Groups on not quite an expert

Respectable smuggling

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my meta-curation, I read articles recommended by The Browser. This week, The Browser recommended “The Peoples of America” by Rudyard William Lynch, best known for WhatifAltHist.

I initially found the article an interesting exploration of the influence of geography, ancestry, and ethnicity on American culture. However, I noticed something felt off. Lynch nods toward the fall of civilization due to degeneracy:

The Edenic California of the 20th century no longer exists, and has been replaced by a cross between Blade Runner and the degeneracy of ancient atheists’ multicultural Babylon or Rome. California is the story of a society that has everything—wealth, genius, perfect geography, strong political institutions, and military protection—brought down by the one thing it does not have: a functioning culture … . One of my good friends is a native Washingtonian and another an old stock Californian, and both feel that the places they grew up have now been irrevocably destroyed. They belonged to the old cowboy Western culture, while its new inhabitants are trying to build a post-Christian, post-Western, possibly transhumanist society, which we see manifest most clearly with Silicon Valley’s various strange ideologies.

Idealized religious bodies

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My biologist friend describes the ecosystem of human beliefs like an ecosystem of organisms - those with more fit characteristics will more likely survive and grow.

The National Museum of Asian Art has an exhibit about religious art from South Asia. In it, I noticed the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist art shared the concept of an enlightened state without form, taking form in the idealized bodies of religious figures. The enlightened state without form and the idealized bodies of religious figures both represent more fit characteristics of a human belief system.

Crémant

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

You could buy Champagne, or for like half the price you could buy Crémant, made the same way from the same grapes grown just outside the Champagne region.

To almost anyone, they taste indistinguishable, and I’ve declared that subtlety bends toward classism. So why does Champagne command such a premium?

Branding, of course. In centuries past, Champagne became associated with royalty, a popular image for the emerging middle class. However, in the American spirit like early Webster promoting purpose over tradition, why would we pay more for association with such an anti-egalitarian concept as centuries-old royalty? Long live 22-buck Crémant!

Maloya

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Maloya in Bushwick serves the “French-Créole” cuisine of Réunion Island. Established by the French as a plantation economy in the 17th century, Réunion Island (east of Madagascar) incorporates influences from enslaved laborers from East Africa and indentured laborers from India, China, and other parts of Asia. Today the language (Réunion Creole) and the food mix those influences.

From Maloya I enjoyed the camarons coco-vanille, the coconut milk-poached shrimp drawing from South and Southeast Asia, and the vanilla drawing from the heavy production of vanilla in that region of Africa along the Indian Ocean. In fact, we call it “Bourbon vanilla” because we originally called Réunion Island “Île Bourbon” around when it became the world’s leading vanilla producer. I enjoyed the camarons coco-vanille on the level of flavor, and on the level of philosophy, challenging the notion of “authentic”.

Lightly scammed

Sat, 02 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Leaving the office late, I bumped into some guy on the street. He picked his glasses up from the sidewalk, and showed me the crack in one of the lenses. Noting he didn’t have insurance, he insisted I give him cash to help pay for a replacement. His manner of speech and parted eyes (strabismus) suggested he had a minor disability.

I didn’t have the personality to simply brush the guy off, and I didn’t have the capability to immediately verify the cause of and fix for the crack. So I gave him 30 bucks from my wallet.

Justin? Who?

Sat, 17 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A coworker with an impressive resume casually invited me to their combined birthday party. Though the invite counter over 100 people going, I thought I should go, for the sake of maybe personal, more likely professional relationships.

To my surprise, they still lease houses large enough for 100+-people parties in prime Manhattan, and they filled this one with bulk packs of beer and hard seltzer and basically no furniture.

An ex-coworker, who left for a different startup, arrives. Though they have a common name, I still need a second to dig it up from my memory. I gradually enter their circle, and the ex-coworker, bottle of truth serum in hand, introduces everyone. The ex-coworker introduces me as “Justin, who I used to work with”.

Dating the same person

Sat, 10 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A date (who’d recently moved) asked me an out of context question: “So how’s dating in New York City?”

A bit surprised, I responded “In New York City, you can find anyone …” or any two, or any three, etc. " … if you search hard enough."

Though looking around the people close to me (around my age), I see most people dating the same kind of person, staying within the same race and class boundaries. In fairness, you generally want a long-term partner who really understands you, and someone from the same race and class more likely understands you.

