters and stories then.
Arden takes all of them (and more that I did not read about) and weaves a beautiful story through fable and history and time. She’s a lovely storyteller. The prose is lovely too! Nature comes alive. Old faith and tradtitons tangle with the new. All against the backdrop of cold wintry nights. I absolutely loved reading Vasilisa’s coming of age and finding her path through life, all the time being framed in events that were true yet beautifully enhanced by the fantastic. I hope these books entrance young folk, while also make them read and fall in love with the old tales as well.

Better late than never, so let’s begin!
This month I moved from history to historical fiction.
From modern spy novels to medieval detective fiction, I had centuries worth of fun!

Deep Questions, Cal Newport, Episodes 381-390

Some non fiction first.

I finished catching up with all the episodes of the podcast and now I’ll keep listing them as soon as I finish a batch of ten (around 8+ hours of listening to something counts as book length to me. Unless it’s a four hour Dan Carlin episode. Those are dense 😂)
The new episodes hew toward philosopical discussions about how to live in a world that is slowly being infected with AI. What is true? What is art? Is AI really taking over the world? Is AI really an apt term for what we are seeing? Pretty interesting listen.

Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts

Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts.
— James Nicoll

Watts is one of my favourite authors. I often wonder why he did not get popular.
The Rifters trilogy is my favourite science fiction series. Nothing has come close yet. Power is now taken from geothermal vents in the oceans. The only folks who can adapt to this environment are folks with psychological disorders. They’re given iron gills and other alterations to withstand deep sea pressure. Murder and mayhem ensue. Between the crazy beasts in the dark of the ocean and the crazies themselves.
Techno lingo mixed with poetry, crazy doomsday scenarios and lots of potty mouthedness! Nobody writes quite like him. Nobody writes what he does either. Hard biological sci-fi.
If you’d read the adventures of Lenie Clarke, then nothing about today’s creeping AI world and its dumb “intelligence” would surprise you. And that is precisely why I want to go read Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth once more. To see if the books still engage.
You can too! The novels are available as ebooks in various formats for free on his website.
(If you are going to print them, then caveat printor! These are chonky beasts.)

But all this is besides the point. Beyond the rift, is a lot of short stories in the world of the Rifters. It clears up, follows through or talks about other things in that setting. I loved it.

Pspsps, some short stories are available on the link I shared above as well!

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

Daddy gave me a even more battered copy of the book, than the pic above.
I don’t know what possesed him to do that. I don’t know what his fascination with Le Carré (& Forsyth) was. For a man who would normally be pretty optimistic and generaly full of hope, to be suggesting I read a book with such a cold, inhospitable view of the world was quite out of character. But I loved reading all about Smiley and the circus. And I spent most of my boyhood, learning about WWII and the cold war world via Smiley and gang.

The book is a modern classic, though I don’t know why. Probably just a luck of the draw? I’m not complaining though. It’s a wonderful piece of spy drama.
On teensy flimsy actions, on such tiny wings does the world turn. What if Liz and Leamas didn’t get together? Would Smiley’s plan have worked then? A cynical yet bemused Le Carré would say yes and invent some other small thing that would have things just as bleak as they turned out to be.

Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality

These came before Spy did, and read more like dark Christie novels. More detective than spy. Good fun!

Falco, The Official Companion, Lindsey Davis

Medieval detective fiction is no longer enough. I’m now going to ancient Rome for some crime!
I found Lindsey Davis’ Falco who is a soldier turned detective in ancient Rome. (with some Britain thrown in.)
This book is a non fiction companion to the series and the world ala GRRM’s, A World of Ice and Fire. These are Davis’ thoughts and recollections on how she created Falco, the history (actual and imagined) of the world at the time, the impetus behind why he behaves the he does and all sorts of other bits and bobs. She shares her day, her writing process and lots of intersting tidbits from here there and everywhere. This was tonnes of fun. I’m going into the series, really pumped!

The Novice’s Tale, The Servant’s Tale, and The Outlaw’s Tale, Margaret Frazer

I turned away from Frazer’s group of players in her Joliffe series (which I began last month) and went a few decades earlier to meet Dame Frevisse.
She is a hosteller when I meet her in the Novice’s tale, which solves the problem of how a nun in a convent, is able to meet and talk to people. She’s also Chaucer’s niece which gives her a wee bit of influence.
She reads like a more wonderfully written Sexton Blake. The way they solve crimes is not a coming together of what you may have observed, but something that is happens or is shown at the very end. I hope it gets better with the solution and the foreshadowing as I go deeper into the series. What makes me want to read though is the journey, Frazer takes us on and the conversations these people have and the expositon of the lives they lead. All that is wonderfully done!

In Novice, a crazy rich woman, comes to get her niece back from the convent where Frevisse is and then gets murdered.
Servant, brings in Joliffe who I read last month into this world when his band of players come to the convent, bearing the dead body of a villager who they claim they found on the way. One of the players is blamed, and accusations fly across the three engaged parties. Who killed that loathsome villager?
Outlaw, seems like an episode of a serious K drama, where the main cast takes off to Jeju island for a holiday and something happens there. Dame Frevisse is accompanying her fellow nun to her home for a baptism, when they are kidnapped! The kidnapper is Frevisse’s cousin! And then he’s murdered!

Frazer writes good page turners!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

Modern detective fiction! A journalist plays detective in this one.
Take a girl on the autistic spectrum, give her a really bad childhood, and have still be as normal as possible.
An old man, keeps getting flowers on his dead grand-daughter’s birthday for close to thirty years after she dies.
A self absorbed yet talented journalist who loses darn near everything and now has such a stain on his integrity that no one will believe him.
Bring them all together, add in a pile of dead bodies in the freezing countryside of Sweden and you have a thriller!
I read it when it was first published and I turned to it again. It still holds up. It’s a fun read.
Larsson supports women and is a feminist, yet does not quite know how to write women. He still makes the book work though.

Lisbeth Salander is a woman who hates men who hate women. And she really is badass!

More next month! À bientôt!

This was a good reading month. I think I have become a history geek, thanks to podcasts and books and those are going to be what I read heavily for quite a while now. Some books intentionally read, some comfort reads.
All recommended.

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

A mystery whodunit. I am finally in my Noir phase. And enjoying it.
Drunk retired detective, socialite wife, multiple red herrings, 30s America, what’s not to like?!

The Rest is History, The Nazis at War, Hitler Strikes West, Parts I-IV

Every year, the company of Holland and Sandbrook, walk through the events (slowly) of World Wars One and Two, in order to make up for the travesty of the coverage that they started the show with! Then entire French Revolution in 20 minutes if I remember correctly. 😂 This time, they covered the events of Nazi Germany’s march on and upto the fallo of France. The duo are lovely when they are in flow and these episodes are worth a listen.

The Rest is History, Jack the Ripper, Parts I-IV

More from the podcast, this time covering the ghastly killings of the Whitechapel Murderer. Between reading about the events with morbid fascination as a child and then growing up and reading different versions of the events (I liked Alan Moore’s, From Hell if you are a comics person or the ITV miniseries featuring Michael Caine), I thought I had heard all and seen all. The duo surprised me by telling the story from distinct and different perspectives. One was how the media influenced the events, drawing parallels to today, and the other, more importantly, was the lives of the victims, and the events from their perspective leading to their sad demise. The series leaned heavily on a Hallie Rubenhold book, The Five to do that. I bought it and it is now on the pile. This probably is the least I felt I could to to erase young Jason’s fevered fascination with killers.

The Second Stain, The Man with The Twisted Lip, and The Muskgrave Ritual, Sherlock & Co. Podcast, Seasons 37, 38 & 39

This is the other boyhood fascination that still remains. Sleuths and detectives and whodunits.
This series has several lovely takes on the original Doyle stories and are worth your time, if you want to be entertained! When they began, I felt their voices were too akin to the modern BBC series featuring Cumberbatch & Freeman, but now they’ve grown on me and the reverse feels true. Some stories are fun and relaxed and some taut all through. All of them are lovely.

Mania for Subjugation III, Hardcore History, Episode 73

This is Alexander as never told before. In true Carlin style, you wait eight months to a year between episodes, but when they come, oh boy, do they deliver. We are at the third episode in the series and Alexander has just about started his journey to conquering the world as he knew it. If you want deeply researched history, Dan Carlin’s your man. The amount of books and time and work that goes into each episode is incredible. My only nitpick, is if he could be more humane. The man comes from the other end, a wargamer who loves what-if scenarios (like young Jason with his fascination for murderers and sociopaths). He’s come a long way from his earlier episodes, but I wish for just a little more humanity. The stories have enough pathos though and he always does them justice.

Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy A. Snyder

I thoroughly disliked this one. This feels like someone read the Book of Revelations¹ when high and then based a sci-fi novella on it. Deliciously unhinged, reads a review. It’s unhinged, alright.

I normally don’t mention or list books that I hate or do not finish or do not agree with. This is not that. This is a prime example of a “this is not for me” book. And this probably is the first book I read, that I felt this about. The writing is competent, but it did nothing for me. So no. Not for me. A pandemic rages through the world, and people get affected differently, in different manners. All gruesome.

I think only one person does horror, the way I want and love. And I remain grateful to the stories and work of Guillermo del Toro.

The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel

I loved the old timey self help folks. Carnegie, Ziglar et al. Simple truths told with lovely stories.
Housel is the modern form of that persona. Observations on how you think about money, what is wrong with it and suggestions on how one ought to actually think. All interspersed between engaging stories. I wrote a post about the book, if you want to know more.

Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple

This soothed an itch, that’s been there since my childhood. Raised as I was, in the last remnants of empire and with a father and grandfather—who sometimes were sad about what was lost—I was always fascinated with British India. To learn about the length and breadth of the British Indian Empire, was both novel and yet unsurprising. More thoughts in a post I wrote when I finished the book. If you love reading Indian History, this is a must get, must read book.

History of the Alphabet, Kevin Stroud

This one felt like I already had so many disparate pieces of some whole and Stroud made them all fit, to form a beautiful tapestry.
I’m following his History of English podcast², and I bought the History of the Alphabet to try and support him, not expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Weaving through times and peoples, from Egypt to the Levant to Greece to Italy with the Eruscans and later the Romans, to France and beyond. It’s a lovely tale!

A Play of Isaac, Margaret Frazer

This is a lovely piece of historical detective fiction. Set in Oxford in the middle 15th century, it follows a company of players who are staging Abraham and Isaac for a local lord and someone dies at their doorstep.

More than this specific book itself, I want to write a bit about this class of author, whose writings I have really come to enjoy. I have no name for the kind of writing they do. But I love the prose to bits. Gail Lynn Brown (writing as Margaret Frazer), is the latest. The other two I found so far were Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) and Rosemary Kirstein.
I found Edith first, with her monumental Cadfael series of books. By the time I was in book two, I was amazed by this man who could do nuance so perfectly (Of course, it turned out to be a woman 😂). But yes, it is the nuance, the way they do turns of phrase, the way they write their characters … I don’t know what binds them togther, what the likeness is. It can’t be genre, because while Pargeter and Brown write historical detective fiction, Kirstein does not.(She seems to have created a unique genre/niche of her own.)
So like I said, while I don’t know what unites them, I will continue to ravenously read everything they write. The writing is letter perfect to my mind and heart. I enjoy them, with emphasis on joy.

These are all for now. I hope you found something in the list above that tickled your fancy.
À demain!

Ever so often, after one of my reading updates on social media, some of my young friends ask me how I get so much reading done.

So, I decided to answer it here for posterity and then just point folk here.

The only things that matter, when it comes to reading are …

That’s about it for now. If I remember something more, I’ll come back and tack it on here.

I’m tired of making excuses for my tardiness 😂
So, like Don Cheadle says in Iron Man 2, “Look, it’s me. I’m here. Deal with it. Let’s move on.”

While I tell you about the books I loved, you can also click each month to find the complete list of titles I loved.

January

I think this year continues my fascination with Agatha Christie.
January was mostly spent in the world of Marple. I think I’ll be back doing Christie runs in the coming months. I don’t know what it is about her worlds, but I keep coming back to them ove and over again.
(even more than Doyle and Holmes, though I love the new fresh takes in the Holmesian world. While David Suchet and his run will always remain the canonical Poirot to me, I have no such qualms with anyone else doing Holmes)

So I spent January with Ms. Marple. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side was my favourite. The sudden, heart-stopping realisation of what must have happened, by one of the main characters, the immense grief that must have rolled down on them all over again, summed up in the lines from Tennyson’s poem that give the book its title.

