Category: Food for thought

This comment by godelski on Hacker News about how folks in the long tail, who seem least productive, are the ones who end up changing the world.

You can’t have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm.

How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).

Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They’re probably the “most productive”.

Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it’s incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren’t leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.

But then there’s those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the “least productive”. Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.

Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I’m willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.

In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I’m not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.

This reminds me of the book Slack by Tom DeMarco.

Becca Caddy talking about the future humans in the Pixar movie Wall-E and how that future now looks scary.

I’ve been researching how AI shows up in sci-fi for an article I’m writing, and I keep coming back to Wall-E. Compared to The Terminator or The Matrix, nothing overtly terrifying happens. There’s no war between humans and machines, no extinction event, no malevolent intelligence plotting our downfall. 

And yet, Wall-E feels more disturbing than most AI dystopias, at least to me.

Because in Wall-E’s imagined future, humans aren’t enslaved by machines – at least not in the Matrix-y sort of way we usually imagine. But they’re gradually enfeebled by them. 

Enfeeblement is a really useful world here. It doesn’t mean oppression or domination. It means becoming exhausted, debilitated and weakened by lack of use. Muscles atrophy, skills fade and agency dulls. 

It’s not quite the same as the idea of learned helplessness, but it’s hard not to think of it. Those experiments where animals stop trying to escape from a threat, like drowning. And it’s not because they’re restrained either, but because they’re learned that effort no longer matters.

That’s exactly what happens in Wall-E. Systems move for humans, think for them, decide for them. Until people barely use their bodies, their attention and their capacity to choose at all. Life becomes effortless, deeply comfortable, completely frictionless and smooth.

Wall-E is one of my favourite movies. I still can’t imagine how Pixar pulled it off with no dialogues and only facial features of Wall-E to communicate emotions.

Wall-E came out in 2008, one year after iPhone launch. AI and robots were a far away future. But the movie had the foresight about how AI and robots will transform humans when they become a reality. And now that AI and robots are becoming a reality, the future that Wall-E showed also seems to be becoming a reality. Unbelievable.

Ted Lamade explaining how our imperfections give us character.

Perfection, or the perception of it, has become the goal. We curate our lives on YouTube through highlight reels and post our airbrushed photos from vacation on Instagram. It’s why people are increasingly using artificial intelligence to “perfect” nearly everything they do. And yes, it’s why people are increasingly buying artificial Christmas trees….because they are easier to set up, cleaner to maintain, and “perfect” in so many ways.

But here’s the question:

By attempting to remove all the imperfections in life, are we removing the stories? The moments that make us laugh? The mistakes and imperfections that make us uniquely human?

I don’t know. Maybe I sound like the Grinch. Maybe I am overly nostalgic for the past. Maybe I just need to accept that this is what progress looks like. Or maybe, just maybe, there is something special about the tree with the flat top. The one that leans a little. The one with “character.” The one you talk about for weeks, if not years later. The one that reminds you that since perfection is impossible, you might be better off simply embracing life’s imperfections.

I love RSS. No algorithms showing me ads. No infinite scroll. Just blogs that I have chosen to follow showing up in NetNewsWire. 

And yet, at times, RSS also gives me anxiety. I follow around 150 blogs and open up NetNewsWire every single day in the morning. I dip in and out, read what catches my eye, and keep myself updated on the topics I care about. 

But then life happens. A busy week. A vacation. Essentially a stretch of time where reading isn’t the priority. 

And when I come back, open NetNewsWire, I am greeted with 200+ unread posts. Suddenly the thing that was supposed to reduce noise feels overwhelming.

The feeling is oddly specific: “I am going to miss something important. I carefully chose these blogs. If I don’t read them, what was the point?”

But overtime I have come to accept the uncomfortable reality—I will never read all the great posts that exist. Never. Once I accepted that reality it became easier to hit that “Mark all as read” button. A clean slate to begin with. And I have come to a realisation that if something was truly great it resurfaces, sooner or later, through another medium. Great posts never disappear forever.

PS: Do not use this strategy on your work emails when coming back from vacation. Else you might be forced to take another vacation. 

This post by Aled Maclean-Jones where he uses Tom Cruise’s filmography to explain what is embodied knowledge is… chef’s kiss.