Logarithmic happiness

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Social science research converses with itself. For example, you might’ve heard money doesn’t increase happiness past a certain point, or you might’ve heard the opposite that money continues to increase happiness. In a recent paper, Mellers negotiates these seemingly contradictory findings: money continues to increase happiness for some people.¹ Revolutionary.

Reading the paper more deeply, the log(income) part of its conclusion caught my attention. In computer science, we think of a O(log(n)) complexity algorithm as growing extremely slowly. For instance, binary search on 256 sorted items takes 8 comparisons, on 65,536 sorted items takes 16 comparisons, and on 4,294,967,296 sorted items takes 32 comparisons. Intuitively, to add happiness you would need to multiply your income.

Personal user guide

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How can people best work with you? If you have a well-meaning organization, or at least team, you can tell them. Inspired by this example, a wrote a user guide about myself. It contains:

Styles of communication 💃🕺
Areas of strength 🦸
Opportunities for growth 💪
Paths of trust ⛓️
Methods of feedback 🪞
Views of success 🎗️

Hinge thots III: journal

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started going on dates! My friend advised me, after we both read How to Not Die Alone, that you go on the first date just to figure out if you want to go on a second date. That mindset takes a lot of pressure off me.

That same book recommends reflecting on you and the other person after each date, so I started a dating journal. Following this template I found, each person in my dating journal has 3 sections:

Hinge thots II: duty

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What do you owe to someone you’ve dated? Intuitively, you owe more the more you’ve dated. However, my friends have given me pretty different answers.

On one of my dates, the other person jumped onto the subway, took a bow, and announced “I don’t think it’ll work out.” “Oh! Ok…” We waved at each other, and they went off in the wrong direction.

I appreciated the honesty. However, I felt like we owed each other more, especially as I carried an entire picnic’s supplies home.¹

Hinge thots I: actual experience

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I finally created a dating app profile on Hinge! I had hesitated for so long because doing so requires confronting big questions like:

What do I even want?
How do I appear to others?
How do I compare to others?

Like I learned from woodworking, at some point you just have to try, rather than theorize. Actual experience will provide some answers.

Savvy stupid

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

At the Chicago “L” train station, a kindly Chinese grandma approached me, asking me to sign her petition, to end the Communist Party of China (CPC).

I can’t tell how how a petition would end the CPC. However, I can tell what organization someone like this would belong to. The same one that performs Shen Yun: the Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa.

On the back of the pamphlet, I spotted the website of The Epoch Times. Published by the Falun Gong, The Epoch Times has embraced far-right politics, peddling misinformation including anti-vaccine screeds. The Falun Gong have found a curious coalition in their fight against the CPC.

I moved 3 times in 2023

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As the title declares. The first time, our lease expired and my roommate wanted to live in a different neighborhood. The second time, just one month later, I needed a better place to sleep than the second floor overlooking the highway. The third time, I took a job in another city.

The first time, I suffered chaos by my procrastination and permissiveness. By the third time, I learned to act and communicate early, and set clear expectations; my third move went as well as it could have (except one broken mug).

Airport theft

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In between jobs, I’ve been moving through a bunch of airports lately. So I’ve wondered - do airports have abnormally high or low rates of theft?

I could imagine airports have abnormally high rates of theft, because lots of people move through them with packed valuable baggage and stress, prime targets for thieves.

I could imagine airports have abnormally low rates of theft, because security checkpoints guard the boarding areas, discouraging thieves.

You're only famous when you're dead

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I put in my 2-week notice. And suddenly, everyone wanted to chat.

I don’t feel salty, though. I feel grateful, and a bit baffled, by the sheer number of people with whom I’ve connected while working at Glean.

And I feel genuinely uplifted by the many people who’ve told me that they’ve liked working with me, and they’ve liked me.

Bittersweet the notion that this era of me is coming to an end.

Hyperspecialization

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I get my oolong tea from one purveyor (Song Tea), and my Japanese tea from another (Kettl).

I get my tinned fish from one restaurant (The Anchovy Bar), and my oysters from another (Hog Island Oyster Co.).

My taste, and the modern American economy it seems, rewards getting really, really good at something really, really specific.

However, does this hyperspecialization impede us from the joys and value of mixing specialties?

