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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? 🤔

I still remember a time when leetcoding interviews were less common, and then all of a sudden, they became the norm. Even for jobs that have nothing to do with leetcoding, it seems that most “tech” companies have galvanized around the idea that before you can hire anyone they must first prove that they can adequately impress someone with their skills at coding during an interview.

The big news today is the US Federal Reserve’s big FOMC meeting. The expectation is that the Fed will announce a big rate hike, on of the biggest in decades. The previous rate hike amounted to 0.5%, and the expectation for today is 0.75%. While it’s entertaining watching Jim Cramer and his ilk share their opinions on various matters which–I think–they likely have no clue about, it’s even more interesting learning about how institutions like the Fed really have no clue what they’re doing.

By 2050, scientists predict there will be more plastic than fish in our oceans by weight. Last month, I found myself wandering around Muji, phone in hand, about to buy yet another kitchen gadget I didn’t need. That moment of consumer autopilot made me question: how much of my consumption actually improves my life versus simply contributing to our ecological crisis?

Something I’ve noticed in recent times, and it may or may not be a trend–I’m not sure–is the idea that someone somewhere in a position of authority knows what’s going on, how to fix it, and they’re coming to save us. Probably a good example of this at a mass level was the 2020 Biden election, where scores of people were convinced that the world would go back to normal and evil would be defeated if Biden won.

One truth we all eventually have to face as we become fully formed adults (“grown-ups”) is that being right doesn’t matter. The only thing that really matters is appearances, being in the right place at the right time, and your connections. This is an idea that has been floating around in my head for a while, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe it. To do so, I can only think in terms of storytelling so that’s what I’ll do.