reflection

May Update

As I am typing this, I am feeling the tug of this wonderful fidget toy on my attention, at the corner of my eye.

purple toy.

This is a Purple sample. Purple is a mattress brand, and their mattresses are made of this material. With this texture. No other filling than air.

purple toy.

It tends to squeeze directionally. As a sleeping aid, it’s weird. But as a toy, visually it is satisfying.

purple toy.

So much squeeze.

purple toy.

Squeeze in all directions.

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I am using my left hand to handle the toy because my right arm is giving me some trouble lately. My elbow problems feel solved (at last), and my left shoulder has mostly healed, but the right shoulder has taken a turn for the worse. I currently feel pain around my joint most of the time throughout the day. This is a relatively sudden development: I believe I made a mistaken gesture a few weeks ago and “pulled a muscle” (unsure what that means). It has not recovered since. I will plan a doctor visit next week, after I my return home. Typing this entry is thus not particularly pleasurable.

For context, I am currently finding myself in New York. There are a few people I wanted to talk to here regarding a recent project (more on this below), plus a bunch of friends to catch up with. Late May is also an excellent season to visit NYC; as I mused yesterday with a friend on a ride home, with a spectacular night view of the Brooklyn Bridge in the background: June and October are the only months in the year where I wholeheartedly entertain the idea of living here.

For even more context, May was overall rather busy.

I paid a visit to my mom at the start of the month, who is still powering through life and her recovery with the means at her disposal (that is, alas, few). I chose to drive this time, for the first time ever on my own. It helped me discover both the pleasure of driving long distances on an empty road, and the dismay and exhaustion arising from an even short ride in severe traffic.

Besides the frequent meetups this month (some new, some now recurrent), I also reached out to meet several new and recent company founders to spar intellectually on matters of strategy (also more on that below). A few friends also visited, and as usual hosting them delivered both joy and a delightful sense of communal purpose.

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Another thing that happened is that I spent half an hour at the 9th Avenue Saloon yesterday night. This bar is nondescript, utterly quiet on Sunday evenings, and nothing of significance happened here; yet, there is much to tell about the occurrence.

For a bit more context, I spent most of yesterday in Fort Greene Park. The occasion was a large birthday picnic, with numerous old and new friends. The weather graced us with a bit of sun, a moderate temperature and no rain. Overall, it was a glorious endeavor, and much delicious food and social catch-up was had. We finally parted around dusk. My body was achy and my mind foggy, and the device that constantly measures my biological well-being was reporting exhaustion. The urge to start the journey back to my local home coincided with an urge to lay down and rest.

A few steps into the subway stop, then a few more into the train, made me reconsider. Without the larger social group around, my mind felt suddenly less foggy, and revealed a longing for uncomplicated fun and community. My host had offered to discover the 9th Ave Saloon before, a place he frequents; on our ride back, I spontaneously took him up on this invitation. “Just for a pit stop,” I offered, as he had a subsequent neighborly visit planned and I was still realistic about my need for rest.

We only sat briefly at the venue, barely more than half an hour. During that time however, I was vibing! The music was upbeat, and the few patrons engaged: singing, dancing, and otherwise rather cheerfully chatting with each other. Two of them approached me and my host: all of them were regulars, and had grown a modest friendship from custom together. They treated me with both welcome and curiosity, and I felt like I belonged, effortlessly. In less than an hour, my spirits were lifted, my mind was clear (and cheerful), and the dull aches of the day were not an obstacle anymore. Had the weekend been longer, I felt I could have celebrated further into the night.

On the subsequent short walk home, my host and I debated briefly what this was about. We were comparing two positions. I do not remember precisely which was whose, but it doesn’t matter.

One was that my other friends were wealthy, and as wealthy people do, mostly spend time seeking new experiences; that the pic-nic was nice, but will be remembered as a mere fleeting moment in a constellation of disconnected happenings, all in different and less-intentional locales and emotional circumstances. In comparison, less-wealthy people instead seek companionship and foster bonds, both as an economical substitute for worldly experiences and a foundation for social safety. This might even be more true of minorities that were historically ostracized.

The other position stemmed from my observation that as far as I could remember, my social time outdoors in Brooklyn has been spent in different venues each time. My personal longing for quality time with friends had rarely driven us back to specific locales, and I had been happy to oblige a large diversity of cravings, schedules and geographical constraints. We thus observed that my friends and I never coalesced the parameters necessary to develop a social routine, and thus denied ourselves the opportunity to grow organic friendships this way.

These two positions are not contradictory and we chose not to settle the argument in favor of either one of them. One day later, however, my mind keeps meandering towards them. How many aspects of our routines, social-economic values and default choices for social time unintendedly result in a fragmented or stunted social life?

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On an entirely unrelated note, I’m also working on a new project. It’s thematically related and a natural extension of my previous work.

For context, last year I developed a system that helps people connect at in-person events. I’m still convinced of its utility, but it is somewhat expensive to operate (there are material costs for each event) and I was not able to find a business model (the people who would benefit the most are not the same people as those able/willing to pay for it). That project is thus currently on hiatus but I still care about its original motivation.