     She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried
     The Lady of Shalott.

I also love following these pretty webs, authors lay for me. Thanks to Agatha Christie penning these words in 1962, I went looking for a poem from 1832 and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

Honourable mention to the Sherlock & Co. podcast.
I began listening to it, just for curiosity’s sake and have now been looking forward to each new adventure of our intrepid heroes. My favourite parts are when other hosts from the Goalhanger universe come in to do cameos, like Will Dalrymple and Anita Anand (Empire) did in one of my recent favorites, The Sign of Four (Season 22 on iTunes) or when Dominic Sandbrook (The Rest is History) played a crazy, stressed lawyer in The Norwood Builder (season 27 on iTunes). It’s really fun!

February

February started me on the road of my (hidden) goal of reading at least one technical book a month. Learning Go, by Jon Bodner taught me the language. One thing I’ve learnt though, is that I almost nearly always need 2-3 authors / books before I understand whatever it is I need to learn. I’ve realised that I have been spoiled with authors in other domains when it comes to explaining things lucidly. (plus any topic in tech is vast and no single author can fill in all the gaps of my ignorance.) My solution to this is to be a syntopical reader and figure out whatever it is I need from multiple texts.

I learnt well enough from Bodner, and Ricardo Gerardi’s Powerful Command-Line Applications in Go to go write a tool I sorely needed in Go lang. A small tool to generate RSS feeds for my audiobooks, I call Rederb. It’s still raw and unpolished, but it got my audiobook ducks in row, so I could listen to whatever struck my fancy on the recent break.

I also discovered Grant Snider this month. While full of whimsy, they are also really thought provoking. I devoured The Art of Living, and The Shape of Ideas. Highly recommended! The one that started it all for me and was specifically written for me, was I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf.

Honourable mention to Anita Anand and William Dalrymple for doing the Three Kings (Empire Podcast, episodes 212-214), explaining the confluence of Byzantine and Persian cultures, myths and history.

March

was spent mostly in the company of the aforementioned Anand & Dalrymple charting the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire (Empire Podcast, episodes 205-211, and 215-222). This engaging series filled in so many gaps in my head and what the landscape of our country was like. I need to now go see what my land was like, before the Mughals.

More history was in the offing with part two of The Rest is History’s continuing history of the French Revolution. I listened to Parts Two and Three this month. (Episodes 503-507 and 544-547). Part one was last year (Episodes 475-482).
A really refreshing change of pace by Holland and Sandbrook, considering they have covered the Revolution once before in two twenty minute episodes! I love the slow, measured march this time. The more I listen, the more I wonder how much of history hinges on chance events! I also love their slightly irreverent and self deprecating tone. We’re still not done, and I look forward to revisiting France during the revolution, soon.

Honourable mention to the Acquired Podcast’s coverage of Rolex. This was one of the few I really enjoyed, besides their story on Hermès. I think I just like old company stories. Hopefully someday we’ll get Nintendo and Yamaha.

And that’s it for now. I hope you folks find something in here, that interests you too :)

An extract from the page I read today from A Velocity of Being.

Dani Shapiro writes …

My Dear Future Friend,

I will probably never know you. We may not ever walk this earth at the same moment. But listen carefully.

Books saved my life.

In the stillness of reading. the silence save for the sandpapery sound of my fingers turning the page, I was born. In the quiet of a summer afternoon spent in a hammock, of a winter night spent sneaking under the covers with a flashlight, dawned the awareness, slow but unmistakable, that I was not alone. That I was not insane. That my heart was not so very different from everyone else’s.

Books made me feel less ashamed. Less weird. Less different.
They connected me deeply to my own humanity.

I took close to a year to finish two of the books from last years reading list.
That’s because I was reading them, in tiny bits, in small chunks, a day at a time

I was already reading a poem a day and then some time early last year I serendiptioustly ran into this Ryan Holiday post, which spoke to the virtues and pleasures of page-a-day books and daily wisdom.¹
So, along with my daily poem, I read a Robert Greene reader called The Daily Laws as well as the Ryan Holiday–Stephen Hanselman collection of Stoic meditations in The Daily Stoic.

I absolutely love it.
It gives me varied nuggets of wisdom, from various perspectives.
It let’s me start the day on a tranquil, aware, intentional note.
And it calms the unfounded nagging fear, I always have in the back of my head; that I’m not reading enough.

So what’s a boy to do when he stumbles across something good?
Well … do lots more of it!

I looked around for some more books that I’d like to read this way.²
And decided to read several Anthony De Mello books that I read growing up.
Looking in the bookshelf yielded One Minute Wisdom and The Prayer of the Frog (Vols. I & II) as well as the book that made me fall in love with him, The Song of the Bird.
There’s lots of overlap and repetition in the fables and teaching across the books. That’s just a bonus to my mind.

And finally I decided to read Maria Popova’s, A Velocity of Being.
I have two of her books. The other one is called Figuring.
I resisted, so strongly resisted, reading either of them, because I’m in love with her beautiful prose and her sense of syntopia and her unique lens on the world.
I was always waiting to be marooned on an island, with only her books for company, because I wanted to savour them slowly.
The last couple of months though, in some sense, I have been lost at sea. So I gave in and read A Velocity of Being.

It’s a series of letters from people, young and old, big and small, across varied paths of life, all united in one common purpose. To tell young readers, why they think reading is important and the various ways reading changed their life.
It’s a letter a page³, each letter accompanied by an extravagant, lush, often sensuous piece of art.

I leave you with the letter I read today.
Laura Brown–Lavoie, rejoices in the way she gets lost in a book.
Happy Reading!

Sometimes when I’m reading a good book and I’m under a blanket and no one’s trying to talk to me, I forget that I’m reading. The tall grass of the story grows up around me, and I’m just another silent creature whose heart beats in that world.
If I sit still and keep reading that way, sometimes a sentence stalks by as lovely as a lioness. Blood around its mouth; that fresh, that killer. I read it once, and I know I have to read it again, not look away, watch closely how it moves.
And then I start to notice my eye muscles moving my eyeballs back and forth again, and see the black of the letters on the gray of the page, and I’m just plain reading under a blanket. It’s still fun.
But the reason I read is for the lionesses. For the sentences that pull me in with all their teeth.
Love, Laura

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Hello, hello, it me! :)

With all that is going on in my life, I don’t have the will or wherewithal to compile the annual reading list this year.
So I’ll keep sending you folks, the lists that I come across and find compelling enough to share.

I’ve always ended my annual books-to-read list with the Marginalian.
(the erstwhile Brain Pickings aka Maria Popova)
And I always say, Maria saved my life.
For nearly a decade, during times of deep dark despair, it was her posts that kept me going.

I’ve always wished that I could weave word tapestries like she does.
(Or be as succinct and pithy as Mandy Brown. Someday I will be.)

Without further ado, here’s Maria’s list.
From art to philosophy to whimsy, there’s something for everyone.
The one I look forward to reading the most is Haleh Liza Gafori’s rendition of Rumi.

I hope you find something in there too!
Happy Reading :)

I have a stuff-to-do.org file, that serves as an inbox for most long term tasks that I want to tackle. Stuff that needs doing, books that I want to buy, books that I want to read, courses that I want to learn, movies or tv shows that I want to watch, stuff on the web that I want to catchup on, etc. etc. etc.

And all this while, I have been moving tasks into my daily-tasks.org as and when I tackle them. This meant I needed to open both files, and then cut said task out of one and paste it into the other. And as usual, I am now doing this often enough, that it’s become bothersome. Because there are a couple more files as well, that serve as inboxes.

And the same question arises, as usual. Can Emacs help with this?
The answer as it almost always is, is a big, resounding, Yes!

I know it had to do something with what Org calls a refile, since I keep using C-c C-w to move items between different headings in my daily tasks file.
So after a bit of reading the manual, reading blog posts, spelunking through the emacs stackexchange, stalking the Org Mode reddit and an hour of head scratching, I roughed up something that does what I want :)

In a nutshell, what I am doing is what Org calls, a Refile and Copy. The manual page let me know that I could do this across files too. This was exactly what I wanted. It also told me that I needed to configure org-refile-targets variable to tell Org a list of locations, that it would then let me refile my tasks to.

Having split my emacs init.el file into a set of logical files, I opened up the file that held my org settings (very imaginatively called emacs-org-mode-settings.el) and then thought a bit about what files I would want Org to pop up when I wanted to file tasks to.
Would just my daily tasks file do? What if I wanted to file something out of my daily tasks file? Or what if I wanted crisscross transfers between all my task inboxes and daily task file?

I then realised that I was already telling Org Agenda to scan my tasks folder (which holds all my productivity system files) for tasks and dates and schedules and deadlines. I decided to use the same set of files as my targets for refiling. And this turned out to be easier to do than expected. I just had to tell Org to use org-agenda-files as the value for org-refile-targets

It looks a little bit like this.

1
2
3

(setq org-refile-targets
      '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	   (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))

I’m telling org-refile-targets on line 1, to look for targets in two locations.
Line 3, is what we were talking about above. Org will look to the same location that org-agenda-files points to, for its refile targets.
Line 2, is where I tell Org to include my current file, the one I am working on, as a target. It helps me move stuff in my daily tasks file from one day to another.
The maxlevel bit is to tell Org the level of headlines to show as targets. Org has headlines and sub-headlines and sub-sub-headlines.¹ I just need the first level, which is why it’s set to 1.
It seemed to work, until I ran into a small stumbling block. Org would not let me refile my task at level 0, i.e. the root of the file as a level 1 headline. It could only nest under an existing headline. So, line 4 below, fixes that for me.

1
2
3
4

(setq org-refile-targets
      '((nil :maxlevel . 1)
	   (org-agenda-files :maxlevel . 1)))
(setq org-refile-use-outline-path 'file)

And tada! It works! You can see it in action below.
Click any of the images below to view them, larger.

After struggling to renew my certs for the third time in a row, hopefully these pointers should keep me on track for the next time.

1. Namecheap does not yet support automatic wildcard renewal for the Letsencrypt/Certbot combo. Check next year.
2. Have your Namecheap control panel open and ready.
3. Switch to root or run the command below with sudo
4. Command to renew: certbot certonly --manual --manual-public-ip-logging-ok --preferred-challenges dns-01 -d *.domain.com -d domain.com
5. certbot will then, print a couple of lines that you need to add as a TXT record in the Namecheap DNS control panel.
6. When you do that, make sure you set the TTL of the record, to a minute, so that you can redo stuff quicker, if you mess up.
7. certbot might ask you to do multiple records. Read the instructions carefully.
8. When you check to see if the TXT record is set, search for the whole domain name. For e.g. _acme-challenge.domain.blah instead of just domain.blah
9. If you’ve done all of the above, hopefully things should go smoothly and the certificate should renew.
10. Restart Nginx and you’re done.
11. If you have multiple machines, figure out a way to securely transfer the certs there too.

    ---

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I may not know Emacs, but I do know what I want out of a general purpose text editor.
And bending Emacs to do my will, to do what I want it to do or behave in the manner I want it to behave. And Emacs to my eternal gratitude, is flexible to do all I want, thanks to the last forty six years worth of hard work and ideas of people from all over.

Want your screen to be a certain width, because you miss CGA screens? Emacs can do that.
Want your font to be monospaced, because it helps you write? Emacs can do that.
Want to tweak the space between your lines, because your font looks better that way? Emacs can do that.
Want to save your place in the file, so you can come back to where you were? Emacs can do that.
Themes? Want your editor to look a certain way? Emacs can do that.
Love Markdown? Emacs does that.

That’s just the core editor and that’s just me setting up my writing environment.
That’s just me scratching the surface.
I haven’t scratched the universe that is setting it up as an IDE, or using it as a Git frontend, or to read mail, or be an IRC client or play games or the million other things it can do.

As, for me, I have slowly branched out my use of Emacs too.
In addition to its use as a daily general purpose text editor, I use Emacs in three specific domains.