In the world of Final Reckoning, where the Entity is all-seeing, things unsearchable and uncheckable like secret clues and symbols become vital. The president convinces an admiral to help her by writing down a date whose significance only the two of them understand. That admiral earns the trust of the USS Ohio’s commander by giving Cruise a medal whose meaning is private between them. To fool the Russians, who they know are listening in, Cruise’s team sends coordinates that direct him to the opposite side of the world from where he needs to be: a feint they know only he could decode.

What Cruise and his team carry in their heads and bodies not only saves them but the world. Donloe, the CIA chief exiled to Alaska, knows the submarine’s coordinates because he memorized them a decade ago. Tapeesa, his wife, can deliver the lifesaving decompression tent because she still knows how to navigate by compass and sextant. Grace, Hayley Atwell’s pickpocket-turned-teammate, saves the world through a skill so subtle it can barely be named: the thing that separates a ‘good pickpocket’ from a ‘great one’ — timing.

This division between characters with embodied knowledge and those without runs through all of Cruise’s recent work. His own impossible mission is to teach the value of physical competence: not just knowing things, but knowing how to do them. In Final Reckoning, this idea finds its clearest form.

And a little further down in the post.

It was Ryle who, in 1945, formulated the distinction that runs through Cruise’s films: that between knowledge of and knowledge how. The former was propositional, the sort you can articulate in neat, explicit statements. The latter was practical aptitude, the kind only revealed by competent action. Crucially, you can possess the latter without the former; knowing how does not entail being able to explain it. Donloe, crouched over a live nuclear bomb in Final Reckoning, gives the idea its best cinematic gloss. “Where’d you learn to do this?” asks his colleague, watching nervously. “Never said I did,” he replies.

Deepak Shenoy talking about how money can help buy two additional days of vacation.

A ticket costs 1.5 lakhs to go to the US in economy. The same ticket is 5 lakh rupees to go to the US and back in business class. If it costs 1.5 versus five, I will never spend the five.

One thing that happens with business class is that you get reclining seats so you can sleep, which you can’t in economy. The difference is you wake up fresh. So, you go to a holiday for 7 days, you’re not spending 2 days recovering from the aching pains that you get through this exercise. And then on the way back, you get another 2 days off. So, you’re going to enjoy your holiday a little bit more. Yes, it cost a lot of money, but money is just a tool.

That extra 3.5 lakhs gave you two days of that holiday. And maybe tomorrow when you think back about the holiday, those two days will be valuable in your own life.

So with 3.5 lakhs I can start my holiday the moment I board the plane and not when I land in the US. While I won’t spend the extra 3.5 lakhs but this perspective is something to think about.

James Clear’s excerpt from the book Atomic Habits where he explaining dangers of aiming for perfection.

On the first day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo. 

It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

Mandy Brown explaining what does growing down mean. And why it is equally important as growing up.

From the post Psychology of craft.

One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the ladder, your territory across the way. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman implores us to think rather of growing down, of growth not of branch but root, of becoming more grounded, sturdier, less able to be pushed around by the whims of others.

From the post Grow down.

That is, we grow not only up—not only skyward—but down, into the roots, back to that from which we came and to which we will, one day, return. We become, in time, more rooted and resilient, more capable of surviving the storm, less easily shaken away from ourselves by idle wind or rain. When I think about growing down instead of up, I think about becoming centered, about knowing what work is ours to do (and, critically, what work is not), about a slow, steady power rather than a rash and inconstant one. After all, as anyone who’s ever lived among city trees can tell you, neither brick nor concrete nor iron can stop a root as it seeks out water. We should be as steady in our search for that which nurtures our own lives.

This is such a wonderful thought.

Tony Alicea explaining why you shouldn’t use LLMs to write blog posts.

If you rely on an LLM to write all your posts, you are making a mistake.

Your voice is an asset. Not just what you want to say, but how you say it.

Your voice is unique. It is formed from your lifetime of lived experiences. No one’s voice will be exactly like yours.

Your voice becomes recognizable. Over many posts it becomes something people subconsciously connect with, recognize, trust, and look forward to.

Your voice provides the framework for the impression you leave in a job interview, while networking at a meet-up, or with a co-worker.

Piyush Gupta talking about how NASA’s Voyager 1 will be one light day away from Earth. The one light day, not one light year.

After nearly 50 years in space, NASA’s Voyager 1 is about to hit a historic milestone. By November 15, 2026, it will be 16.1 billion miles (25.9 billion km) away, meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it. For context, a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion km), so one light-day is just a tiny fraction of that.