Last month, I explained how I was setting up a new belief system with associated practices called “Quintism”, with the aim to help people make difficult life choices when they are too busy or unsure, and develop habits that elevates their life. Incidentally, after talking about this with friends, I learned that the word “religion” is counter-productive when talking about it, and so I will hitherto just call it a “philosophy” or “philosophical movement”. I still feel there are multiple ways to motivate this work (again, read last month’s entry to inspect its various overlapping narratives), but since then, two are standing out clearly: 1) committing my opinions on metaphysics and group dynamics in writing helped me clarify many positions I hold dear; and 2) following my own written principles has tremendously simplified my life and enhanced my emotional engagement when talking to new acquaintances.

I do not feel the foundational aspects of this project require more foreground attention for now; the next step (writing more stories, to make the principles more relatable) will be better served by occasional creative interventions, later, interleaved with new life experiences.

That said, as I was progressing last month, I mused that I could amplify my voice by providing a “share button” of sorts. So I spent some time building a simple mobile app. The motivation, at the time, was foremost to follow up on an earlier desire to learn more about UI building (I knew little about React and other web technologies); I figured that “build a share button for my philosophy” would be a suitable small-scale practical project to support my learning. This was largely successful: after about a week, I had a new mobile app (an online browser for my “verses”) with a share button, as I intended. It also brought me the start of an understanding about how to build for mobile, and a more deeply qualified understanding of how AI assistants can boost my productivity.

With this experience behind me, my “creative juices” were flowing, and so were my recently developed business instincts. A new opportunity profiled itself before me, and I started to give it serious consideration: what if I built something actually useful? Something that can actually help people, address one of today’s major social challenges, in a quirky and/or unique way that reflects my own lifelong experiences on building a meaningful life?

This is what the new project is about. I am currently attempting to build a calm, smart companion to help folk cut through life’s noise and focus on what really matters. The main idea is to show just one thing the user cares about a time, at a paced rhythm, help them create a personal story through assisted journaling, and offer a curated library of effective actions one can take for the big things that matter in life, including reclaiming our attention, building new friendships and effectively guiding younger people towards a higher sense of purpose and civic participation. (NB: this paragraph is not the actual pitch; I am leaving a lot out.) I will likely continue to work on this over the summer.

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Meanwhile, the improving state of my elbows has allowed me to increase my reading load again.

Book-wise, I continued to engage with fiction, finishing the first three volumes of Megan Lindholm’s Winsingers series. “Megan Lindholm” is the first pen name of Robin Hobb, whose later works include some of my favorite fantasy novels. The Winsingers series was her first published work, and it was fascinating to me to see her writing style develop through her first books.

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Also, some learnings on how exist better on the daily.

In A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship, Rhaina Cohen reflects on the experience of four friends who moved close to each other to raise their kids together. Overall, the results were largely positive. The author uses this story to highlight how modern social norms in the US are antithetical to fostering these types of communities and rob parents from much-needed support. Readers are then encouraged to extend their understanding of the word “family” to include the people who they build their life with, beyond their marriage. (queer people have known this for, like, forever, but I think it’s good that non-queer folk learn about it too).

In Our narrative prison, Marina Benjamin points out that most of the works of storytelling in the West (from books to movies) are following the same fundamental structure. She muses whether this is constraining our culture and our creativity: while our stories often portray individual transformation, they typically reaffirm the status quo, offering a sense of closure that discourages deeper societal critique. This pattern may contribute to a cultural environment less inclined towards challenging established norms and more focused on personal narratives of change.

The most engaging philosophical musing this month was probably How to live an intellectually rich life, by Utsav Mamoria. You can read this either as a reflection on the challenges of modern society in India, or a review of the author’s own principles on how to make sense of the world and move forward with resolve, despite all the complexity and noise thrown at us. I am largely in alignment with the author’s views, even though I would choose “aim to improve things” over the author’s “fight with curiosity” as a prime ethical directive.

On a more mundane yet wholehearted note, Joseph Thacker offered us Root for Your Friends, a lightweight guide on how to be a good friend. In his words, “rooting for your friends is the best way to live.” Preach.

And on a yet even more mundane note, I enjoyed watching The Only 6 Exercises Men Need To Build Muscle by Adam Radcliffe. In short, these are incline dumbbell presses, dips, barbell back squats, Romanian deadlifts, pull-ups and hanging leg raises. I asked my personal trainer to review this for accuracy. The verdict: it’s not half bad, and should serve well for workouts on a time diet.

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There were also some insights on building effective organizations.

On a practical note, Brian Kihoon Lee taught me in LLM Shibboleths determine AI effectiveness that the particular choice of words in a LLM prompt has a dramatic influence on the quality of the results. The idea here is that the models infer responses by association, and so if you prompt it like a non-expert / beginner would, you get something that looks like the answers given to a beginner / non-expert (usually from lower-quality online communities). If you prompt it using the vocabulary and concepts from the experts in a field, you get associated content from serious publications in that field. The idea is obvious in hindsight, but it was a “ah-ah” moment for me.