1. As an editor for all my blog posts, and prose writing. I use Markdown Mode to accomplish this.
2. As a second brain. To write down notes and references and ideas and to link them all together. A syntopical sort of linking. A Zettelkasten, in fact. Org Roam is the tool I am using to build this edifice.
3. And as a tool to manage my productivity, my day and my sanity using the awesome Org Mode.¹

Which brings me to my current conundrum.
All those tweaks I mentioned above?
They are all in a file called the init.el, which Emacs reads everytime it starts up.
And given my propensity to be a control freak, while at the same time verbosely documenting every change I make, my file had already grown to 300 lines and counting.
Going back to read stuff and change existing things meant scrolling up and down or searching across 300 odd lines.
And I quickly tired of that.

Which is when I learnt Emacs let me organise my init files too!
Between learning to load lisp files and how to organize my init files, I quickly divided my main file into a total of four files.

1. The base init.el file, containing things I thought were absolutely needed²
2. A miscellaneous file, that would hold everything else Emacs.³
3. A file to hold my Org Roam Zettelkasten settings.
4. A file to hold my Org Mode settings.

And then, within my base file, I called the other three, like so … ⁴

(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-misc-settings.el")
(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-org-mode-settings.el")
(load "~/.config/emacs/emacs-org-roam-settings.el")

And that gave me space to breathe :)
Everything is now properly organised.
I can just go look in the appropriate file (or add one) for the appropriate setting.
And life is peachy again.

Of course, once again, I am barely scratching the surface, compared to other folks’ vastly elaborate setups.
But this works for me, and I’m really happy!

Just like him, I try to structure and outline what I write, I really do, and just like him, I can do it fairly ok, and still never really enjoy the process.

I never quite understood why, until I realised I was a gardener.
This also helped me understand, why the recent move to the Zettelkasten process is helping me write without the stress that I previously used to encounter when I attempted writing something even a teensy bit long or complex.

Like he says, I know what I want to write about, a tiny bit of structure helps.
But the trick is in the syntopical thoughts, the seeds that germinate and the cross pollination of words and ideas and the thrilling uncertainty of waiting for my plants to take root and to see, in time, what comes of what I sow.

One of my favourite authors thinks and writes, just like I do.
The only thing that I need to become so good that I cannot be ignored is to show up and do the work and tend to my garden.

Today, reading GRRM reminded me of my Zettelkasten, which needs regular tending, which reminded me of Cal Newport’s ideas on slow productivity and showing up daily and whose book on being great was inspired by Steve Martin, all of which led me to writing this post.
This is where my garden path led me today!

Showing up daily to tend my garden!
This is liberating.
This is … freedom!

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P.P.P.S. And if you are a ASOIAF aficionado like me, definitely read the post to know what is happening in those lands.

And then this perfect storm of stuff happened recently.
I have a lot to learn this year.
I am taking a lot of notes, but just full text search, does not cut it for me.
So I’ve been casting about for a way to take notes and thoughts and relate all of this together.
And I ran across the Zettelkasten method across a lot of people I pay attention to.
Despite all the new fangled tags of “personal knowledge management” and “knowledge graph” and who knows what else, the Zettelkasten method’s old and it’s Lindy.
So definitely worth my time to learn and invest in, if it helps me write and share more.

At its heart, all it is, is a system to take and refer to your notes and your thoughts.
Folks have recommendations about how to take notes, the types of notes, the way to store the notes, and various ways and means to link and refer to them notes.¹
I found David Kadavy’s long post as well his book and Sascha Fast and Christian Tietze’s posts over at the zettelkasten.de website really helpful with me getting started.

I decide to use Org-roam as my tool of choice.
It’s very loosey-goosey² and flexible.
It’s Lindy.
It’s plain text.
And it is built on Org mode and Emacs.
Wouldn’t recommend you use this, unless you want to put in the time to learn about Emacs. There are plenty of user friendly options out there.

I spent about a week putting in lots of stray notes, I had.
And some time building up links between them.
And some more time, reading a couple of books and then taking notes and linking them as I went.

And I realised two things, both good for me.

1. This is turning out to be a sustainable, lifelong habit. One that I enjoy
2. Building up links and doing highlights and jotting thoughts, all lead to me having a coherent view of what I just read and learnt as well as having something, a lot of raw yet fertile somethings, that I can use to build something derivative out of, create a larger work from, expand on much more easily.

I’ll revisit this in a year and tell you how it went :)

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I don’t know how to share what I collected, so I’ll just put a set of links down here to all of them.

This is all the work/tech stuff. And this is all the other, personal / life stuff!
Enjoy!

Hopefully, clearing my mind should get me going, get me writing, even if in a small but consistent way.

P.P.P.S I forgot that i had quite a few, year in reading, best of, book lists handy.
So here they are. Happy Reading!

Ryan Holiday

• 13 Strategies That Will Make You A Better Reader (And Person)
• Our Country is Filled with Problems; Reading Too Many Books Isn’t One of Them
• If You Only Read a Few Books in 2022, Read These
• The (Very) Best Books I Read In 2021

Susan (Fowler) Rigetti

• So You Want to Study Math… (Finally!)
• My Favorite Books of 2021

The Art of Manliness

• The Best of Everything on the site in 2021

Ben Orlin

• Books I Loved in 2021 (first half)

Austin Kleon

• 21 good books I read in 2021

Vanessa Grall at Messy Nessy

• MessyNessy’s 21 Favourite Little Stories of 2021

Tim Ferriss

• My Favorite and Most Impactful Reads from 2021

Farnam Street

• 10 Lessons From the Smartest Minds In The World (video)
• How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time

and finally, the woman who saved my soul …

Maria Popova

• Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn
• Of Trees, Solitude, Love, Loss, and the Stubborn Symphony of Aliveness: The Best of Brain Pickings / The Marginalian 2021
• Highlights in Hindsight: Favorite Books of the Past Year

Seth Godin on the ethical use of our newly gained technological capabilities

No wonder we’re a bit dizzy. We just multiplied our minds by many orders of magnitude. It’s easy to confuse someone else’s memory (or manipulation) with our hard-earned ability to remember things that actually happened to us.

And we’re now realizing that we have the power (and perhaps the obligation) to use shared knowledge to make better, more thoughtful decisions. And to intentionally edit out the manipulations and falsehoods that are designed to spread, not to improve our lives.

Intel to Build Silicon for Fully Homomorphic Encryption

When considering data privacy and protections, there is no data more important than personal data, whether that’s medical, financial, or even social. The discussions around access to our data, or even our metadata, becomes about who knows what, and if my personal data is safe. Today’s announcement between Intel, Microsoft, and DARPA, is a program designed around keeping information safe and encrypted, but still using that data to build better models or provide better statistical analysis without disclosing the actual data. It’s called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, but it is so computationally intense that the concept is almost useless in practice.

So whether that means combining hospital medical records over a state, or customizing a personal service using personal metadata gathered on a user’s smartphone, FHE at that scale is no longer a viable solution. Enter the DARPA DPRIVE program.

DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DPRIVE: Data Protection in Virtual Environments
Intel has announced that as part of the DPRIVE program, it has signed an agreement with DARPA to develop custom IP leading to silicon to enable faster FHE in the cloud, specifically with Microsoft on both Azure and JEDI cloud, initially with the US government. As part of this multi-year project, expertise from Intel Labs, Intel’s Design Engineering, and Intel’s Data Platforms Group will come together to create a dedicated ASIC to reduce the computational overhead of FHE over existing CPU-based methods. The press release states that the target is to reduce processing time by five orders of magnitude from current methods, reducing compute times from days to minutes.

Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show

Excuse me a moment—I am going to be bombastic, over excited, and possibly annoying. The race is run, and we have a winner in the future of quantum computing. IBM, Google, and everyone else can turn in their quantum computing cards and take up knitting.

One key to quantum computing (or any computation, really) is the ability to change a qubit’s state depending on the state of another qubit. This turned out to be doable but cumbersome in optical quantum computing. Typically, a two- (or more) qubit operation is a nonlinear operation, and optical nonlinear processes are very inefficient. Linear two-qubit operations are possible, but they are probabilistic, so you need to repeat your calculation many times to be sure you know which answer is correct. A second critical feature is programmability. It is not desirable to have to create a new computer for every computation you wish to perform. Here, optical quantum computers really seemed to fall down. An optical quantum computer could be easy to set up and measure, or it could be programmable—but not both.

So, what has changed to suddenly make optical quantum computers viable? One is the appearance of detectors that can resolve the number of photons they receive. A second key development was integrated optical circuits. performance has gotten much, much better. Integrated optics are now commonly used in the telecommunications industry, with the scale and reliability that that implies.
The researchers, from a startup called Xanadu and the National Institute of Standards, have pulled together these technology developments to produce a single integrated optical chip that generates eight qubits. The internal setting of the interferometer is the knob that the programmer uses to control the computation. In practice, the knob just changes the temperature of individual waveguide segments. But the programmer doesn’t have to worry about these details. Instead, they have an application programming interface (Strawberry Fields Python Library) that takes very normal-looking Python code. This code is then translated by a control system that maintains the correct temperature differentials on the chip.

What is more, the scaling does not present huge amounts of increased complexity. In superconducting qubits, each qubit is a current loop in a magnetic field. Each qubit generates a field that talks to all the other qubits all the time. Engineers have to take a great deal of trouble to decouple and couple qubits from each other at the right moment. The larger the system, the trickier that task becomes. Ion qubit computers face an analogous problem in their trap modes. There isn’t really an analogous problem in optical systems, and that is their key advantage.

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked

• https://twobithistory.org/2021/02/07/arpanet.html
• https://twobithistory.org/2021/03/08/arpanet-protocols.html

This is what was totally new about the ARPANET. The ICCC demonstration didn’t just involve a human communicating with a distant computer. It wasn’t just a demonstration of remote I/O. It was a demonstration of software remotely communicating with other software, something nobody had seen before.
So what I’m trying to drive home here is that there is an important distinction between statement A, “the ARPANET connected people in different locations via computers for the first time,” and statement B, “the ARPANET connected computer systems to each other for the first time.” That might seem like splitting hairs, but statement A elides some illuminating history in a way that statement B does not.

In a section with the belabored title, “Technical Aspects of the Effort Which Were Successful and Aspects of the Effort Which Did Not Materialize as Originally Envisaged,” the authors wrote:

Possibly the most difficult task undertaken in the development of the ARPANET was the attempt—which proved successful—to make a number of independent host computer systems of varying manufacture, and varying operating systems within a single manufactured type, communicate with each other despite their diverse characteristics.

There you have it from no less a source than the federal government of the United States.

The 1Password blog with a high level overview of their Smart Password Generator

Long, random passwords just aren’t convenient. If you need to enter 45 randomly-generated characters on another device often enough, you’ll inevitably change that password to something like password123 because it’s easy to type and remember. It’s also - you got it - not strong.

While a lengthy, unintelligible password may appear stronger than a smart one, it’s mainly illusion. Pronounceable syllables make a smart password look human generated and, therefore, weaker. But a human-generated password could never be chosen uniformly and, therefore, can’t be accurately assessed for entropy.

We’ve made a compromise of sorts. We’ve sacrificed a few bits of (theoretical) entropy, that don’t affect real-world security, to gain a whole lot of convenience, compatibility, and accessibility — and those certainly are real world, which is what really matters.

Mahmoud Hashemi talks about Changing the Tires on a Moving Codebase

We realized that CI is more sensitive than most users for most of the site. So we focused in on testing the highest impact code. What’s high-impact? 1) the code that fails most visibly and 2) the code that’s hardest to retry. You can build an inventory of high-impact code in under a week by looking at traffic stats, batch job schedules, and asking your support staff.
…
We realized that CI is more sensitive than most users for most of the site. So we focused in on testing the highest impact code. What’s high-impact? 1) the code that fails most visibly and 2) the code that’s hardest to retry. You can build an inventory of high-impact code in under a week by looking at traffic stats, batch job schedules, and asking your support staff.

And it really is important to develop close ties with your support team. Embedded in our strategy above was that CI is much more sensitive than a real user. While perfection is tempting, it’s not unrealistic to ask a bit of patience from an enterprise user, provided your support team is prepared. Sync with them weekly so surprise is minimized. If they’re feeling ambitious, you can teach them some Sentry basics, too.

