reflection

August Update

Somehow life caught up and this update nearly missed getting written at all. There is a lull today between two long hectic periods and I will attempt to cram a decent write-up in the few hours available. Still shorter than usual though.

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On the family front, I had to visit my mom once more to complete the initial set of adjustments to her living situation. This included arranging for support services every day, as well as completing a number of administrative steps towards her official retirement. Over the course of August, it appeared that her health was stabilizing, although as usual it is hard to make predictions further out than a few weeks at a time. I will likely need to visit again in the next couple of weeks.

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Given how intense June/July had felt, I had planned a small break at the end of July. I went to Berlin around the Pride celebration, called “Christopher Street Parade” there. This was my second “summer trip on my own and without planning” (after Florence last year), also a success. New life experiences included making friends on the two hour line to get into a night club; enjoying the night club experience without hyping myself up beforehand; wandering aimlessly on the streets as a tourist and actually enjoying it; as well as some experiences that cannot really be written about. My choice for Berlin also preempted my earlier preference to visit Slovenia, and so that might become next year’s destination.

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Health-wise, I received a preliminary diagnosis of a mild case of secondary “frozen shoulder”, an affection with no clear treatment but which thankfully tends to resolve on its own after two years. I felt relieved by the positive prognosis, and bummed out by the expected duration. Thankfully, it already has evolved into “stage two” where the pain subsides and is not permanently distracting anymore.

Meanwhile, mental health is in a better place than it was in June, thanks to the many adjustments from July. Those adjustments definitely shook my life up quite a bit. I’d say I have become far more active than I used to be, and this includes both physical and intellectual “production” activities. There are also far fewer pauses through the week to reflect and recoup. I am also more frequently physically and mentally tired, albeit less emotionally, and I recover better each time. I feel that that particular combination is sustainable, so that’s an improvement I’ll want to keep. This is incidentally why long-form writing is currently running at a lower priority. Long-form reading has also taken a hit, and it took a lot of care in August to accommodate some serious reading hours in my schedule again (more on this below).

The uptick in social activities is still much welcomed, and a keeper. There’s also a few new people in my life whom I’ll try to get to know better over time, and even space for more.

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This was also the month where the last project from my house remodel, started four years ago, was completed: some small wall covering fixups (covered under warranty) and, as a final touch, hanging a ceiling lamp in my living room.

Lamp.

Its purpose is to provide bright light when I work on hobbies or crafts below. It stays off most of the time, and a design constraint was to minimize the height and visual noise when it’s off.

Time is thus coming for a small celebration (or several), as well as kicking off a few new smaller-scale projects. For example, I have recently spent more time learning about how to connect new devices to Home Assistant, and one of the next steps towards improving my sleep quality will be to hook up my CO₂ monitor(s) and my ventilation speed together. Stay tuned.

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There were also ten days in NYC, with a combination of work-related activities and spending quality time with friends.

Sunset over Brooklyn, seen from the train.

I frequently commute between Brooklyn and Manhattan when I am in NYC. I always enjoy the train over the bridge more than through the tunnel.

One highlight was spending a day in New Jersey to try mountain biking with a few friends. I had chosen a ski resort with the idea of using their lifts for the “going up” part; I had mistakenly assumed it would make the endeavor simpler. This was a mistake. The inclination of ski slopes makes the biking down much more challenging, and the lack of vegetation overall makes the ineluctable contact between body and ground much more damaging. (None of these things were clear until after we completed that adventure, when we learned that the “regular” first time MTB experience usually happens on a walkable, and thus less slanted, forest trail.) Nonetheless, my enjoyment was real. It was the first time in many months that I spent multiple hours on end not having any thoughts while conscious. It was glorious, and bears repetition.

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As mentioned earlier, I made some progress on my reading list.

Straight Jacket - Matthew Todd
This book was recommended to me by some online forum and it had good ratings. In a nutshell, it provides guidance on how to overcome certain obstacles that “straight culture” imposes on gay men and that often result in psychological dysfunction. Maybe I’m different, or maybe I lacked the kind of upbringing to impose “straight culture” on me (or both), but I found this book quite inapplicable to me. Reading this was also really a downer; if I reverse engineer what this book advocates for and try to imagine the life of a person in its target audience, I see a lot of tragedy and sadness. Maybe that is really the lesson here: that there are people in the world for which this book is useful. Chilling.
The Friendship Factor - Alan Loy McGinnis
I came across this book by following the source of a quote about a principle of friendship that is dear to me. It was also well rated, so I figured perhaps I could learn a few things from someone who has interests close to mine. Overall, I would say this is well-written, and probably it could have helped me understand certain things faster if I had access to it in my twenties. However, I have already “graduated” from its wisdom. I would also hesitate to recommend it, because it has a heavy Christian slant that is totally unnecessary in my opinion and feels a bit like gate-keeping (as in “only Christians can really understand friendship”).
$100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No - Alex Hormozi