The melancholies of helping an old Chinese man get back to Oakland

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The distanced melancholy of not knowing your mother tongue, the native language of your mother, your father, and most of your family
The vicarious melancholy of seeing someone live in a region spoken and written primarily alien
The selfish melancholy of “losing” an hour, because you don’t have 100% confidence this person will find help otherwise, and missing your scheduled exercise class
The fearful melancholy of becoming more dependent on others as you age
The vain melancholy of wanting to publicize your act, and thinking a truly good person would not
The yearning melancholy of wanting to know more of the colliding half-stranger, waving bye as you go your unknown ways

Evolutionary intelligence

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today my friend explained a surprisingly simple evolutionary theory of intelligence.

Organisms evolve to face the challenges of their environment. At the same time, evolution pressures to keep solutions broad and simple, in order to conserve resources. Animal intelligence, especially human intelligence, addresses an extremely broad set of challenges with relatively little genetic complexity. Fascinating!

Though one wonders about the evolutionary future of humans, whose most pressing challenges seem to come from human forces, rather than natural environmental ones (if there exists a distinction).

COVID lonely

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I done caught COVID! I tested positive for the first time, three years after the pandemic started.

I spent this week mostly alone. My roommate is still gradually moving in, and for everyone’s well-being I didn’t go to the office, and canceled my plans with friends.

I recently read The Lonely Stories, a collection of essays covering the complexities of loneliness. One of the essays related the writer’s experience at the beginning of the pandemic. While it made me grateful for the relatively disease-free path I’ve had since then, it also reminded me of the intense feelings of loneliness that come with COVID.

Stories from the community table

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Some busy restaurants employ a community table, an efficient setup for small parties and walk-ins who don’t mind sitting next to strangers to reduce wait times.

The first time I sat at a community table, I was trying to get a lobstah roll at Neptune Oyster in Bahston. After a short introduction, the guy next to me asked, without prompting, “have you heard of crypto?” He then told me his dad took out a couple thousand dollars on his mom’s credit card to “invest” in cryptocurrencies. That money disappeared in a flash, and his parents have separated. I changed the topic, silently thanking some divine force I wasn’t being sold cryptocurrencies at the community table.

Experience, interpretation, experience

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Philosophies as broad as Buddhism to Stoicism separate experience from interpretation. For example, you may experience someone looking at you, and you may interpret that look to mean attraction, or hatred, or nothing at all. Though we often share interpretation, the separation from experience emphasizes choice: we choose how we interpret our experiences.

In turn, our interpretation creates another experience. Depending on how you interpreted the look from the previous example, you would feel and act differently. This forms a loose cycle between experience and interpretation.

Fired

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Truthfully, I did not transition my mindset between roles fast enough, at least in the eyes of my manager (and their manager). 6 weeks into my job, my manager sat me down, and told me to shape up or get out.

My manager acknowledged that the start-up life did not fit everyone - something I had heard before, though never hit quite as hard as then. They (honestly quite insultingly) offered that I could leave the company with no hard feelings.¹

Work and boundaries

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My first job out of college, I worked for Google during the pandemic. Both those taught me to set boundaries between my professional work and my other interests. I learned to remove distracting work apps from my phone; I learned to not feel guilty stopping early some days; I learned to get back to it tomorrow, or later.

My next job, my current job, at Glean forced me to reset those boundaries. I keep Slack on my phone in case of outages and late-night questions; I stay past 8 hours every day I go to the office; I finish up day of, even in the night.

Uncle Roger

Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I’ve been watching a lot of Uncle Roger videos. The videos follow the Asian Uncle Roger character watching non-Asian people cook Asian dishes, bemoaning how incorrectly or badly the non-Asian person is cooking the Asian dish.

The videos stand out to me for their relatability. The character reminds me of the ups and downs of growing up with Asian parents, and more relevantly for this post, the flaccid attempts at Asian-ish dishes that peppered my growing up in suburban Michigan.

Chinese sushi

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Before starting my new job, I visited my sister in Michigan. The week before, her toilet had clogged, spewing ew water across her room’s floor. I brushed off the smell, happy to see my sister again for the first time in months.

The week after, I went to a fancy schmancy sushi restaurant in New York City. They accompanied one of the dishes with fancy schmancy custom kombucha. As I sipped, the scent reminded me of my sister’s room.

Meat culture

Sat, 06 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Our food system constitutes one of humanity’s greatest impacts on the earth. Consider a simple tomato: greenhouses, irrigation, pesticides, fertilizers, pickers, processors, storers, shippers, merchandisers, stockers, and finally cookers. Revel in the effort it takes so you can make a mediocre spaghetti sauce.