My main takeaways

• Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth, — Mike Tyson
• Prioritise work on what actually matters. Perfection can wait.
• People and their feedback comes first. Matters a lot more than data driven decisions. After all, software is used by by and for people, in the first place.

A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety

You’re adapting my what? When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness.

Which is where the human comes in. Under the SAE’s definitions for automated driving, in Level 2 the car controls braking, acceleration, and deceleration, but the human is responsible for providing situational awareness at all times. Of course, this raises the question of whether the driver is actually paying attention.

To test whether drivers were actually paying attention while using a Level 2 system, IIHS recruited participants and then had them drive for roughly an hour, either using the car’s Level 2 system or not. At three predetermined locations on the test route, a second car—the one with the large pink bear attached to its trunk—would overtake the participant’s vehicle. At the end of the study, the drivers were asked if they saw anything odd, and if so, how many times.

Crazy obsessions like this, are why even I got into writing software. TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!

From the problem page,

In the second image, there are three ‹N›’s. Yet, they all look exactly the same. A real typewriter can, quite rarely, have one of its letters damaged, or misaligned, such that that letter regularly makes an inferior strike to all the other letters. However, this degree of regularity is impossible; could Underwood or Remington have acheived it, they would have leapt for joy.
While working on the project, incredibly, another bad typewriter scene intruded upon my life. I don’t often sit around and watch movies, so I suppose there are only two possibilities:

a. There are so many of these unrealistic typewritten documents in late-2010’s cinema that almost any movie with a typewritten document in it will be hopelessly unrealistic, or
b. The universe, nay, God himself, was urging me on to complete this project in lieu of others I could finish!

The Font is here.

Did you know, some planets can generate new atmospheres?

In general, we don’t currently have the technology to image exoplanets unless they’re very large, very young, and a considerable distance from the star they orbit. Yet we can still get some sense of what’s in their atmosphere. To do that, we need to observe a planet that transits across the line of sight between Earth and its star. During a transit, a small percentage of the star’s light will travel through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, interacting with the molecules present there.

Those molecules leave a signature on the spectrum of light that reaches the Earth. It’s an extremely faint signature, since most of the star’s light never even sees the atmosphere. But by combining the data from a number of days of observation, it’s possible to get this signature to stand out from the noise.

That’s what scientists have done with GJ 1132 b, an exoplanet that orbits a small star about 40 light years from Earth. The planet is roughly Earth’s size and about 1.5 times its mass. It also orbits extremely close to its host star, completing a full orbit in only 1.6 days. That’s close enough to ensure that, despite the small, dim star, GJ 1132 b is extremely hot.

It’s so close and hot, in fact, that the researchers estimate that it’s currently losing about 10,000 kilograms of atmosphere every second. As the host star was expected to be brighter early in its history, the researchers estimate that GJ 1132 b would have lost a reasonable-sized atmosphere within the first 100 million years of its existence. In fact, over the life of the planet, the researchers estimate that it could have lost an atmosphere weighing in at about five times the planet’s current mass—the sort of thing you might see if the remaining planet were the core of a mini-Neptune.

So, researchers were probably surprise to find that, based on data from the Hubble, the planet seems to have an atmosphere.
How’d that get here?

Moderation in Infrastructure – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Detailed interviews here

It was Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, who pointed out to me that one of the animating principles of early 20th-century Progressivism was guaranteeing freedom of expression from corporations:

Exactly the same kind of restraints upon freedom of thought are bound to occur in every country where economic organization has been carried to the point of practical monopoly. Therefore the safeguarding of liberty in the world which is growing up is far more difficult than it was in the nineteenth century, when free competition was still a reality. Whoever cares about the freedom of the mind must face this situation fully and frankly, realizing the inapplicability of methods which answered well enough while industrialism was in its infancy.

This is why I take Smith’s comments as more of a warning: a commitment to consistency may lead to the lowest common denominator outcome Prince fears, where U.S. social media companies overreach on content, even as competition is squeezed out at the infrastructure level by policies guided by non-U.S. countries. It’s a bad mix, and public clouds in particular would be better off preparing for geographically-distinct policies in the long run, even as they deliver on their commitment to predictability and process in the meantime, with a strong bias towards being hands-off. That will mean some difficult decisions, which is why it’s better to make a commitment to neutrality and due process now.

Excel Never Dies

Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains. These programs often serve as high-fidelity prototypes of domain specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form.

If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today.

Pair with, These SaaS Companies Are Unbundling Excel – Here’s Why It’s A Massive Opportunity

On The dance between the long tail and the short head

The disconnect occurs when producers and creators try to average things out and dumb things down, hoping for the big hit that won’t come. Or overspend to get there. The opportunity lies in finding a viable audience and matching the project’s focus and budget to the people who truly want it.

And the dance continues.

Ten reasons to write a book (I’d say these translate well to blogging too!)

Here’s four …

It clarifies your thinking.
It’s a project that is completely and totally up to you.
Because it’s a generous way to share.
It will increase your authority in your field.

Brent Simmons on How NetNewsWire Handles Threading

Advice

Some developers I’ve known seem to think that being good at concurrency makes them badass. Others seem to think that senior developers must be great at concurrency, and so they should be too.

But what senior developers are good it is eliminating concurrency as much as possible by developing a simple, easy, consistent model to follow for the app and its components.

And this is because concurrency is too difficult for humans to understand and maintain. Maybe you can create a system that makes extensive use of it, and have it be correct for one day. But think of your team! Even if you’re a solo developer, you and you-plus-six-months makes you a team.

I know you’re worried about blocking the main thread. But consider this: it’s way easier to fix a main-thread-blocker than it is to fix a weird, intermittent bug or crash due to threading.

Laurie Barth on Human-Readable JavaScript

Experts don’t prove themselves by using every piece of the spec; they prove themselves by knowing the spec well enough to deploy syntax judiciously and make well-reasoned decisions. This is how experts become multipliers—how they make new experts.

So what does this mean for those of us who consider ourselves experts or aspiring experts? It means that writing code involves asking yourself a lot of questions. It means considering your developer audience in a real way. The best code you can write is code that accomplishes something complex, but is inherently understood by those who examine your codebase.

And no, it’s not easy. And there often isn’t a clear-cut answer. But it’s something you should consider with every function you write.

Len Kleinrock: The First Two Packets on the Internet

AnandTech Interview with Jim Keller: ‘The Laziest Person at Tesla

First, I was at Digital (DEC) for 15 years, right! Now that was a different career because I was in the mid-range group where we built computers out of ECL - these were refrigerator-sized boxes. I was in the DEC Alpha team where we built little microprocessors, little teeny things, which at the time we thought were huge. These were 300 square millimeters at 50 watts, which blew everybody’s mind.

So I was there for a while, and I went to AMD right during the internet rush, and we did a whole bunch of stuff in a couple of years. We started Opteron, HyperTransport, 2P servers - it was kind of a whirlwind of a place. But I got sucked up or caught up in the enthusiasm of the internet, and I went to SiByte, which got bought by Broadcom, and I was there for four years total. We delivered several generations of products.

I was then at P.A Semi, and we delivered a great product, but they didn’t really want to sell the product for some reason, or they thought they were going to sell it to Apple. I actually went to Apple, and then Apple bought P.A Semi, and then I worked for that team, so you know I was between P.A Semi and Apple. That was seven years, so I don’t really feel like that was jumping around too much.

Then I jumped to AMD I guess, and that was fun for a while. Then I went to Tesla where we delivered Hardware 3 (Tesla Autopilot). So that was kind of phenomenal. From a standing start to driving a car in 18 months - I don’t think that’s ever been done before, and that product shipped really successfully. They built a million of them last year. Tesla and Intel were a different kind of a whirlwind, so you could say I jumped in and jumped out. I sure had a lot of fun.

Ryan Holiday’s 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life

4 - Say no (a lot).
15 - It’s not about routine but about practices.
71 - Go the f*ck to sleep.
81 - Don’t just read books, re-read books.

Maria Popova, on How Reading Is Like Love

Now you are being read.
Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being…

Shane Parrish posits Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed

A good metaphor is installing an update to the operating system on your laptop.
Would you rather install an update that fixes bugs and improves existing processes, or one that just makes everything run faster? Obviously, you’d prefer the former. The latter would just lead to more crashes. The same is true for updating your mental operating system.

Ryan Holiday presents A Practical Philosophy Reading List: A Few Books You Can Actually Use in Real Life

You must know by now: I don’t believe that philosophy is something for the classroom.
It’s something that helps you with life.
It shouldn’t be complicated.
It shouldn’t be confusing.
It should be clear, and it should be usable.
As Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man.”

Leo Babauta on the First Two Steps to Creating Resilience

The first step is to remove things that are adding unnecessary stress.
The second step is to do things that help us feel replenished.

David Ogilvy had skin in the game! Who knew?

The Ogilvy agency … was founded by a man who didn’t have an MBA, or even a college degree.
Before he became the King of Madison Avenue, Englishman David Ogilvy was an Oxford dropout who worked as a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a researcher for George Gallup, an agent of the British Intelligence Service during WWII, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.

In fact, while most agencies had subordinates present campaign ideas to clients, Ogilvy often made these presentations himself; he wanted to be directly involved, and felt it made the pitches more memorable (“One orchestra looks like every other orchestra, but there is no confusing one conductor with another”).

Ogilvy also rejected around 60 potential new clients each year. A common reason for this rejection was the chairman’s lack of confidence in the product that a company wanted his agency to pitch. Ogilvy used all the products he advertised, and wouldn’t create campaigns for those he couldn’t personally back, believing that it was “flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy,” and that it was impossible to craft an effective ad for something you couldn’t earnestly get behind …

The beauty of Seth Godin¸ is that every post on his is darn here quotable. This is him, on the weight of repetitive tasks …

If we’re lucky enough to work indoors, with free snacks and podcasts in the background, we might not get physically exhausted the way we would moving thousands of pounds of bricks. But the cognitive and emotional toll of repetitive tasks is real, even if doesn’t leave callouses.

The discipline is to invest one time in getting your workflow right instead of paying a penalty for poor digital hygiene every single day.

Hacking your way through something “for now” belies your commitment to your work and your posture as a professional. Get the flow right, as if you were hauling bricks.

The Art of Manliness podcast have a ton of episodes on making and breaking habits, which they have collected into one handy page

If you’ve failed at habit building or breaking in the past, you might think you just need more willpower.
That’s not what James Clear argues in this interview. Rather, it’s simply about crafting optimal systems for behavior change. Clear walks the listener through his own research-backed 4-step process for effective habit formation.

What is the key to making risky decisions? Scott H Young has thoughts

The correct approach to thinking about risky decisions is not to ignore the odds, but to model your decision and explicitly include things like the benefits to coming in second place.

A good decision model ought to include:

1. What is the baseline likelihood of success?
2. What information do you have that makes you different from the average competitor?
3. What are the outcomes for less-than-ideal results?
4. What are the emotional and financial costs of going forward?

Leo Babauta on Staying at the Edge of Uncertainty

When we get into a situation that feels uncertain, most of us will immediately try to get to a place of certainty.
Instead of having a difficult conversation, we’ll stay in a crappy situation for longer than we need to.
Instead of putting our art out into the world, we’ll hide it in the safety of obscurity.
When things feel chaotic and overwhelming, we look for a system that will feel ordered and simple.

All of us do this in most areas of our lives. Sometimes, we are able to voluntarily stay in uncertainty, but those times are relatively rare, and usually we don’t like it so much.

Here’s the thing: the edge of uncertainty and chaos is where we learn, grow, create, lead, make incredible art and new inventions.
The edge of uncertainty is where we explore, go on adventures, get curious, and reinvent ourselves.
The edge of uncertainty is where we can find unexpected beauty, love, intimacy, vulnerability, meaning.
Everything we truly crave is at the edge of uncertainty, but we run from it.

The trick is to stay in it.

You’ve read the classic works of stoicism. What now? The Daily Stoic helps with, Assembling A “Bible” of Stoicism: What To Read After The Romans, https://dailystoic.com/bible-of-stoicism

The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them. . . . All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

—Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

P.S. If you are new and want to explore the Stoic way of thinking about life, I heartily recommend Ryan Holiday’s trilogy for a gentle introduction. The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy and Stillness is the key are short yet surprisingly deep and engaging books.

