whaack

mircea_popescu: there's this common tendency among noob bloggers to regard the blog as some sort of trophycase/showcase. they miss out on their own youth, as the lived story of their own personal path through life, consisting as such always does of failure, and tribulation.

Reading your own writing is akin to looking at yourself in the mirror. If you haven’t done it in a long time (or ever) you are going to be quite unhappy when you look. You'll notice all the blemishes and faults that everyone else can see but are invisible to you. The childish approach to dealing with this is to never look in the mirror. But not looking into the mirror does not make those imperfections disappear.

In reality writing for a blog is much more daunting than looking in the mirror, because instead of just seeing your reflection you are taking a snapshot of your mind and posting it for yourself and the world to see. When I take a look back at my previous writings I often cringe from reading what I wrote. I read my writing about goals I still haven’t made progress into, let alone accomplished. I read world views that not only seem ridiculous now, but were written in broken English. And I know that in the future I will likely feel the same way reading the post I’m writing today.

But I take solace knowing that there is more honesty in blogging frequently and keeping a record of one’s development than there is in showing only a very curated “trophy case” of thoughts. Everyone save naive children knows that in-between the highlight reel of a millennial’s antisocial media posts are painful and embarrassing moments. The crime of erasing one’s past and cherry-picking content to display on your blog is not that your lying to everyone else. It’s that you’re lying to yourself. It prevents you from confronting your inner hayseed.

In You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner, Jack writes to his friend Al constantly updating him about his life. Reading Jack’s letters is amusing not only because you see how foolish he is and how he can’t keep any of his commitments, but also because Jack manages to remain complete oblivious to his own character. One wonders if had the fictional character Jack written blog posts instead of writing letters, he perhaps would have been able to see his ridiculousness and improve himself.

Here’s to finishing Apollo, starting my game Zylon, staying healthy, avoiding my bad habits, and most importantly using every minute of my time wisely.

It’s been well over a month since my last post; a new piece of writing is very much due. My life trajectory has changed dramatically between my last publication and now. Before I had plans to return to Costa Rica on January 2nd, but today I am still here in New York City. The reasons for this are numerous - but the primary cause of me staying here is to be with the people who I love and have known the longest in my life.

At times I feel that I am regressing by staying in New York. My time spent in Costa Rica was nothing short of heavenly. Nearly every day consisted of waking up to a chorus of birds chirping, surfing magnificent waves, and enjoying the company of close friends. I had a wonderful three bedroom apartment that I was very proud to invite people over to. I was picking up, however slowly, my second language Spanish and finally starting to have enjoyable conversations with locals in their tongue. Although I wasn’t working when at the moment I left, I had previously succeeded in obtaining well paying jobs where I could work remotely and support myself. And now that I’m back in the city, just about all of this is gone. I’m back to the cold concrete jungle of the city. I have my closest friends and family here - but making new friendships is much harder than it was in Costa Rica. As for my living situation - I’m back to crashing my parent's house. I can’t even begin to fathom sacrificing my time spent reading, coding, learning the guitar, etc. to work a boring 9-5 to sustain a shoebox of an apartment in the city. But this day will have to come soon..

Another great pain of leaving Costa Rica is the feeling that the friendships I made there will fade away quickly. Given that I don’t have accounts with the normal antisocial media websites, it can be a bit tricky maintaing certain relationships. The fact that I lost my phone and subsequently my phone number does not help either. There are many people I miss terribly, and I apologize to them for not having put in the time to message them.

New York being home is not the only thing that draws me back here. In Central America I felt that my days were being spent well since I was thoroughly enjoying my youth, yet I couldn’t help but think that I was not pushing my career forward like I should be. Even though I picked up two wonderful hobbies that will last me a lifetime - guitar and surfing - I felt that most of my hours were spent were only going to give me pleasure at the specific moment I spent them. I had fears of becoming an adult that had little to show for his earlier years. The one educational reason - or should I say excuse - for being in Costa Rica was to learn Spanish. This, however, was not progressing at the rate it should have been since I had enclosed myself in an English speaking bubble within Costa Rica. My friends spoke Spanish as their primary language, but with me the conversation always was in English. I believe I still have learned more Spanish in America than I have in Costa Rica. So I felt, and feel currently, that I needed to stay in New York to develop a lifestyle that allows me to soak up knowledge and build a career.

I hope to return to Costa Rica within the year, but when I do it will likely be for only a relatively short period of time. As for now, it's great to be back home.

There is a rule of thumb that applies to nearly everything you are trying to learn.

For every skill, there is a finite set of fundamentals whose application and combination will allow you to perform that skill.