Kitchen animosity aside, we observe that since animals spend so much energy unrelated to final human consumption, plant foods on average boast multiple times more energy-efficient production than animal meats.¹ Ignoring the energy initially created by photosynthesis in plants, overwhelmingly the energy spent in our food system comes from fossil fuels. We could, all else held equal, significantly reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by consuming more plant foods instead of meat.

Making eye contact with strangers

Sat, 30 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In more individualist, less power-distant cultures, eye contact usually signals interpersonal connection. Of course, this depends on context and person; the spread based on context and person spans far wider than the distance between cultural averages.

That considered, eye contact holds surprisingly broad and deep power over people.

During my freshman year, my upperclassman mentor gave me feedback that I made basically no eye contact in conversation. I started to make more eye contact while talking.

Golden Era

Sat, 28 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I claimed before that “Food and stories form the easiest and most common way to share culture.” For Buddhism and proximate ways of life, the first manifests in veganism.

In between Civic Center and Tenderloin in San Francisco lies Golden Era Vegan Restaurant. Followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai run the restaurant, so as Eater warns, “while the food is indeed delicious, folks uncomfortable with religious propaganda should probably steer clear.”

Raised Roman Catholic, Hai followed a Buddhist monk for a few years. Then denied entrance to his monastery on the basis of gender, she moved to India to study different religions. This explains why Hai’s “way of the Light and Sound through the Quan Yin Method” mixes Christian, Buddhist (from which it takes veganism), and Hindu ideas. Christians mad, Buddhists mad, Hindus not clear.

Instrumental and terminal

Sat, 21 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We can characterize goals as either “instrumental” or “terminal.” We care about instrumental goals in support of others, and about terminal goals in themselves. For example, the instrumental goal of figuring out whether seaweed counts as a plant supports the terminal goal of understanding the natural world.

The distinction between instrumental and terminal depends on perspective, where broader perspectives bias toward instrumental. A hard drive has a terminal goal of storing and loading data. More broadly, a computer has an instrumental goal of storing and loading data to support a terminal goal of performing useful computation. More broadly, a person with a computer has an instrumental goal of performing useful computation to support an instrumental goal of figuring our whether seaweed counts as a plant to support a terminal goal of understanding the natural world.

Confidences and certainties

Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When working together, people often demand of us two seemingly contradictory qualities: confidence and humility. At first glance, an excess of confidence will undermine humility, and an excess of humility will undermine confidence. Supposedly, you should strive for a balance, in the middle.

I propose a more precise description for your consideration. We can have certainty and confidence, and we can have them in ability, process, and outcome.

Certainty stems from determining what to measure, how to measure it, and finally measuring it. We can measure quantitatively, e.g. money, and qualitatively, e.g. honest and constructive feedback from peers.

Sunk cost and "free"

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I paid $159 for a 1-year bikeshare membership. In San Francisco, most trips I want to take stay within 2 miles one way, so this membership’s free 45-minute rides work out well.

When deciding how to get around SF, one might naturally ask:

Since I paid for this bikeshare membership, should I take a free bike ride, or the public transport?

In economic terms, however, we should ask a different way.

Sweat the big stuff

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today I met someone who told me they finessed their credit card benefits to save up to a few hundred dollars on food and transportation during their move. When I asked how much they were paying for their new place, they revealed a monthly rent about $1000 more than mine (after splitting with my roommate).

When trying to optimize money, sweat the big stuff. For most people, that breaks down to 2 foci: rent and income. Saving on rent or growing your income can translate to many, many meals, rides, and hangouts. And certainly to me it seems more efficient when accounting for time spent optimizing.

On the joys and perils of a profane name

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Coq

Coq provides an interactive theorem prover for proofs about programming languages and other computer systems. Coq plays on the name of creator Thierry Coquand, puns on the Calculus of Constructions (CoC) Coquand was working on before, and follows the French tradition of naming tools after animals (coq meaning rooster in French).

This year, the Coq team announced it would receive proposals to rename Coq. “Testimonies from people who experienced harassment or awkward situations [and] reports about students (notably women) who ended up not learning / using Coq because of its name” spurred this effort. The announcement goes so far as to assert “[t]he only thing that is clear at this point is that we cannot just ignore the issue [of the name Coq] and do nothing.” The wiki documents a significant effort to change the name, paragraphs of advantages and disadvantages plus another page dedicated to the implications of changing the name.