Speaking of reading, Ali Abdaal teaches us, The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently

Level 4: Syntopical Reading
The final level of reading is about our understanding of a subject more generally. Whereas analytical reading focuses on our comprehension of a specific book, syntopical reading helps shape our opinion and increase our overall fluency of the wider topic through understanding how different books relate to one another. This may sound a little abstract, but bear with me.

“The benefits [of syntopical reading] are so great that it is well worth the trouble of learning how to do it” — Adler

The first step is to begin by deciding the subject we want to tackle (eg: productivity or habit-formation). We can then draw up a bibliography of books on the topic, and select just a handful of them that we believe to be most relevant.

Having compiled the list of books, we can begin reading syntopically. This means reading each of the books analytically and building mental connections between each of them. I try to define common subject keywords in my own words, identify and answer the most pressing questions that the books collectively address, and make an informed decision about the strengths of each author’s argument.

“Creativity is just connecting things” — Steve Jobs

Through syntopical reading we’re connecting the best ideas on a subject, which acts as a powerful catalyst giving rise to creative solutions and real insight. It’s truly game-changing (when we actually do it).

Shane Parrish distills Mortimer Adler’s advice from How to Read a Book: The Ultimate Guide by Mortimer Adler

I bet you already know how to read a book. You were taught in elementary school.
But do you know how to read well?
There is a difference between reading for understanding and reading for information.
If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t given much thought to how you read. And how you read makes a massive difference to knowledge accumulation.
A lot of people confuse knowing the name of something with understanding. While great for exercising your memory, the regurgitation of facts without solid understanding and context gains you little in the real world.
A useful heuristic: Anything easily digested is reading for information.
Consider the newspaper, are you truly learning anything new? Do you consider the writer your superior when it comes to knowledge in the subject? Odds are probably not. That means you’re reading for information. It means you’re likely to parrot an opinion that isn’t yours as if you had done the work.
This is how most people read. But most people aren’t really learning anything new. It’s not going to give you an edge, make you better at your job, or allow you to avoid problems.

“Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”
— Edgar Allen Poe

Learning something insightful requires mental work.
It’s uncomfortable. If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not learning.
You need to find writers who are more knowledgeable on a particular subject than yourself. By narrowing the gap between the author and yourself, you get smarter.

Farnam Street has an awesome page chockful of articles, that help us become better readers

You can’t get where you want to go if you’re not learning all the time. One of the best ways to learn is to read.

Reading habits don’t need to be complicated, you can start a simple 25 page a day habit right now. While it seems small the gains add up quickly.

Above all else remember that just because you’ve read something doesn’t mean you’ve done the work required to have an opinion.

Ryan Holiday on Marginalia, the Anti-Library, and Other Ways to Master the Lost Art of Reading

Step three, be ruthless about acquiring knowledge through books. If you see anything that remotely intrigues you–just get it.
Quit books that don’t hold your interest or deliver the goods.
Swarm onto topics that do, even if there is no immediate relevancy to what you’re doing. After all, creativity comes from combining old ideas into something new. Reading a variety of topics gives you more ammo than your competition.

If something enthralls you and you want to deeply understand it, go at it. You don’t have to slowly trudge along through a book. Think of someone like Frederick Douglass, who brought himself up out of slavery by sneaking out and teaching himself to read, or Richard Wright who forged notes from his white boss so he could check out books from the library. Books weren’t some idle pursuit or pastime for these great individuals, they were survival itself.

Ed Latimore on How to stop hating someone and holding grudges

You don’t stop hating someone because it’s the right thing to do or because they’ve done something to finally make it acceptable for you to stop hating the person. You stop hating because if you don’t stop, then there are very consequences to your mental, physical, and emotional health.

You’re the only who pays the cost and you get absolutely nothing of value in return. In fact, when you hate someone, you’re paying this cost to have things of value taken from you. Mainly, your peace of mind, love of other people, and openness to the world.

This is why releasing and removing hatred is an important goal.

Ryan Holiday on How to Digest Books Above Your “Level”

I shouldn’t be able to read most of the books on my shelf. I never took a single classical history class and I cheated through most of Economics 001. Still, the loci of my library are Greek History and Applied Economics. And though they often are beyond me educationally, I’m able to comprehend them because of some equalizing tricks. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is–lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wresting with them until you can–shying away from the “easy read.”

This is how I break down a new book: …

Ryan Holiday on How To Read More — A Lot More

When you read a lot of books people inevitably assume you speed read. In fact, that’s probably the most common email I get. They want to know my trick for reading so fast. They see all the books I recommend every month in my reading newsletter and assume I must have some secret. So they ask me to teach them how to speed read.

That’s when I tell them I don’t have a secret. Even though I read hundreds of books every single year, I actually read quite slow. In fact, I read deliberately slow, so that I can take notes (and then whenever I finish a book, I go back through and transcribe these notes for my version of a commonplace book.

So where do I get the time?

Look, where do you get the time to eat three meals a day? How do you have time to do all that sleeping? How do you manage to spend all those hours with your kids or wife or a girlfriend or boyfriend?

You don’t get that time anywhere, do you? You just make it because it’s really important. It’s a non-negotiable part of your life.

Ryan Holiday on How And Why To Keep A “Commonplace Book”

This is why I have the Commonplace Blog too! And also why, I am now creating a Zettelkasten to help me think and write.

Some of the greatest men and women in history have kept these books. Marcus Aurelius kept one–which more or less became the Meditations. Petrarch kept one. Montaigne, who invented the essay, kept a handwritten compilation of sayings, maxims and quotations from literature and history that he felt were important. His earliest essays were little more than compilations of these thoughts. Thomas Jefferson kept one. Napoleon kept one. HL Mencken, who did so much for the English language, as his biographer put it, “methodically filled notebooks with incidents, recording straps of dialog and slang” and favorite bits from newspaper columns he liked. Bill Gates keeps one.

… And if you still need a why–I’ll let this quote from Seneca answer it (which I got from my own reading and notes):

“We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application–not far far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech–and learn them so well that words become works.”

Book I’m reading - The Code Breaker, lovely article on Ars Technica

You were in the middle of reporting this book when something seismic happened in the world of CRISPR. In 2018, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui revealed he had not only edited human embryos but started pregnancies with them, leading to the birth of twin girls. How did that affect the trajectory of the story you were trying to tell?

That really became a crucial turning point in the narrative. Because now all these scientists were forced to wrestle with the moral implications of what they’d helped create. But then things changed again when the coronavirus struck. I wound up working on the book for another year to watch the players as they took on this pandemic. And that actually caused my own thinking about CRISPR to evolve.

How so?

I think I felt a visceral resistance at times to the notion that we could edit the human genome, especially in ways that would be inheritable. But that changed both for me and for Doudna as we met more and more people who are themselves afflicted by horrible genetic problems or who have children who are suffering from them. And when our species got slammed by a deadly virus, it made me more open to the idea that we should use whatever talents we have in order to thrive and be healthy. So I’m now even more open to gene editing done for medical purposes, whether that’s sickle cell anemia, or Huntington’s, or Tay-Sachs, or even to increase our resistance to viruses and other pathogens and to cancer.

I still have worries. One is I don’t want gene editing to be something only the rich can afford and it leads to encoding inequalities into our societies. And, secondly, I want to make sure we don’t reduce the wonderful diversity that exists within the human species.

Annual Letters, from folks I listen to and learn from …

• Shane Parrish
• Warren Buffett
• Jeff Bezos
• Howard Marks

The Neuroscience of Motivation

When the Eiffel Tower was a Parisian Startup Laboratory

During the pandemic, the Eiffel Tower has been undergoing a fresh paint job ahead of the 2024 Olympics that harkens back to its golden hue of the early 20th century. But at that time, the Eiffel Tower was more than just an attraction: Gustave Eiffel was using his new tower as a his personal laboratory of scientific innovation. In 1909, Eiffel built its first wind tunnel at the foot of the tower, which was made available to the earliest pioneers in aviation and aircraft design. The wind tunnel, still in service in Paris, inside “the oldest aeronautical test laboratory still in working order,” can be considered one of Eiffel’s littlest-known monuments.

Why We Struggle to Motivate Ourselves

While it’s easy to think about pain in the most dramatic terms, it’s often the small pinches and itches that really derail progress.
How many people fail to set up retirement accounts because the thought of trying to understand their 401k program makes them feel a bit anxious? How many get stuck in dead-end jobs because the thought of reaching out to talk to a few people in different career spaces feels awkward?

How to Improve Your Self-Awareness

Self-awareness comes from building a richer, more accurate model of yourself. This combines not only theory, but experience.

Having more self-awareness leads, straightforwardly to more success. If you understand how you operate, both as an individual and as a human being generally, you can be more successful with your ambitions.

But the benefit of self-awareness is much deeper than this. Understanding yourself transcends just trying to make more money or have a better job, because it helps you realize why you want to pursue those things in the first place. In some places, this will strengthen your ambitions, as you recognize a deeper purpose to your goals, in other cases it may change what you pursue entirely, leaving some pursuits that you recognize won’t actually make you fulfilled.

Here’s 10,000 Hours. Don’t Spend It All in One Place.

On October 20, 1874, in Danbury, Connecticut, a child was born who would grow up to be one of the greatest American composers of classical music. More than a half-century ahead of his time, he combined late romanticism, American folk, and avant-garde techniques in a way that revolutionized music.
On the very same day, in the same town, a child was born who would grow up to transform the business of financial planning. An actuary, successful insurance entrepreneur, and well-known financial author, he devised ingenious life-insurance products and created the modern practice of estate planning.

It was not a coincidence that the great composer and the celebrated financial innovator shared a birthday and birthplace. They were the same man: Charles Edward Ives.

There’s an old proverb that goes, “Duos qui sequitur lepores neutrum capit”—“He who follows two hares catches neither.” Perhaps that’s so, but he who chases two hares can at least have a great time trying, which can be more important in a good life. Many of my graduate students in public policy and business administration have a strong background and interest in subjects unrelated to their academic discipline. My advice to them, based on the truths above, is to not abandon either one.
The interests don’t have to be alike. After all, Ives didn’t catch two hares—it was more like a dolphin and a rhinoceros.

A Crash Course in Real World Self-Defense

#1. Use your brain and walking shoes first. Most of the time, you can avoid fights altogether if you just keep a cool head. Keep in mind that any fight can potentially put someone in the hospital or worse; to that end, walking away or using words to deescalate the conflict is often the best defense. So when you make the choice to engage in combat, ask yourself if it’s worth it. Even if you manage to come out on top, you could be looking at heavy legal fines, or the guilt of knowing you caused another person long-term injury, so it’s best to walk away whenever possible. Even better yet is to avoid environments that can put you in antagonistic situations in the first place, such as parties or bars where there might be excessive consumption of alcohol. To repeat the old adage, “Discretion is the better part of valor.”

#7. Keep it simple. “Okay, first, your opponent grabs your lapel. Turn your hand. Now grab his wrist with both your hands. Next turn away from him, pivoting on the balls of your feet. After that you’re going to step under his elbow, pull his arm, then shift your body weight so that he’s moving towards you. Now catch his head with your calf muscle and . . .” Have you ever seen someone teach this sort of complex technique? Such maneuvers tend to not work so well, and that’s largely because they’re too complicated. A joint lock or hold that’s too complicated causes problems for two reasons. First, if any “link” in the chain of moves is weak, then the entire technique can fail. When you factor in the different body sizes and levels of strength that you’re likely to encounter, it adds yet another variable. Second, it requires too much memory and concentration, and when you’re in a fight, those are two things that won’t come easy to you. In short, complicated techniques usually aren’t worth your time, at least in the context of a street fight. The more simple and boring a technique is, the more reliable it tends to be. Let’s rewrite that complicated technique above to make it more simple: “Punch the guy in the face until he lets go, then run.” Much easier to remember, right?

Mandy Brown asking Remote to Who?

If remote work gives us anything at all, it gives us the chance to root ourselves in a place that isn’t the workplace. It gives us the chance to really live in whatever place we have chosen to live—to live as neighbors and caretakers and organizers, to stop hoarding all of our creative and intellectual capacity for our employers and instead turn some of it towards building real political power in our communities.