Thus to succeed at your goal you must:

1. figure out what those fundamentals are
2. figure out what is the correct way to execute those fundamentals
3. Devise and perform a training program to be able to perform said execution from (2) consistently
The usefulness of this advice relies heavily on a clear understanding of the word fundamental in this context. A fundamental is a technique in a finite -but possibly quite large- set of "the fundamentals of skill y." A fundamental is always something that can be trained or improved upon. So, while being tall may be quite important to succeeding at playing basketball, "being tall" is not by our definition a fundamental. In addition, a fundamental cannot be the combination of two or more different fundamentals. The pragmatic reason for this is that if a fundamental is the combination of two other fundamentals, it would be incorrect to train that technique. It would be better to isolate the the two distinct fundamentals that comprise that technique and train them separately. Needless to say, some fundamentals build upon each other in a way that you cannot learn fundamental b without learning fundamental a. Also, while the combination of two fundamentals cannot be a fundamental, the act of combining two fundamentals may very well be a fundamental in and of itself.

With that being clear, we need guidelines on how to perform tasks (1) (2) and (3). Step (1) is often the hardest.

(1)

To figure out the fundamentals of a skill, there are two principal methods that must be combined.

(A) Figuring out the authority on the subject. This is either the best person in the field you can be in contact with, or preferably a book. Then simply inquire from that authority what the fundamentals are.

(B) Reasoning must be used to confirm that a technique is indeed a fundamental of a skill. Of course if you the pioneer of a skill, then this is the only method you can use. This is much harder than simply "downloading" all the fundamentls from an authority, since it can be difficult to figure out the different elements that comprise a technique.

(2)

Once you know what the fundamentals are, then you can begin to judge what is the correct execution of those fundamentals. This is effectively the same process as step one. You consult an authority and combine their advice with rational analysis.

For the sake of example, let us consider the skill of playing tennis. Within that skill is the technique of a serve. We know that a serve, itself, is not a fundamental. This is because a serve is at least the combination of two different fundamentals - an overhead shot and a toss. So let's examine how we would determine the correct way to perform a toss, for our serve, using logic alone.

Of course we want to create the best possible angle for us to hit the ball into our opponents service area, which would mean we want to toss the ball as high as possible. We want to maximize the time the ball stays in the "sweet spot," i.e. the best position for us to hit our overhead shot. This is the highest point at which we can make contact with the ball, so that we can hit the ball at the moment it switches directions (i.e. when its velocity is zero) with the best angle. (etc, etc)

(3)

Once you are aware of what is the correct execution of the fundamentals, you must devise an efficient and regular training plan/schedule to be able to perform all of the fundamentals correctly. From our previous example, this may be something such as:

Toss the ball 10 times trying to hit the height as indicated by a line marked on a wall. Do this with a camera recording your tosses. Review the video and fix mistakes. Repeat 3x 4 days a week.

It is important to remember that when training, mindlessly repeating an action does not help you towards your goal. Only when you are self analytic, by doing an action like recording yourself with a camera and fixing your mistakes, do you make progress. Once again, consulting an authority figure on how to train is often wise. A secret code in the title of books that help you with this stage of learning is "training manual."

Yesterday I arrived in NYC. Back to civilization, I guess, as far as NYC is civilized. Let's recall some events:

I go surfing in the morning before I head out, the swell is gone so it's more of a swim in a lake. However, two friends who have been living in Nicaragua are in the water, and we realize that we are taking the same flight back to the city. We drive to the airport together, and run into two more recent acquaintances who are also on our flight. The two new people are two ladies from NYC, who had a bad event the night prior that caused them to leave CR early.

Two men had cut their power from outside and tried to break into the house the ladies had rented on AirBNB in the middle of Tamarindo. Who would have thought nice CSS ontop of craigslist does not make craiglists any safer? Luckily they had some guy friends over and were okay.

But after leaving their AirBNB a day early, their "landlord" had the balls to ask them to leave them a good review. "Yeah we were almost raped and kidnapped in our own home, but hey the hot water was kinda working." - Four stars!

But here's what will likely happen: the two ladies will leave a horrible review on AirBNB, the landlords will have to create a new account, and the story of the breakin will disappear from AirBNB one way or another. How has trusting a central authority to manage reputation networks worked for you lately?

So back to the trip: the flight thing happens, we land and ten minutes of customs and twenty minutes of cab driving later i am back in my mother's home. The apartment is absolutely gorgeous, everything is clean and chiva and my home felt welcoming in the way only a mother could make it. My brother gave me a wonderful present, an old authentic Costa Rican soccer jersey. I put it on and look in the mirror - boy have I changed in the last year. Seeing myself in the mirror in NYC is much different then seeing myself in the mirror in Costa Rica.

