Podcast Recommendations
1.) Tyler Cowen
I’ve recommended Tyler Cowen’s podcast Conversations with Tyler in the past, but Tyler has a new book coming out and I recently listened to three podcasts where he discusses some of the ideas from it. Here are the two I recommend if you like thinking about what makes people successful, how to measure talent, how to interview better, and related themes:
- Conversations with Tyler, with Daniel Gross
- Daniel Gross is the coauthor of Tyler’s new book Talent, and well-known for his time spent as a partner at Y Combinator. Who better to listen to about a new book then the two authors themselves? Here is a gem from the episode, a good interview question to break the boring usual questions: “What are the open tabs on your computer or phone right now?”
- Very Serious with Josh Barro
- If you have an appetite for more on talent, this one is good too!
2.) Lex Fridman Podcast, with Saifedean Ammous
This one is good for a light hearted, but at times technical, discussion on money. It includes a discussion on traditional fiat money like the US Dollar as well as new cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. There is also a great overview of the gold standard and how the world moved off of it. Listen for answers to questions like “isn’t money just valuable because we all believe it is valuable?” and “what makes something valuable?”, or “why are diamonds used in engagement rings?”.
3.) Distributed with Matt Mullenweg, Sid Sijbrandij
Sid is the founder of GitLab. This episode contains wonderful insight on running large organizations with values, the extreme culture of documentation and making nearly all internal documents public, how to run a distributed organization, how to make meetings effective, and navigating radical transparency (such as live streaming all company meetings on YouTube).
Here are some new Twitter accounts I started following recently that I’d recommend:
- @baconmeteor: I discovered Maciej after coming across his essay ‘A Rocket to Nowhere‘ about NASA’s shuttle program. Then, after clicking around somewhat randomly on his site idlewords.com, found Pinboard. Pinboard is a product Maciej built (and has run since 2009) that makes online bookmarking effortless. Using JavaScript snippets in your bookmark toolbar, you can quickly add any site to your bookmarks with special tags. I am trying this for my universal read later tool, and many of the features available on Pinboard are currently in the “ideas” toggle in my Printernet Notion notebook or things I am actively building at the moment! Super inspired by this.
- @electric_type: Another recent find during my continued brainstorming and exploration in the land of improving reading and reading workflows in the digital era. I heard from many people after Printernet’s launch that they have a hard time finding articles or essays that would interest them. They are interested in plenty, but perhaps because of the sheer volume of material online, haven’t established a reliable way of discovering reading material that they will love. Given the power of algorithms in other corners of the web, I find this area shockingly underdeveloped. For now, I recommend a carefully curated Twitter following as the best method. I have many thoughts about this, and I sense there will be more to come here as it pertains to Printernet, but The Electric Typewriter is a delightful site I found that aims to solve this problem of discovery. You can find thousands of good articles or essays (and even books) on their site, and can sort by author, topic, and much more. Very cool.
Tools and Tips
Woah, a new section in the roundups…
Only one this time to establish the section.
This extension tells you if a book you are viewing on Amazon is available for checkout at your local public library. It shows you if there are any physical copies or ebooks available at any number of the libraries near you, you can enter as many of your go to libraries as you want. Instead of impulse buying your next new book, get a free ebook or checkout a copy from your library. This saves you money, avoids shipping related negative externalities, reduces the risk of wasting resources on a book you end up not liking and thus not wanting to own, and supports your public library. I’ve already used it to get an ebook version of The Peregrine by J. A. Baker, following a recommendation from Warner Herzog.
Reading Recommendations
As always, you can keep up with what I am reading here. Here are some recent reads that stood out to me.
1.) Why the Children of Immigrants Are the Ones Getting Ahead in America – Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan
The set up: children born to immigrants outperform children born to non-immigrant parents on measures of social mobility (income compared to their parents). The insight: this may be because immigrants are more likely to move to areas of high opportunity within the US, while children born to non-immigrant parents are more likely to stay put. When comparing the two groups in high opportunity cities within the US, the difference was diminished. This harmonized with another article I read last month, that argued that where you raise your kids has the highest impact on how they turn out.