This Is How To Have A Long Awesome Life: 5 Secrets From Research

If you ever wanted to be guilted in a very happy and helpful way, into exercising, then Eric Barker is here to do just that

Daniel Lieberman decided to do an informal — and very sneaky — study.

While at an academic conference, he counted how many people took the escalator vs the stairs. In ten minutes, 151 people walked past him and only 11 used the stairs. That’s just 7 percent.

Thing was, this was a meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

And the name of the conference was “Exercise Is Medicine.”

Actually, these results weren’t as bad as you might think — formal studies of the general populace show, on average, only 5% of people take the stairs. We all know exercise is good… but most of us just don’t do it.

Farnam Street has a concise summary of the evergreen classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

I shan’t summarise it here. A summary of a summary would be redonkulous, non? 😂

Go Read.
Ok, one quote that always resonates with me.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

Carnegie was echoing Maimonides of old. Munger too, later echoed Carnegie when he spoke of the work required to have an opinion

“The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things.
You have to work hard on it.
Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side.
It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents.
This is a great mental discipline.”

The World Map of the Internet in 2021

I was going to send this to the work newsletter, but the drawings are too gorgeous to restrict to just that subset.
There’s all sorts of stuff; protocols that undergird the net, browsers in use, & how the world is slowly amalgamating into huge walled continents of a few centralised websites.
These maps are a joy to watch. (and a bit unsettling to reflect on.)

Reminds me a little bit of this map of food corporates.

Maya Angelou’s Paris Review Interview, on writing and language and life and growing up. Watching this could probably the best hour of your life.

On Making it Look Easy …

I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics — New York critics as a rule — who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

On Wisdom …

“Most people don’t grow up.
It’s too damn difficult.

What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.
Not really. They get older.

But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed.”

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Lots of links in this letter, because there won’t be a work letter later, this month :)
This one is all about, drum roll … Reading :)

You know the drill. Click the headers to wander off to the original articles.

Books I Read Last Month

• So Good They Can’t Ignore you, is a book I strangely keep coming back to.
  Lots to learn about how to build a sustainable career
• Needle Points, You need to do the work required to hold a fair opinion. Tablet’s long form piece helped me understand vaccine hesitancy.
• I finally got tired of waiting for the old man to finish his series, and started reading everything around it, to immerse myself in The World of Ice & Fire This was almost as fun as discovering and reading A Game of Thrones in the late 90s. Only for completionists though. It’ll feel like a slog for anyone who is not a fan. If he still keeps dilly dallying, I might have to go watch the TV series next.
• And Discipline Equals Freedom, just for that semi regular kick in the pants.

You’ve read the classic works of stoicism. Now what? The Daily Stoic helps with, Assembling A “Bible” of Stoicism: What To Read After The Romans

The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning.
On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man’s experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them …
All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

— Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (1851)

P.S. And if you haven’t read the classic works and if you are new and want to explore the Stoic way of thinking about life, I heartily recommend Ryan Holiday’s trilogy for a gentle introduction. The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy and Stillness is the key are short yet surprisingly deep and engaging books.

Ali Abdaal teaches us, The Art of Reading More Effectively and Efficiently

Level 4: Syntopical Reading
The final level of reading is about our understanding of a subject more generally. Whereas analytical reading focuses on our comprehension of a specific book, syntopical reading helps shape our opinion and increase our overall fluency of the wider topic through understanding how different books relate to one another. This may sound a little abstract, but bear with me.

“The benefits [of syntopical reading] are so great that it is well worth the trouble of learning how to do it”
— Mortimer Adler

The first step is to begin by deciding the subject we want to tackle (eg: productivity or habit-formation). We can then draw up a bibliography of books on the topic, and select just a handful of them that we believe to be most relevant.

Having compiled the list of books, we can begin reading syntopically. This means reading each of the books analytically and building mental connections between each of them. I try to define common subject keywords in my own words, identify and answer the most pressing questions that the books collectively address, and make an informed decision about the strengths of each author’s argument.

“Creativity is just connecting things”
— Steve Jobs

Through syntopical reading we’re connecting the best ideas on a subject, which acts as a powerful catalyst giving rise to creative solutions and real insight. It’s truly game-changing (when we actually do it).

Shane Parrish distills Adler in How to Read a Book: The Ultimate Guide by Mortimer Adler

I bet you already know how to read a book. You were taught in elementary school.
But do you know how to read well?
There is a difference between reading for understanding and reading for information.
If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t given much thought to how you read. And how you read makes a massive difference to knowledge accumulation.
A lot of people confuse knowing the name of something with understanding. While great for exercising your memory, the regurgitation of facts without solid understanding and context gains you little in the real world.
A useful heuristic: Anything easily digested is reading for information.
Consider the newspaper, are you truly learning anything new? Do you consider the writer your superior when it comes to knowledge in the subject? Odds are probably not. That means you’re reading for information. It means you’re likely to parrot an opinion that isn’t yours as if you had done the work.
This is how most people read. But most people aren’t really learning anything new. It’s not going to give you an edge, make you better at your job, or allow you to avoid problems.

“Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”
— Edgar Allen Poe

Learning something insightful requires mental work. It’s uncomfortable. If it doesn’t hurt, you’re not learning. You need to find writers who are more knowledgeable on a particular subject than yourself. By narrowing the gap between the author and yourself, you get smarter.

Farnam Street has an awesome page, chockful of articles, that help us become better readers

You can’t get where you want to go if you’re not learning all the time. One of the best ways to learn is to read.

Reading habits don’t need to be complicated, you can start a simple 25 page a day habit right now. While it seems small the gains add up quickly.

Above all else remember that just because you’ve read something doesn’t mean you’ve done the work required to have an opinion.

and also

Quit Books

Bad books are a grind. Good books almost read themselves.

When you pick up a good book you feel it instantly. Not only are they well written and packed with ideas and insight, but they’re well organized. You want to read the next page.

Start books quickly but give them up easily. One of the biggest things that holds people back when reading is our desire to finish what we start. Good books finish themselves. You can’t put them down. Trying to finish a bad book, on the other hand, is like walking through the mud with a wheelbarrow full of bricks. Life is too short.

When it comes to reading, you don’t need to finish what you start.

Once you realize that you can quit bad books (or reading anything for that matter) without guilt, everything changes. Putting a bad book down creates the opportunity and space for a great book.

Skim a lot of books. Read a few. Immediately re-read the best ones twice.

That’s all for now, folks. See you in the new year!
But before I go, this beautiful Gaiman poem (the pic above) reminds me,

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, to say
we have the right to be here, …

So, this Christmas …
I’m grateful, you’re a part of my life.
I’m grateful, you’ve made me a part of yours.
I’m grateful, you’ve given me the right to belong to your world!
I wish you be happy, I wish you love, and as ever I wish you warmth!
Merry Christmas!

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Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

Ok, I’m a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short¹ :)
This work letter is going out to all of you my friends, because there’s not much technical stuff in here.

And because I have a spot of good news to share.
I got a jobby job!
I’ve been trying the past few years, to switch my career to something that wasn’t as taxing, as consulting on hardware and networks and integrating systems.
While I loved the work, it was a lot of work, for not enough money and it took a toll on my physical health.²
So writing software from the comfort of my home, is it.
And two weeks in, the team’s taken me under their wing and they are guiding me along and I’m loving it!

And now that’ve gotten all that happy Wheeeeeee! out of my system, on to our letter :)

Human Computer: The Forgotten Women’s Profession

By WWII, with all hands needed for the war effort, the Army hired a group of women computers to calculate artillery trajectories. These women worked as support to the engineers and were brought on because computing was still thought to be menial and low status work; too dull for the highly educated men on staff who wanted more exciting jobs. This disregards the fact that in order to solve these equations these women would have to re-work the same calculations over and over again for hours. Former computer, Marilyn Heyson, recalled in an interview that the job was intellectually interesting, but a marathon. These calculations not only required great mental endurance, patience, and attention to detail, but advanced mathematical skill.

The dance between the long tail and the short head

The disconnect occurs when producers and creators try to average things out and dumb things down, hoping for the big hit that won’t come. Or overspend to get there. The opportunity lies in finding a viable audience and matching the project’s focus and budget to the people who truly want it.

And the dance continues.

Ten reasons to write a book

I’d say these translate well to just writing and publishing yourself on your blog, in general too!
Here’s four …

• It clarifies your thinking.
• It’s a project that is completely and totally up to you.
• Because it’s a generous way to share.
• It will increase your authority in your field.

So long and see you next month folks :)

P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list!
Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe!
P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

A few days late, but Happy Diwali, folks! :)

A small ask of you, to begin with.
Like I wrote in the past, I don’t have any sort of tracking in these mails.
There are no ads, nothing to push. Just a labour of love.
So I have no idea whether these posts resonate or I’m just howling into the storm that is your inbox.
If you like it, hate it, agree/disagree, write me :)
All I get to see are a couple of folk leaving, every once in a while, and my list, my tribe in fact is really tiny and it feels a bit discouraging.¹

So share this with friends and ask them to subscribe and write to me and tell me how much you love the letters and make me happy :)
What is a festive season without a bit of emotional, tugging of the heartstrings? 😂

On to our letter!
You know the drill! Click the headers, to wander off to the original articles and read them :)

Why You Should Stop Reading News, Shane Parrish

Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the media we consume:
Is this good for me?
Is this dense with detailed information?
Is this important?
Is this going to stand the test of time?
Is the person writing someone who is well informed on the issue?
Asking those questions makes it clear the news isn’t good for you.

“[W]e’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us, that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”

— Nicolas Carr

Shane, once again on, How to Remember What You Read

If you only remember six things after reading this article, it should be the following truths about reading:

1. Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.

• Speed-reading is bullshit. Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things. Confuse them at your peril.
• Book summary services miss the point. A lot of companies charge ridiculous prices for access to vague summaries bearing only the faintest resemblance to anything in the book. Summaries can be a useful jumping-off point to explore your curiosity, but you cannot learn from them the way you can from the original text.
• Fancy apps and tools are not needed. A notebook, index cards, and a pen will do just fine.
• We shouldn’t read stuff we find boring. Life is far too short.
• Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them.

Complement with Nicky Case’s amazing website, applet, spaced repetition teaching aid, explorable explanation, How To Remember Anything Forever (…ish)

Tony Stark nearly gasped as a gloved hand trailed down his spine. The steady pressure was smooth and almost reassuring. Obama chuckled. “You mean, the–

This is why we write, Neil Gaiman

This little piece on Neil’s blog is so heartwarming, empowering and inspiring, that I refuse to spoil it for you.
Go read and smile :)

So long for now, and I’ll play catch up next month :)
Remember to write! ²

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P.P.P.S If you love language and word jokes as much as I do, this should keep you chuckling.³ (once when you read the thread and then for the next couple of days as you keep thinking about it.)

Welcome to the October work letter! :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles.

Over at Ars Technica, Researchers think a planet lost its original atmosphere, and built a new one

In general, we don’t currently have the technology to image exoplanets unless they’re very large, very young, and a considerable distance from the star they orbit. Yet we can still get some sense of what’s in their atmosphere. To do that, we need to observe a planet that transits across the line of sight between Earth and its star. During a transit, a small percentage of the star’s light will travel through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, interacting with the molecules present there.

[…] It’s so close and hot, in fact, that the researchers estimate that it’s currently losing about 10,000 kilograms of atmosphere every second. As the host star was expected to be brighter early in its history, the researchers estimate that GJ 1132 b would have lost a reasonable-sized atmosphere within the first 100 million years of its existence. In fact, over the life of the planet, the researchers estimate that it could have lost an atmosphere weighing in at about five times the planet’s current mass—the sort of thing you might see if the remaining planet were the core of a mini-Neptune.

So, researchers were probably surprise to find that, based on data from the Hubble, the planet seems to have an atmosphere.
How’d that get here?

Moderation in Infrastructure by Ben Thompson

Read the more detailed interview, that the article references, here.

