There is this scene from The Office that I’m thinking about a lot lately. It’s from the later seasons. The CEO, Robert California, is searching for game-breaking ideas to turn the business around. Kevin Malone, the office simpleton, makes an observation about the layout of cookies in the break-room vending machine. [paraphrasing] - “The best spot in the machine is being taken up by cookies 🍪 that nobody likes.” Robert hears (without really hearing) what Kevin said....
“Is your red the same as my red?” A question that middle-schoolers and high-schoolers ponder in jest actually has some profound applications to perception. “Is your red the same as my red?” Perception is this in-betweeny thing that exists between reality, in this case the color red, and your interpretation of reality, what you perceive as red. Now, we can make all sorts of measurements and claims to try to circle around a definition for reality-red....
Lee looked at him and the brown eyes under their rounded upper lids seemed to open and deepen until they weren’t foreign any more, but man’s eyes, warm with understanding. Lee chuckled. “It’s more than a convenience,” he said. “It’s even more than self-protection. Mostly we have to use it to be understood at all.” Samuel showed no sign of having observed any change. “I can understand the first two,” he said thoughtfully, “but the third escapes me....
Kernighan’s Law - Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. Tuld: Oh, Mr. Sullivan, you’re here. Good morning. Maybe you could tell me what you think is going on here. And please, speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever....
Was a remarkably fun conversation getting ChatGPT to write in the style of the Screwtape Letters. The elder demon, Screwtape, is writing letters to coach the younger Wormwood. At one point it even added (without prompting) a closing of “your affectionate uncle”, even though I think none of the prior prompts included anything about a familial relationship between Screwtape and Wormwood. It took some back and forth to get the prompting right....
Sticky-ing this post I often don’t know what I’m talking about. I hold ideas loosely. My thoughts change over time. If something I said can be interpreted in 1 of 2 ways, and 1 of them is offensive, then I meant the other one.
There is a surprisingly large degree of variation between knowing something and knowing something. Unfortunately, the english verb “to know” doesn’t have enough dimensionsality to express all this variation. Knowing is simple awareness. While knowing is something deeper. A couple terms I enjoy that express the degrees in this variation: qualia is kind of an experiential knowledge. I can tell you that a particular strawberry is sweet, but qualia is tasting that sweetness for yourself....
I’m a sucker for Patriots/Tom Brady/Bill Belichick content. They’re one of the greatest sports dynasties in recent memory. Their quarterback/coach tandem was one of the most successful of all time. And their coach is principled and disciplined man with a hard-shelled and opaque exterior. What’s not to love. So of course I’ve been watching the new docu-series on Disney+ about the team. With first-hand interviews from Tom Brady and many players in the league, it’s a great inside look into what made the Patriots tick....
When temperatures drop in the winter, every conversation inevitably begins with the weather. “It’s cold out.” My default response to this is some flavor of “you’ve never experienced real cold”1. At first, this response seems like harmless banter. But, I had a realization as I was playing a recent round of replay-the-conversation-in-your-head-while-taking-a-shower. My default response suuuuucks. Rule for good conversation: Accept the premise. A conversation is a bit like improv (an improv-ersation2 if you will)....
Music that unlocks an emotion. Music has a unique capability to bottle up a feeling and store it for replay later. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever had certain songs trigger memories to come flying back to you. Whenever The Weekend’s “In the Night” plays, I remember the joy and warmth I felt on that car-ride after I proposed to my now wife. Whenever I hear David Crowder Band’s “How He Loves”, I remember the intense revalations I felt worshipping on a mountainside in Mexico....