Category: Food for thought

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.

Cory Doctorow explaining what is surveillance pricing.

Economists praise “price discrimination” as “efficient.” That’s when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they’re revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy’s.

That’s not how economists see it, of course. When a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that’s efficient, provided that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in. The empty room makes them nothing, and $50 is more than nothing. There’s a kind of metaphysics at work here, in which the room that is for sale at $500 is “a hotel room you book two weeks in advance and are sure will be waiting for you when you check in” while the $50 room is “a hotel room you can only get at the last minute, and if it’s not available, you’re sleeping in a chair at the Greyhound station.”

But what if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you’re in chemotherapy, so you don’t have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now? What if they charge you more because they can see that your kids are exhausted and cranky and the hotel infers that you’ll pay more to get the kids tucked into bed? What if they charge you more because there’s a wildfire and there are plenty of other people who want the room?

The metaphysics of “room you booked two weeks ago” as a different product from “room you’re trying to book right now” break down pretty quickly once you factor in the ability of sellers to figure out how desperate you are – or merely how distracted you are – and charge accordingly. “Surveillance pricing” is the practice of spying on you to figure out how much you’re willing to spend – because you’re wealthy, because you’re desperate, because you’re distracted, because it’s payday…

Surveillance pricing essentially lets the seller devalue buyer’s money.

That surveillance can be weaponized against you, through “surveillance pricing,” which is when companies raise prices based on their estimation of your desperation, which they can infer from surveillance data. Surveillance pricing lets a company reach into your wallet and devalue your money – if you are charged $10 for a burger that costs the next person $5, that means your dollar is only worth $0.50

This intriguing thought by thekla on writing and using AI to write.

but on a deeper level, writing is more than just the process by which you obtain a piece of text, right? it’s also about finding out what you wanted to say in the first place, and how you wanted to say it. this post existed in my head first as a thought, then it started to gel into words, and then i tried pulling those words out to arrange them in a way that (hopefully) gets my point across. there is nothing extra there, no filler. i alone can get the thought out and writing is how i do that.

and sure, there is a lot of text that is not written with this kind of goal. but then, perhaps, we should ask why it has to be written in the first place; and if the cost of that might be higher than just the co2 that is attributable to its creation. in a similar vein, neither should we forget to ask whether those texts that are now written by ai would indeed otherwise have been written by humans, or if there isn’t an awful lot of text produced now that simply no one would have spent their time writing before.