When I look at myself in the mirror in Costa Rica, there is less of a sense of psychological contrast. In Costa Rica my sun-made blonde hair and tanned skin is normal and it's what I always see when I look in the mirror. Here I can contrast the way I look now with the memories I have of myself in the same mirror from when I was younger.

After a few minutes of hugs kisses and gift exchanging, I pull out my weapon and begin to tune it. I think that the act of tuning the guitar in front of my mother and brother had the same or more effect than my playing the guitar itself. I could watch their eyes widen as they heard the loud low E string rumble through my bedroom. After I played a few songs (Silent Night, Etude in C Major by Tarrega) I knew it was time to get off stage as my mother was tired and my brother wanted to talk instead of here me play.

I slept in that night, got up at around 11am and then started immediately getting the things I needed to get done, done. I scheduled an appointment with Apple to have them fix my broken laptop battery. This story goes back.. I committed the great sin of trying to fix my own Apple computer myself by taking out the battery and replacing it, which made Apple refuse t service the laptop since when I gave it to them I did not have the original battery. So I brought it back from Costa Rica, and now hopefully I'll be able to have The Company revive my laptop that just needs a new fucking battery.

After that was done it was off to lunch with my dad, we went Le Pain Quotidien to have a cup of coffee each, a waffle for him and a piece of salmon and an egg for me for $45. Yes you read that right: two coffees, a slice of salmon and an egg and a waffle for $45. Yes the salmon for some reason came with a huge stack of plain bread next to it, am i supposed to eat that? So I can look like the 50 or so hamplanets that are sitting in the restaurant? Yeah, no thanks.

Conversation at breakfast was the usual sort with my dad, we talked about my childhood and things that he wished he had done differently raising me. Primarily this was talking about wishing he had insisted that my Brazilian nanny growing up had taught me her native language, Portuguese. He told me that my pediatricians, who he described as isolationists, all insisted that it was bad for my development to have to process learning two languages. Off to the gallows with them...

The morning ending with a trip to Barnes and Nobles to overpay for some printed books. Yeah I can read on my kindle and yeah I can read anything for free on my computer, but I do like the feeling of real paper and paying for a book psychologically pushes me to read it. What can i say, as far as I can tell I have to play dumb tricks on myself to get myself to do what I want to do. The books I bought were: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist and Ulysses by James Joice.

I walked home by myself after that, and being unsatisfied from breakfast went to relive an old habit of getting some shitty pizza. I bought two broccoli and chicken slices at Famiglia Pizza for $9, After I ate the two slices I nearly threw up. My stomach still feels quite uncomfortable an hour or more later as I write this post. I'll have to get to practicing making what I usually eat in Costa Rica - a $5 casado: fish, rice and beans, a salad, and a few plantain slices.

For what it's worth, it's nice to be back home in NYC. I plan to bring the Pura Vida here, hopefully I'll manage to get a few souls to stop staring at their dumbPhones for a few extra minutes. Having access to any item I want from thousands of stores, something not quite possible in Guanacaste, is quite nice. I'll try to stock up and make some good progress on Apollo with the extra time I'll have from not surfing.

The time you have left on this Earth moves in only one direction, down. Each minute that you spend doing something is a minute you spend not doing something else. Even if what you're doing is productive, is it as productive as it can be? Even if what you're doing is fun, is it as fun as it can be?

Time on the Earth is monotonically decreasing, but chances are you're still going to be here next year. Billions of years of evolution has gotten one thing right - the ability to keep yourself alive. When you realize you're not dead yet in a year, are you going to have something to show for from the previous year?

There's no pause button on the great play of life. You may be able to get away from it all for short periods of time while you're sleeping, but just because you're not on stage doesn't mean the show doesn't go on.

Each second you spend doing the bullshit it is you do with your time is a second you can never get back.

You got drunk at the bar and woke up sick the next morning? You sat around and watched Netflix all day? You blew some air out of your nose as you watched some cats attack each other on the internet? Well, I sure hope you enjoyed yourself.

If you move intelligently and efficiently through the universe and you will feel like your gliding. If you figure out how to cut the time you waste in half three times in a row, you will get to live eight lives. Four times, and you will live the equivalent of sixteen lives. It keeps getting more difficult, but the rewards get greater and greater.

To realize what you can achieve you must first come to terms with what you have failed to achieve, and can no longer ever achieve. Didn't practice soccer diligently since you were five? We won't be seeing you in the world cup. Didn't study hard in high school? You will never be a great academic, the great ones are already way ahead of you and they're not planning on giving up their lead.

