whaack

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 [↩]

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is a very easy read that provides more inspiration than it does practical advice. However, while there is no central theme of this blog, i would say i aim to make practical advice for myself and others a key pillar of its mission. So to leave with some practical advice, we will take a quote from the book,

If you start out by promising what you don't even have yet, you'll lose your desire to work toward getting it.

and go over it.

I feel that for software developers, these words of wisdom ring with truth regarding taking any form of investment for your project. The psychological shift that occurs when you receive money for your idea in exchange for a portion of the future fortunes can be enough to prevent you from realizing your goal. Here are the some of the negative consequences:

1. You no longer can stand up and proudly say, "this is my project, and my project alone."
2. Your vision will no longer be your vision but a blur of your vision and someone else's.
3. You will have to constantly consult all interested parties about almost every action you take. You will have extra overhead work of keeping everyone informed.

Software projects are special because they require almost no capital investment. With a good laptop and perhaps a server you can start cranking right away. If you take an investment in return for a promise of future profits, you will negatively affect the most important factor to your project's success: your drive to succeed.

I remember the day at MIT where a "great discovery of our universe" was made. As I walked through the hallways the flags of the United States were waving on the screen while a women in a suit was standing behind the podium announcing the results of a finding at the LIGO lab. She was saying that a great theory regarding gravitational waves predicted by none other than Einstein himself had been confirmed with the help of some very expensive equipment. The halls of the university were packed with excitement, all of our teachers announced the finding in the beginning of class, and i had the feeling we were all supposed to be very happy about this great scientific accomplishment ~ regardless of our ability to understand it.

Shortly after many videos were released to help 'non-sciency' people understand the work of the great scientists. I recall lots of videos with a bed sheet spread taught and a marble placed in the middle drawing objects closer together was supposed to somehow explain this gravity finding (isn't that circular reasoning - gravity is the thing that's pulling things together on the bed sheet?) I digress.

Every truth in the world has a cost to confirm for yourself. Some truths, such as the presence of a force that attracts objects together based on their mass and distance apart are very cheap to verify for yourself. It's cheap to see that there is another electromagnetic force between things called magnetics. It doesn't cost so much to see that oil and water don't mix. It's cheap to see computers are the king of chess - just download stockfish.

Others truths, like the presence of microscopic bacteria, cost a little bit more to verify for yourself. A good microscope for this purpose may run you between $100-$500. Still doable, but the range of people who can confirm this truth is narrowed.

And lastly there are truths that most individuals will never have the resources to be able to confirm themselves. This is the Big Science. This is Google's supercomputer powered AI. This is the LIGO experiment. This is CERN. This is the Manhattan Project. This is the images from the Hubble telescope.

Big science is incredibly important, and with its use a few people are able to make profound discoveries. But to an individual, its authenticity forever can be put into question.

The theory that we are in a simulation, i.e. stuck in a matrix that is a subset of a bigger world running on what we would think of as a computer, is bullshit.

Being in a simulation of a bigger universe has a probability of strictly less than being in a "real" outer-most-level universe. This is because being in a simulation would still require a universe, and on top of that it would require a universe with sufficient technology to create "sub-universe" simulations.

We cannot create any sub-universe simulations. If we were in a simulation there is no reason not to expect this to recurse infinitely downward. I.e. knowing that we are at the "bottom-level" is evidence that that "bottom-level" is the "top-level."