Wait long enough to write and the updates are bound to be interesting! I’ve gone through many lives since I last wrote, back in July of 2020, mid-pandemic. Leaving Google for… Computer Algebra? I quit my job at Google at the end of 2021. I’m not sure I ever wrote about starting this job back in 2019. Yes, for about 15 months I was a *Staff Research Engineer *at *Google X, *a dream job on paper! In reality, fairly pedestrian and factory-like. ...
Humans have a strange relationship with reality. We’ve developed a large body of mathematical tools that sometimes seem to let us beat time. We can send spaceships out to take photos of distant planets, and be almost totally sure that they’ll make it. It takes minutes (seconds?) to simulate voyages of thousands of years. We can examine light from stars millions of light years away, and make good guesses about the stars’ ingredients. ...
I’ve had an odd, intellectual fever dream going for years now; I’d like to learn enough advanced math and physics to make my way through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality, and not just understand it, but feel in my bones what it’s like to intuitively get our current best guess about how reality works. (If you haven’t heard of this book, or Roger Penrose, go check out the Amazon reviews, then listen to Penrose’s appearance on “The Portal“ podcast. He allegedly wrote this tour of all modern physics as a popular science book, but Penrose is so mis-calibrated, or optimistic, about non-Penrosian math ability that physics and math professors routinely flame out.) ...
Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music is a lovely book about music, and practice, and the strange psychological battle that doing anything difficult and creative seems to require. Early in the book he lays out a very simple framework for how to think about why it’s so hard to learn new things and make progress on seemingly clear goals. Imagine two small people living in your head. One is named “Self Two”. Self Two is a cherub, an almost helplessly creative little kid, the source of every “what if” and impulse you’ve had to build and share anything. ...
I hope you’re all doing well during these strange times of quarantine and uncertainty. I’ve been passing the time by playing my guitar, and the experience has generated a few insights that I think are worth sharing. First, some background, then the nuggets. I played as a teenager for a few years, and had a fairly cramped relationship with music. I was good, technically, but I didn’t have much feel for music, and compensated for this by learning really difficult solo jazz arrangements of songs I didn’t listen to, like Autumn Leaves or Lullaby of Birdland. I can still feel the prickling shame and performance anxiety I’d feel at big family gatherings when my uncle or mom would ask me to play something. A test! And I had no repertoire that was fun for anyone else, no chords, no ability to lift myself or anyone else up with music. ...
Well, here we are, close to 18 months after I left my job at Stripe and put out the call for subscribers to this newsletter. In the future, expect notes on my new, strange identity as an “AI research engineer”, working on machine learning and evolution; notes on information theory, set theory, linear algebra and friends, squeezed through my mind and decorated with as much non-symbolic intuition as I can manage; how to take a run at difficult things outside the usual set of difficult things everyone thinks they want. Today, a note I wrote after a day out working on the RV10 4-seater airplane I’m building in the garage. ...