is it really worth squeezing into that spec

trading your personal development for unobjectionability

you know, there are a whole generation of people who’ve been trained:

be careful what you put out on the internet! anyone (future employer, …) might see it.

this is funny because i would roughly say

be careful what you throw away offline! man, someone might’ve needed that¹

a case study in obliteration

my maternal grandmother died a decade before i was born, in 1993. i very, very rarely think on her. the only trace that exists on the internet is her name and some (not all) immediate family relations. no photos. i barely know anything about her. she was probably pretty good, though, because idk what’s going on in my genes but something’s up

and that’s it. all atoms disassembled (cremated). because she left no trace, i think on her so infrequently that the last time i thought on her, i think i was <10yo and thought heaven existed². i’m just now updating all that exists of her is the memories, in the heads of 4-5 people i hardly have time to track down; certainly it’s a ‘would be nice’, but i do have a lot of priorities to balance.

self-obliteration

sometimes i ask my awesome friends like nick hey, what would be left of you if you dropped dead tomorrow? and they’re like yeah…it would be pretty bad.

you can avoid writing on the internet…so that you can get into a job…where they’ll put you under an nda…and you can carry out your duties under nda. and the world will be ~none the wiser.

i do remember something edgy uli said once which is

trying to get into college is like a bird trying to get into a cage

posting as default

i often perceive some dynamic process as ‘default’:

• technological progress

• getting educated and entering a cushy job

• recording significant insights online

— and the world without that process as an aberration. i hold dynamic baselines. i now hold regular online posting as default, expected

cancel culture is immature / not lindy

yet many people are terrified of being wrong on the internet (good job, zeitgeist!). at least sf/tech/hacker culture is a bit better. github normalizes errors, in always keeping the commit history on public repos public, “because people should be able to see what went wrong during development”.

my current housemates are cool in a lot of ways, but perhaps one of the coolest³ is that they don’t cancel people. we’re throwing a party on friday, and i’ve heard some dodgy stuff about a couple of RSVPers, so i went to my housemates saying we’ll just take these people off the list, right? and they listened to what i’d heard, and said idk, sounds like hearsay, i don’t f*ck with that. the thing to do is to take them aside and talk to them. and i started to object, but housemate was like i’m willing to do all the ‘taking aside’.

i was really impressed by that.

living in fear is the worst. i often make decisions with a ‘don’t live in fear’ bias — i.e., weigh up all the costs and benefits, then at the end skew / bias towards the option that seems least like living in fear

so another thing i now say is “i’d rather be wrong in public than wrong solo!”

you do absolutely have to make your contributions worth people’s time. corrections are a public service; giving too many is taxing. you can handle that

1. and so i ask the researchers, “hey, where can i follow your work? :)”. and they don’t have any online presence. how can they even justify taking public money? these are groups [so cool](proofsandreasons.io); they probably throw away 10 good research directions / month; i might want to chase some of those down! yet…crickets.

2. it does; it’s the internet right now

3. cool: rare, non-imported; they had to inside-view-develop this culture themselves