Lobster rolls

Sat, 13 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I: Lobster

I’ve spent the past 2 weeks in the Boston area. In my time around Boston, I’ve had 3 lobster rolls: one at James Hook & Co., one at Saltie Girl, and one at Neptune Oyster. 3 lobster rolls in, I sure feel like I ate lobster and butter and bread.¹

By which I mean I found the rolls good, not mind-blowing. In retrospect, I kind of regret how much I paid for the lobster rolls. I tried 3 times to change my perception of lobster, and I’ve ended up confirming I just don’t have the taste others have for it.

Great leaders

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Do you believe in great leaders? I don’t mean that rhetorically.

Often we describe great events with respect to great individuals: the reign of queens like Victoria, the breakthroughs of inventors like Einstein.

The alternative, that great events evolve from great systems, can scare me. Systems seem further from my control; systems introduce luck and misfortune and randomness.

Imagine a great leader and a flock of idiots. That convinces me that great individuals do not suffice to produce great results. Yet also imagine great groups competing through mutually exclusive causes. The interaction, the collaboration, matters.

CJK segmentation

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s return to the Unicode Standard from the last post:

Programmers do not expect the characters c, h, a, and t alone to tell us whether chat is a French word for cat or an English word meaning informal talk. … Similarly, the Han characters are often combined to “spell” words whose meaning may not be evident from the constituent characters. For example, the two characters “to cut” and “hand” mean “postage stamp”" in Japanese, but the compound may appear to be nonsense to a speaker of Chinese or Korean.

CJK fonts

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

You may wonder, based on my previous post, how Unicode handles when the same Han character gets written differently in different languages. Writing evolves over time, so can we represent the same Han character with the same Unicode code point across languages? Unicode answers:

Even where there are substantial variations in the standard way of writing a character from locale to locale, if the fundamental identity of the character is not in question, then a single character is encoded in Unicode. … It is well-recognized that the Han characters involved are the same, even when used in different countries to write different languages. … There are occasional instances of unified characters whose typical Chinese glyph and typical Japanese glyph are distinct enough that the Chinese glyph will be unfamiliar to the typical Japanese reader, e.g., 直 U+76F4. … Where a distinction in style needs to be made (for example, Chinese-style vs. Japanese-style glyphs in the same document), appropriate fonts should be applied to the specific text as needed.

Language carries history

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

To demonstrate language carries history, I’ll use Unicode.

Unicode

First, what “Unicode”? Unicode defines encoding characters (formally, graphemes, a minimally distinctive unit of writing), including letters, symbols, and emoji 😮. Unicode covers most of the world’s writing systems, and nearly all web pages use Unicode (UTF-8).

Unicode provides a unique code point, a number, for each character. For example, the (decimal) number 75, 0b01001011 in binary, represents the uppercase K. Computers represent data in binary, so essentially Unicode provides a mapping from binary data to characters.

Pizza puffs

Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Have you tried Chicago’s least iconic iconic food? I’m talking about the pizza puff.

Pizza puffs

What does a pizza puff entail? Well, imagine a hot pocket but better. This may seem blasphemous (as a former “hot pocket fiend” [my friends can attest], I understand). However, I personally could fulfill all my hot pocket hankerings with a pizza puff, while I could not fulfill all of my pizza puff hankerings with a hot pocket.

The last mile

Sat, 10 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

How did my trip from the airport to the hotel cost nearly as much as my trip from Detroit to Chicago?

Last mile travel

In transportation, the “last mile” refers to the final leg of a route. Last mile travel stands out as the least efficient: the least distance per cost and the least distance per time. This holds true because of how we design our transportation systems.

Hubs

In many transportation systems, many routes significantly overlap. For example, many people travel from the Detroit area to the Chicago area each day. With limited resources, you optimize by building hubs near the points of significant overlap. By selecting hubs this way, we can take advantage of economies of scale for legs between hubs. So many people travel Detroit to Chicago that airlines can offer cheap flights between DTW and ORD multiple times per day.

Cream tea

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Have you ever had cream tea? Contrary to the name, you don’t put cream in the tea. Cream tea consists of tea, clotted cream,¹ scones, and jam; you actually eat the named cream with the scones.

Variation

Traditional servings of cream tea vary between counties of England.