It was Patrick Collison, Stripe’s CEO, who pointed out to me that one of the animating principles of early 20th-century Progressivism was guaranteeing freedom of expression from corporations:

Exactly the same kind of restraints upon freedom of thought are bound to occur in every country where economic organization has been carried to the point of practical monopoly. Therefore the safeguarding of liberty in the world which is growing up is far more difficult than it was in the nineteenth century, when free competition was still a reality. Whoever cares about the freedom of the mind must face this situation fully and frankly, realizing the inapplicability of methods which answered well enough while industrialism was in its infancy.

This is why I take Smith’s comments as more of a warning: a commitment to consistency may lead to the lowest common denominator outcome Prince fears, where U.S. social media companies overreach on content, even as competition is squeezed out at the infrastructure level by policies guided by non-U.S. countries. It’s a bad mix, and public clouds in particular would be better off preparing for geographically-distinct policies in the long run, even as they deliver on their commitment to predictability and process in the meantime, with a strong bias towards being hands-off. That will mean some difficult decisions, which is why it’s better to make a commitment to neutrality and due process now.

Excel Never Dies

This is an awesome piece, on the amazing longevity and entrenchment of Excel in the face of competitors nibbling away at and creating billion dollar companies from just a fraction of Excel’s capabilities.

Excel has been around a long time, so we can expect Excel to be around for a long time.

That’s the Lindy Effect at work: the longer something lasts, the longer it can be expected to last. Something that has been around for a year is expected to be around for another year, but something that has been around for 100 years is expected to be around for another 100 years.

There are a couple of reasons for that:

Quality. Cream rises to the top, and only the strong survive. Part of the Lindy Effect can just be explained by the fact that some things are higher-quality than others, that people recognize and appreciate quality, and that over time, higher-quality things tend to outlast lower-quality things. If you put Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics on a permanent bookshelf and had people choose between it and some modern high kid’s philosophical ramblings in an ongoing tournament, generation after generation would recognize that Aristotle is better, and Aristotle’s work would survive.

Network Effects. As people recognize something’s quality and as it lasts longer, they become more comfortable building on top of it, which increases the odds that the thing sticks around. That’s a form of network effect, specifically a Two-Sided Platform Network Effect. As Aristotle’s work persists, more philosophers build on top of it, and more philosophy professors build their curricula around it, which creates lock-in and makes it even more likely that his work survives for millennia hence.

Excel is Lindy software.

So long, folks! :)

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It’s October! Time to play catchup with Jason’s letters! :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals.

I read a few books and wrote about them!

1. Brave Enough

• This is Water
• How to Pronounce Knife
• A Mathematician’s Lament
• The Comfort Crisis

The first two, I believe, should be mandatory reading for every growing adult.

Seth Godin on The Weight of Repetitive Tasks

The beauty of Seth Godin¸ is that every post of his is darn near quotable!

If we’re lucky enough to work indoors, with free snacks and podcasts in the background, we might not get physically exhausted the way we would moving thousands of pounds of bricks. But the cognitive and emotional toll of repetitive tasks is real, even if doesn’t leave calluses.

The discipline is to invest one time in getting your workflow right instead of paying a penalty for poor digital hygiene every single day.

Hacking your way through something “for now” belies your commitment to your work and your posture as a professional. Get the flow right, as if you were hauling bricks.

The Art of Manliness page on Habit Formation

If you’ve failed at habit building or breaking in the past, you might think you just need more willpower.
That’s not what James Clear argues in this interview. Rather, it’s simply about crafting optimal systems for behavior change. Clear walks the listener through his own research-backed 4-step process for effective habit formation.

The Daily Stoic on the Pursuit of Knowledge

Does the pursuit of knowledge ever end? We need to keep at it, says the Daily Stoic.

So when does this all culminate and coalesce into wisdom? When are you good?
Never. The answer is never.
“Until when is a person obligated to study Torah?” Maimonides once asked, rhetorically.
“Until the day of one’s death.”

So here’s to ever pursuing knowledge! I’ll see you next month, folks :)

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Welcome folks, to the September work letter! :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles.

A Bear? Where? Over There — Strapping a giant teddy bear to a car in the name of highway safety

You’re adapting my what?
When activated, adaptive cruise control uses forward-looking radar to maintain a specific distance to a vehicle in the lane ahead, slowing down or speeding up (to a maximum of whatever speed cruise control was set to) as necessary. Lane-keeping systems use forward-looking cameras to detect the lane markings on a road to keep the vehicle between them, and when both are active together, the vehicle will do a pretty good facsimile of driving itself, albeit with extremely limited situational awareness.

Which is where the human comes in. Under the SAE’s definitions for automated driving, in Level 2 the car controls braking, acceleration, and deceleration, but the human is responsible for providing situational awareness at all times. Of course, this raises the question of whether the driver is actually paying attention.

[…] To test whether drivers were actually paying attention while using a Level 2 system, IIHS recruited participants and then had them drive for roughly an hour, either using the car’s Level 2 system or not. At three predetermined locations on the test route, a second car—the one with the large pink bear attached to its trunk—would overtake the participant’s vehicle. At the end of the study, the drivers were asked if they saw anything odd, and if so, how many times.

TT2020 is an advanced, open source, hyperrealistic, multilingual typewriter font for a new decade!

Crazy obsessions like this, are why even I got into writing software.
From the problem page,

In the second image, there are three ‹N›’s. Yet, they all look exactly the same. A real typewriter can, quite rarely, have one of its letters damaged, or misaligned, such that that letter regularly makes an inferior strike to all the other letters. However, this degree of regularity is impossible; could Underwood or Remington have acheived it, they would have leapt for joy.
While working on the project, incredibly, another bad typewriter scene intruded upon my life. I don’t often sit around and watch movies, so I suppose there are only two possibilities:

a. There are so many of these unrealistic typewritten documents in late-2010’s cinema that almost any movie with a typewritten document in it will be hopelessly unrealistic, or
b. The universe, nay, God himself, was urging me on to complete this project in lieu of others I could finish!

The Font is here.

Home Assistant decided to implement password security checks by integrating Pwned Password lookups at the Have I Been Pwned project and all hell broke loose. Here’s Troy Hunt’s measured look at the situation.

I’ve written before about how IRL analogies are terrible and this one is no exception. You will not die if you use a weak password. There aren’t government regulations defining how the software is built. You can be any age to operate it. Home Assistant is free. And so on and so forth.
Cars warn you about a number of unsafe decisions and so does Home Assistant, but that’s where the similarities end. Everything else can be adequately discussed by simply talking about the technology rather than trying to find things IRL to compare to.

If it’s in Pwned Passwords, I’ve seen it in plain text. If I’ve seen it in plain text, hackers have seen it in plain text. It doesn’t matter how many letters and numbers and symbols you’ve got in your password, if it’s in Pwned Passwords then it’s floating around the web where plenty of other people have access to it. The guidance from NIST I quoted earlier said not to use “passwords obtained from previous breach corpuses” - there is no caveat that says “unless you think it’s a really good one”!

Pascal has already indicated this will be configurable and as I said earlier, I agree. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect he’d do things differently in the first place, even though the intention was good.
I do agree with the comments that people should be free to be dicks and deal with the consequences. What I’d like to encourage people to do, however, is to take this as an opportunity to get a password manager and strengthen all passwords that require it.

Until the next letter folks!

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It’s September! Time for a new letter :)
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals.

Leo Babauta on the First Two Steps to Creating Resilience

If you’ve known me for any length of time in the past decade, you know I set great store on being Antifragile..
While Leo says these are two beginner steps, to my mind, these two will bear the brunt of all the resiliency / antifragile weight. It’ll take you more than half the way there.

The first step is to remove things that are adding unnecessary stress.
The second step is to do things that help us feel replenished.

Ryan Holiday presents A Practical Philosophy Reading List: A Few Books You Can Actually Use in Real Life

Any philosophy forged in the crucible of action and subject to hardship, endures.
Like Stoicism did.

You must know by now: I don’t believe that philosophy is something for the classroom. It’s something that helps you with life. It shouldn’t be complicated. It shouldn’t be confusing. It should be clear, and it should be usable. As Epicurus put it, “Vain is the word of the philosopher which does not heal the suffering of man.”

David Ogilvy had skin in the game! Who knew?

Continuing with our theme of action and doing, even the creative process is not all in the mind.
It requires digging down in the mud and blood and sweat and tears …

The Ogilvy agency … was founded by a man who didn’t have an MBA, or even a college degree.
Before he became the King of Madison Avenue, Englishman David Ogilvy was an Oxford dropout who worked as a chef in Paris, a door-to-door salesman, a researcher for George Gallup, an agent of the British Intelligence Service during WWII, and a farmer in Pennsylvania.

In fact, while most agencies had subordinates present campaign ideas to clients, Ogilvy often made these presentations himself; he wanted to be directly involved, and felt it made the pitches more memorable (“One orchestra looks like every other orchestra, but there is no confusing one conductor with another”).

Ogilvy also rejected around 60 potential new clients each year. A common reason for this rejection was the chairman’s lack of confidence in the product that a company wanted his agency to pitch. Ogilvy used all the products he advertised, and wouldn’t create campaigns for those he couldn’t personally back, believing that it was “flagrantly dishonest for an advertising agent to urge consumers to buy a product which he would not allow his own wife to buy,” and that it was impossible to craft an effective ad for something you couldn’t earnestly get behind …

Until next time!

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You really ought to subscribe

Welcome to August’s work letter :)
As usual, click the headings to wander off to the original articles

A couple of my own posts

I wrote about my thoughts on my Kindle Oasis …

I got it.
I used it.
And decided within a day, that I was not going back to a Paperwhite, ever.
I realised that the Oasis, to me, is not a “premium” device.

and joining images using ImageMagick.

Two exhaustive articles on the historical significance of the Arpanet and how the protocol worked

• Article 1
• Article 2

This is what was totally new about the ARPANET. The ICCC demonstration didn’t just involve a human communicating with a distant computer. It wasn’t just a demonstration of remote I/O. It was a demonstration of software remotely communicating with other software, something nobody had seen before.
So what I’m trying to drive home here is that there is an important distinction between statement A, “the ARPANET connected people in different locations via computers for the first time,” and statement B, “the ARPANET connected computer systems to each other for the first time.” That might seem like splitting hairs, but statement A elides some illuminating history in a way that statement B does not.

In a section with the belabored title, “Technical Aspects of the Effort Which Were Successful and Aspects of the Effort Which Did Not Materialize as Originally Envisaged,” the authors wrote:

*Possibly the most difficult task undertaken in the development of the ARPANET was the attempt—which proved successful—*to make a number of independent host computer systems of varying manufacture, and varying operating systems within a single manufactured type, communicate with each other despite their diverse characteristics.

There you have it from no less a source than the federal government of the United States.

The 1Password blog with a high level overview of their Smart Password Generator

Long, random passwords just aren’t convenient. If you need to enter 45 randomly-generated characters on another device often enough, you’ll inevitably change that password to something like password123 because it’s easy to type and remember. It’s also - you got it - not strong.

While a lengthy, unintelligible password may appear stronger than a smart one, it’s mainly illusion. Pronounceable syllables make a smart password look human generated and, therefore, weaker. But a human-generated password could never be chosen uniformly and, therefore, can’t be accurately assessed for entropy.

We’ve made a compromise of sorts. We’ve sacrificed a few bits of (theoretical) entropy, that don’t affect real-world security, to gain a whole lot of convenience, compatibility, and accessibility — and those certainly are real world, which is what really matters.

Mahmoud Hashemi talks about Changing the Tires on a Moving Codebase

We realized that CI is more sensitive than most users for most of the site. So we focused in on testing the highest impact code. What’s high-impact? 1) the code that fails most visibly and 2) the code that’s hardest to retry. You can build an inventory of high-impact code in under a week by looking at traffic stats, batch job schedules, and asking your support staff.

And it really is important to develop close ties with your support team. Embedded in our strategy above was that CI is much more sensitive than a real user. While perfection is tempting, it’s not unrealistic to ask a bit of patience from an enterprise user, provided your support team is prepared. Sync with them weekly so surprise is minimized. If they’re feeling ambitious, you can teach them some Sentry basics, too.

My main lessons from Mahmoud’s post …

• Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth. — Mike Tyson
• Prioritise work, on what actually matters. Perfection can wait.
• People and their feedback comes first. Matters a lot more than data driven decisions. After all, software is used by and for people.

