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Photo by Denys Nevozhai If you happen to know me personally, you are probably familiar with my opinions on cars, and likely tired of hearing about them. I belong to the group of people who frequent subs like r/fuckcars. My favourite YouTube channels are “Not Just Bikes” and “Climate Town”.

Humans are pretty bad at intuiting about exponential growth. Whether it’s pollution, population growth, or the way a virus spreads, our brains are bad at understanding the impact of such growth.

The word on the street is there’s a “labour shortage”. If we look at the data, however, it tells a different story. I’ve heard theories about people retiring, or too many COVID excess deaths, or people being flush with cash because the government gave everyone a couple thousand bucks (which is about one month’s rent), but looking at the data I’m not seeing numbers that reflect most of those theories.

If there’s anything that annoys me about modern culture, it’s the pursuit and obsession with self. I suppose the classic modern day example of this is how everyone believes they’re an “influencer”, a term that is annoying on its own because most of those who call themselves influencers are likely not influencing anyone in any meaningful way, unless you count getting involved in an MLM or some advertising scheme as “influencing”.

I’ve noticed a trend amongst startups (particularly those in the financial-ish space) which amounts to some variation of “hey guys, maybe we can get customers if we use memes?”. This is not dissimilar to the “viral” craze of the early 2010s in startup land, where a number of companies raised mountains of VC cash entirely on some silly app gaining millions of users overnight. One of my favourite examples is the Yo app.

One of my many unpopular opinions is that therapy is mostly a waste of money. To be clear, I’m referring to the kind of therapy where you pay someone for 45 minutes to an hour of their time to sit there, listen to your problems, and perhaps give you some kind of feedback or suggestions (or maybe they’ll just give you CBT book recommendations after they’ve extracted enough revenue from you).

Software engineers are likely familiar with the CAP theorem, something coined by Eric Brewer. In short: the CAP theorem posits that distributed databases can have at most 2 of 3 attributes where a database is either consistent, available, or fault tolerant. In other words, you can have a DB that is consistent and highly available, but not fault tolerant. Or, you can have a DB that’s fault tolerant and highly available, but isn’t always consistent (especially in the event of failure).

One harmful myth perpetuated by the various cultural medias is the idea that there exists some people in the world who have it easy, and aren’t struggling their way through life. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who has mostly managed to fail upwards, which is probably the best outcome anyone can hope for. Even the billionaires claim to be having a real tough time getting through every day (although my advice to them would be to retire and let someone else get some money, because you guys have enough and at this point you’re just greedy).

There are 2 ways to go through life: you can either play the game, or you can play the metagame. The game is 1-dimensional chess, and the metagame is N-dimensional chess. You can apply this idea to just about everything in life. The easiest way to move from playing the game to the metagame is to think about every interaction in terms of incentives. Examining incentives is the easiest way to figure out what people want and how to turn win/lose or lose/lose transactions into win/win.

For a long time I was a futurist, and an optimist about technology in general. I agreed with the thesis that technology makes everything better over time. These days, I’m older and (maybe?) wiser, and I’ve become a lot more pessimistic about technology in general. Can our fossil fuel machines save us from the problem created by fossil fuels? 🤔