In Cornwall, you:

1. Split the scone into halves.

2. Spread jam onto the halves.

3. Spread clotted cream onto the halves.

Not yours to share

Sat, 22 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I

Freshman year I lived in a dorm suite with 4 other freshmen. Our suite had enough space to set up a TV and Wii U, so A, a friend also studying the same year at the school of business, would regularly come over to smoke weed and play Super Smash Bros. A pretty good time overall - I remember betting 2 whole wafers I could beat A 1-on-1 without losing any of my 3 lives, a loss from which I have yet to recover.

Satisficing

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Today I shopped for a plain white t-shirt. My requirements:

plain
white
t-shirt

All in all, pretty simple. So how in the everloving world did I spend 2+ hours buying plain white t-shirts?

Buying online

Buying basically anything online represents a hard problem.

First, you face a staggering amount of candidates. Search for lotions or cables or shirts and you’ll find yourself trekking through an endless jungle of prices, styles, and brands.

I dreamt of missing class

Sat, 01 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

again. I commonly dream about school, I guess because school had dictated my life for so long. When I miss class in these dreams, I don’t miss one class. I discover I had some class all along, and I have missed all classes so far.

What a silly fear, obviously. In the waking world I would never fully and repeatedly forget an entire class. However, the dream world doesn’t have to make sense. In fact, it rarely does.

A mistaken, corrected, still simplified history of English

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mistaken

In my head I have the extremely loose timeline:

Some centuries ago, the English colonized America; a few centuries later those colonists declared independence and became the United States of America.

From that timeline, I thought:

In an effort to establish their own identity, Americans invented new spellings, e.g. “colour” became “color” and “centre” became “center.”

as well I thought:

Further in that effort, Americans reformed their accents, most noticeably going hard on the /r/s after vowels, “hard” not “hahd.”

100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

First, a relevant video link. No, your eyes don’t deceive you. The 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar note represents a curiosity in fiat money and hyperinflation.

Fiat money

From the lens of economics, money serves as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value. In plain terms, this means money serves as a persistent, comparable amount of value that enables people to easily trade valuable items.

Historically, people made money out of intrinsically valuable materials, such as gold. We call this commodity money. However, making commodity money at scale becomes difficult because of material limitations. The world only has so much gold, and mining it takes a lot of effort.

Making time

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Like me, you probably have a list of background to-dos that you want to eventually get around to. They range in importance from big passion projects to small decoration ideas. However, it often seems you just don’t have enough time for them. You have work or classes. This week you have an appointment for this or preparation for that, so next week probably works better. Or maybe you don’t feel you can set aside a long enough chunk of time to really commit to this to-do.

Outside the sphere of influence

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Some might recognize this as the Serenity Prayer. Often reworded from churches to Alcoholics Anonymous, I have reproduced the version I have heard the most.

Sphere of influence

Imagine a wide space of things that matter to you. In this space live 3 types of things:

Post-modernism and irony

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Inspiration

Post-modernism

Post-modernism rejects universal truth and grand narrative. Instead, post-modernism poses meaning as only contextual. For example, a post-modernist might claim there doesn’t exist a god or gods who gives every person meaning, and there doesn’t exist any set of morals or values that apply to all groups of people.

lol something matters

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I: A Marketing 300 lecture

In the winter of 2019, I took MKT 300 as required by my business degree. The research interests of the professor, Dr. Carolyn Yoon, lived in the intersection of neuroscience and marketing.¹

Within her interests, how does presentation affect people’s ability to internalize the message of an informational campaign (e.g. PSA debunking myths)? In one lecture, Professor Yoon provided an example that really piqued my interest: a CDC poster of facts and myths regarding the flu vaccine. Professor Yoon explained that after a while, the “false” or “not” component of the message sometimes faded away, potentially backfiring on the attempt to clear falsehoods.

Punch up, not down

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Let’s start with 2 observations:

Our words affect others.
We can control our words.

It follows that we should control our words to have the desired effect on other people. Abstractly, we should say things that promote good and avoid harm.

Jokes

People often use jokes to express contentious or controversial ideas with less risk. Personally, I find myself more inclined to watch a stand-up embedded with political themes than read an explicitly political essay, though sometimes I will find the space for the latter.

Beauty and style

Sat, 04 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

A quick post on a useful distinction.

Beauty

Beauty is socially defined. What is beautiful is almost always exclusive, like being young or rich. Imagine a runway model.