Until the next letter, folks … :)

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New month, new letter!
As usual, click the headers to wander off to the original articles

Maria Popova on How Reading Is Like Love

Now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being …

Related watching: Max Joseph’s awesome video on, How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content.
It’s 40 minutes long, but definitely worth every minute of your time.

Ryan Holiday’s 100 (Short) Rules for a Better Life

4 - Say no (a lot).
15 - It’s not about routine but about practices.
71 - Go the f*ck to sleep.
81 - Don’t just read books, re-read books.

After all,

Shane Parrish posits Your Thinking Rate Is Fixed

A good metaphor is installing an update to the operating system on your laptop. Would you rather install an update that fixes bugs and improves existing processes, or one that just makes everything run faster?
Obviously, you’d prefer the former. The latter would just lead to more crashes. The same is true for updating your mental operating system.

Have a lovely August! Until next time …

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New month, new work letter.
Before I begin though, please hit reply to these letters and let me know what you think, whether you like them or not and if there is anything you’d want me to write / hunt & research about!
Like I wrote in the introduction to April’s letter, both the letter and the website have zero tracking.
So I have no way of knowing, whether you like stuff or not, whether it resonates or not, whether I am preaching to throngs or shouting into the void, unless you tell me!
Let’s dig into it. As usual, click the headers, to wander off to the orginal articles :)

Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show

Excuse me a moment—I am going to be bombastic, over excited, and possibly annoying. The race is run, and we have a winner in the future of quantum computing. IBM, Google, and everyone else can turn in their quantum computing cards and take up knitting.

One key to quantum computing (or any computation, really) is the ability to change a qubit’s state depending on the state of another qubit. This turned out to be doable but cumbersome in optical quantum computing. Typically, a two-(or more) qubit operation is a nonlinear operation, and optical nonlinear processes are very inefficient. Linear two-qubit operations are possible, but they are probabilistic, so you need to repeat your calculation many times to be sure you know which answer is correct. A second critical feature is programmability. It is not desirable to have to create a new computer for every computation you wish to perform. Here, optical quantum computers really seemed to fall down. An optical quantum computer could be easy to set up and measure, or it could be programmable—but not both.

So, what has changed to suddenly make optical quantum computers viable? One is the appearance of detectors that can resolve the number of photons they receive. A second key development was integrated optical circuits. performance has gotten much, much better. Integrated optics are now commonly used in the telecommunications industry, with the scale and reliability that that implies.
The researchers, from a startup called Xanadu and the National Institute of Standards, have pulled together these technology developments to produce a single integrated optical chip that generates eight qubits. The internal setting of the interferometer is the knob that the programmer uses to control the computation. In practice, the knob just changes the temperature of individual waveguide segments. But the programmer doesn’t have to worry about these details. Instead, they have an application programming interface (Strawberry Fields Python Library) that takes very normal-looking Python code. This code is then translated by a control system that maintains the correct temperature differentials on the chip,

What is more, the scaling does not present huge amounts of increased complexity. In superconducting qubits, each qubit is a current loop in a magnetic field. Each qubit generates a field that talks to all the other qubits all the time. Engineers have to take a great deal of trouble to decouple and couple qubits from each other at the right moment. The larger the system, the trickier that task becomes. Ion qubit computers face an analogous problem in their trap modes. There isn’t really an analogous problem in optical systems, and that is their key advantage.

Intel to Build Silicon for Fully Homomorphic Encryption

When considering data privacy and protections, there is no data more important than personal data, whether that’s medical, financial, or even social. The discussions around access to our data, or even our metadata, becomes about who knows what, and if my personal data is safe. Today’s announcement between Intel, Microsoft, and DARPA, is a program designed around keeping information safe and encrypted, but still using that data to build better models or provide better statistical analysis without disclosing the actual data. It’s called Fully Homomorphic Encryption, but it is so computationally intense that the concept is almost useless in practice.

So whether that means combining hospital medical records over a state, or customizing a personal service using personal metadata gathered on a user’s smartphone, FHE at that scale is no longer a viable solution. Enter the DARPA DPRIVE program.

DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DPRIVE: Data Protection in Virtual Environments

Intel has announced that as part of the DPRIVE program, it has signed an agreement with DARPA to develop custom IP leading to silicon to enable faster FHE in the cloud, specifically with Microsoft on both Azure and JEDI cloud, initially with the US government. As part of this multi-year project, expertise from Intel Labs, Intel’s Design Engineering, and Intel’s Data Platforms Group will come together to create a dedicated ASIC to reduce the computational overhead of FHE over existing CPU-based methods. The press release states that the target is to reduce processing time by five orders of magnitude from current methods, reducing compute times from days to minutes.

Seth Godin on the ethical use of our newly gained technological capabilities

No wonder we’re a bit dizzy. We just multiplied our minds by many orders of magnitude. It’s easy to confuse someone else’s memory (or manipulation) with our hard-earned ability to remember things that actually happened to us.

And we’re now realizing that we have the power (and perhaps the obligation) to use shared knowledge to make better, more thoughtful decisions. And to intentionally edit out the manipulations and falsehoods that are designed to spread, not to improve our lives.

Until next time …
Don’t forget to write! :)

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Click the section headers to wander off to the original articles.

My notes on Antifragile

I spent a ton of time on this.
Because I did not just want my beloved Antifragile to be only an annual read.
This series reinforces whatever I’ve learnt and done, with the book so far.
From the book’s prologue …

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

We just don’t want to just survive uncertainty, to just about make it. We want to survive uncertainty and, in addition—like a certain class of aggressive Roman Stoics—have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque, and the inexplicable.

How?

The Feynman Learning Technique on Farnam Street

Shane starts with the familiar aspects of the popular technique used for learning things, and then amps it up to 11.

If you’re after a way to supercharge your learning and become smarter, the Feynman Technique might just be the best way to learn absolutely anything. Devised by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, it leverages the power of teaching for better learning.

The Feynman Learning Technique is a great method to develop mastery over sets of information. Once you do, the knowledge becomes a powerful tool at your disposal. But as Feynman himself showed, being willing and able to question your knowledge and the knowledge of others is how you keep improving. Learning is a journey.

The best writing advice from Colson Whitehead’s 60 Minutes interview

If you’re going to listen to anyone about the process of writing, Colson Whitehead is a pretty good choice: the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient won back-to-back Pulitzers for his novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, making him the only writer to win that prize for consecutive novels in history.

…

Write for yourself, because time is short.

[I write] really for me, which sounds very selfish. Should I have written a zombie novel? It made perfect sense to me. I grew up loving horror movies and then horror fiction. Is that something I should be doing as a literary author? I don’t know . . . if it gives me pleasure, if it’s exciting, you know, our time on earth is pretty short. I should be doing what I feel like I should be doing.

Hope you enjoyed this edition. Until next time …

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I have two, count ’em, two articles from Stephen Wolfram today.
And a fantastic historical restrospective on one of the early handhelds, the Psion!

What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project

So, What Is Consciousness?

What’s special about the way we humans experience the world? At some level, the very fact that we even have a notion of “experiencing” it at all is special. The world is doing what it does, with all sorts of computational irreducibility. But somehow even with the computationally bounded resources of our brains (or minds) we’re able to form some kind of coherent model of what’s going on, so that, in a sense, we’re able to meaningfully “form coherent thoughts” about the universe. And just as we can form coherent thoughts about the universe, so also we can form coherent thoughts about that small part of the universe that corresponds to our brains—or to the computations that represent the operation of our minds.

Stephen Wolfram on Tini Veltman (1931–2021): From Assembly Language to a Nobel Prize

So far as I know it all started from a single conversation on the terrace outside the cafeteria of the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva in 1962. Three physicists were involved. And out of that conversation there emerged three early systems for doing algebraic computation. One was written in Fortran. One was written in LISP. And one was written in assembly language.

I’ve told this story quite a few times, often adding “And which of those physicists do you suppose later won a Nobel Prize?” “Of course,” I explain, “it was the one who wrote their system in assembly language!”
… One of the important predictions of what became the Standard Model were so-called neutral currents (associated with the Z boson). In the end, neutral currents were discovered in 1973. But Tini explained that many years earlier he started telling people at CERN that they should be able to see neutral currents in their experiments. But for years they didn’t listen to him, and when they finally did, it turned out that—expensive as their earlier experiments had been—they’d thrown out the bubble chamber film that had been produced, and on which neutral currents should have been visible perhaps 15 years earlier.

Psion: the last computer

The Series 5 pocket computer from Psion was launched 10 years ago this week (1997. the article was written in 2007 — mjb). It was a remarkable achievement: entirely new silicon, a new operating system, middleware stack and applications were developed from scratch in just over two years.

This was the last time anyone undertook such a daunting task: it may be the last time anyone ever tries, either. Companies or projects that are formed to achieve simply one of these four goals typically end in failure: to achieve all four successfully, and put them in a product that was successful, too, was a triumph of creativity and management.

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Snow clouds rolling down a mountain peak, near Se La.
Click to embiggen

I don’t know the name of this bird,
    I only imagine his glittering beak
        tucked in a white wing
                while the clouds—

which he has summoned
    from the north—
        which he has taught
                to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
    into the world below
        like stars, or the feathers
                 of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
    that is asleep now, and silent—
        that has turned itself
                into snow.

White-Eyes, Mary Oliver

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Welcome to another edition of the work letter :)
Let’s just dive into it. Click the headers to wander off to the original articles.

OS X Reviewed

Sometime earlier this year, the operating system known as Mac OS X aka OS X aka macOS, stepped into its 21st year of existence, marking two decades of steady iterative movement.
That its underpinnings are older, by at least another decade, is story for some other time.
I put this in here, not for the OS itself but for the reviews of the OS, by John Siracusa. From it’s fledgling days, through the first ten releases upto 10.10, John covered it all.
In painstaking detail.
Other folks wrote reviews. John wrote introductory books to each new OS.
Every other line was linked someplace I could learn more.
It meant that everytime, I sat to read and learn from a John Siracusa review, I would have to set aside a couple of days to finish it.

From why spatial interfaces matter, to covering the rise of Webkit (which would soon be the bedrock of the modern web) to kernel changes to single handedly goading Apple into creating a new filesystem for their devices,¹ John wrote about it all.

If you want to learn about operating systems and design and how stuff comes together, you owe it to yourself to read John’s chronicles of Apple’s desktop operating system.

And for the curious, yes I have been using Macs (and Mac OS) that long (longer in fact), only to have shifted to Linux in the last couple of years, because I don’t agree with or like the direction Apple seems to be taking it in. I used System 7 and Mac OS 8, then tried the OS X DP2 hotness, got horrified with how agonizingly slow it was and stuck with Mac OS 8 until 10.2 was released in 2002.

Researchers build a swimming robot that works in the Mariana Trench

From the Ars Technica post,

But that may not be entirely necessary, based on a report in today’s Nature. In it, a team of Chinese researchers describe adapting hardware so that it could operate a soft-bodied robot in the deep ocean. The researchers then gave the robot a ride 10 kilometers down in the Mariana Trench and showed that it worked.

Mention robots, and for many people, the first thing that comes to mind are the collections of metal and cabling that make up things like the dancing Atlases from Boston Robotics. But over the last decade, plenty of researchers have demonstrated that all that rigid hardware isn’t strictly necessary. Soft-bodied robots work, too, and can do interesting things like squeeze through tight spaces or incorporate living cells into their structure.

The key phrase here is ‘core of Intel’s compute offerings’. It could be interpreted in two ways: at the core of a CPU design is a CPU core, which would mean an x86 design unless Intel were to skew away from x86 (unlikely). The other alternative could be an IO chiplet, which is also a ‘core part’ of a compute offering. Paul Alcorn from Tom’s Hardware has confirmed from Intel that the key element here is ‘compute cores’, and although Intel hasn’t specifically said the ISA of those cores, we are set to believe that Intel does indeed mean x86.

This means that other foundries will have access to the floorplans of Intel’s x86 designs, which used to be a big no-no at Intel. […] the fact that Intel is even letting another foundry build x86 cores that is the highlight of this announcement.

All-in-all, Pat Gelsinger is enabling a roadmap that allows Intel to pivot, and pivot hard.

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