2.) The Bitter Lesson – Rich Sutton
For those interested in AI development, this short read is great. It argues that trying to get computers to “think” like we do always loses to approaches that leverage computational power. For example, instead of trying to get a computer to understand the game of chess in a human way, Deep Mind was able to defeat Garry Kasparov (world champion at the time of their match) by leveraging deep search. Injecting knowledge into AIs (like knowledge of Chess) does not improve with computational power. Whereas as computation improves, the chess AI can search more things more quickly.
3.) The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician – Rivka Galchen
The tale of Alexander Grothendieck, an eccentric mathematician who revolutionized the field with his novel approach to viewing mathematics and problem solving. This New Yorker piece feels almost like a Borges’ short story (and even includes a society of intellectuals publishing under a pseudonym and sending out wedding invites for their make believe person’s daughter), but the very fact that it is true makes it all the better. Picture a prodigy, untrained, eventual Jedi who brings balance to the force only to renounce the whole endeavor and flee into Luke Skywalker like hiding. But, two mathematics students seek him out… This piece is packed with gems on solving problems, going against the norms of your time, humor (for a period Grothendieck spoke exclusively in rhyme) and tons of quotable wonders.
Here is one from the piece, from a colleague attempting an analogy for Grothendieck’s style of mathematics: “if you want to know about people, you don’t just look at them individually—you look at them at a family reunion.”
What I have been up to lately
I turned 26! I was able to spend my birthday with my family, as it coincided with my youngest brother’s graduation. It was a low-key and happy celebration. I received some great gifts this year. One was a kayak! I am very excited to take that out on the water all summer. Another was this awesome Gemini Express Espresso maker (aptly named for a late May birthday gift), a fun twist on the Moka Pot.
Another great gift was from Tim, who passed on his Yakima Load Warrior roof rack. Sadly Tim’s Subaru was too badly damaged to keep after he was hit by a distracted driver… but I am happy to hold onto it for now.
Every birthday offers an opportunity to find significance. Our tenth birthdays mark the first time we are “double digit”, our 18th marks adulthood for the average American, we enter our twenties on our 20th, can drink legally on our 21st, and so on… they are all important and unimportant, it is what we make of them right? 26 means passing the quarter century mark and eyeing 30. I feel just fine about being 26.
Blog numbers
Another fun update is that my blog has already outperformed every other year for number of views and number of unique visitors! The obvious reason why is because I have written more consistently than any of the previous years (more on that below). I also passed 50 likes across all of my posts, which seems small but many of my posts only get one or two “likes” even when they get hundred of reads, so I am super happy about that. I have been writing here since 2017, and really appreciate all of you who read and follow my writing here. More on this in a full post soon.
Rough Draft 2022 updates
Finally, as we are now halfway through the year now, I want to check in on my goals for 2022. You can check them out here. Right before the new year I wanted to try a new system for my goals this year. Instead of loosely brainstorming some things that sounded good and ignoring them until December, I tried to really think about what mattered to me. What are the things that I will be super proud of having accomplished on December 31st, 2022? Then, I created a rough draft for my year and made sure to have a measurable component to each, in the style of OKRs. It has been invaluable for tracking my progress.
- Read ~300 pages a month: this one is tracking well! I have established a super reliable habit of reading one to five articles or essays each week and have chugged through four books so far. For the articles and essays establishing a workflow for finding articles and essays (Twitter), saving them (Notion + now experimenting with Pinboard), and reading them (reader view extension on desktop for screens, Printernet for print) has really helped. The books I have read are Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, It by Stephen King, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, and 11/22/63 by Stephen King. I mostly make progress on books at night or on flights. I have stopped using the hour before bed on my phone or to watch some show and instead, read on my Kindle until I can’t keep my eyes open. It has been wonderful. Would love some book recommendations if you want to leave a comment with a recent read, I like fiction and non-fiction so nothing is off the table.