Style

Style is individually defined. You can be stylish at any age, at any level of wealth, no matter the circumstances of your birth. Imagine a drag queen.

Conclusion

I am still trying to find my style.

Partial reinforcement and addictive games

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

I’ve been gaming a lot recently, so this has been on my mind.

Reinforcement and punishment

In operant conditioning, behavior is modified with reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement and punishment are defined pretty much exactly as you would intuit:

Reinforcement uses a pleasant result to encourage behavior.
Punishment uses an unpleasant result to discourage behavior.

In formal terms, both reinforcement and punishment can be “positive” or “negative.” Note “positive” and “negative” do not refer to goodness. Here, by “positive” we mean “giving,” and by “negative” we mean “taking away.” Positive reinforcement gives a pleasant stimulus; negative reinforcement takes away an unpleasant stimulus.

Jupyter, and collaborative filtering continued

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Introduction

I came across an interesting Atlantic article recently.¹ tl;dr: Wolfram and Jupyter notebooks allow us to express research, especially research involving programming, more precisely and reproducibly than traditional paper papers. Of course, durability is a concern with Wolfram and Jupyter notebooks. However, I wanted to make an honest effort of Jupyter notebooks in this post.

The Jupyter bazaar

In his famous 1997 essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Eric Steven Raymond contrasts two development models:

Collaborative filtering

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

Collaborative filtering is an important problem in recommender systems. These recommender systems form the basis of some of the largest products today: search (Google), marketplace (Amazon), and content (Netflix, YouTube) products all rely on some form of recommender system.

Collaborative filtering types

Collaborative filtering comes in 2 main types: memory-based and model-based. Memory-based models employ user and item data, described in detail in the next section, to form recommendations. Model-based techniques, outside the scope of this post, encompass all other deep (neural network) and shallow models used to form recommendations.

Voting continued

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A continuation of this post

Because I wanted to combine the themes of people and programming, I wrote a short Python script to calculate and visualize outcomes of the different voting schemes described in my last post.

This script is available in this public Github repo. It provides a detailed example of how different voting schemes can lead to different outcomes in the example directory.

Voting, and system design matters

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Continued in this post

Introduction

In the United States, we use plurality (winner-takes-all) voting. However, this is just one of multiple single-winner voting systems that exist. Other voting systems include:

Instant-runoff voting
Approval voting
Borda count voting
Positive-negative voting

A review of plurality voting

In a plurality voting system, the candidate with the most votes wins. Plurality voting is generally the most simple system. However, this simplicity is not always a virtue. The minimum number of votes a candidate needs to win under plurality voting is:

Institutions defined (by me, not quite an expert), and employment is a market

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

As a society, we use 5 broad classes of institutions: hierarchies, democracies, markets, self-organization, and algorithms. Let us start with a basic question:

What is a system?

A system is

a collection of individuals,
interactions between them, and
relationships influencing those interactions.

Take the computer system I am currently running:

A collection of individuals: processor, memory, battery, keyboard, screen, etc.

Note these individuals are not necessarily atomic. For example, memory could be broken down into volatile (DRAM, or just RAM for most people) and non-volatile (SSD, a.k.a. “disk” or “hard drive”) memory, or keyboard could be broken down into individual buttons (though the usefulness of a keyboard with only one button is suspect).

A crown of vignettes

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1: Not with a bang but a whimper

Due to the outbreak, classes have been moved online and Commencement has been canceled. I understand why. I know that among all that people are experiencing now, I am closer to the zenith than the nadir. Yet I feel an undeniable disappointment, a sadness with being denied the catharsis of a proper end to my formal education.

Part 2: Crisis on service

The consequences of the outbreak for me are small compared to for others. The most affected are service workers, losing jobs and, of those who still have one, working even more than normal to meet the needs of the crisis. Especially in the US, we tend to treat service workers (in contrast to knowledge workers) not great. If you’re using a delivery service like me (I don’t want to pass anything to my parents), make sure to leave an extra, extra large tip.

Restricting the solution space can restrict the benefits of group decision-making

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

For complex and difficult decisions, institutions often employ groups to make those decisions. For example, legal systems employ juries and companies employ hiring committees. Institutions prefer these groups because they are (hopefully) less likely to have inappropriate biases and because they draw from a wider pool of knowledge and information than individual members. Here’s an interesting idea: no matter the characteristics of the problem, a restricted solution space can restrict these previously mentioned benefits. Let us consider an example.