In You’re a little company, now act like one, Jason Cohen points out that small businesses do well by approaching customers with an emphasis on humility and relationships. At this stage, customers are more likely to engage when they see an incomplete product with a hesitant sales pitch, than if their first contact was more polished.

In Five Boring Things That Have A Bigger Impact Than “A.I.” Coding Assistants On Dev Team Productivity, Jason Gorman reminds us that AI productivity improvements matter little without a well functioning broader organizational structure. One of the key arguments is the importance of psychological safety, a topic that I already covered last year while reviewing Your company needs junior devs by Doug Turnbull.

Another angle that resonated well was Moxie Marlinspike’s argument in The magic of software; or, what makes a good engineer also makes a good engineering organization. Broadly speaking, the idea here is that when all the participants in a project have a good understanding of everyone else’s work, the overall quality of the result improves. By introducing abstraction boundaries and “black boxes” (what product and middle-management staff loves doing), progress is stifled and quality decreases. Given current restrictions on LLM context windows, there’s an interesting conclusion to draw here.

At a more macro level, Kyla Scanlon offers us a theory in The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction: that the automatic aggregation of large lists of related information has become very cheap and commoditized, so much so that the only thing that will remain with tradeable value will be curated content, that is hard to collect and maintain (“friction”). This rings very true with my own experience, and will in fact be one of the guiding concepts for the app I’m building.

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Some monthly “AI skeptic” notes as well.

Not from this year, but interesting nonetheless, in Noam Chomsky Speaks on What ChatGPT Is Really Good For (Noam Chomsky Interviewed by C.J. Polychroniou), N.C. connects the dots on the relationship between engineering and science, the nature of “true understanding”, and general directions for ethical use of the new technology. The interview is from 2023, but its main ideas still valid today.

On a more recent note, Neal Stephenson (one of my favorite, but also extremely well-reputed sci-fi author) graced us with two key insights in Remarks on AI from NZ.

His first insight is that even people who do not full understand LLMs will nonetheless likely build effective mental models of how to place the new technology in an “ecosystem” of power/utility relationships. In this view, it is more likely than not that we can lead coherent policy discussions about “intelligence” and “safety” of systems even when the participants are not technology experts. I’m not 100% sure I agree with this, but the argument intuitively makes sense—it makes me “want to believe”, and we need more optimism out there.

The second insight is that it would do us collective good to always remember that any technology augmentation is also an amputation (words originally from Marshall McLuhan). Because of this, at a macro level we have a moral obligation to continue weighing seductive technology innovations (augmentation) against their long-term costs on our ability to continue to create and govern (amputation).

On a more precise and scientific note, I was intrigued to read We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. (archive) by James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart. In short, LLM inference is using a giant amount of energy (the entire energy budget of a medium size country), just accounting for the information we already have, and we know it consumes even more that we are not measuring yet. The authors also tell us that image generation costs less than text generation (arguing something about fewer parameters in the models), but I find that hard(er) to believe and even found some contradictory evidence.

There was also some noise in political news about a pseudo-scientific manifesto called “AI 2027”. I skimmed it and found it to be mostly junk; just a blip on my radar. Sadly, I then saw many people refer to it with various degrees of concern, and it touched my mind to try and write about it. Thankfully, I did not need to do this work myself; it turns out that Gary Marcus already publish a brilliant analysis and critique in The “AI 2027” Scenario: How realistic is it?.

An argument that did attract my attention more fully was Bohemians at the Gate?, by Jack Wiseman. In this piece, the author dives into the relationship between art(ists), copyright and LLM training, and sketches solid directions towards new policy making. His angle is the UK perspective, but I feel the ideas would generalize well.

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Finally, two pieces have helped me think at a larger scale.

In The Second World, a pseudonymous author from Puerto Rico who titles themselves as “the evil cat” explains how “first world” civilizations (high trust, functioning institutions) devolve into “second world” when the trust that people placed into institutions starts to break down. As the proposed theory goes, it is not possible for a nation to grow from “third world” (low trust, lack of institutions) to a “second world” (low trust, functioning institutions that slowly veer into dysfunctional) directly. It takes a particular sequence of mistaken choices. As usual, I had some intuitions about this topic already but reading about them written by someone else helped me clarify my views.

In a very related (and likely, instrumental) way, in The Who Cares Era, Dan Sinker muses about his impression that people “do” more and more things lately but the doing is overall mediocre and disheartened; in short, that people “do not care” anymore (in the US, that is.) It was entertaining to see how the yellow site reacted to this publication: it is as if an abscess was pierced, and liberated all their grievances about the corporate workplace.

To me, it was more instructive to reflect on how much this piece rings true in my own corner of the world. I am not observing mediocrity on workplaces locally, but I am feeling a general vibe of “giving up” around the problem of integrating immigrants culturally and addressing the housing shortage (two of the main political tensions in the Netherlands). The other thing that attracts my attention is the evidence that most people yearn to care about stuff (even in the US). The “not caring” discussed here stems from cynicism, but not complete discouragement. I am convinced that there is an opportunity to create new social structures, including new ways to organize workplaces and projects, that can elicit constructive trust again. I would love to meet people who are interested in this too.

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