This one bubbled on top of the list from a confluence of references from other materials I was studying. At first approximation, this is a book by one rich guy who became rich by selling his course on “how to become rich” to wannabee rich people. There are thousands of those around these days. There were two things I found intriguing however, and that put me in the mood to pay attention. The first is that Alex H is objectively rich and did not grow up rich from rich parents. So something valuable happened and I wanted to learn what it was. The other thing that I had picked up from interviews with him is that he has things to say about human psychology in sales, and I am currently currently studying that.

My concerns about value creation notwithstanding (see below), this was a seriously enjoyable read. It was not just a page turner; I was taking notes at every chapter, with tangible and actionable ideas for my own projects. While his “method” remains mostly inapplicable to my work, there are things that I need to be reminded of frequently regarding how atypical my relationship to influence is and why/how sales tactics objectively work even when I’m not sensitive to them personally, and this book does this very well. There are chapters I already plan to re-read in a few months.

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There was a significant amount of interstitial reading since the last newsletter, but sadly today I don’t have time to share all the things that I found significant.

Let’s focus first on the main “AI science” results that made me change how I think.

On a practical level, a consortium of multiple universities (including MIT, Stanford, etc.) has done a broad-scope review of the various human activities involved in software engineering, and what would be required for “AI” solutions to really take them over. Their findings have been published as Challenges and Paths Towards AI for Software Engineering (Alex Gu, et al.), and reviewed by Rina Diane Caballar for IEEE Spectrum. My take away was, there is a lot of work to do and really replacing the humans throughout would require technology advances that are not quite plausible. But I did like reading this for another reason: it was a good overview of the various processes involved in building technology! This is interesting to learn about, both for people who build organizations and people who study processes (or work on solving process problems).

Meanwhile, here are some findings on some social aspects we should strongly keep in mind.

In AI-induced dehumanization, Hye-young Kim and Ann L. McGill did some real experiments that demonstrate that when people use AI agents a lot, and treat them like machines, then after a while hey start to treat real people like machines too. The take away for me is that as we introduce more and more of those technologies in our life, we should treat them politely and respectfully—not because they deserve it (they don’t!), but because it helps us remain polite and respectful the rest of the time.

In Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs, Jan Betley, et al. dive into a recent major discovery: when a LLM is exposed to obviously mistaken solutions to a problem as input (as in, the solution is incorrect), then it starts to propose morally problematic solutions (albeit possibly correct) as output when prompted to work on new problems. It’s not exactly clear what the underlying mechanism is, but this seems like a major finding, especially in work to use LLMs to drive policy or governance.

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Looking at a more “macro” level, the following two things were intriguing.

Are OpenAI and Anthropic Really Losing Money on Inference? (Martin Alderson). The answer seems to be “no,” as long as most users ask for short answers. The cost of processing input tokens is negligible; the compute costs really come from output. Since most output tokens are currently produced by a minority of use cases, the coast is (still) clear. Things might change as more and more people integrate inference APIs in applications that are not just chat bots.

Meanwhile, TJ Jefferson tells us about The startup bubble that no one is talking about: the theory is that we’ve seen a glut of VC funding recently not because of the AI hype; it was merely a ZIRP after effect. This would imply that funding is likely to drop soon even if the AI hype is not over yet (and even if it’s not a hype at all). This means that we could see major economic shakes happen and a focus towards profitability even before the eventual AI bubble pops. I think it’s a good thing, as it might make the industry more resilient ahead of the pop. (But don’t quote me on that.) It might make things even more difficult on the job market, though.

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On a different level entirely, I loved reading A Crack in the Cosmos by Colin Wells. On the surface, this tells us the story of how the Greek scientist Anaxagoras discovered the motion of the earth around the sun and later was exiled by people who found his work “heretical”. The article makes a bigger point: that in any age where science becomes stronger, there’s a chance of a backlash against it afterwards. Salient quote:

The stronger the bonds of nature are perceived to be, the stronger must be the ‘divine force’ that bends or breaks them; the more concrete the boundary, the bigger the thrill of transgression.

I’d say this is good to read both to learn more about famous ancient Greek philosophers and their context (both their life and the politics around them); and also to learn more about macro geo-political changes that our world is currently going through.

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