Only once you've seen how you've failed to use your time wisely and have embraced the severe consequences you have already suffered can you begin to fix your problems. Imagine where you could be today if you had begun ten years ago, and then imagine where you can be in ten years.

I waste time:

1. Listening to music on youtube. This is of course a pleasurable experience, so it could be considered not a waste of time. Yet I do it when I'm trying to accomplish goals, so it is a distraction. Also sometimes I find myself listening to the same songs I don't even like anymore.

2. Playing the guitar in a way where I'm just reinforcing bad habits. Whenever I'm practicing the guitar by playing it aggressively without reflection This is also another pleasurable experience, but sometimes I just get frustrated and I feel so much more rewarded when I've diligently practiced a new song.

3. Not optimizing my time on how I take care of my basic homeostasis. Sometimes I don't properly plan out simple things - like where I"m going to eat. So I find myself walking back and fourth from my house to the supermarket etc. an unnecessary number of times.

4. I waste time over obsessing about how to respond to certain emails/texts. I care a lot about how I come across and I try to make all my messages "perfect." But sometimes I could find myself spending an absurd amount of time responding to something that is in the long run rather trivial.

5. Derping around on the internet. Sometimes I catch myself on redditesq sites, looking at dumb short attention span entertainment like those old vine videos.

So here is how I plan to fix these issues:

1. Setup a program to modify my hosts file to nullroute youtube when I want to work.

2. Create a list of songs I want to learn and practice on the guitar, and print out the tabs to have at the ready by my guitar so that when I want to play I can have at the ready the materials I need to practice. I could also print out all my guitar exercises from my ancient guitar scroll.

3. Buy more things in bulk, basic stuff like food supplies etc. Also potentially take fifteen minutes or so to create a plan for the day of things I'm going to do so I don't catch myself all of the sudden realizing i need x or y.

4. When I have an email or message that I feel I'm going to waste a lot of time responding to, I should immediately start a timer for 5 minutes or so and rush to finish it in that time.

5. Same as point 1, null route all my distraction sites like freetetris.org, jesus christ.

Here at whaacked.com¹ the wheel has certainly been reinvented. Instead of choosing the sane option of using Wordpress or another blogging platform,² I have taken upon myself to write the code for my own website. This gives me a lot of freedom, but implementing the simplest of features are just yet another thing i have to do.

In general, it is quite a bad idea to reinvent the wheel. You are wasting your time and money and your customers time and money. Are you trying to figure out how to rip youtube videos - because you don't even know that youtube-dl exists? Have you built an app whose purpose can be undermined by having the same end goals be accomplished via emails or a shared chat channel?

Reinventing the wheel is a massive time sink, so if you plan to do it it should probably be for the learning experience. Also, don't rewrite your code from scratch. Shoutout to Joel.

1. ztkfg.com [↩]
2. fixed now, eh? [↩]

The title of this post is taken from Taleb's book Fooled by Randomness How are there so many people with lots of money who are not very intelligent? The answer is simply: luck.

If you have 300,000,000 people playing the stock market and their stock choices can be modeled as complete guessing, then after a binary event outcome 150,000,000 are going to come out on top. And from those 150mil, 75mil will win again. This repeats a few times and in the end you're left with some very rich people who have done nothing but guess. Everyday some bloat comes out of the casino as a winner.

So then you have someone who has won n times, is fairly wealthy, and falsely assumes he will win n+1 times. There's tons of men in suits with lots of cash, and if you're an investor in people and relationships it's your job to determine which one of these men came about their wealth through luck and which ones came about it through a refined process. Especially when you're in the stock market world.

I have oscillated in my life between being very in shape and, uh, fairly out of shape. Here are my essential tips:

1. It's all about the diet. All those weights you lifted are thwarted by the extra chocolate bar. Eat slowly throughout the day, using your common sense. All things that are adding calories etc. need to be filling. Peanut butter very good, sugary soda drink very bad. When you need to lose weight, enjoy the feeling of feeling slightly hungry all the time.

2. For most people, the gym just fucking sucks. In the unreal world where you are mr. discipline it'd be the place to go all year round. But usually the gym mindset mode will just happen in spurts of a month or two, and then you're left with a credit card bill you forgot about. Better to find a sport or something you like to do and get some enjoyment out of being active. I have burned many more calories surfing, soccering, and squashing than i have ever burned at the gym.

3. Brush your teeth after every meal. This will make you have great breath, and also every time you reach for a cookie you are going to think, "uh...but then I have to brush my teeth again."¹

And that's it. Staying in shape is mostly a psychological battle, you already know what you need to do.

1. This idea was taken from a post on thelastpsychiatrist.com [↩]