Recently

Hello! Only a day late this time. October was another busy month but it didn't yield much content. I ran a second half-marathon, this time with much less training, but only finished a few minutes slower than I did earlier this year. Next year I'm thinking about training at a normal mileage for the kinds of races I'm running - 25 miles or so per week instead of this year's roughly 15.

And speaking of running, I just wrote up this opinion I have about how fewer people should run marathons.

Reading

I enjoyed reading Why Functor Doesn't Matter, but I don't really agree. The problem that I had with functional programming jargon isn't that the particular terms are strange or uncommon, but that their definitions rely on a series of other jargon terms, and the discipline tends to omit good examples, metaphors, or plain-language explanations. It's not that the strict definition is bad, but when a function is defined as _a mapping that associates a morphism F: X -> Y in category C to a morphism F(f): F(X) -> F(Y), in category D, you now have to define morphism, categories, and objects, and all of which have domain-specific definitions.

I am loving Sherif's posting about building a bike from the frame up.

Maximizers are biased to speed, optionality, breadth, momentum, opportunism, parallel bets, hype, luck exposure, momentum, “Why not both?”, “Better to move fast than wait for perfect”. Maximizers want to see concrete examples before they’ll make tradeoffs. They anchor decisions in the tangible. “Stop making things so complicated.” “Stop overthinking.”

Focusers are biased to focus, coherence, depth, meaningful constraints, doing less for more, sequential experiments, intentionality, sustainability, “What matters most?”, compounding clarity. Focusers are comfortable with abstraction. A clear constraint or principle is enough to guide them. “Stop mistaking chaos for progress.” “Stop overdoing.”

John Cutler's post about maximizers vs. focusers matches my experience in tech. Like many young engineers, I think I started out as a focuser and have tried to drift to the center all the time, but the tension both internally and interpersonally at every job is present.

I recently remarked to a friend that traveling abroad after the advent of the smartphone feels like studying biology after the advent of microplastics. It has touched every aspect of life. No matter where you point your microscope you will see its impact.

Josh Erb's blog about living in India is great, personal, a classic blog's blog.

For me, the only reason to keep going is to try and make AI a wonderful technology for the world. Some feel the same. Others are going because they’re locked in on a path to generational wealth. Plenty don’t have either of these alignments, and the wall of effort comes sooner.

This article about AI researchers working all the time and burning out is interesting, in part because I find the intention of AI researchers so confusing. I can see the economic intention: these guys are making bank! Congrats to all of them. But it's so rare to talk to anyone who has a concrete idea about how they are making the world better by doing what they're doing, and that's the reason why they're working so hard. OpenAI seems to keep getting distracted from that cancer cure, and their restructuring into a for-profit company kind of indicates that there's more greed than altruism in the mix.

every vc who bet on the modern data stack watched their investments get acquired for pennies or go to zero. the only survivors: the warehouses themselves, or the companies the warehouses bought to strengthen their moats.

It's niche, but this article about Snowflake, dbt, fivetran, and other 'data lake' architecture is really enlightening.

Listening

Totorro's new album was the only one I picked up this month. It's pretty good math-rock, very energetic and precise.

Watching

• One Battle After Another was incredible.
• eXistenZ is so gloriously weird, I really highly recommend it. It came out the same year as The Matrix and explores similar themes, but the treatment of futuristic technology is something you won't see anywhere else: instead of retro-steampunk metal or fully dystopian grimness, it's colorful, slimy, squelchy, organic, and weird.

Speaking of weird, Ben Levin's gesamtkunstwerk videos are wild and glorious.