- Write one blog post a month: I wanted to write at least one blog post in each calendar month, for 12 total. Counting this post, I have published 9 already, including my most read post to date. I feel great about the momentum I’ve gained with my writing this year.
- Play a live show and release one song this year: this one is at risk! I have countless demos and yet have only released one piece of music ever (and it is a Christmas cover!). I want to get a song up on Spotify this year and also play some live music (at least one show). I am a tad nervous this one may not get done this year… but who knows what the back half holds in the cards.
- One family trip: this one is also at risk sadly. Luckily I have already spent tons of time with family this year (which is ultimately the thing that matters most), but this goal specified that it doesn’t count if it is at one of our own houses. I want a genuine vacation with them. May still happen.
- Choose a wedding date: this one is marked done because Tessa and I found a date we like that should work, but logistics are still being navigated so technically this isn’t yet complete. But I am super happy with our pick!
- Establish a consistent workout routine: This one was very important to me heading into the year. I don’t consider myself unhealthy, but have never had a consistent workout routine. I wanted to elevate my heartrate at least once a week (a low bar by design!), and aimed for 70 – 80% of my max heartrate. I am super proud to say that since the start of the year, I have gone on forty five runs! I have written a bit about how I got this habit going, but in summary I took Tessa’s advice of running way slower than I felt I could until I liked running. That worked! On January 12th I ran my first run (3 miles) with an average pace of 11:35/mile. On April 27th I had my best run yet, running 4 miles with an average pace of 8:01/mile. I have loved running so far, and truly look forward to each one. The key for me is to run in nature, it makes it so enjoyable running through trees, by the water, and around everyone else being active outside. I even joined a running club, the Austin Coffee Run club. Woo!
- Get my chess ELO rating up 200 points and play in at least one over the board tournament: Like many people, I developed an affinity for chess early in 2020 as a pandemic hobby. I played in several online tournaments last year and even one Swiss Style over the board tournament. This goal is at risk though, because I have developed an addiction to bullet chess (games where each player has less than three minutes) and have logged barely any games in rapid chess (games between 10 and 60 minutes) as a result. It is my rapid rating that I want to take from about 1000/1100 to 1200/1300, but I fear that may not happen unless I prioritize “slow” chess and do some more studying. The in-person tournament may be possible, but I will probably play poorly. Check out a recent game below I had with the black pieces, where my opponent and I had 1 minute each.
- Finish the hardware prototype I started last year: This is referring to the resistance sensor I started building for Tessa’s stationary bike last year. It works off of the principle of Hall Effect sensors. These sensors can detect when a magnet passes them, and by mounting a magnetic band on the resistance knob on the bike, I can program the right resistance level based on how many turns of the knob Tessa makes. The key problem to be solved was how to tell which direction the knob was turning (clockwise for adding resistance and counterclockwise for reducing resistance). I solved that using the idea of telling the Arduino which Hall Effect sensor was last triggered, based on that I can tell if I need to add or substract resistance. You can view the code here, which is complete. I made great progress on the hardware and it works great, but I need to go the final mile of making the Arduino and LED screen mountable on the actual bike and positioning the sensors correctly. I think I can get this done with a solid week or two of prioritizing it, but nevertheless have this marked as “at risk”.
- Continue building the software project I started in 2021: This one is referencing Printernet! I wanted to launch an MVP by the end of the year, so the fact that readprinternet.com is live is a huge win. There is much more I hope to accomplish with Printernet, but getting this one complete far faster than I originally imagined is very gratifying.
- More photos: For Tessa’s 26th birthday last year, I got her a 35mm Pentax film camera. It is so fun to shoot on, but because film is a bit more involved, I wanted to make it an actual goal to get more photos this year. We are on roll three so far, so I am feeling like this is on track.
That is all for now, thanks for reading!
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